Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nextcloud Hub 21

nextcloud.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 153 posts

Re: Nextcloud Hub 21

#71

Post by jerf »

goalieca wrote: post #60
jerf wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I’m in awe of something like Debian where entire mirrors have been served on ancient computers with reasonable performance." Static file serving is easy. If you don't even need SSL because it's all signed content, it's really easy. Linux has a syscall [1] where you can tell the kernel "ok, now, send this file through this socket without bothering userspace anymore", meaning you get full kernel-mode file transfer wit…

Browsing a directory of essentially static artifacts is really slow in nextcloud. Git isn’t the best place to store binaries and assets and we tried nextcloud as an alternative since we are already hosting it.

Nextcloud isn't serving static files, it was serving a database hit in a PHP environment throwing away a lot of stuff on every connection and doing all sorts of things. Presumably this newer backend does less stuff (as that is the key to performance). Debian serves static files.

Re: Nextcloud Hub 21

#72

Post by rektide »

> The High Performance Back-end for Files in Nextcloud is an optional, binary component developed in Rust. It is capable of maintaining a direct connection with desktop and web clients, providing file change and notification updates to the clients.

petty as heck but nextcloud being entirely php (afaik) until now has been a huge turn off. Moving some critical online bits to rust is a huge indicator to me that the team is taking resource consumption & performance optimization seriously.

Re: Nextcloud Hub 21

#73

Post by remram »

l72 wrote: post #14

I really wish there was an LTS release that was supported for at least 2 years (just bugfixes, no new features). I self host my own instance, and I really just want to set it and forget it. I don't mind doing low risk patches every few months or weeks, but I don't want to do a major version upgrade every 4-6 months. I did my last major version upgrade only 15 months ago, and I am now 4 major versions behind, which me…

They also raise PHP version requirements. To keep my NextCloud on supported version, I had to update the Linux distribution on my server (was not EOL or anything) to get a PHP that supported versions of NextCloud support...

I just wanted to keep getting bug/security fixes for NextCloud.

Re: Nextcloud Hub 21

#74

Post by adkadskhj »

jerf wrote: post #43
znpy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First things first: don't get me wrong, I do understand your point. The thing is: you have a system administration problem, whether you want or not (that is a big part of what you're actually paying for when you buy Dropbox or when you let Google feed on your data). Now, as an hobbyist, when you start depending on services you set up and manage yourself, it would be a good idea to take some time to learn additional t…

"It's way simpler but you'd only get a yesterday's copy in case of problem." I have a restic backup running on that plan instead of rsync, which means I get true backups. The nice thing about that it is that this can be integrated into any "docker compose" pipeline that you like. I'm generally not as hot on Docker as a lot of people but it does do a nice job of containing household services into a text file that can…

Wasn't Sandstorm a bit incompatible with Docker? Notably it didn't just containerize apps, it communicated over a custom protocol to fully isolate and limit their permissions. Eg network/disk access was tightly controlled.

Though perhaps there was a shim layer? Eg over normal containers, it shimmed network/disk from the container over the Sandstorm RPC buffer?

Really cool tech regardless, but it had a big tech maintenance burden. That's my fear in all these self hosted apps. Everything needs to be maintained for it to feel good to the user, and that seems like such a tall ask.

Re: Nextcloud Hub 21

#75

Post by johnchristopher »

contravariant wrote: post #26
znpy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) I upgrade from 17->18->19->20->21 and hope nothing breaks! I did a similar path (started from 18 iirc) and nothing broke. But there's a catch, because I have some safeguards in place: 1. Nextcloud has its own dataset in a ZFS zpool. I take snapshots hourly, and I took a snapshot just before upgrading 2. I run nextcloud and its own postgreql via docker-compose. the docker-compose file along with the configuration…

I don't disagree but as a hobbyist I don't really want system administration problems. Well and I was mostly interested in Nextcloud as a possible alternative to Dropbox/Google drive with versioning and, I hoped, backups. However the only proper backup solution that I could confidently state would allow me to recover should disaster strike was the one you just explained e.g. putting everything in docker and snapshott…

Then maybe it'd be less expensive (money and time) to pay for a netxloud account ?

Re: Nextcloud Hub 21

#76

Post by adkadskhj »

dsr_ wrote: post #34
znpy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First things first: don't get me wrong, I do understand your point. The thing is: you have a system administration problem, whether you want or not (that is a big part of what you're actually paying for when you buy Dropbox or when you let Google feed on your data). Now, as an hobbyist, when you start depending on services you set up and manage yourself, it would be a good idea to take some time to learn additional t…

> you have a system administration problem, whether you want or not Right. You can pay people to do things for you, or you can do them yourself, but either way the things have to be done, and they should be done by someone who is good at it and has a contract with you -- employment or otherwise.

There is a middleground, imo. The way apps are designed massively impacts the general requirements of system administration.

What we're seeing is largely centralized applications and the work it takes to manage them. Ignore UX for a second, and imagine you wrote a database on top of a distributed system - ala IPFS - and all modifications were effectively pushed into IPFS. This suddenly boils the system administration tasks down to:

1. make sure my IPFS node is up to date

2. make sure my computer is online

And even those can be heavily mitigated with peers who follow each other.

Now we're not there yet, i'm not advertising a better solution. I'm simply saying that part of the administration is a heavy lift simply because of how these apps were written. I think we can do better for the home user.

Secure Scuttlebutt is a lot easier to maintain, for example. The most important thing with that is that you simply connect to the internet and publish your posts/fetch other posts. In doing so, other people make backups for you and you of them. Backing up your key seems like the highest priority.. and even that could be eliminated i imagine, in the P2P model at least. Very low maintenance.

Re: Nextcloud Hub 21

#78

Post by 40four »

reasonabl_human wrote: post #50
hexanal wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To echo what the other replies are saying: mine has been running on a DigitalOcean droplet since early 2019 and I only had to reboot it once. It syncs everything, the iOS app and web dashboard are adequate. I would recommend it (but I haven't tried anything else, other than Google Drive or Dropbox, of course)

Haven’t used droplets, do you have to manage backups yourself or is it part of the service?

Droplets are great, and I like the ease of use of Digital Ocean. But, as far as server backups go, I've never liked managing these, so I use an external data store and DB server. In my case, my instance is wired up to an Amazon S3 bucket, and an RDS database. If you set it up this way, there is no need to worry about backups of the application server.

I could nuke the app server, change hosting providers, or if there was a hardware failure or whatever, it won't matter. I can always spin up a fresh server, and plug back into my external DB and data store.

Re: Nextcloud Hub 21

#80

Post by 40four »

reasonabl_human wrote: post #49
40four wrote: post #3

I started running a self hosted Nextcloud instance last year, and I couldn’t be happier with it! This release sounds exciting, guess it’s time to go upgrade :) For those looking to ‘de-Google’ their lives, and control their own data Nextcloud is one of the best options out there.

Very easy to setup and maintain with a dedicated unraid box. Grab an old dell enterprise server like the r210 II and put some WD reds in raid + zfs, install unraid, and it’s good to go. I actually virtualize unraid within esxi so that one small 1U box can be my router / firewall and an unraid machine serving home services. Best setup I’ve ever had and learned so much along the way!

This sounds interesting, might have to look into it. Running a physical home server would be awesome, but it currently sounds above my skill level as far as hardware and networking :)

I run a cheap EC2 instance, and plug it into an S3 bucket for file storage, and my RDS MySQL database.

Post reply on HN