If you have been following my previous posts you will see a trend of late. I am heavily into file access and file storage for my personal use. I thought I had come up with a great solution for my own Private Cloud Storage which involved a Raspberry Pi, Samba, AjaXplorer and Deluge.
As of this morning I was informed that a product I was very interested in, but did not think suited my needs, now has an Android client. I am talking about BitTorrent Sync (BTSync).
When I first looked at BTSync and played around with it as a possible solution for my file access, I dismissed it because I was more interested in getting access to my file server rather than syncing to my devices. Using AjaXplorer I can access my home file server from anywhere with ease. What AjaXplorer lacked at the time was a desktop sync client.
Now that there is an Android client for BitTorrent Sync, I have the ultimate Private Cloud solution. On top of the Raspberry Pi, Samba, AjaXplorer and Deluge I now have BTSync to synchronise selected files from my home file server to my laptop, desktop or mobile phone. BTSync complements AjaXplorer rather than replaces it. AjaXplorer provides a beautiful web interface to all the files on my file server while BTSync keeps my frequently accessed files at my fingertips.
Better yet, on top of BTSync synchronising my frequently accessed files I have configured the new Android BTSync client to synchronise my phones DCIM (Digital Camera IMage) folder to my file server and desktop. Now if I take a photo with my phone it is automatically available on my file server for my wife to access and on my desktop for me to manage. Using my desktop I can delete poor pictures and generally manage my photos and the changes will be synchronised.
What about backups? The BTSync client has a trash folder and an archive (versioning) folder, but nothing beats a manual backup. Once a week I backup my file server to an external USB hard disk drive. I still have a Dropbox account and have decided to use it for only one purpose. I have my Android Dropbox client configured to automatically upload photos. I will forget about my Dropbox account unless there is some need to access the uploaded files.
I am not going to post on my blog about how to install BTSync because it is so easy to do on a running Debian system. See this forum post for details.
Showing posts with label Cloud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cloud. Show all posts
Thursday, 18 July 2013
Thursday, 13 June 2013
Private Cloud Storage
I am a big fan of Dropbox. I have been in the information technology industry for well over a decade now and my first smart phone made me very interested in the cloud storage solutions available. It's not until you have a modern mobile phone that you realize how handy it is having your data available whenever and wherever you are.
So with my new HTC Incredible S purchased December 2011 I installed Dropbox. I then proceeded to install other Dropbox clients on my Windows desktops and Linux desktops. Low and behold my files just appear everywhere at the same time, perfect.
Then I learnt about Evernote. At the time I thought Evernote was handy and complemented Dropbox quite nicely. After using Evernote for a year or so and learning how to use it properly, I discovered the benefit of building an information architecture based around the Tags in Evernote.
So here I am in the year 2013 with some experience on personal cloud storage and I have found a few interesting observations about my use of these services. Firstly, Dropbox is less important to me than it was to start with. In fact when I look back now, it was never really that useful to me on my phone. I found it very useful on my Desktop but not my phone. Secondly, the information you want on the run is normally text. Evernote is absolutely brilliant for handling text notes and photos that you want to use for research or reference.
I should add at this point that I don't like spending money on services if I can avoid it. Call me cheap if you wish but I am a dad with four kids and my beautiful wife stays at home running the household and home schooling the bunch. My children, wife, house and life in general will always be a higher priority for me than cloud storage and hence the finances get steered in that direction.
This is where Dropbox and Evernote now need to be compared. Both Dropbox and Evernote are businesses and need to make money. Both services need to attract customers to make their service popular and get support from third parties making their services even more valuable. Dropbox chose the path of storage amount restrictions to cause customers to pay for their service while Evenote chose the path of storage traffic restrictions.
With Dropbox you get a fixed amount of storage for free. At the time of writing this post that amount is 2GB. You can get up to 18GB of storage for free if you invite a lot of people to use Dropbox. If someone installs Dropbox from an invite you sent then, both you and the person you invite will get an extra 500MB of free storage. If you use the Dropbox link at the very top of this post and become a member of Dropbox I will get an extra 500MB as will you.
Now the business model that Dropbox has is not bad. If you love the service and need it for work or storing large amounts of data then you pay for a subscription. If you don't need to store a lot of data, it is free. Over years of use you will find they increase your storage quota also. The problem is most people have many gigabytes of data stored somewhere and it will cost them money to store this in the cloud. An example is my CD collection. I ripped all of my CDs many years ago and having a little OCD when it comes to information technology I used a lossless codec. This comes to 82GB of storage and only includes my music. Add to that the videos, pictures and other documents it is going to cost me $500 a year to store it in the cloud with Dropbox.
How about Evernote? Well Evernote could have chosen the same storage limit business model as Dropbox but they didn't. They chose, in my opinion, a much better solution. Evernote only charges you for traffic to their site and it is only accumulated monthly. At the time of writing this post you can upload 60MB of data per month for free. My quota used today is 2.2MB or 4% and this will be reset in 9 days. What this means for someone like me is that the service is totally free and is unlikely to ever cost me money. Does that mean that I am a leech on Evernote and not contributing to it? Definitely not. By using Evernote and blogging about Evernote and showing people Evernote to explain information architecture for SharePoint content types I am giving them free publicity. I am making the product more popular. I am one of the many millions of people who have the app installed on my phone adding support to its popularity. Evernote benefits by supporting me as a free customer.
So where are we? Well you have gathered by now that I am a big fan of Evernote and still a fan of Dropbox. But I don't need Dropbox. I have a 4TB USB hard disk attached to a Raspberry Pi at home and it has all of my files stored on it. I have another 4TB USB disk I use to backup all of the files in case of hardware failure. This file server storage I have setup has cost me only a minimal amount. The Western Digital USB drives cost $198 each. The Raspberry Pi cost $50 with a case. So for under $500 I have massive amounts of storage that will last for a few years at least.
All of this led me to research private cloud storage. I don't need Dropbox to store my files. What I need is access to my files from anywhere. I started researching open source private cloud storage solutions with the intent of replacing Dropbox but I learned after installing a few of them that I didn't want file sync on my phone. I just want to be able to access the files. Similarly I do want file sync for my desktops.
I started my private cloud storage research with ownCloud. I tried very hard to love this open source product but found it very buggy. In fact it has so many bugs it is unusable. So I started looking at other solutions. This Reddit post helped a lot with my research.
Here is a list of private cloud storage solutions I looked into or installed and a brief comment on each.
So I now have a headless Raspberry Pi installed in my house running off a phone charger using maybe $15 worth of electricity per year. Plugged into that is a Western Digital 4TB USB hard disk. The Raspberry Pi has three primary services running on it being Samba for local file access, AjaXplorer for private cloud file access and Deluge for the odd Bit Torrent file I need to download.
I am still a user and fan of Dropbox. I use the Camera Upload feature of the Android Dropbox client. It allows me to share files with other users of Dropbox. It also lets me share files to non Dropbox users through the public links saving my home upload bandwidth. But I realized through this whole process that I didn't need a cloud storage solution, I already had one. All I needed was easy access to it.
I will continue to be a big fan of Evernote. It is perfect for information access on your mobile devices and desktops.
If you know of any other private cloud storage solutions I have not looked into, please comment below.
[Update - 2013-07-18] - I have added to my Private Cloud Storage solution and blogged about it here.
So with my new HTC Incredible S purchased December 2011 I installed Dropbox. I then proceeded to install other Dropbox clients on my Windows desktops and Linux desktops. Low and behold my files just appear everywhere at the same time, perfect.
Then I learnt about Evernote. At the time I thought Evernote was handy and complemented Dropbox quite nicely. After using Evernote for a year or so and learning how to use it properly, I discovered the benefit of building an information architecture based around the Tags in Evernote.
So here I am in the year 2013 with some experience on personal cloud storage and I have found a few interesting observations about my use of these services. Firstly, Dropbox is less important to me than it was to start with. In fact when I look back now, it was never really that useful to me on my phone. I found it very useful on my Desktop but not my phone. Secondly, the information you want on the run is normally text. Evernote is absolutely brilliant for handling text notes and photos that you want to use for research or reference.
I should add at this point that I don't like spending money on services if I can avoid it. Call me cheap if you wish but I am a dad with four kids and my beautiful wife stays at home running the household and home schooling the bunch. My children, wife, house and life in general will always be a higher priority for me than cloud storage and hence the finances get steered in that direction.
This is where Dropbox and Evernote now need to be compared. Both Dropbox and Evernote are businesses and need to make money. Both services need to attract customers to make their service popular and get support from third parties making their services even more valuable. Dropbox chose the path of storage amount restrictions to cause customers to pay for their service while Evenote chose the path of storage traffic restrictions.
With Dropbox you get a fixed amount of storage for free. At the time of writing this post that amount is 2GB. You can get up to 18GB of storage for free if you invite a lot of people to use Dropbox. If someone installs Dropbox from an invite you sent then, both you and the person you invite will get an extra 500MB of free storage. If you use the Dropbox link at the very top of this post and become a member of Dropbox I will get an extra 500MB as will you.
Now the business model that Dropbox has is not bad. If you love the service and need it for work or storing large amounts of data then you pay for a subscription. If you don't need to store a lot of data, it is free. Over years of use you will find they increase your storage quota also. The problem is most people have many gigabytes of data stored somewhere and it will cost them money to store this in the cloud. An example is my CD collection. I ripped all of my CDs many years ago and having a little OCD when it comes to information technology I used a lossless codec. This comes to 82GB of storage and only includes my music. Add to that the videos, pictures and other documents it is going to cost me $500 a year to store it in the cloud with Dropbox.
How about Evernote? Well Evernote could have chosen the same storage limit business model as Dropbox but they didn't. They chose, in my opinion, a much better solution. Evernote only charges you for traffic to their site and it is only accumulated monthly. At the time of writing this post you can upload 60MB of data per month for free. My quota used today is 2.2MB or 4% and this will be reset in 9 days. What this means for someone like me is that the service is totally free and is unlikely to ever cost me money. Does that mean that I am a leech on Evernote and not contributing to it? Definitely not. By using Evernote and blogging about Evernote and showing people Evernote to explain information architecture for SharePoint content types I am giving them free publicity. I am making the product more popular. I am one of the many millions of people who have the app installed on my phone adding support to its popularity. Evernote benefits by supporting me as a free customer.
So where are we? Well you have gathered by now that I am a big fan of Evernote and still a fan of Dropbox. But I don't need Dropbox. I have a 4TB USB hard disk attached to a Raspberry Pi at home and it has all of my files stored on it. I have another 4TB USB disk I use to backup all of the files in case of hardware failure. This file server storage I have setup has cost me only a minimal amount. The Western Digital USB drives cost $198 each. The Raspberry Pi cost $50 with a case. So for under $500 I have massive amounts of storage that will last for a few years at least.
All of this led me to research private cloud storage. I don't need Dropbox to store my files. What I need is access to my files from anywhere. I started researching open source private cloud storage solutions with the intent of replacing Dropbox but I learned after installing a few of them that I didn't want file sync on my phone. I just want to be able to access the files. Similarly I do want file sync for my desktops.
I started my private cloud storage research with ownCloud. I tried very hard to love this open source product but found it very buggy. In fact it has so many bugs it is unusable. So I started looking at other solutions. This Reddit post helped a lot with my research.
Here is a list of private cloud storage solutions I looked into or installed and a brief comment on each.
- ownCloud
I installed this and found it buggy and poorly programmed for its primary task. - git-annex
I am a developer and LOVE git, but this isn't quite what I wanted. - Seafile
I installed this and was very happy with it except that the files are stored in a database format rather than just allowing easy access. - SparkleShare
I was keen on this solution but I could not see an Android client on Google Play so did not install it. - BitTorrent Sync
This is an awesome file sync tool but again, not quite what I was looking for. - SpiderOak
This solution is not open source so I didn't really look into it. - Unison
I didn't look into this solution at all. - AjaXplorer
This is a brilliant browser and mobile file access solution with a desktop client on the way.
So I now have a headless Raspberry Pi installed in my house running off a phone charger using maybe $15 worth of electricity per year. Plugged into that is a Western Digital 4TB USB hard disk. The Raspberry Pi has three primary services running on it being Samba for local file access, AjaXplorer for private cloud file access and Deluge for the odd Bit Torrent file I need to download.
I am still a user and fan of Dropbox. I use the Camera Upload feature of the Android Dropbox client. It allows me to share files with other users of Dropbox. It also lets me share files to non Dropbox users through the public links saving my home upload bandwidth. But I realized through this whole process that I didn't need a cloud storage solution, I already had one. All I needed was easy access to it.
I will continue to be a big fan of Evernote. It is perfect for information access on your mobile devices and desktops.
If you know of any other private cloud storage solutions I have not looked into, please comment below.
[Update - 2013-07-18] - I have added to my Private Cloud Storage solution and blogged about it here.
Tuesday, 28 May 2013
Installing AjaXplorer with Nginx on Debian
Over the past few months I have been looking into private cloud storage. I have been using Dropbox for a long time now but am unhappy with the use of a third party for file storage. That said, Dropbox is an awesome product and I will still use it for some functions in the future. After much research I think I may have found a solution for private cloud storage that is best suited to my needs.
I will write another post about the different solutions I have found and tested but for now I am installing AjaXplorer. This product is open source, installable on your own hardware and gives you access to your already existing file server with minor configuration.
Following are the instructions for installing AjaXplorer with Nginx on Debian Wheezy. The hardware I am using is a Raspberry Pi with a 4TB Western Digital USB hard drive attached. Because the Raspberry Pi is a low powered device I am using Nginx as the web server with PHP-FPM for processing php.
Assumptions
To start off with we need to install the prerequisite packages. I am keen to keep my Raspberry Pi lean and so I did some testing to determine the minimum required packages needed to get the full functionality of AjaXplorer. Note I am not including the requirements for the AjaXplorer desktop client yet because it is in beta and I am not interested in testing it. If you wish to use the desktop client you will need some rsync php related packages. So here is the command to install the prerequisites;
Once the prerequisites are installed, create the www directory and set ownership;
We need to configure php to support larger file uploads so edit the php.ini file;
Edit the following values to your liking;
Now we need to configure Nginx to setup our AjaXplorer web site (use your own domain name below);
Here is the x.yourdomain.com config file I am using. Make sure you change the max_body_size value and replace x.yourdomain.com with your servers DNS name;
Take note of the two include statements at the bottom of the Nginx site file. You will need to make these files also;
And here is my drop.conf contents;
Note the first two deny all statements above are specific to AjaXplorer.
Now create the php.conf file;
Here is my php.conf contents;
The last statement in the above file is the mapping between Nginx and PHP5-FPM.
Now that all the Nginx files are created we can enable the site by deleting the default Nginx site and linking to the new site;
Time to get the AjaXplorer files. Download the latest version and save it to your /var/www directory. Extract the downloaded file to the root of the www directory;
Prior to opening a browser and seeing the result we need to restart the required services to pick up the new config files;
Now open a browser and hit your IP address or DNS name. The first time you access AjaXplorer you will see a diagnostics page that will look like this.
You will need to fix any issues discovered by the Diagnostics program before continuing. You will notice the warning about SSL Encryption. I am accessing my server using Pound as a reverse proxy to encrypt the pages using SSL.
Once you have fixed any errors reported by the Diagnostics page click on the link under the title to continue to the AjaXplorer main interface. You will need to log in with a username of admin and a password of admin for the first access. Make sure you change the password at some point.
The last required configuration for the installation is to adjust the AjaXplorer upload file size limit. This is achieved under settings;
That's it. AjaXplorer is now installed and waiting for you to configure repositories and other customizations. There are plugins available and client applications. I am using the Android client successfully and will look at the Desktop client once it is out of beta.
The Raspberry Pi is an amazing platform for free open tools like this and I am now using a low powered Pi with a USB disk as my home file server cutting my electricity bill and reducing my carbon foot print.
I will write another post about the different solutions I have found and tested but for now I am installing AjaXplorer. This product is open source, installable on your own hardware and gives you access to your already existing file server with minor configuration.
Following are the instructions for installing AjaXplorer with Nginx on Debian Wheezy. The hardware I am using is a Raspberry Pi with a 4TB Western Digital USB hard drive attached. Because the Raspberry Pi is a low powered device I am using Nginx as the web server with PHP-FPM for processing php.
Assumptions
- You already have Debian 7.0 (Wheezy) running.
- You can download the AjaXplorer compressed file to your Debian server.
To start off with we need to install the prerequisite packages. I am keen to keep my Raspberry Pi lean and so I did some testing to determine the minimum required packages needed to get the full functionality of AjaXplorer. Note I am not including the requirements for the AjaXplorer desktop client yet because it is in beta and I am not interested in testing it. If you wish to use the desktop client you will need some rsync php related packages. So here is the command to install the prerequisites;
apt-get install nginx php5 php5-fpm php5-gd php5-cli php5-mcrypt
Once the prerequisites are installed, create the www directory and set ownership;
mkdir /var/www
chown www-data:www-data /var/www
We need to configure php to support larger file uploads so edit the php.ini file;
vim /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini
Edit the following values to your liking;
file_uploads = On
post_max_size = 20G
upload_max_filesize = 20G
max_file_uploads = 20000
Now we need to configure Nginx to setup our AjaXplorer web site (use your own domain name below);
vim /etc/nginx/sites-available/x.yourdomain.com
Here is the x.yourdomain.com config file I am using. Make sure you change the max_body_size value and replace x.yourdomain.com with your servers DNS name;
server {
listen 80;
server_name x.yourdomain.com;
root /var/www;
index index.php;
client_max_body_size 20G;
access_log /var/log/nginx/x.yourdomain.com.access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/x.yourdomain.com.error.log;
location / {
}
location ~* \.(?:ico|css|js|gif|jpe?g|png)$ {
expires max;
add_header Pragma public;
add_header Cache-Control "public, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate";
}
include drop.conf;
include php.conf;
}
Take note of the two include statements at the bottom of the Nginx site file. You will need to make these files also;
vim /etc/nginx/drop.conf
And here is my drop.conf contents;
location ^~ /conf/ { deny all; }
location ^~ /data/ { deny all; }
location = /robots.txt { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
location ~ /\. { access_log off; log_not_found off; deny all; }
location ~ ~$ { access_log off; log_not_found off; deny all; }
Note the first two deny all statements above are specific to AjaXplorer.
Now create the php.conf file;
vim /etc/nginx/php.conf
Here is my php.conf contents;
location ~ \.php {
try_files $uri =404;
fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string;
fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME $fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $request_filename;
fastcgi_param REQUEST_URI $request_uri;
fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_URI $document_uri;
fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_ROOT $document_root;
fastcgi_param SERVER_PROTOCOL $server_protocol;
fastcgi_param GATEWAY_INTERFACE CGI/1.1;
fastcgi_param SERVER_SOFTWARE nginx;
fastcgi_param REMOTE_ADDR $remote_addr;
fastcgi_param REMOTE_PORT $remote_port;
fastcgi_param SERVER_ADDR $server_addr;
fastcgi_param SERVER_PORT $server_port;
fastcgi_param SERVER_NAME $server_name;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
}
The last statement in the above file is the mapping between Nginx and PHP5-FPM.
Now that all the Nginx files are created we can enable the site by deleting the default Nginx site and linking to the new site;
cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
rm default
ln -s ../sites-available/x.yourdomain.com
Time to get the AjaXplorer files. Download the latest version and save it to your /var/www directory. Extract the downloaded file to the root of the www directory;
cd /var/www
tar -xzf <gz file name here>
ls -l
mv <extracted directory name>/* /var/www
rm -R /var/www/<extracted directory name>
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www
Prior to opening a browser and seeing the result we need to restart the required services to pick up the new config files;
service php5-fpm restart
service nginx restart
Now open a browser and hit your IP address or DNS name. The first time you access AjaXplorer you will see a diagnostics page that will look like this.
You will need to fix any issues discovered by the Diagnostics program before continuing. You will notice the warning about SSL Encryption. I am accessing my server using Pound as a reverse proxy to encrypt the pages using SSL.
Once you have fixed any errors reported by the Diagnostics page click on the link under the title to continue to the AjaXplorer main interface. You will need to log in with a username of admin and a password of admin for the first access. Make sure you change the password at some point.
The last required configuration for the installation is to adjust the AjaXplorer upload file size limit. This is achieved under settings;
That's it. AjaXplorer is now installed and waiting for you to configure repositories and other customizations. There are plugins available and client applications. I am using the Android client successfully and will look at the Desktop client once it is out of beta.
The Raspberry Pi is an amazing platform for free open tools like this and I am now using a low powered Pi with a USB disk as my home file server cutting my electricity bill and reducing my carbon foot print.
Thursday, 21 March 2013
Installing ownCloud v5.0 on Debian Wheezy using Nginx running on a Raspberry Pi
My last post was about installing ownCloud onto Debian Wheezy using Git. I didn't mention in that post that Debian was running as a Virtual Machine on Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. This install is working well for me but I wanted to use a Raspberry Pi for the install of ownCloud so I could attach a USB hard disk for storage and use as little power as possible.
I decided to try installing ownCloud with Nginx as the web server because of articles around the web stating that Nginx uses less resources than Apache2. This being the case it makes Nginx a great candidate for the web server when using a low powered Raspberry Pi as the hardware.
So here is the process I used to achieve my goal.
Firstly we need to get the Raspberry Pi setup with Debian, or as it is called in the Pi world, Raspbian. I didn't need a graphical environment for this setup, so I used a custom version of Raspbian called Raspbian Server Edition. Raspbian SE was at v2.3 at the time of writing.
We can use the beginners guide to install the Raspberry Pi operating system to an SD card. Just use the Raspbian SE images instead of the full Raspbian image.
Once you have the Raspberry Pi installed and running including a static IP address, SSH server and other standard configurations, you then need to install the required packages;
Just because we have installed so many packages, I feel it is a good time to do a restart and to test the Nginx server is starting after boot. So type the command Reboot and wait for the system to come up.
You can now open a browser and hit the address of your Pi. You should get a warming message as below;
Nginx does not use the /var/www directory by default so lets make that directory and setup security on it;
Now lets configure the site file for Nginx. Create a new file in the sites-available directory changing the name as desired;
Now paste in your web server configuration. Here is the site file I ended up with;
Once you have saved the file you will need to make a symbolic link to it in the sites-enabled directory;
It's always nice to see some progress being made, so lets make a phpinfo() file and test the web server and php functionality;
Now open a web browser and hit the IP address of your Raspberry Pi. We should see the standard PHP information being displayed.
As with my last post, we need to add the US UTF-8 locale. I will keep this post short. See the ownCloud installation process from my last post.
Here are the references I used for this install;
http://rasberrypibeginnersguide.tumblr.com/post/27283563130/nginx-php5-on-raspberry-pi-debian-wheezy
http://blog.martinfjordvald.com/2010/07/nginx-primer/
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1025286
I decided to try installing ownCloud with Nginx as the web server because of articles around the web stating that Nginx uses less resources than Apache2. This being the case it makes Nginx a great candidate for the web server when using a low powered Raspberry Pi as the hardware.
So here is the process I used to achieve my goal.
Firstly we need to get the Raspberry Pi setup with Debian, or as it is called in the Pi world, Raspbian. I didn't need a graphical environment for this setup, so I used a custom version of Raspbian called Raspbian Server Edition. Raspbian SE was at v2.3 at the time of writing.
We can use the beginners guide to install the Raspberry Pi operating system to an SD card. Just use the Raspbian SE images instead of the full Raspbian image.
Once you have the Raspberry Pi installed and running including a static IP address, SSH server and other standard configurations, you then need to install the required packages;
apt-get -y install nginx php5 php5-fpm php5-cgi php5-gd php5-json php-pear php-xml-parser php5-intl php5-sqlite curl libcurl3 libcurl3-dev php5-curl smbclient cifs-utils mp3info zip git
Just because we have installed so many packages, I feel it is a good time to do a restart and to test the Nginx server is starting after boot. So type the command Reboot and wait for the system to come up.
You can now open a browser and hit the address of your Pi. You should get a warming message as below;
Nginx does not use the /var/www directory by default so lets make that directory and setup security on it;
mkdir /var/www
chmod 774 /var/www
chown www-data:www-data /var/www
Now lets configure the site file for Nginx. Create a new file in the sites-available directory changing the name as desired;
vim /etc/nginx/sites-available/oc.domain.com
Now paste in your web server configuration. Here is the site file I ended up with;
# This is the complete example of nginx configuration file for ownCloud 5
# This config file configures proper rewrite rules for the new release of ownCloud
# Also, this config file configures nginx to listen on both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses
# If you want it to listen to IPv4 address only, use listen 80; instead of listen [::]:80
# First, we configure redirection to HTTPS (substitue owncloud.example.com with the proper address of your OC instance)
server {
listen 80;
server_name owncloud.example.com;
rewrite ^ https://$server_name$request_uri? permanent;
}
# Now comes the main configuration for ownCloud 5
server {
listen 443 ssl; # Make it listen on port 443 for SSL, on both IPv4 and IPv6 interfaces
server_name owncloud.example.com;
root /var/www; # Make sure to insert proper path for your ownCloud root directory
index index.php;
# Now we configure SSL certificates. Make sure you enter correct path for your SSL cert files
ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/localcerts/oc.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/localcerts/oc.key;
client_max_body_size 2G; # This is the first parameter which configures max size of upload, more to come later
fastcgi_buffers 64 4K;
# Configure access & error logs
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
# Configure proper error pages
error_page 403 = /core/templates/403.php;
error_page 404 = /core/templates/404.php;
# Some rewrite rules, more to come later
rewrite ^/caldav((/|$).*)$ /remote.php/caldav$1 last;
rewrite ^/carddav((/|$).*)$ /remote.php/carddav$1 last;
rewrite ^/webdav((/|$).*)$ /remote.php/webdav$1 last;
# Protecting sensitive files from the evil outside world
location ~ ^/(data|config|\.ht|db_structure.xml|README) {
deny all;
}
# Configure the root location with proper rewrite rule
location / {
rewrite ^/.well-known/host-meta /public.php?service=host-meta last;
rewrite ^/.well-known/host-meta.json /public.php?service=host-meta-json last;
rewrite ^/.well-known/carddav /remote.php/carddav/ redirect;
rewrite ^/.well-known/caldav /remote.php/caldav/ redirect;
rewrite ^/apps/calendar/caldav.php /remote.php/caldav/ last;
rewrite ^/apps/contacts/carddav.php /remote.php/carddav/ last;
rewrite ^/apps/([^/]*)/(.*\.(css|php))$ /index.php?app=$1&getfile=$2 last;
rewrite ^(/core/doc[^\/]+/)$ $1/index.html;
index index.php; # This one might be redundant, but it doesn't hurt to leave it here
try_files $uri $uri/ index.php;
}
# Configure PHP-FPM stuff
location ~ ^(?<script_name>.+?\.php)(?<path_info>/.*)?$ {
try_files $script_name = 404;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock; # Be sure to check proper socket location for php-fpm, might be different on your system
fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $path_info;
fastcgi_param HTTPS on;
# This one is a little bit tricky, you need to pass all parameters in a single line, separating them with newline (\n)
fastcgi_param PHP_VALUE "upload_max_filesize = 2G \n post_max_size = 2G"; # This finishes the max upload size settings
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; # On some systems OC will work without this setting, but it doesn't hurt to leave it here
include fastcgi_params;
}
location ~* ^.+.(jpg|jpeg|gif|bmp|ico|png|css|js|swf)$ {
expires 30d;
access_log off;
}
}
Once you have saved the file you will need to make a symbolic link to it in the sites-enabled directory;
rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/oc.domain.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/oc.domain.com
It's always nice to see some progress being made, so lets make a phpinfo() file and test the web server and php functionality;
echo "<?php phpinfo() ?>" > /var/www/index.php
service nginx restart
Now open a web browser and hit the IP address of your Raspberry Pi. We should see the standard PHP information being displayed.
As with my last post, we need to add the US UTF-8 locale. I will keep this post short. See the ownCloud installation process from my last post.
Here are the references I used for this install;
http://rasberrypibeginnersguide.tumblr.com/post/27283563130/nginx-php5-on-raspberry-pi-debian-wheezy
http://blog.martinfjordvald.com/2010/07/nginx-primer/
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1025286
Wednesday, 27 February 2013
Installing ownCloud on Debian GNU/Linux using Git
I have been watching an open source project for a while now with great interest. The name of the project is ownCloud and it is a file synchronising server with a web interface that operates much the same as Dropbox, SkyDrive, iCloud and other cloud based storage solutions.
Now that ownCloud is feature rich and has a client for Android, iOS, Windows and OS X, I wanted to install it to move my cloud storage away from Dropbox and onto my own server. By doing this I will have control of my data without the need to pay for space and more flexibility as to how I access my data.
I am a fan of the GNU/Linux distribution called Debian so I installed a virtual machine running Debian Wheezy release candidate to host ownCloud. You can install ownCloud on Windows Server if you wish. The stable version of ownCloud on their website is at v4.5 which has issues using external storage on a Windows shared folder, so I needed to install the latest beta version.
To get the latest version of ownCloud I needed to install using the Git repository from GitHub. At the time of writing this article the ownCloud version on GitHub is at v5.0 beta 2.
To start off with I needed to install the prerequisites on Debian with this command;
At this point, I changed the php.ini file to increase the upload_max_filesize value from the default 2M to 1024M;
I decided to install ownCloud into the root of the apache2 www folder;
I removed the original apache2 index file;
To get the latest ownCloud version I needed to use Git to clone the core, 3rdparty and apps repositories into the root of the web server. Note that the apps clone needs to be cloned into a new target apps2 directory to prevent conflicts with the core repositories apps folder. I will need to edit the config.php file later to include the apps2 folder, but it does not exist yet;
Now I need to give ownership of the ownCloud directories to www-data with;
To improve the security of ownCloud I needed to enable .htaccess in the virtual host file;
Now change the /var/www directory element so AllowOverride is set to 'All' as in this example;
I found when I first tested this install approach the Admin page reported a locale issue so I needed to install the en_US.UTF-8 locale for the system to work correctly with file names. My default locale is en_AU.UTF8. To install the US UTF8 locale run this command;
Then select the US UTF-8 locale.
Check the installed locales with;
Lastly enable the following modules and restart apache2;
I can now open a web browser and access my ownCloud instance (http://ServersIPAddress/) but there is an expected error. When I first connect to ownCloud like this it will create a config.php file.
Now that I have an ownCloud config file I need to edit it to support the apps2 directory. If you read on the apps repository page here https://github.com/owncloud/apps (near the bottom) it states the need for this change. When you edit the config.php file using the instructions from the link above it states to leave the apps and apps2 directory as writable = false. This failed on my install and I needed to change writable to true on the apps2 directory for user downloaded apps;
Here is my complete config.php file;
I can now connect to my new ownCloud server and run through the setup wizard to create the SQLite database and admin user.
I now have a working cloud storage solution!
To update to the latest Git version I will need to run these commands;
There is more to do such as enabling SSL and mapping to my external shared folder running on Windows but that is another story.
Here are the references I used to complete this task;
https://github.com/owncloud (ownCloud github site)
http://doc.owncloud.org/server/5.0/admin_manual/installation.html (v5.0 installation documents)
http://forum.owncloud.org/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=8012 (fixing the US UTF-8 issue)
To use port SSL use this reference to enable it on Apache2 with Debian;
http://wiki.debian.org/Self-Signed_Certificate
Now that ownCloud is feature rich and has a client for Android, iOS, Windows and OS X, I wanted to install it to move my cloud storage away from Dropbox and onto my own server. By doing this I will have control of my data without the need to pay for space and more flexibility as to how I access my data.
I am a fan of the GNU/Linux distribution called Debian so I installed a virtual machine running Debian Wheezy release candidate to host ownCloud. You can install ownCloud on Windows Server if you wish. The stable version of ownCloud on their website is at v4.5 which has issues using external storage on a Windows shared folder, so I needed to install the latest beta version.
To get the latest version of ownCloud I needed to install using the Git repository from GitHub. At the time of writing this article the ownCloud version on GitHub is at v5.0 beta 2.
To start off with I needed to install the prerequisites on Debian with this command;
apt-get -y install apache2 php5 php5-gd php5-json php-pear php-xml-parser php5-intl php5-sqlite curl libcurl3 libcurl3-dev php5-curl smbclient cifs-utils mp3info zip git
At this point, I changed the php.ini file to increase the upload_max_filesize value from the default 2M to 1024M;
vim /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
I decided to install ownCloud into the root of the apache2 www folder;
cd /var/www
I removed the original apache2 index file;
rm index.html
To get the latest ownCloud version I needed to use Git to clone the core, 3rdparty and apps repositories into the root of the web server. Note that the apps clone needs to be cloned into a new target apps2 directory to prevent conflicts with the core repositories apps folder. I will need to edit the config.php file later to include the apps2 folder, but it does not exist yet;
git clone https://github.com/owncloud/core ./ git clone https://github.com/owncloud/3rdparty git clone https://github.com/owncloud/apps apps2
Now I need to give ownership of the ownCloud directories to www-data with;
chown -R www-data:www-data ./* chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www
To improve the security of ownCloud I needed to enable .htaccess in the virtual host file;
vim /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default
Now change the /var/www directory element so AllowOverride is set to 'All' as in this example;
<directory var="" www="">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</directory>
I found when I first tested this install approach the Admin page reported a locale issue so I needed to install the en_US.UTF-8 locale for the system to work correctly with file names. My default locale is en_AU.UTF8. To install the US UTF8 locale run this command;
dpkg-reconfigure locales
Then select the US UTF-8 locale.
Check the installed locales with;
locale -a
Lastly enable the following modules and restart apache2;
a2enmod rewrite a2enmod headers service apache2 restart
I can now open a web browser and access my ownCloud instance (http://ServersIPAddress/) but there is an expected error. When I first connect to ownCloud like this it will create a config.php file.
Now that I have an ownCloud config file I need to edit it to support the apps2 directory. If you read on the apps repository page here https://github.com/owncloud/apps (near the bottom) it states the need for this change. When you edit the config.php file using the instructions from the link above it states to leave the apps and apps2 directory as writable = false. This failed on my install and I needed to change writable to true on the apps2 directory for user downloaded apps;
vim /var/www/config/config.php
Here is my complete config.php file;
<?php
$CONFIG = array (
'instanceid' => '512efd12eb6d8',
'passwordsalt' => '5555c4f3a4fbeb1a527d376095555',
'datadirectory' => '/var/www/data',
'dbtype' => 'sqlite3',
'version' => '4.94.10',
'installed' => true,
'apps_paths' =>
array (
0 =>
array (
'path' => '/var/www/apps',
'url' => '/apps',
'writable' => false,
),
1 =>
array (
'path' => '/var/www/apps2',
'url' => '/apps2',
'writable' => true,
),
),
);
I can now connect to my new ownCloud server and run through the setup wizard to create the SQLite database and admin user.
I now have a working cloud storage solution!
To update to the latest Git version I will need to run these commands;
cd /var/www git pull cd /var/www/3rdparty git pull cd /var/www/apps2 git pull
There is more to do such as enabling SSL and mapping to my external shared folder running on Windows but that is another story.
Here are the references I used to complete this task;
https://github.com/owncloud (ownCloud github site)
http://doc.owncloud.org/server/5.0/admin_manual/installation.html (v5.0 installation documents)
http://forum.owncloud.org/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=8012 (fixing the US UTF-8 issue)
To use port SSL use this reference to enable it on Apache2 with Debian;
http://wiki.debian.org/Self-Signed_Certificate
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