Freezing February !! And we froze our selection for Open Source Datacenter Conference 2018’s speaker list. Alexander said Apple Pi is simple and secure, have you tried it yet? Philipp was happy to celebrate his six -month anniversary at NETWAYS with his fellow trainees Afeef and Killian. Julia announced a 25% discount for Ceph training in March.
Marius showed us how to upgrade MariaDB from 10.0.x to 10.2.x. in 10 easy steps. Jean-Marcel talked about the quest for su on Windows. Lennart educated us all with Icinga 2 “Eat or Die”, the variable scope. Nicole announced detailes on the Nextcloud 13 update. Dirk recapped the Configuration Management Camp Ghent 2018.
Isabel invited you to NETWAYS – Monitor your server rooms with us! And told us about MultiTech MTD- H5-2.0 USB powered- easy SMS sending, and, also about the Braintower SMS Gateway with 2 variants. Blerim had the honor of presenting the program for the Icinga Camp Berlin 2018. And, last, but not least,Christoph wanted to Samba Samba all night!!
NETWAYS Blog
NETWAYS Web Services: Nextcloud 13 now up and running!
A lot of Nextcloud users have waited for the new Nextcloud 13 version to be available. Now our NWS team has implemented it for all Nextcloud apps on our platform.
Nextcloud 13 will bring you the following enhanced functions to your cloud:
- Video and Text chat
- End-to-end Encryption
- Refined User Interface
- Improved Performance
- Improved File Sync and Share
Nextcloud users will now profit from a new app called Nextcloud Talk which provides an Open Source platform for audio, video and text communication in real-time as well as in asynchronous mode. Push notifications will help you to never miss a message! Absolute privacy is guaranteed by implementation of end-to-end encrypted calls that are 100% secure peer-to-peer.
Another big innovation is the End-to-End Encryption of content which can now be controlled by the users themselves. In the current Tech Preview release in version 13 it is now possible to encrypt single folders chosen by the users via their Nextcloud client. This prohibits the server side from accessing and seeing the folder or file content. The preview is available in mobile clients for Android and iOS as well as in desktop clients for Windows, Mac and Linux. Nextcloud will continue to enhance its encryption functionality over the next months.
Performance is also an important subject when it comes to the daily use of a certain software. The Nextcloud team has done a lot to make your work and collaboration faster and more comfortable by decreasing for example page load times as well as improving Server-Side-Encryption and external storage performance. For more information on performance enhancements please have a look at Nextcloud’s own blog article
For more detailed information on the new Nextcloud release you should visit the Nextcloud website or start your own Nextcloud instance on our NWS platform. Please remember that we offer a 30 day free trial period for every app!
NETWAYS Web Services: Connect to your own Domain!
Our team has continued to improve the NETWAYS Web Services products for providing more comfort to our customers. Now any app can be run under its own Domain Name in combination with its own SSL certificate. This option is available for the following products:
- GitLab CE
- GitLab EE
- Nextcloud
- Rocket.Chat
- Request Tracker
- SuiteCRM
The implementation within the product is quite simple. After your app has been created successfully, you will find a new webform in your app’s Access tab. Here is an example of a Request Tracker app:
As the webform shows, customers simply have to enter a registered Domain Name and their SSL Certificate as well as their SSL Key. The implementation in the app will be done by our NWS platform fully automated. Customers only need to take care about the quality and correctness of the certificate and to make sure they enter the DNS record correctly on their Domain Name Server. The IP address needed will be indicated underneath the webform in the information section. Furthermore, it is still possible to set an additional CName for your app. This means that your customized Domain Name and the CName can be used in parallel. Furthermore, the platform generated standard URL will stay valid and customers can always go back to the initial settings by removing their entries from the webform.
After clicking the save button, the app will be restarted and all changes will be taken into production immediately.
The bonus of this option is clear: Anybody working with your apps will be glad to use easy to read and memorize URLs. Furthermore, company identity and culture is even more important today than ever. So why not also provide your SuiteCRM, Rocket.Chat or Nextcloud with a well branded URL?
More information can be found on our NWS homepage, in any of our product sections or by contacting us via the NWS livechat.
Important note: All NWS products are up for a 30 day free trial!
How To Administrate Nextcloud Using CLI
With Nextcloud you can configure almost everything using the Webinterface.
But you may do updates and configuration also via CLI.
In this How To I’ll go over some common use-cases for the Nextcloud CLI.
Update / Upgrade
Let’s start with upgrading to the newest version. Go to the directory where your nextcloud is located – there should be a folder called ‚updater‘.
[root@nc-vm ~]# cd /var/www/nextcloud/updater [root@nc-vm ~]# ls index.php updater.phar
Inside the updater folder is a file called updater.phar.
Now execute the following command.
[root@nc-vm ~]# sudo -u www-data php updater.phar Current version is 11.0.3. Update to Nextcloud 12.0.0 available. (channel: "stable") Following file will be downloaded automatically: https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/nextcloud-12.0.0.zip Steps that will be executed: [ ] Check for expected files [ ] Check for write permissions [ ] Enable maintenance mode [ ] Create backup [ ] Downloading [ ] Extracting [ ] Replace entry points [ ] Delete old files [ ] Move new files in place [ ] Done Start update? [y/N] y
Confirm with ‚y‘ to start the update.
Info: Pressing Ctrl-C will finish the currently running step and then stops the updater. [✔] Check for expected files [✔] Check for write permissions [✔] Enable maintenance mode [✔] Create backup [✔] Downloading [✔] Extracting [✔] Replace entry points [✔] Delete old files [✔] Move new files in place [✔] Done Update of code successful. Should the "occ upgrade" command be executed? [Y/n] Y
After the new files have been moved in place you’ll have to confirm to execute the „occ upgrade“ command.
Nextcloud or one of the apps require upgrade - only a limited number of commands are available You may use your browser or the occ upgrade command to do the upgrade Set log level to debug Updating database schema Updated database Updating federatedfilesharing ... Updated federatedfilesharing to 1.2.0 Updating files_pdfviewer ... Updated files_pdfviewer to 1.1.1 Updating files_texteditor ... .. .. Checking for update of app workflowengine in appstore Checked for update of app "workflowengine" in appstore Starting code integrity check... Finished code integrity check Update successful Maintenance mode is kept active Reset log level Keep maintenance mode active? [y/N] N
And finally you enter ‚N‘ to disable the maintenance mode
Maintenance mode is disabled
And that’s it. But note: even if it tells you that a lot of apps are be updated, you may find that not all of your apps have been updated.
OCC Command
Next we’ll explore the features of the occ command.
[root@nc-vm ~]# cd /var/www/nextcloud [root@nc-vm ~]# sudo -u www-data php occ
You will get a long list of the available options and commands.
Nextcloud version 12.0.0 Usage: command [options] [arguments] Options: -h, --help Display this help message -q, --quiet Do not output any message -V, --version Display this application version --ansi Force ANSI output --no-ansi Disable ANSI output -n, --no-interaction Do not ask any interactive question --no-warnings Skip global warnings, show command output only -v|vv|vvv, --verbose Increase the verbosity of messages: 1 for normal output, 2 for more verbose output and 3 for debug Available commands: _completion BASH completion hook. check check dependencies of the server environment help Displays help for a command list Lists commands status show some status information .. .. versions versions:cleanup Delete versions versions:expire Expires the users file versions
I won’t be able to cover all of them in this post. But I’ll go over a view of them in the following.
Reset Admin Password
This is pretty useful if you forgot your admin password and you find yourself locked out of your Nextcloud.
[root@nc-vm ~]# sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ user:resetpassword admin Enter a new password: Confirm the new password: Successfully reset password for admin
Change Log Level
Sometimes you to increase the log level to figure out what is wrong. By default the log level is set to ‚warning‘ (level 2).
To get more information you’ll have to decrease the number. So 1 is level ‚info‘ and 0 is for ‚debug‘.
You may also set it to ‚error‘ which is level 3 to get less information.
[root@nc-vm ~]# sudo -u www-data php occ log:manage --level 0 Enabled logging backend: file Log level: Debug (0) Log timezone: UTC
Encryption
For server side encryption it’s necessary to enable the encryption app first.
(In Nextcloud Version 12.0.0 and prior enryption does not work with S3 object store as primary storage.)
[root@nc-vm ~]# sudo -u www-data php occ app:enable encryption encryption enabled
And then enable encryption
[root@nc-vm ~]# sudo -u www-data php occ encryption:enable Encryption enabled Default module: OC_DEFAULT_MODULE
Note that only new uploaded files will be encrypted and not the existing ones.
In order to encrypt all existing files of all users you will have to issue the following command:
[root@nc-vm ~]# sudo -u www-data php occ encryption:encrypt-all You are about to encrypt all files stored in your Nextcloud installation. Depending on the number of available files, and their size, this may take quite some time. Please ensure that no user accesses their files during this time! Note: The encryption module you use determines which files get encrypted. Do you really want to continue? (y/n) y
Continue with ‚y‘. You may notify the users by mail about their private key passwords.
But this only works if the users have provided their email-addresses.
Encrypt all files with the Default encryption module ==================================================== Create key-pair for every user ------------------------------ This module will encrypt all files in the users files folder initially. Already existing versions and files in the trash bin will not be encrypted. Key-pair created for all users [============================] Start to encrypt users files ---------------------------- all files encrypted [>---------------------------] Generated encryption key passwords ---------------------------------- +-----------+----------------------+ | Username | Private key password | +-----------+----------------------+ | admin | BqaK1WtI | +-----------+----------------------+ A list of all newly created passwords was written to data/oneTimeEncryptionPasswords.csv Each of these users need to login to the web interface, go to the personal settings section "basic encryption module" and update the private key password to match the login password again by entering the one-time password into the "old log-in password" field and their current login password Do you want to send the passwords directly to the users by mail? (y/n) n
Configuration
Usually the config file for Nextcloud is located in /var/www/nextcloud/config.
So in order to change the configuration you may edit the file /var/www/nextcloud/config/config.php with a text editor.
But you can also import a custom config file in json format. In this example I imported a config to set Ceph S3 object store as primary storage for Nextcloud:
[root@nc-vm ~]# cat objectstore.json {"system": { "objectstore": { "class": "OC\\\\Files\\\\ObjectStore\\\\S3", "arguments": { "bucket": "$RGW_BUCKET", "autocreate": true, "key": "$RGW_KEY", "secret": "$RGW_SECRET", "hostname": "$RGW_HOSTNAME", "use_ssl": true, "use_path_style": true } } }} [root@nc-vm ~]# sudo -u www-data php occ config:import objectstore.json Config successfully imported from: objectstore.json
It’s also possible to view only specific sections of the config:
[root@nc-vm ~]# sudo -u www-data php occ config:system:get objectstore class: OC\\Files\\ObjectStore\\S3 arguments: bucket: $RGW_BUCKET autocreate: true key: $RGW_KEY secret: $RGW_SECRET hostname: $RGW_HOSTNAME use_ssl: true use_path_style: true
Apps
To get a list of all installed enabled and disabled apps:
[root@nc-vm ~]# sudo -u www-data php occ app:list Enabled: - activity: 2.5.2 - bruteforcesettings: 1.0.2 - calendar: 1.5.3 - comments: 1.2.0 .. .. - workflowengine: 1.2.0 Disabled: - admin_audit - encryption - files_external - previewgenerator - user_external - user_ldap
To enable/disable apps:
[root@nc-vm ~]# sudo -u www-data php occ app:enable previewgenerator previewgenerator enabled [root@nc-vm ~]# sudo -u www-data php occ app:disable calendar calendar disabled
Like I mentioned before, there are many more commands and the ones I picked are just a view of them.
But I hope they were useful at least for some of you.
NETWAYS Web Services: Nextcloud Hosting
Nextcloud ist die perfekte Lösung zur Speicherung von privaten Daten, Fotos usw. und zum Filesharing in Teams und Unternehmen. Als Fork von ownCloud gestartet, kann sich dieses Open Source Projekt durch eine Vielzahl von Optionen, die bei ownCloud nur in der Enterprise Version enthalten sind, von seinem Ursprung absetzen. Wir nutzen vor allem die S3-Integration, über welche wir den entsprechenden Speicherplatz über unser hochverfügbares Ceph-Storage zur Verfügung stellen. Einen schönen Vergleich zwischen ownCloud und Nextcloud von Gabriel gibt es hier bei uns im Blog.
Über die NETWAYS Web Services können wir Nextcloud Instanzen in verschiedenen Größen für alle Einsatzzwecke zur Verfügung stellen – natürlich voll von uns gemanaged.
Nextcloud kann komplett über das Webinterface bedient werden und es werden Clients für alle wichtigen Betriebssysteme und Apps für iOS und Android zur Verfügung gestellt.
Und das beste – Sie können Nextcloud bei uns 30 Tage kostenfrei testen. Jetzt schnell anmelden!