Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today I am celebrating my Project of the Year. I have Nextcloud installed! Let’s get started!
My NextCloud Experience in Brief
This week, I achieved a major milestone for my homelab – one I’ve been poking since at least early March of this year when I noted, “Nextcloud has been a wish list item since I gave up using Google’s ecosystem,” [1].
As I learned more about the tech I’m working with, I added specifications for storing scanned pictures on high capacity, but slow hard disks while making smaller files available with the speed of solid state – only to learn later how rootless Podman is incompatible with NFS. I studied “Docker Secrets” to learn best practices for password management – only to move the project to an older version of Podman without that feature. One innovation to survive this torrent of course corrections is running the containers in a pod, but even that was shifted around in the switch from Rocky 8 to Debian.
Two major trials kept me occupied for a lot of this time. The first involved getting the containers to talk to each other, which they weren’t willing to do over localhost, but they were when given a mostly equivalent IPv4 loopback address.
The second was the apparent absence of a database despite multiple attempts to debug my startup script. Nextcloud was talking to MariaDB, but it was like MariaDB didn’t have the database specified in the command to create its container. For this, I created an auxiliary MariaDB container in client mode (Thank-you-dev-team-for-this-feature!) and saw enough to make me think there was none. I wasn’t sure though.
One Final Piece
#remove MariaDB’s “dirty” volume
podman volume rm MariaDBVolume
#reset everything
./resetVolumes
./servicestartThere was no huge push this week. I came across an issue on GitHub [2] wondering why there was no database being created. By starting a bash shell within the MariaDB container, I found there were some files from some long-forgotten attempt at starting a database. All I had to do was completely reset the Podman volume instead of pruning empty volumes as I had been doing.
Future Nextcloud Work
Now that I have the scripts to produce fresh instances, I still have a few work items I want to keep in mind.
I expect to wipe this one clean and create a proper admin account separate from my main username, a practice I want to better get into when setting up services.
Adjacent, but I’ll want access on my tablet, which will entail getting the Bitwarden client to cooperate with my home server.
I still want my data on GoldenOakLibry. I’m hoping I can create a virtual disk or two to satisfy Podman which in turn RedLaptop can relay over NFS to network storage.
Final Question
Have you taken the time to set up your own personal cloud? I look forward to hearing about your setup in the comments below or on my Socials!
Works Cited
[1] Shadow_8472, “I Studied Podman Volumes,”letsbuildroboticswithshadow8472.com,March 6, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://letsbuildroboticswithshadow8472.com/index.php/2023/03/06/i-studied-podman-volumes/. [Accessed Oct. 2, 2023].
[2] rosshettel, thaJeztah, et. all, “MYSQL_DATABASE does not create database,” github.com, July 9, 2016. [Online].Available: https://github.com/MariaDB/mariadb-docker/issues/68. [Accessed Oct. 2, 2023].