I’ve just finally and fully spun down a proxmox server I’ve been running and updating as my home lab for six years.
Every major update seemed to break something. Upgrades were always a roll of the dice as to whether it would even boot. It’s probably at least partially my fault for using an old R710 and running docker directly on the OS instead of within a container, but it was still by far my least reliable piece of kit.
The last apt update removed sudo, and I can’t be arsed to rebuild, so I’ve moved the critical bits to a fleet of SBCs. Powering that fucker down was a huge relief.
What we need is something that is a) Private (not saying nc isn’t) b) Independent of any judicial government c) P2P and ultra redundant d) Run by a true non-profit (not like openAI) e) Massively distributed, process wise and storage wise f) OS independent, written in pure C or Rust.
I won’t update without first creating an image of the server to roll back to. Like others on here, the web updater almost always fails and goes into maintenance mode and I have to ssh in to fix it.
Having said that, functionally, I have no issues. Only when upgrading does the whole thing shit the bed.
This has been a serious concern of mine. In the event that I prematurely die I have everything set up with automatic updates, so that hopefully my family can continue to use the self-hosted services without me.
Nextcloud will not stop shitting the bed. I’d give it a few months at most if I died, at which point my family would likely turn back to Google Drive.
I’m looking for a more reliable alternative, even if it’s not as feature-rich.
The way that they do updates doesn’t make automated updates very easy. There are usually a few little nagging things that have to be done or changed and they don’t always seem to be the same. I just update manually and make sure I’ve got a good backup of all my family’s files.
If you’re ok with just file storage sftpgo has been solid for me for years now. Does sftp ftp and WebDAV (like nextcloud). Webui isn’t as pretty but it’s fast. Mobile apps will be various sync apps with sftp or WebDAV support. On Android folder sync pro is pretty good for keeping documents and pictures backed up
I’ve told my wife and family that if something happens to me, they need to start migrating all their stuff off my self-hosted services to cloud services because its a matter of time before something fails and nobody’s around who knows or cares to fix it.
My oldest kid is a senior in highschool and is starting to show some interest in Linux and this kind of stuff. I’m hopeful that I can change my tune soon and maybe have one of the kids to share a hobby with!
The problem child for me right now is a game built in node.js that I’m trying to host/fix. It’s lagging at random with very little reason, crashing in new and interesting ways every day, and resisting almost all attempts at instrumentation & debugging. To the point most things in DevTools just lock it up full stop. And it’s not compatible with most APMs because most of the traffic occurs over websockets. (I had Datadog working, but all it was saying was most of the CPU time is being spent on garbage collection at the time things go wonky–couldn’t get it narrowed down, and I’ve tried many different GC settings that ultimately didn’t help)
I haven’t had any major problems with Nextcloud lately, despite the fragile way in which I’ve installed it at work (Nextcloud and MariaDB both in Kubernetes). It occasionally gets stuck in maintenance mode after an update, because I’m not giving it enough time to run the update and it restarts the container and I haven’t given enough thought to what it’d take to increase that time. That’s about it. Early on I did have a little trouble maintaining it because of some problems with the storage, or the database container deciding to start over and wipe the volume, but nothing my backups couldn’t handle.
I have a hell of a time getting the email to stay working, but that’s not necessarily a Nextcloud problem, that’s a Microsoft being weird about email problem (according to them it is time to let go of ancient apps that cannot handle oauth2–Nextcloud emailer doesn’t support this, same with several other applications we’re running, so we have to do some weird email proxy stuff)
I am not surprised to hear some of the stories in this thread, though. Nextcloud’s doing a lot of stuff. Lots of failure points.
Yea I’ve been using nextcloud for a while and it’s fine.
I remember when I used owncloud before nextcloud was even a thing and the upgrade experience was absolute shit.
These days it’s just fine.
Well… no… I have been self hosting it for several years over multiple major versions now. Only for Files, Calendar and Deck though. It was a bit hard to set up, but reading the general Apache and PHP documentation helped a lot.
The solution for me is that I run Nextcloud on a Kubernetes cluster and pin a container version. Then every few months I update that version in my deployment yaml to the latest one I want to run, and run kubectl apply -f nextcloud.yml and it just does its thing. Never given me any real trouble.
Yeah the Docker version hated me, mainly due to it sometimes getting a bit behind on updates and then having schema mismatches if I ran an update in that missed the previous one. No issues with the Snap thus far
I used to have this problem. I started pulling a version number (like 27) instead of “latest” so that I could just pull minor releases when I did updates, and then I manually step up the version in the docker-config file for major versions when I’m ready for them. (I don’t like to pull a major release version until there’s been 1 or 2 maintenance releases since my nextcloud is fairly critical for my family)
For me it’s the opposite. I tried to use nextcloud for years, installing the normal way, and it always broke for no reason. I just started using it on docker and it has been perfect, fingers crossed.
Interesting, when I used docker on a proxmox build, it would give me trouble. Once I installed it the normal way on an Ubuntu build, it was good to go.
I wonder why that is?
Fingers crossed that it continues to work for you in the current configuration!
Installed Nextcloud-AIO using the docker script, took about 4 - 5 terminal commands. Practically zero issues! Hopefully someone else can provide some help in the thread!
I have it set up. Try the AIO docker image. Once you get it set up, it pretty much just works. You just pick which office suite you want, check a few optional features if you want 'em, and it handles the rest for you. Most importantly, the AIO image is from nextcloud. They test it, it always works because it is the blessed version from them. If you’re not a Linux guy, don’t try the other installation methods, they’re much, much more difficult.
I’ll give it a shot. I’ve tried so many different approaches already. I think I maybe tried to install AIO straight onto a linux vm; don’t recall how it got derailed. I did build a Lubuntu VM for experimentation. I really wanted to get an Ollama chatbot running to assist me in my future digital endeavors, but it just wouldn’t come together.
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