Web Server/Cloud

[petmor]

Hi

I'm looking at creating a cloud for my own use and that of the kids (so must be easy to use). I have played with OwnCloud on the lan and been impressed but now am wondering what the differences between OwnCloud, the Fedora Cloud and the Ubuntu Cloud are.

I would like the experience of running my own proper cloud as I'm thinking of moving into a Linux career in the future, so Fedora or Ubuntu sound interesting but are they just too over the top for such small use?

Would the Fedora cloud or OwnCloud installed on Fedora run on a Raspberry Pi with virtual storage on a NAS? I have a spare Atom box if not, would an Atom be enough?

Also since I'll be opening this up to the internet are there good tutorials for best practice and security (both hardware and Fedora based) so I can make it as secure as possible?

thanks in advance

[CoffeeNKeyboard]

Sorry, I can't answer your question. But I was curious to know about your findings for ownCloud on Fedora.

Which Fedora release did you try?
What installation procedure did you follow? Was it smooth, or did you have to tinker a fair bit?
Did you try setting up authentication and authorisation?

[glway]

I don't think fedora is a good choice for anything other than a personal computer/laptop simply because it is not the most stable choice and the life of a version is just 12 months. You might want to try the older brother centos. Also to be perfectly honest I was messing around with clouds and such and I found the Opensolaris solution quite good for the job... Idk personal opinion.

[CoffeeNKeyboard]

Fedora's 6 month cycles may seem short, but it still offers us the choice. The benefit comes in terms of support for newer hardware.

I update my machines on alternate releases. Had Fedora 15 earlier. Once I found that Fedora 17 was looking good, I moved to it.
--- Update ---

Sorry: Let's not hijack this thread.

[petmor]

I installed OwnCloud on 17 Desktop edition. I just followed the instructions here (http://owncloud.org/support/install/) and found that fairly simple. I did also use some other threads but unfortunately lost my usbkey and lost what the links where (another reason I need a cloud).

I also install Gallery3. The biggest issues I found where to do with SELinux and getting that working. Once I had figured that out I was fine.

I did play with users but not much.

I have since found out that Fedora doesn't work that well in Raspberry Pi (I built the server up on a netbook to test how it worked) but will now be using Debian. I also installed all this on Ubuntu and found it much easier.

Hope this helps.

[glway]

I am still waiting to get my hands on a Raspberry pi... However

Despatch expected in 15 week(s)

Yeah right....

[petmor]

I have mine but haven't had time to play with it yet. Only got the base Debian on it. Will be installing OwnCloud etc this weekend hopefully.

[glway]

Any news yet? Keep us updated.

[petmor]

Unfortunately I got side tracked on another project of putting a mini itx board into a MS Xray case . This is also a Fedora forum and since I'll be putting Debian on it I wasn't sure it was still appropriate but if you want updates I'll continue.

I have it booted up, first thing I need to do is change the user and password then I'll start the installs.

[petmor]

Not sure if anyone is still interested but just in case. I gave up with the Raspberry Pi and went back to a mini ITX Atom board.

Basic install is as follows. I can provide more details if anyone wants them.

To install Lamp I followed this thread until the finish of installing Php.
http://fedorasolved.org/server-solutions/lamp-stack
Beware some of the lines marked as older versions still need to be run. ie restarting iptables and Apache.

Then switched to this doc to install the remaining packages
http://owncloud.org/support/install/

I have moved my document root to a different partition so needed to up date Apache with that info by editing it in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf. There are two places this needs to be done.

The document says to allow overrides for all of the root but I added a new Directory entry for the OwnCloud directory and set it in there. I didn't do ‘a2enmod rewrite’ and ‘a2enmod headers’ and still am not overly sure what they mean.

Create the data directory and change the owner on it and apps and config to Apache.

The biggest issue was the SELinux context but found that
sudo chcon -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t filename
works. Do it for data, config and apps.

Make sure all parent directories are owned by root and owncloud is owned by Apache.

This was a lot of testing and messing around so I may have missed something. I am now using OwnCloud with no apparent issues.

Next I need to determine how secure it is before I open my server to the internet.

Any questions let me know.

[coffee412]

I run FC17 on my surf box but apache2 on my ubuntu12.x box. I loaded owncloud on it and kinda checking it out. I have noticed some things and decided to update it to the beta version. Seems to run better but some issues still remain.

1. The music link on the left doesnt list all songs. There is something wrong with some songs and they either listed as unknown or not at all. Im thinking some tag issue?

2. Pictures link on left - doesnt show all the pics. The latest ver. 4.07 it did work but on the beta it doesnt. Shows them overlapping but cannot seperate them. just checked them again right now and they are working (?). So, Ill amend this to "now and again".

Incidently, I wanted to change the storage of files to my raid instead of my system disk. So, I basically did the following below and its worked just fine.

1. Create a directory on raid (mine was /mnt/raid5/owncloud/data)

2. Go into the config.php file and change path:

'datadirectory' => '/var/www/owncloud/data',

To the path you need:

'datadirectory' => '/mnt/raid5/owncloud/data',

**** Be sure to copy and chown the old data directory to the new one.

Now, Changing the graphics is easy enough as most are all png files and you can sub out what you want instead.

Regards,

coffee

[petmor]

I haven't added my music as I have a large ipod that I take everywhere and use that. Later I will be looking into putting my media up either through a vpn pipe for some friends or through something like OwnCloud but this is my first webserver so I want to run it with minimal data first and not have my nas open to the web. Thanks for the info on changing the location though.

I also won't use OwnCloud for pics as I want to use Gallery3 so I can use its tagging. I finally got it install last night.

[jpollard]

Originally Posted by petmor

...
The biggest issue was the SELinux context but found that
sudo chcon -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t filename
works. Do it for data, config and apps.

Not good - making everything read write - especially the config and apps. These should be readonly (httpd_sys_content_t), the CGI should be httpd_sys_script_exec_t.

This prevents accidentally changing the configuration via some apache interface, and the same goes for the CGI.

The static data should be read only, but read/write data files need to be httpd_sys_rw_content_t.

[petmor]

Thanks for that. I'm still new and not 100% sure I'm using the right contexts. That's one thing I need to study up more on.

I did pick up in their instruction document that they wanted more access than I though so I have already restricted it but I'll do this tonight when I get home.

ta

---------- Post added at 05:45 AM ---------- Previous post was at 02:33 AM ----------

I tried changing the context to httpd_sys_rw_content_t for both apps and config and it errored saying it needed write for both.

I've had to change it back but thanks for the suggestion.

[jpollard]

That sounds like a security problem somewhere.