"owncloud"

roasted

Has anybody ever tinkered with your own self-hosted cloud software before? I was never too keen on putting my stuff on Google Docs or Dropbox except for things that were disposable that I would store there more out of convenience than anything else.

I have a Linux server running in my basement that has a whole array of tasks. Randomly I found an article about OwnCloud, which is primarily Linux based but I understand it'll work on Windows server too. I fired it up and so far I'm kind of digging it. I already had a DDNS account set up at my house so I'm basically able to navigate to myowncustomURL.com/owncloud and log in, and everything in the data folder on my server is just... there.

At first I began to question how much I'd really use it. It has a calendar section as well as contacts that you can (somehow) sync downward. I haven't tinkered with that yet but any music files you have on the server you can stream through the built in music player right there within the web interface. Likewise, the picture gallery is very, very nice. I began wondering how convenient this would be for family members to swap pictures around... where basically after vacation instead of loading all the SD cards on my house when everyone is itching to get home, have them just go home and log in to the server and upload the pictures as they wish. Of course, they'd be segregated to their accounts only, but once they share the folder out, it'd be a nice and easy way to handle that.

There's a built in plain text editor, but of course that doesn't really work with ODS and DOC files and whatnot. That said, it really feels like Dropbox with GoogleDocs-like sharing features. So far, I dig it.

Has anybody else out there tinkered with any projects like this? It seems to be gaining some decent traction.

hyunelan2

The thing that has kept me from setting my home server up like that is security. It's much easier to let Google/Amazon/Dropbox/etc. worry about keeping things secure and reliable than for me to have to duplicate that effort. I use Unraid on my server, and know there are some plugins to put it on the web, but worry about then having to secure my otherwise very-streamlined file server.

roasted

I was actually surprised how easy it was to set up. In fact, at first I was raging at the thing because I couldn't get it to work. Any time PHP and MySQL are involved I can't help but to think it's going to be quite a task to get things moving. All I really did was download the tarball and move it to the already installed Apache directory. When I installed MySQL-server it asked for a root password, so I created one there of course. But once I fired up the web interface it actually self configured everything else, including creating a new user when I put in the user/pw I wanted. That was uh.. that was it.

What's nice is I have my own personal server limited only to my raid array size... I talked to some guy who had OwnCloud set up with 8TB. Can't get that from Dropbox.

Not to mention, Dropbox and other services aren't 100% hack proof either. Mitt Romney, granted him being a political icon defaults him to having a bigger target on his back than any average user would, but supposedly his Dropbox was hacked ~2 weeks ago. I still use Dropbox and the security hasn't once phased me. I like the OwnCloud idea because it's on my own server with me managing things the way I want, setting up users as I want, and having virtually unlimited disk space as long as I have hard drives big enough to accommodate it accordingly.

FYI - How do you like your Elantra? I have an 01... 170k hard miles, factory clutch, still purring. Flipping love that company.