I’ve recently started the project of a FreeNAS server as a backup to my Synology NAS. Would love to see a video on using the ownCloud app to have a “Dropbox” like experience using FreeNAS and benefiting from ZFS.
You will get that experience but I would use Next Cloud the product is much more robust and is supported on FreeNAS. Used Own Cloud for a while but was a hosted service liked the fact that a file save on one system was available on another and could be shared. Lot of features but it does require a bit of setup if you want a secure system. Before doing anything please read the OwnCloud / NextCloud docs.
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Here is the guide I used for setting up Nextcloud on FreeNas. Its about the most comprehensive I could find. https://www.samueldowling.com/2018/12/08/install-nextcloud-on-freenas-iocage-jail-with-hardened-security/
I wouldn’t recommend using the Plugin. Be warned however that running Nextcloud is kind of tricky. For example when I upgraded FreeNas from 9.3 to 11 (skipped 10 – big debacle – you can read about it on the internet), I had to reinstall Nextcloud from scratch. Possibly this didn’t need to be done, but my Nextcloud was just totally broken and I wasn’t experienced enough to wade through all the troubleshooting. I think the way this guide sets up its datasets its probably much more robust and keeping the data if the main Nextcloud install was borked.
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Thanks @kevdog! This is a great guide and has answered many questions. I’m still in the testing phase with this Dell R240. Still trying to decide how I want to do this and have a stable backup to my Synology with 10Gbe and ZFS.
I hope it helps you. My entire experience with Nextcloud (Owncloud previously) has been really mixed. There seems to be a lot of issues with it if upgrading. Try it for yourself but actually try for a couple of months and go through a couple of upgrade cycles prior to using it for mission critical things. I’m currently in my testing phase which is going on month 2 for current nextcloud version.
One thing you may want to really evaluate is collabora code if you need live on-line document editing. Its a really cool potential feature however in my experience its super buggy and prone to breakage. I definitely would not rely on this feature if you absolutely require it. It requires either a docker image or can be run natively on Linux. Because FreeNAS is freebsd based and bsd in general has really bad support for Docker (Sorry RancherOS not a replacement), I needed to spin up an Ubuntu VM to try both options. I’ve tried both the docker image and the native installation and they both seem to have their own unique problems. Again cool feature to have just very poor implementation by the collabora people
Lastly the guide I referenced has really good security tips near the end of the blog. I’ve actually applied some of the security tips to my other VMs (like aide for example). If I was smart I’d spin up an ansible script to actually be able to do some of these things automatically. I’m just recently into ansible so I’m learning. I’ve just gotten to the point that ansible can automatically upgrade the packages of all my running VMs on various platforms (arch, ubuntu, bsd) and will install python2 or python3 if package not found since ansible requires this on the host to run more intensive tasks.
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