LINUX Unplugged - 374: Perfect Nextcloud Setup

Episode Date: October 7, 2020

Our secrets for a low-cost bulletproof Nextcloud server that we figured out the hard way. We take you into the "server garage" and share our lessons learned. Special Guests: Brent Gervais and Drew DeVore.

I feel like pre-show should be Brent's department, you know? Yeah, he is good at scouring strange and interesting things. Brent, anything in the pre-show department this week? Well, pre-shows. Give me a sec. I think here I got a mouthful of trail mix. Check your folder. Open up your pre-show folder.

I know you have a Manila folder over there, right? Did I say that right, Wes? Manila? Mm-hmm. Okay, thank you. It's actually Vanilla Manila. Well, you've got the scented ones. Yeah, you just got the scratch and sniff envelopes. I know that.

Hello, friends, and welcome into your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. 374 is brought to you by the all-new A Cloud Guru, the leader in learning for Cloud Linux and other modern tech skills. Hundreds of courses, thousands of hands-on labs. Get certified. Get hired. Get learning.

A Cloud Guru dot com. Wes, today on the show, it's one of those where we adventure out into the server garage and we attempt to do something that we probably should have taken a few more precautions before we even got started. That's for sure. I mean, it was a while ago on the show a few weeks back. We have updated people on our setup with Nextcloud. It was a question that came into the show, 362 of this podcast. So it's been a little bit. We reveal how much we were spending per month, and I think people were shocked. And so we set out on a mission to tighten that up by quite a bit and update, reconfigure, and maybe come up with the damn near most perfect Nextcloud setup I've ever seen. That is fairly bulletproof. It's portable and something we're going to recommend in a little bit.

But we have a lot to do before we get there, including some community news that I'm very excited about. So to help us analyze all of this, it is our team of experts, Time Appropriate Gritting, Virtual Lug. Hello. What? Howdy. That was a good one. Hey, you know, 22 strong this week. We've had more, but I think maybe one of the better intros there.

So hello, everybody. Thanks for being here with us today. Why don't we start with a little KDE news? Because it's been a while since we've talked about the Plasma desktop. Too long. The excellent Plasma desktop and KDE developers for more than a year have been working to evolve the default Breeze theme, which that work is being done by the KDE Visual Design Group, and it's finally paying off with an initial Breeze Evolution.

Yeah, Breeze Evolution is a modest refresh to the UI. So far, various subtle changes have landed around window shadows, sidebars, and color alterations. More work on Breeze Evolution will continue leading up to its debut in KDE Plasma 5.21. Ooh, I look forward to that. Also happening is some work on KWIN's Wayland Virtual Keyboard, which now, get ready for this, supports GTK applications. Bet you didn't think that's what I was going to say. Ooh, that's neat.

Yeah. We'll have a link to the blog post by Nate, who we've had on the show before, that covers this and a bunch of other really cool stuff coming to the next update in KDE. It's such a nice, solid performer these days. And I think we have slipped into a mistake of not talking about it very much. And so we wanted to right that wrong with kind of some really thought-provoking KDE discussion that came out of Academy 2020.

Oh, yes. At that annual KDE conference, of course, held virtually this year, KDE developer and head Graham delivered a talk entitled Visions of the Future about the possible future of KDE on commercial products. Subtitled Plasma Sold on Retail Hardware. Lots of it. The session concentrated on ways to make KDE applications, and also the Plasma desktop, the default environment on hardware sold to the general public. The proposal includes creating an official KDE distribution with a hardware certification program and directly paying developers. Yeah, there's also another bombshell in here, and I got some audio from the event,

but we'll also link to the entire YouTube video. Graham started by giving some context. The ideas that were to be presented was a follow-up on the entire KDE accessibility and productivity goals that we talked to him about in 2017. And one of the objectives was to get Plasma and KDE applications ready to work on all kinds of hardware. Well, Graham thinks that this has been achieved and now it's time to move to the next step for KDE. And that is creating an official KDE operating system. I think what that next thing is, is to create an official KDE OS. So you might ask, why would we want to do this? Well, the simplest reason is we have to if we want a direct relationship with hardware vendors, because that's what they need. They need an OS, and that means working with distro partners, or it means having our own OS. And we love our distro partners.

I do too, but having our own OS allows us to have our own relationship with them. And thankfully, we already have one. That OS is Neon. Unfortunately, Neon is a bit of a halfway product. It's mostly designed to showcase KDE software. Non-KDE software can be very outdated and is not necessarily guaranteed to work. It has a very small development team. And most puzzlingly, we don't admit that KDE Neon is an OS in our own messaging. On the other hand, KDE Neon is indeed enough of an OS that the Slimbook people ship it on their hardware. And lots and lots of people use it as their daily driver on their own computers, including my wife.

She loves it. It's really great. So I think it's time for us to finally admit that Neon is a real OS and treat it as such. We can say that it's what we believe the reference implementation of KDE software ought to look like and promote it accordingly. You know, just clean up our messaging a little bit. Minimac, this sounds similar to an initiative by the GNOME folks, doesn't it? Yeah, indeed it does. I mean, it was years ago that GNOME developers wanted to create a GNOME OS because they thought that they would be just good to have its own OS,

but never appeared. Well, they're still kind of working on it. I heard them talking about it at this year's Guadec, so it may still be coming. There are ISOs out there. This does make me think sometimes when we talk about this, you know, we lament default settings, at least occasionally and historically in some of these big desktop environments. And I wonder if some more of this vertical integration, actually more, you know, more fully shipping something that's considered an OS. I wonder if that will have any impact. You know, I'm sitting here right now reading this news off of a machine running KDE Neon.

I mean, Wes, do you have even the foggiest guess of how old this install is? Older than 2018, maybe 2017? No, no. It's getting close to three years, I'd say, at least. It's a pretty solid desktop. As a pretty happy KDE Neon user, I kind of wondered, well, what would a more official KDE Neon look like? And Nate has thoughts on that as well. First of all, it would have the latest kernels in it for hardware enablement purposes. It would probably have a method to have newer kernels in it than even

its parent OS Ubuntu does. It would have more up-to-date third-party apps, if not from the repos, then maybe from Flatpak or Snap or one of these generally new generation app deployment mechanisms that we support. It would have a lot more development resources, too. And this is sort of a call to action here. I think if you want to make this happen, please, please go ahead and help out. There's also the possibility that in case Neon's Ubuntu base ever proves unsuitable for some reason, it could be rebased on another OS. I think we can be fairly agnostic about that.

And generally, our new Neon-based KDE OS would just be more awesome in every way. That's what I think is the most important thing about it. I don't know about that new base OS. I really appreciate that it's based on Ubuntu, actually. I think Nate's a big OpenSUSE Elite fan, so I understand. But I think that'd be really something if the project started being just a little more upfront. Yeah, this is actually the

official OS and this is what our developers are using and targeting. And this is what we're working with hardware providers. And Nate also talked about a hardware certification program that would sort of go along with this. And so there are several official goals, I think, that they would foresee with an actual KDE OS. I think the end result of this would be pretty beneficial for us because we would be able to work directly with hardware vendors in a better way. Having Neon has already allowed us to do this. And I think it's important that we continue to improve that offering so that we can improve our ability to work with hardware vendors. so that we can improve our ability to work with hardware vendors. And I think there's also a very good chance, as I mentioned earlier, that making Neon our own official reference implementation of KDE software

would encourage other KDE distros to up their game, do a better job. Not to say that they do a bad job. Obviously, I use a non-Neon distro, and I think they do a great job, but there's always room for improvement everywhere, right? And I think this is an example where competition has the potential to help everybody. is it seems like it would take away this development playground where they can try things out. If it needs to all of a sudden be a quote-unquote reference implementation, then the burden of getting it right and having it polished is a bit higher, isn't it? Yeah, right.

I mean, I think right now, as we use KDE Neon, we kind of have a caveat of like, well, you know, we shouldn't really treat it like it's stable. You probably shouldn't use it unless you're willing to have your desktop maybe possibly break. And in practice, I don't think that's really happened. Or if it does happen, it updates so frequently that the next day, you know, you've got an update fixing whatever small regression happened. But they probably still need a playground, right? Like some sort of new area testing branch of if KDE Neon itself becomes something more like stable. I have a question for a couple of you in the Mumble room. Maybe I'll start with Brent and Carl. What are your thoughts on almost more fragmentation in the Linux landscape

if we start seeing different distros spin up into their quote-unquote own operating systems for hardware deals? Are you concerned at all about more distros, more fragmentation, more islands? That's a question that comes up often, isn't it? And I wonder if our energy, like in developers, will get spread out. It feels like we're a little thin already. So if we start going into all our own little projects around every single little technology, is that going to cause some problems? But maybe on the flip side, maybe it's a good thing. Maybe it means that hardware manufacturers, there's a lot more opportunity there than there was even a year or two ago. So maybe it's a good sign. Very true. It could be. I really don't have a problem with it. I mean, the way I look at it, it's people's free time

and they can spend it how they want to. And for a lot of them, it's their creative outlet. They're going to have opinions about the way they want to do things. And I have no problem with that whatsoever. And at least for the moment, right, they are still based on the Ubuntu base. So if anything, maybe that just adds some draws some folks might use a different KDE based distro over to the Ubuntu world and, you know, more testers there. And if you think about it at that level, well, then really it's getting pretty standardized stuff here. You have an Ubuntu base, it's using systemd, it uses a kernel of a certain version that has these certain features, and you start to realize it's not really all of that

fragmented. I mean, at that layer, at that level, things are actually becoming more and more consistent, despite what some people would prefer. I'm going to keep listening for this. Haven't heard much from the KDE Neon folks, but would love to know their thoughts on this if this is something they'd be interested in pursuing. And then if it is, how do we as a community step up and support it and make it happen? Because I'd love to know that this KDE Neon install that I have here is the official KDE Plasma OS and that it's going to be supported and around for a long time that just kind of as an end user gives me a little more reassurance

i'm not convinced that's who neon's designed for right now but uh maybe that's the transition they can make maybe they're willing to take that transition linode.com slash unplugged get a 100 60 day credit on your new Linode account. We'll have a link in the show notes, or you just go to Linode.com slash unplugged. They're the largest independent cloud provider, full stop, and they make it easy for anyone at any skill level to get started. No matter what technology stack you use, Linode can help your ideas come to life. If you just need a personal web server for a blog or a portfolio,

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Linode.com slash unplugged. Thanks to Linode for sponsoring this show, and thanks to everyone who supports our sponsors out there. Linode.com slash unplugged. So let's talk a little more hardware. This got me thinking. This week, NVIDIA unveiled a Raspberry Pi competitor. We've got hardware on the brain, and so I kind of wanted to just chat about this with you guys. And just in time, a wild Mr. Drew has snuck into the studio. Hello, Drew. Hello, Chris. Good to have you here.

You know, the state of disarray that our hardware is slowly devolving into here in the studio. It's all reached like the five year mark or something like that since we built it, or maybe four year. I'm not sure. It runs it runs 24 7 so in computer years it's a lot and wes and i spent some time this weekend racking our brains on how to really kind of attack this problem and figure out like should we should we build it differently should we say break the system up into six or seven individual components or should we consolidate it down into one really super powerful rig i mean we've kicked around all the different scenarios and listener of the show mike f has sent us some hardware recently which is still coming it's still inbound west there's still more oh boy yeah and one of the things he sent us is a batch like a lot of pine 64 one gigabyte small boards you know ones that are closer to the raspberry pi they have the gpio ports um i don't think it's the rock pro 64 but

it's it's still a it's still a little pine board and we're not really even sure what we're going to do with all of them you know what do you do with like seven boards like that and so then i so i started thinking well maybe like we could use them as sensors you know like a temperature sensor out in the server room to check check in on that so anyways like it's we're in this weird hardware phase right now where we need to replace our recording machine which currently runs uh zubuntu it might have actually been kubuntu converted to zubuntu for some reason. And that runs Reaper, which records individual tracks for everyone in Mumble and for myself and Wes and Drew. And then it also routes the audio out to remote people and remote guests.

And then the other machine that's kind of falling apart on us is the OBS machine, which does the live stream and records any videos if we record video versions and captures all of that and puts it out and also makes our backup recording. Both of these machines are just completely falling apart. And I don't think these arm boards are where we need them yet, but it has started to enter our mind that maybe in the future we're going to start replacing these x86 systems with these low power arm systems that could be freaking mounted to the table just put them up under the table right small lower power maybe fanless and if they're cheap easily replaceable sort of standardizable so nvidia comes along with their lowest priced

arm small board computer to date they're really kind of focusing this at the developer market robotics market it's for small tasks that need pretty high-end CPU and GPU for what you get in this form factor. It's called the Jetson Nano, and it's already pretty cheap, but today they're introducing a $60 version. So their standard Jetson Nano was $100, but now they're introducing a $60 version that looks like it's priced pretty nice for what you actually get in something this size. Well, yeah, right? I mean, it's $59 USD, and it's quite similar to the $99 full board, but with just 2 gigs of system memory rather than 4. So it's kind of in direct competition with the higher-end Raspberry Pi models,

but it has a more powerful Tegra GPU and NVIDIA's extensive GPU-optimized software solutions, if you're into that. Well, there's a lot of people that are basing their software around it, and $60 gets you four Cortex-A57 cores at 1.43 gigahertz, like Wes said, two gigs of RAM. You get microSD, and there's a 128-core Maxwell GPU on this thing that has NVEC, which is their NVIDIA encoding, and CUDA capabilities. It also has, so you can get the data in and out of there pretty fast, gigabit, Ethernet, HDMI output, and three USB 3.0 ports.

Ooh, isn't that fancy? Now, the ARM cores on the Raspberry Pi 4 should probably perform a little bit better, but the Jetson Nano 2 gig has the much more capable GPU, and I think you kind of hit on it there with the CUDA support, sort of more similar to a board that you might run on a standard x86 environment. So if you just need to do this maybe in the field, you've already got stuff optimized for the NVIDIA stack, and you just want to run the same stack,

but in a smaller, lower power form factor. Maybe this looks pretty interesting. I can't help but feel the elephant in the room is Apple has an ARM announcement next week as we record this on Tuesday. We've been kicking around the whole ARM development angle on Coder Radio, which by the way, everybody, Coder Radio is back, if you didn't know. Coder Radio program. Coder.show. Is it just me, or is there a new one dropping today?

I think there's a new one dropping probably as we speak, so check it out. Coder.show, it's back. The last few episodes, I've managed to really piss off the Seuss lizards, so I could use some backup there if you want to catch up on the last couple of episodes. I'd love to hear your thoughts. But also, we've been kicking around ARM as a development target. And all of this kind of plays into that. And I don't know, Wes, I feel like there is a change in the winds. Winter is coming potentially for desktop Linux, but. Oh, you sweet summer child.

I talk about it more in Coder Radius. Check it out. The Coder Radio program is back, and it's glorious. Business. All right. You know, Wes, before we get into the next cloud stuff, what do you say we just do a little spot of housekeeping? Yeah, let's do it. It's high time in here. It's kind of dusty.

I know, and you know, something we should have been mentioning for a long time, but the Jupiter Broadcasting All Shows feed is probably the way to go now. If you look at it, we've kind of honed in on what JB covers. And at Coda Radio, for example, you'd know it's back. It's in the All Shows feed. And there are things in the works. You don't want to miss anything new. The All Shows feed, you can just search for all jupiter broadcasting shows in your podcast client or there is a link why waste all that time subscribing individually when it's a one-stop shop

also now that jupiter broadcasting is independent again we are looking for some sponsors if you're looking to reach the perfect audience you know if you're out there you know this is a great audience to reach the best audience in podcasting and And we have some opportunities. So email me, Chris at Jupiter Broadcasting dot com. And you may notice here on the old Linux on plug show, we try to keep the politics out. This is a technology area, but it is political season in the States. So it's never been a better time to check out Unfilter, Unfilter dot show. It's not part of Jupiter Broadcasting, so we don't talk about it here, but it is up and cranking to cover the people's history in real time. I'm doing live streams for each of the debates. They start 30 minutes before the debates.

And of course, we'll do a live stream for the election night itself. All of that, unfilter.show. Check it out. It's back weekly and I think better than ever. Thanks, everybody, who also has already joined over there and been hanging out with me in the discord. That was a lot of fun. We did the last debate. We're going to do it again. And that's one of the nice things. I like the setup. I just decided, JB, you know, it's going to it's got its focus and we're not going to bring all of that stuff into it. So we don't that way. We don't have to talk about it in the shows. We have a spot for it. All the politics, all of the world news, all of that. Unfilter.show. Go check it out.

Okay. So we had a bit of a next cloud conundrum. Pretty quickly, our monthly storage bill was getting close to $400 a month. And it's a pretty essential tool. It's how we pass around all of our raw recordings, how we pass around our finished recordings. It's how we pass around all of our raw recordings, how we pass around our finished recordings. It's where we store our assets for things like, well, things like jingles, like that housekeeping jingle. They're all stored in NextCloud. Yeah, it's really integrated into the workflow at this point. And one of the things that we did when we built our last NextCloud setup is we decided to base the backend storage on object storage, which allowed us to grow at infinitum, which we were intentionally doing.

That's how we got to like 400 gigs. Yeah. And we wanted something where we could just keep working and load it up, and then we could come back and clean it up. And we knew that would be a job we'd have to do. But what was more important is that the daily productions wouldn't get held up by running out of storage, which is where we'd always run into trouble with our previous NextCloud and own cloud implementations is eventually we'd run out of storage because we're constantly passing around 80 megabyte, 100 megabyte files, even larger when they're waves,

and video clips. So we needed something that wouldn't eat itself storage-wise. And we knew at some point we'd have to come back and clean things up. And that is now. We wanted to re-architect how we do NextCloud. And what we've gone with, if you'll allow the term here, I apologize ahead of time, a hybrid cloud setup. I know I'm using the buzz terms. How dare you? I'm sorry, Wes. But it's true. We've gone with the on-premises and in the cloud setup, and we've kind of arranged things

in a way that we think is going to work really good long term and keep the overall monthly cost down. And so that meant getting a space set up here on our local file server that runs Arch that you guys will hear us talk about very often. It also has a NextCloud instance on there, but there was a little bit of maintenance we had to do to get it to that point.

You know, it needed a little love, just a bit, yeah. And so good guy Wes came up on Sunday this last weekend. After I finished recording Linux Action News, Wes showed up and we had some killer food. Really good. I don't think I complimented you enough on the pork. It was tremendous. And my wife got us some sides and she got us some barbecued chicken. And we sat down and we had one of those work and eat days.

I mean, I think we did it in the wrong order in that we feasted first and then tried to get to work. But, I mean, we got the stuff done. We were a little sleepy. We had a little bit of food coma. But we had to get the base server here in the studio ready. We had to prep it, if you will. So job one was take care of the base Arch install before we loaded it up with a bunch of data. So we set off into the Jupyter Broadcasting high security server garage.

Okay, job one is we got to prep this thing. So we got to do all of our due diligence, make sure the OS is up to date. So we'll do that because it's been a month or two. Do you just Pac-Man so that way it's not all the AUR, too? I thought we might start there, see what we're working against. Yeah. Should we replace this package name with some other package name? Yes. Core something with something.

Core other something. Oh, yeah. Util Linux Libs. That's probably not important. All right. New kernel. New Linux LTS kernel coming in. Excellent. So we will also have to upgrade.

Ooh, new wire guard. Yep, new systemd. There's probably going to be a ZFS update in there, too. New Samba. The big question is, what about Docker? Because, yep, new Docker as well. Because this is just the base OS. It doesn't even get us to Nextcloud.

Funny, though. 547 megabyte download. Net upgrade size, 45 megabytes. Gotta love Arch. Challenge? Yeah, let's do it. I gave us a hard time for being reckless, but in a way, we were actually taking a fairly methodical approach here.

We were first updating the base OS to make sure all of the host OS packages were up to date. We were on the latest version of Docker. And you'll recall part of our bulletproof arch setup is this thing snapshots every time it does an upgrade. And we're running now on the LTS kernel, a change we made not too long ago that already pay dividends this time around. Oh, yeah. And we wanted to just get all of that right. So you got to do all of that. And then it's reboot time. And you guys know how nerve wracking this can be when you've done a big update. And this one in particular, this one took a really, really long time to shut down.

And then it booted up. And somehow, like the silent boot mode got turned back on or we never disabled it. And so we just sat there staring at a screen for what felt like 27 years. I think your Sony is still working. There we go. Here's somebody in spellboard. Here we go. I'm reminded that this is a pretty foolproof setup we have with one major exception.

And that is the entire OS runs off this one 10,000 RPM hard drive. So the data's all safe on a RAID, but we have one OS drive. Chris, you do have to factor in that we conveniently located the OS drive on the exterior of the case for easy replacement, in case that's necessary. Welcome to Grub, Wes. It's good to be here. Yep. The monitor sure turns off and on and on. Yeah, why are we going to PowerSafe? Oh, you know, this is one of my first LCD screens I ever bought.

This monitor is probably about 17 years old. You gotta say it's a nice aspect ratio. Yeah, it's the old aspect, the old square aspect ratio, yeah. It does make good for a console. It's kind of perfect. Alright, system D firing up. I see drives

lighting up. That's a good sign. It means it's probably talking ZFS. You're always watching for, like, all the signs. You know, okay, drives are flashing. That's a good sign. It means it's probably talking ZFS. You're always watching for, like, all the signs. You know, okay, drives are flashing. That's good. Oh, the fans, they change their sound. That's a good sign. Yeah, maybe the display resolution changes.

Yeah, that does happen. You see the video driver load. So it booted up eventually. We got the login screen. And the first job for then, really, this is like job two of just bringing the Arch server up to date now, is make sure the ZFS pool mounted, all our data's there. Now, it did take a long time to reboot last time we did this. I mean, at least until I come online, I can SSH in.

Oh, hey, there we go. Oh, there we go. So I think we should just switch that. You know, we want to see the consoles growing up. Look at all the disks going. Well, yeah, I think we should just switch that. We want to see the consoles growing up. Look at all the disks going. Well, yeah, I thought we did have that on. Let's log in and see if we have a Z-Pool. Everything's online

and our containers may still be loading actually i think they're still loading all right we'll give it a minute we'll check back back. This next part, I would have messed up, Wes, if you weren't here. It was your idea that we should go kind of incrementally through the NextCloud releases. I would have just gone whole hog to the latest version. You just love updates. I do. I just would have gone for it.

But you had a process. You had a procedure. And we were ready to now tackle NextCloud and get it all up to date so that way we could have both the cloud version and our locally hosted version at the same exact version. We turn our attention to NextCloud, which is version 17 dot something. It's a few releases behind. We want to go hands-on with this update because we want to make sure that we get this right. It appears we're going to need to go in a bit of a stepped approach. We're going to step up to version 18 and then to 19, or how does this work? Yeah, it sounds like you should really only go one major version at a time.

At least I noticed some lines in the docs advising that. I suggested we just go all the way to current, but Wes wanted to be careful. I know. So, okay, so if I understand, we're going to go 17, and we're going to update to a supported version of 17, and then to the release version, whatever current version that is right now. Exactly. Okay. Let's give it a go.

So first step is Docker Compose pull. Yep. You have to pull a specific... Yeah, we want to update and make sure we're grabbing the right image here. Okay. So how are you going to make sure you pull the right to update and make sure we're grabbing the right image here. Okay, so how are you going to make sure you pull the right version of this container since we're doing a pull? Well, they've got a list of supported versions up on their GitHub, a few other places in their documentation,

and that includes supported Docker image releases. So we're just going to use the tag for that version. Which is really just a simple update the YAML file, make sure you've specified the exact version of the image you want, and you figured that out by doing what, Wes? Well, I just headed over to their Docker Hub page, and they had a big list, and then they also, I mean, there's a bunch of spots in their docs and on GitHub that basically list, like, these are our supported releases, and then on the Docker Hub page in particular,

they've got a big list of all the tags that correspond if you want to use Apache or Alpine or FPM, you know, all the various options of image flavors that they ship. They've basically got one for each of those for each of the supported versions. So go find the one that looks like the one you're already using except a newer version and slot that into your YAML. Yeah. And then it was just a matter of rinse and repeat. We would update the Docker compose tag, pull that version, we'd stop and start everything, and then check to see if we could log in.

Take it all down, Wes. Take it all down. Shut it all down. Boom! Okay. So really, the only thing that's going to have a major update is Redis, because we just said pull whatever latest version of that is. But otherwise, we've pulled tagged versions of everything. So now I say up it and leave it on the command line so we can see the output.

See what happens. Yeah. Creating next cloud. Here we go Okay The check will be able to see if it loads on your phone Right That's how we'll know because we didn't bring a computer out here Besides the server

We're rubbing it Yeah that's right. Out in the studio garage server room. Okay. Configuration complete. Ready for startup. Set log level to debug. Turned on maintenance mode.

We're upgrading. Checking for app updates. That seems normal. Which seems to indicate a functioning Next cloud system if it's at that stage that's a good sign that's you isn't it is that you oh yeah it is we can see your we can see your web browser in the debug log you see all the stuff scrolling by is the login screen loads for wes and we would do that each time as we stepped through. I think there was a mid-17 release and then the 18 release, and then we had one last update to do. Or, well, so we thought. Pretty confident

this is going to work fine. Dang it. Why'd you say that? Did I just jinx us? Alright. Should we start her up? Let's do it. A little console output. You know, watching this array work away, all these lights flash, So we start her up. Let's do it. A little console output. You know, watching this array work away, all these lights flash, it makes me kind of miss having that feedback aspect in my PC. Right. You really could feel it was working.

Yeah. You get nothing, right? But with these, like, I know what's going on. It gives me a reassuring work. Okay, it looks like we're doing a lot of updates. Are these apps it's updating? Yeah, it's updating a bunch of apps right now is what it's doing. Oh, well. I guess that's a good thing.

It's doing a code integrity check. Hey. Ready to handle connections. Break out the old test device there, Wes. Let's see if NextCloud loads. Come on, baby, one more time. Yep. Says update successful. Maintenance mode has been turned off.

And... Reset log level. And it looks like it's loading. Pretty painless, I gotta say. Every time we go through a process like this, and it's pretty essentially pain-free, I get a little more confident in NextCloud. So now it just needs to be like this for another 10 years, and I'm going to feel good.

We'll finally be happy. Now we just rinse-repeat on the Linode version of the server. You're right. Kind of the test here is we're, let's say, occasional NextCloud admins. It's a small piece of our overall setup, so it doesn't get the attention that maybe it deserves. It's really nice for this to be simple. Clearly out of practice when I jinxed us and said that it should be all good now. Because just about as we were done, NextCloud 20 came out. That timing.

Yeah, yeah. But, you know, Wes, we should talk about the bigger picture here. The bigger picture is what we've done is, thanks to you primarily, is we've spent the energy and time on getting both the hosted version of NextCloud that's up in the cloud that's costing way too much at this moment and our local version. Then you used a command to essentially use the sync system to pull a bunch of the data down from the cloud version to our local version. Can you talk about that? Yeah, NextCloud CMD, I think it's called. And it's just a built-in little one-shot command line client built into the standard NextCloud client desktop application. And you don't have to have it configured for the desktop. I was a little worried about that since we were doing it

on a mostly headless server. But thankfully, it's Arch. It was easy to get that client installed. And then it accepts the credentials. It's got flags for it. Or you can do it sort of URL style, you know, like user colon password at and then the HTTP address. So we just pointed that in with the right user to sync down all the stuff that we didn't want to keep up in the cloud, the stuff we needed to, you know, that we're going to use day to day, all the archival stuff. Well, we're just going to move that right into the garage. And so we set up that sync. I think it was about 120 gigs of stuff or so. that we're going to use day to day, all the archival stuff. Well, we're just going to move that right into the garage.

And so we set up that sync. I think it was about 120 gigs of stuff or so. Yeah, and then it was a matter of cleaning up the cloud instance. And you have to then, at least if you want to reclaim that space immediately, you need to run a command on the command line to essentially delete everything permanently. Yeah, you know, there's various setups in Nextcloud for keeping multiple versions hanging around and then also sort of defaults around like how long is stuff going to be in the trash? When does it get expired out of there? And does the trash get cleaned up? So we just ran some commands in the command line inside the Docker container with the OCC command to just sort of clean all that up, delete anything that anyone had in their trash, delete any old versions

hanging around and see how small we could get things. And we got it down to what, like 30, 40 gigs now? I think it's more like 50, but it was, you know, pretty good. And that includes anything all the various users have uploaded, as well as our sort of working team folder. Right. And before we did the purge and moved everything down, it was getting north of, I mean, because of all the undelete files, too, I think it was somewhere north of three, 400 gigabytes. It was getting pretty big.

It was over 400 gigs. Yes. Was it? Okay. Yeah. And that's why the cost was getting there so high. And we knew that would eventually be an issue. And so what we're going to do now is we're going to just kind of rework our workflow a bit and only keep certain folders up in the cloud and keep everything else locally. And there's a lot of ways we can make that available to our users from federation to just having two separate URLs. But what really I think was nice here is that the NextCloud project is publishing these Docker images themselves. And as a result, they've taken the time to note which ones are stable releases and they've given you instructions

on which tags to use and you can just tell it's a first class distribution method for the project and i think that gave me kind of a sense of confidence in the method we're using to deploy next cloud and we also as part of this are moving a DigitalOcean droplet to a Linode server. And I don't know, how much can we talk about that, Wes? Because that's a tricky process since we're moving from object storage at DO to object storage at Linode. Yeah, and while the object storage has been handy, you know, it does have some tricks of its own. One, it's not really like a regular file system. And two, the way it's set up with the way we're doing it in Nextcloud currently,

you don't have any of the regular file structure. That's all kept in the database. And you just get a bunch of files with sort of database IDs for names all in one giant flat folder. So that's a little unintuitive, at least at first, and doesn't kind of match up exactly with how you have it stored regularly on disk. Right. So kind of step one is like we got to sync all that data from our previous S3 compatible storage provider over to our new one. Yeah, and there's a couple of ways to do that, but there is specifically like an S3 R-Sync compatible client, right?

Well, we're just using Rclone, which is so handy, a great tool in general. I know it's a favorite over at Self Hosted as well because it's so nice for interfacing with all kinds of different cloud clients. And they've even got a very nice little configuration CLI interface too. So if you're not familiar with the.files and config, it'll walk you through that. You can choose who your provider is.

They've got a lot of default support and then just enter your credentials right there as it prompts you. Nice. Yeah, Rclone's a great little way to also back up a website from the command line to say a Dropbox or Google Drive as well. There's a couple of options there. So we're going to use Rclone to take data from one set of object storage to another set of object storage. So that'll be the data backend. And then it's a

matter of moving the config, which includes the Docker Compose and anywhere that the Docker Compose is set up to bind to for data and configuration. We'll have to make sure that we have similar mount points on the new host. We'll pull down the Docker image, and hopefully it'll connect to its previous configuration. It'll connect to the storage with new updated object storage URLs and, in theory, turn on. Although we're waiting to actually do it until this shows out because we don't want to screw things up. But we're ready.

Well, and there's one more piece there. You know, over at DigitalOcean, we were using a managed database, but we're going to switch that. You know, we're not using this Nextcloud. We're using it for less stuff. So we're just going to run a Postgres database locally on the host. So we've got to stand one of those up and make sure we've exported the database from the previous database host and move it over. Right, right. The database part, we were going

with the hosted solution, which also will be a little bit of a cost savings. And then that's an area where we're doing it kind of differently. We're doing a different implementation in our local LAN setup of Nextcloud, but it's all just implementation details. At the end of the day, LAN setup of NextCloud, but it's all just implementation details. At the end of the day, the end users just see NextCloud. And so I imagine we'll probably stay around the 50, 60 gig range on our cloud version, and we'll probably keep about 125 gigs or so and growing here on the archive version. Yeah. And, you know, now we've kind of worked out as well, if we need to do occasional, you know, we've accrued a bunch of stuff up in the hosted version and need to move that down.

We've got that workflow figured out. But here's what I kind of walked away with, and I want to pass on to the audience. If you're thinking about NextCloud or how you might re-architect your NextCloud, I'm really happy with the setup. We've used it for over a year now. And even when we kind of let things slip, because, well, honestly, we've been busy with a lot of things recently. It's been really crazy. And so NextCloud just didn't get updated for a few releases.

And our data grew more and more than it should. And I think what I walked away with is not only did we learn how to do it better, but the setup with running NextCloud in a container, with using object storage, with creating these two different versions with an archive version and a cloud version that is super fast and accessible to our team that works around the world, you know, that's one of the great advantages of a cloud version. But our long-term storage on a local, more cost-effective storage medium is great for archival purposes. And also the requirements of that data just aren't as extreme. You know, our editors aren't trying to download and upload those files as fast as possible. And that combination, I know it sounds crazy, but two Nextcloud servers, when you're managing via containers

and your storage backend is super flexible, has been a bulletproof Nextcloud setup. We went from 17 to 17.5 to 18 to 19 and now to 20 in a relatively problem-free progression. It really wasn't very much trouble. And we have modified these Nextcloud instances. We've themed them. We've installed a fair amount of apps. We use them quite a bit.

There's a lot of storage there. There's a large database to track all of it. I mean, you name it. We've put this thing through its paces. Yeah. And I mean, it's been pretty darn reliable, even without us giving it as much care and attention as it might need, which I think we touched on a little bit in the clips, which is, yeah, we're occasional Nextcloud admins. We don't use it for all of the features it has, which are a lot, impressively a lot these days. We're mostly just using it as a nice UI and some

file syncing. But even there, you know, we can ignore it and it as a nice UI and some file syncing but even there you know we can ignore it and it just keeps working. I mean it sounds like hyperbole but I really feel like this might be the perfect Nextcloud setup. Yeah it is pretty nice and especially coming as the casual sort of you know we gotta do updates and oh gosh we gotta move this thing it's nice not having to deal

with as much miscellaneous system state you know it's at least constrained we might not know everything about the ins and outs of how NextCloud works or might have forgotten it since the last time that we had to do a lot with NextCloud. But there's a limit to how complicated it can be because it's just all containerized. So we've got container images, we've got volumes, and we've got a database. And then, you know, a whole bunch of files. But that's it.

It's just some fundamental components. And as long as we can deal with each of those, it's not that complicated. XMN in the chat room is asking, so what's the cost update now? Well, we don't really know because we went from like nearly, well, so I said over 400 gigs to like 40

or we're going to be around 50 gigs when we're all done. I just don't really know what that cost savings is because then at the same time, we're going to transition from Dio to Linode. And so there'll be just a different pricing structure there. So we'll give you an update after we've done it for a little bit. I say go forth. This is a Linux unplugged approved setup.

Boom. It does look like, you know, if we were staying at Dio, it would be significantly cheaper because I think that by default, the spaces are about $5 per month up to 250 gigs. So ours was going up because we'd sort of exceeded that. That's a pretty comfortable ceiling where we're at now, though. Ah, yeah. Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure. I'm sure it would be.

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Okay, Wes, I've been promised that we have an email that presents the last text editor that we'll ever use. Should we get to it? Yeah, we probably should. Although, actually, this one came from our Telegram group, which is another place you can ping us with feedback. Although, email is a little easier to sneak into the show with. Look at you. You took somebody and you put it all up into a Slexi.org document here

and made it like an email for me. I know how much you love talking about text editors. See what I'm saying? Yeah, you guys see what I'm saying about this, Wes, right? You see what I'm saying. All right, well,

so Jitty wrote in Telegram, lately you've been mentioning text editors and listing some picks for editors on LUP. He thinks perhaps I'm trying to replace Nano. I assure you that is not the case. He says, he goes on to say, or they go on to say, I heard you praise Nano on the latest episode. Who, me? No, never. Which I use until I found Micro. It's probably the last terminal text

editor you'll ever use. Very sane and easy to figure out with default hotkeys, syntax highlighting right out of the box, and mouse support. It's kind of what Nano should have been, and it's written in Go. I was surprised Micro didn't come up, even in conversation on LUP. Also, I should add, Micro has a hotkey that exposes a host of other very powerful options, which basically gives you a cross between Vim and Nano overall. The best feature, though, in my opinion, is the prompt that asks you if you meant to edit a file with sudo, which then runs sudo if you answer yes. Okay, that actually

seriously sounds great, Jitty. Syntax highlighting, key combos similar to Nano and Vim, and that problem where I edit a file that i meant to do with sudo but i just forgot that time and then i have to jump out is so frustrating that uh i think i might switch to micro ha wow good work jitty you know this does look pretty nice there's a ton of different editors but that it's go means it should be fairly simple for you to get on your system and set up and it does seem like it might be kind of a sweet spot for you, Chris, where it's got some niceties, you know, maybe you're editing a random, you know, a random configuration file, some YAML, something where some syntax highlighting will come in handy, but you obviously don't need

all the complicated stuff in VS Code or Vim or something more full featured if it's just on a random server machine. Yeah, especially if you need something that's on the command line. You want to take a shot at the pronunciation of this next one? You know, I think that's Rain writing to us about the next generation of Linux users. Yeah, Rain writes, in the previous episode, 372, you talked about the distro Triforce and the next generation of Linux users. Happily enough, I am one of them. So I thought I'd write in.

What a great idea. They go on to say, I'm obviously still very new to Linux, but I already am sticking to one distribution as I want things to work on my only school laptop, just as predicted. During the show, which they say it was already quite difficult to convince my parents to let me use Linux, by the way, but I'm currently using Fedora, and I like the idea of dependencies thoroughly being checked. So that's pretty great. Listening to the show live.

And P.S., I'm looking forward to MS Edge on Linux, as I currently have four different Microsoft accounts for education, and they're held and managed in a single browser. You know, that's the second bit of feedback we got since last week where somebody's looking forward to Edge on Linux for various different use cases. I guess at this point I am too. Really? No, not really. I am just curious. It's been so long.

It's interesting that they're, you know, actually making it over to the Linux world. I want to see what it looks like. Jordan writes in with a NextCloud to-do system mention, which kind of went well with today's topic. Jordan writes, I recently finished sorting out a to-do list system for the wife and myself, and I thought I'd throw it out there. The system has to be pretty cross-platform because my wife has an iPhone and I have an Android phone. And while we both use Ubuntu on our laptops, I primarily use an iMac at work. Oh, and well, I have a Pine phone, a Pine tab, and a Pinebook Pro.

So, you know, I'm kind of all over the place. And I like to get work done on those too. The actual functionality we need out of such a system is really quite minimal. I think shared grocery list and, you know, a couple of items with some due dates. Other characteristics are open source, integration with the operating system, and well, no more web apps if possible. NextCloud's CalDev-based Task Apps fills out these requirements nicely. It integrates with the Reminders app on macOS and iOS

and GNOME's ToDo app through the Internet Online Account Setup without requiring any additional software. On Android, it's a bit more involved, namely the NextCloud app, DevX5, and Task.org, which is a lot. You have to put it all together, but it really isn't too bad. It kind of goes off the rails when you go from there. But the primary drawbacks are really the Reminders app on both iOS and macOS lacks support for subtasks,

and the Kanban-style boards like Todoist now supports. Those aren't possible. But Jordan says, try out NextCloud to-do system. It could be the way to go. And I know, I think, I remember Cheese mentioned he uses it. Drew, do you use any kind of task management system or any of these things built into NextCloud? Not in NextCloud.

I just use Google Tasks. Oh, yeah, that's right. You're a Google Tasks guy. Which does integrate with Gnome To-Do, just FYI. Right. I was just going to mention that. It does. Look at that. Yeah. James says, should I be using Memberful?

I just signed up for Patreon by... Is that a mistake? I'm confused between Patreon and Memberful. So, Memberful is the white label service that we use for the core contributors. So, if you want to support the show directly, that's where you become a core contributor. Unpluggedcore.com. If you want to support the network productions, that's where you become a core contributor, unpluggedcore.com.

If you want to support the network productions, that's where Jupiter Signal or the Patreon comes in. I am frustrated that Wes and I burned a lot of hours on that Sunday that we talked about because I screwed up. I thought I was going to be able to offer a bundle of all of the membership shows to the patrons. I'm still working on a solution for that. I thought I'd have it by now, but I'm trying to come up with something. It may end up being a substantial discount for a bundle. I'm not sure what it's, it's so much more stupid, complicated than you'd think. That's for sure. And then of course we want to tie all of it into our automation system and production. So that way things go out on time for everybody when we release episodes and all of it. So it's a lot of layers to this dip. But right now,

in terms of just supporting the network, helping us go independent, keeping us going, there's really two avenues. You can support your favorite show memberships and really appreciate that. And or you can support the entire network and that's done at jupiter signal now that kind of goes towards future productions maybe shows that don't have sponsors that need to run for a while until a sponsor can land on them like which is currently the case for linux action news that kind of thing the patreon enables it's not nearly enough revenue but it's sort of like an emergency budget that we have access to.

And then if the revenues increase from there, then we can leverage it for other things. But that's what we use right now. So we use Patreon to support the entire network productions

at patreon.com slash jupiter signal. And then our individual shows have membership programs, not all of them, but some of them. Those are linked to their respective websites.

Like ours, for example, is like we mentioned, the core contributors at unpluggedcore.com. And I just am very grateful for anybody who sticks in there. You know, one of the great things about these shows is they are a regular reoccurring thing that happens in the community. You know, you can set your watch to them and it allows for like-minded people to come together and talk about something that has only really gotten better, right? And 2020 has brought a lot of bad things, but

Linux and open source and free software is all still pretty great. And we really have a pretty smart, sharp, welcoming community. And so it's not just keeping the shows going, but it's also about creating that welcoming community for everyone and the rallying around that. And, you know, it's been a wild year.

So I just really appreciate everybody's support. It's really been something, Wes. Why don't we do one pick and then we get the heck out of here? What do you say? Oh, boy, throwing a wild pick out there. All right.

What do you like? Well, I know you've been talking about this file converter pick. You kind of were hemming and hawing that that didn't get picked last time. Should we throw that one out there? Yeah, OK. File converter. You know, this is interesting because it's something we don't talk about on this show very much, but sneaks into Coder Radio.

And that's our friend WebAssembly. Someone took FFmpeg, compiled it with WebAssembly, and stuck it up on the web for you to use. FileConverter.digital. You upload your file, then you select your conversion type, and then they're just throwing CPU power at this, and it converts to a lot of stuff. This must be up on GitHub, right? Like, we could grab this and host it ourselves, possibly? Well, that's a good idea. Yeah, because this can't last forever, but this is a great idea. It looks really clean and simple. Give it a go if you need to convert a quick file. FileConverter.digital. It's been a while since we've had a website pick. Pow, Wes Payne. Oh, and it makes me think of maybe, you know, things like WebAssembly. I'm not saying

it's the best approach or even saying you should use it, but it's interesting to see and take some of these, you know, very useful command line apps that you might otherwise have to go spin up a Linux server, learn how to use from the command line, and instead just ship them right to the browser. Well, you can find me on the social medias if you like.

I'm at Chris Lass. I don't tweet a lot, but I do try to read everybody who tweets at me and reply to darn near all of them. I'm on Twitter at Chris Lass as well, or you can email me, Chris, at jupiterpodcasting.com. Wes Payne, have you decided to set up any social media presence? I know it's new. Yes, I suppose I'm over at Wes Payne. Well, there you go. Breaking news, ladies and gentlemen. And Drew, what about you? Over there at Drew of Doom still? Drew of Doom on Twitter. You got it.

Ha ha. Well done, sir. Proud of you. You can find our sponsor, A Cloud Guru, on social media as well. YouTube.com, Twitter, or Facebook. They're just at a slash, A Cloud Guru. We'd love to have you join us live next Tuesday. The show starts at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern.

You can convert that to your time at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. It uses the high-tech power of a Google Calendar embed I think I did 70 years ago. But it still converts it to your time, and you can find us there. The show is at Linux Unplugged on Twitter if you want to get news. And, of course, links to everything we talked about today, linuxunplugged.com slash 374. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. And we'll see you right back here next Tuesday. Thank you. Not a huge fan of the new NextCloud 20 UI. Have you seen this, Drew?

I haven't, no. It's like, what would you call it? A dashboard? You should probably look it up. NextCloud 20 new... It looks like Kubernetes. Oh, does it? A dashboard? You should probably look it up. NextCloud 20 new. It looks like Kubernetes. Oh, does it? I totally get what they're going for.

And if I used like all of the features of NextCloud, it would be kind of nice to have like an Outlook style today screen. I do think there is there is use to it. But because I primarily use it as a means of file storage, it kind of just slows me down. It kind of just kind of it's one more thing I have to dismiss. Maybe I can turn it as a means of file storage, it kind of just slows me down. It kind of just kind of, it's one more thing I have to dismiss. Maybe I can turn it off. You're supposed to figure out how to actually do something in it. There are no clues, no hints about what you're supposed to do once you're in the UI.

You can get past it pretty quick. You probably can turn it off. I may even be able to customize it. But for me, what I really want is, I don't know if anybody knows how to do this, is I'd like to set my home screen to be several folders deep into our team folder. That would be perfect for me. I only ever go into the web interface very, very rarely. Mostly because, one, I'm syncing to my desktop and two when I need things that are in there that are synced I can just log in using

the gnome interface and it's right there in my file browser so that is a nice thing that is another nice reason to set it up I'm never in here like in the web interface unless I have to share it to somebody well because the web interface sucks