this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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Just had NextCloud denying my credentials (not for the first time). I know they weren't wrong because I'm using a password manager. Logs didn't say much. Was about to reinstall (again, not the first time nextcloud went bonkers on me) before I tried a docker compose down && docker compose up. Lo and behold after a restart the credentials worked again.

This stuff is just way too flaky for something so important.

Is OwnCloud good again? My main usecase is saving photos but I don't want them locked away in a database so SeaFile is out.

Edit: I'm going to take the time to reply to you all, bit busy with work and family suddenly. But a little update - I've quickly setup Immich and fired up the CLI to import my library. AFAIK the files are still stored on disk somewhere but metadata is in a database. I didn't realize this before, knowing that I think my mind is made up and Immich is the best solution. Thanks everyone!

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm not done but I'm so tired of just stupid error messages that don't help from developers. I love the open source community but for gods sake devs, handle your errors in a format that makes sense.

Nextcloud or others, it's always the same. I either get a 200 line stacktrace that means absolutely nothing to me because the dev didn't bother to handle the exception (like you submit a form and get a null reference back. It sure would be nice to know what field was null) or of course the infamous "Exception occurred" and nothing else.

My favorite was I tried to submit to Jellyfin a fix for one of their very opaque exceptions, keep the stack trace but rewrite the error message like "x exception occurred, do you have permissions to do that?" Or something and the PR was rejected. I just can't even with that

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

My favorite was I tried to submit to Jellyfin a fix for one of their very opaque exceptions, keep the stack trace but rewrite the error message like "x exception occurred, do you have permissions to do that?" Or something and the PR was rejected. I just can't even with that

Out of interest, which PR was that?

It's uncommon to rewrite exception messages to be user friendly, they are for developers. The exception shouldn't be thrown in the first place if it's a common issue or the error message should be more generic for unhandled problems.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I strongly disagree with this, any error message shown to the user should be helpful to the user

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think you misunderstood, this is about exceptions, which shouldn't be shown to users unless they ask for it.

Exceptions are not helpful to users most of the time, as shown above. They need instructions on how to report issues instead since they most likely can't fix an unhandled exception by themselves.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Underrated comment.

To put it into user perspective:

Exception X with error code xxx means Y. Y should be shown via a modal dialog to the user. The state of the application has to be reverted to a valid state as error handling.

The exception/error gets logged, the user doesn't receive a exception but the interpretation of the error is shown to him via the UI.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

ehh I try to keep me here and my real github separate. I'm all for exception messages being for developers especially in logs, but things also shouldn't error silently either. This was a case where there was something different with my OS I was running and I wanted to show an error that there was a common reason for that exception being thrown. This was years ago though, so I don't remember details

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I'm also a develop and my philosophy is that stack traces are for the developers but they should be translated to informative error messages for the user. Otherwise you're doing security through obscurity.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

I almost don’t dare to say this, but I’ve been running the snap for more than a year and have no complaints.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago

Too daring of you to say snap

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

6 years here and went from ubuntu 16 to 22

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Most likely you got blocked for some time by the brute force prevention. Have a look at your logfiles.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

^this. You probably had a Nextcloud client somewhere with wrong credentials that was trying to reconnect repeatedly which locked you out. It happened once to me.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (5 children)

My problem with nextcloud is more the performance of the web interface rather than it's reliability (and that's even with mariadb + redis setup and a decently fast minipc). It's fine if you avoid the web interface, but that's part of the draw of the thing.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

The poor performance carries over to the sync clients too because they're just using webdav http requests. Nextcloud will take like 10+ hours to sync my folders, vs about 10 minutes with Syncthing or something else.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The performance is indeed pretty terrible. Most stuff runs fine on my NUCs except nextcloud. Maybe throwing more hardware at it solves it though.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Nope lol I have a pretty godly server and nextcloud is slow as a mf

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

MariaDB runs like hot garbage with Nextcloud imo. I’ve gotten to the point where I use legit MySQL or PostgreSQL and performance is night and day. I have no idea why Maria acts out with Nextcloud for me, but I’ve gotten tired of troubleshooting it.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

There are more twerks to it than "just' using mariadb and redis. Maybe look into Apache/nginx cacheing,tune your mariadb settings and stuff like that. Had performance-problems with my owncloud-instance, now it runs like a champ

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Honestly the official docker images are hot garbage. I used them when I first tried NextCloud and they load incredibly slow. Shelved it for a while, realized there was a bunch of shit they already have that I was looking for, and gave it a go with my own Dockerfile starting from the PHP alpine image. That one runs waaaayyy better.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have no experience with the docker container, but optimization for the database and nginx/apache cacheing must be made individually depending on number of cpu cores, ram-size, etc etc etc. When overtuning for example your database it can happen that you run out of RAM, which means your system will crash or freeze. Happened to me. I run it "Baremetal" and configured it "the classic way". Tbh, after those optimizations it runs really, really fast and response times are really quick.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

What name do you assign the DB for PostgreSQL in Docker and does it by chance happen to match the name of any other containers, possibly in other docker compose files?

I'm only mentioning it because I experienced weird inconsistent issues with a service I was running where it was sometimes having trouble connecting to its DB companion and I eventually realized that it was sometimes connecting to the other container. I was also finding that turning it off and on again was often 'fixing' the issue, at least for a while. Might be worth checking out. I'd also consider viewing the logs for Nextcloud (docker logs -f ) when you're unable to login and see if there are any errors. Frankly I've never had these specific issues with Nextcloud, and given that it's based on PHP (it only 'executes' on an HTTP request), it seems like restarting shouldn't help unless it's something else.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I haven't got this kind of issue with nextcloud, I'm pretty sure you can reset your password using occ via cli

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (5 children)

For photos, I'd highly recommend checking out Photoprism.

the "PhotoSync" app available for both android and apple can sync from your phone to photoprism.

But, nextcloud itself, works pretty nice for me. But, I use OIDC-based logon, with Authentik.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Would highly reccomend https://immich.app/ too. It's the solution I've finally landed on after trying out most of the options out there.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Go with immich if you want to ever have multiple users.

Photoprism locks user accounts behind a paid subscription.

Pretty much everything is more full-featured on immich except for incomplete RAW format support because photoprism is mainly focused on photography and now businesses IIRC.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (12 children)

I am using nextcloud for years now with postgres, redis and configured PHP setttings, but I installed it on the host. Never had any problems, Performance is awesome... Almost everytime I read about problems is with the docker images. The new AIO image shall be bad too, but I can not say anything to this, since I don't use it.

I really like docker, but sometimes it is better to install on the host directly or use an LXC if you need isolation. MinIO is the same... Would not want it in a Container

Maybe seafile could be an option for you 🤔

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

That's how I ran my nextcloud for about a decade and never had problems. On my new server I'm running it in docker and so far it seems to work ok.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Bare metal club! :D

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Been running multiple Nextcloud instances for years on bog standard debian + apache + php-fpm install, as documented in the official docs which do not even mention docker. Upgrades were never a problem. Some apps may suffer some bugs from time to time, but Nextcloud itself works flawlessly. Wrote an ansible role to install, manage and update it. The only thing that deviates from the "recommended" setup is Postgres instead of MariaDB. People need to start following the actual documented/well-supported installation options and stop trying to stick containers everywhere...

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

In my experience, Immich is way better for Photos.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Maybe try https://github.com/kd2org/karadav if you want to continue using the NC apps for photo backups.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Would be interesting to hear a little more about your setup. I had some issues when I had Nextcloud installed directly on Debian (though nothing this major), have since switched to running it on Docker and it's been very solid.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Nextcloud is an overkill. Its just too much. I'd say better split down the needed services. Baikal/radicale etc for contacts/calendar. Photoprism/librephotos etc for photos. A webdav server for storage. And so on.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I’ve been running two NC instances for over five years (linuxserver docker images)—one has been issue-free, and the other had sporadic issues like OP is describing... but not for the last year or so, so I assumed the issue had been fixed in an update. Or maybe the problem was the network configuration instead of NC.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So, now's as good a time as any to ask. Why is everyone using Nextcloud? I've been quietly using Owncloud for a very long time and never had any issues with it. How is Owncloud bad?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Owncloud is not fully open source. Nextcloud is. They have developed in different directions since then, but that remains the fundamental difference that split them apart in the first place. If that matters to you, Nextcloud is the right choice. If that doesn't matter to you, then use whichever you prefer and has the features you need.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is a good summary, but the Tl;DR is that Owncloud has a non-open source Enterprise version with extra features you need to pay for, while Nextcloud is a fully open source fork.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

the Tl;DR is that Owncloud has a non-open source Enterprise version with extra features you need to pay for

This isn't any different than a lot of other softwares, though... Nextcloud has the same Enterprise pricing/features shit, too. https://nextcloud.com/enterprises/

Actually, so does Photoprism. https://www.photoprism.app/features

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

use immich for photos.

owncloud ocis works but is very young. is literally just file hosting with something to open office files online.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Mine has randomly done that for the last few versions now. I also noticed it now maintains several cookies that I have to clear before I can log in successfully again.

I do have Redis configured with it, have never used their AIO image, and previously, the session ID was the only cookie. Haven't kept quite up to date with NC's development, but maybe it's no longer using PHP's session store in favor of its own mechanism?

Unfortunately, I'm too invested in NC to start switching everything to discrete apps, so I guess I just have to put up with it. :shrug:

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

For this exact reason I'm using NextCloud as a service. You can even install plugins.

It's a trade-off ofc but it works rocks solid so far.

I'm not affiliated with that particular provider though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I also stopped using Nextcloud after it broke a couple of times. As a consequence I also never use :latest tag on any docker container anymore - manual updates only

When I switched to Android phone, I also switched to syncthing. If you have enough storage on your phone, it is amazing! Never looked back

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