Making my shares available in opencloud

[guerilla]

Currently I have my data arranged in a greyhole pool and shared via samba. I was looking for a way of making some of these shares available to people outside my network (parents to see photos for example). I installed owncloud as this seemed the way to go however I'm not getting on with it too well. I mounted my shared folder using the local mount plugin ( i mount /mnt/samba/sharedfolder) and it was successful. It is however very slow and works only occasionally, every change to the settings in owncloud sends send apache2 and mysql to the top of process list and the website is unresponsive.

Has any one else had similar problems? I also saw that you can mount smb shares in owncloud, is it possible to mount my data as an smb share within owncloud, or is this exactly the same as mount /mnt/samba/shares. I had a look at the wiki but that mounts (and changes permissions of) files using /var/hda which according to the greyhole wiki is not ideal.

Any help?

[northridgegrp]

1. At the moment the Samba sharing is not working correctly in v4.5.6 of ownCloud.
2. The rescanning performance of the filesystems has always been one of the most talked about items on the ownCloud Community forum. I monitor the ownCloud Community world daily looking for things that could effect Amahi.
3. What you did with Greyhole, mounting them the "local mount plugin" at the moment appears to be the best thing to do when dealing with the Amahi/Greyhole shares. Personally I do not use the "Amahi/Greyhole shares" route. I share all of my "media" files using ownCloud's sharing infrastructure. The ownCloud wiki has this documented, you don't have to fiddle with Linux permissions/ownership on the Amahi/Greyhole shares. It is a lot easier to maintain in the long run. I even have Amahi DLNA accessing ownCloud media files for streaming to my TV.
4. Now here is something else to please to take note of, mounting Greyhole shares as a local mount, they mount as a "CIFS" filesystem type. This is the M$ filesystem type, it is completely different than the Linux/Unix filesystems (ext3, ext4). You lose the elegance of the Linux/Unix permissions/ownership control over directories and files, which later can create confusion when trying to solve compatibility issues with applications (such as why don't my backups work?).
5. Backups? That is something I have been working on for the last couple of months. Stay tuned for the wiki article.

Now as for items 1 and 2 above the ownCloud V5.0 release "apparently" promises to address these issues. Sadly the ownCloud Community is not strong on documentation that is why there is an Amahi ownCloud set of articles. Which are only as good as a "contributor's" curiousity.

[guerilla]

Thanks for replying, it's good t know i wasn't doing anything stupid. It also may explain why I had a crash when trying to mount files as using smb in owncloud.

I know its bad form to ask these things but do you have any idea when owncloud 5 is set to be released?

Thanks again, looks like i'll stick to ajaxexplorer for giving people access for now. I'd just use scp but its not family friendly.

[northridgegrp]

Personally I think you should use the ownCloud sharing scenario. If you give people access to ajaxexplorer or scp you could be opening a security can of worms.

ownCloud 5.0 is tentatively due at the end of Feb. Amahi's release is usually shortly after that as we have to test the Amahi package out to make sure that it works as expected.

PS: Have a look at the wiki, I posted an article on moving to a new Amahi release.

[stern88]

I'd just use scp but its not family friendly.

Bad idea, try filezilla. Setup a secure openssh-server or dropbear. Use at least 2048b rsa-certs (ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 2048), dont permit password-logins and specify "AllowUsers".
Dont forget, there are many scripts out there in the i-net trying to login in unsecure ssh-servers. Check your /var/log/auth.log or /var/log/secure regulary.

[bigfoot65]

OpenVPN ALS is another alternative. It's a clientless VPN using SSL via web browser. I have used it many times from outside my network with no issues.

http://www.amahi.org/apps/openvpn-als

There are a lot of features and security mechanisms that are easy to implement.

[northridgegrp]

I too favour bigfoot65's recommendation! It's safer!