Written by samuel.dowlingJuly 24, 2020

How to install Nextcloud on FreeNAS in an iocage jail with hardened security

I’ve recently been through the process of standing up my own personal cloud server, and found that there were a few points of difficulty not directly covered in existing guides on the topic (such as improving security/hardening the server), and a number of the guides on the topic suggested implementing bad practices, such as the use of mod_php (I’ll be using php-fpm!). My aim here is to be as explicit as possible about the process I followed so that even a relatively new beginner is able to follow them. A lot of this is adapted from dureal99d’s post on the same topic, who did a great job at explaining the process, however it discussed the installation of Nextcloud 13, and the certificate installation process was unsuccessful for me so my thought is to share my learnings to save the next person the trouble. The target audience for this guide is the person with very little exposure to the command line in either Linux or FreeBSD. With this in mind, my aim is to be complete as possible with the information I provide, and also to provide some context about why certain tasks are being undertaken rather than just direction on which commands to run. A disclaimer to this is that I am by no means an expert, and am still learning, so if you spot any errors or have any suggestions please leave a comment below!

One thing I’ve noticed a lot of people get hung up on is dataset structure, so to be explicit, I’ll describe my configuration. I have two data pools (Storage > Pools). One, titled “vault”, is my primary storage pool, comprised of 6x4TB WD Red drives. The second, “jailhouse”, is a 500GB Samsung SSD, and is the pool I store all of my jails on so that they benefit from the faster IO operations an SSD affords. The final dataset structure I have is as follows:

├── vault
│   └── cloud
└── jailhouse
    ├── apps
    │   ├── nextcloud
    │   │   ├── config
    │   │   ├── themes
    │   │   ├── db
    └── iocage
        ├── ...
        ├── jails
        │   └── nextcloud
        └── ...

According to the Nextcloud Documentation, there are four things required to restore a Nextcloud installation:

The configuration directory
The data directory
The database
The theme directory

Therefore, it makes sense to make this data independent of the jail (more on this later). This means that if for whatever reason your Nextcloud jail has been broken or deleted, you should be able to restore back to your previous configuration with minimal hassle. Note that this doesn’t serve as a backup for the purposes of upgrading, however it will afford you some ability to nuke the jail without risking the loss of data. In the above structure, the ‘cloud’ directory represents the data directory; this is where all of your files will be stored. It’s important that this is on your primary storage pool so that it can grow in size as required. I’ve stored the remaining data in their own datasets on my jailhouse pool. To organise this, I’ve created an ‘app’ dataset which holds a dataset for each jail I create. As can be seen, there is a dataset named ‘nextcloud’, which then contains ‘config’, ‘themes’ and ‘db’ datasets for the required information.

The remaining dataset is the ‘iocage’ dataset. This is created automatically when you create a jail, so you don’t need to worry about doing anything here, however it is important to note that this is where the local storage for your iocage jails is held. Specifically, in jails > jailname, or in this case jails > nextcloud. A number of other datasets are created within the iocage dataset, however these aren’t particularly relevant to this guide, so if you see them and wonder if they’re supposed to be there; don’t stress, they are.

I’m sure many of you will have organised your datasets differently – that’s fine; this has worked well for me, feel free to adopt it, or don’t; it will be the context in which I explain this guide though. For those of you who do want to adopt it, and are confused about how to go about it, I’ll explain it below.

Create Your Datasets

Storage Dataset

On the left navigation bar, select Storage > Pools

Expand your primary storage pool. In the right most column of the resulting table, locate the three dots on the row of your primary storage dataset (vault in my case):

Select “Add Dataset”. Populate the form with the following:

Name: cloud
Compression level: lz4
Enable atime: Off

i.e:

Note that the atime value is set to off, which is different from the default. From the FreeNAS User Guide, disabling atime prevents the production of log traffic while files are being read, and results in significant performance gains, which is desirable for our data folder.

Leave the rest of the values as default and press “Save”. This creates the dataset /vault/cloud

Application Dataset

If you don’t already have a folder for your application data, go ahead and create that now. If you don’t have a dedicated pool for your jails or an SSD, it’s not crucial, so just put this on whatever pool is most appropriate for you. My recommendation would be to maintain the data structure listed earlier however, so have an entirely separate dataset earmarked for this purpose.

Select “Add Dataset”. Populate the form with the following:

Name: apps
Compression level: lz4
Enable atime: On

Note that here, atime is set to the default value of ‘on’. It is enabled here because application data is considered less critical as lower performance here won’t impact the usability experience materially.

Leave the rest of the values as default and press “Save”. In my case, I’ve placed this on the jailhouse pool and this creates the dataset /jailhouse/apps

Nextcloud Application Data Dataset

As described previously, select the “apps” dataset and select “Add Dataset”

Populate the form with the following:

Name: nextcloud
Compression Level: lz4
Enable atime: On

Leave the rest of the values as default and press “Save”. This creates the dataset /jailhouse/apps/nextcloud

Nextcloud Database Dataset

Select the “apps/nextcloud” dataset and select “Add Dataset”

Populate the form with the following:

Name: db
Compression Level: lz4
Enable atime: Off

Again, note that in this case atime is off. Leave the rest of the values as default and press “Save”. The database will see steady read and write operations, so performance is a factor here. This creates the dataset /jailhouse/apps/nextcloud/db, and will be used to store the nextcloud database

Nextcloud Configuration Dataset

Select the “apps/nextcloud” dataset and select “Add Dataset”

Populate the form with the following:

Name: config
Compression Level: lz4
Enable atime: On

Leave the rest of the values as default and press “Save”. This creates the dataset /jailhouse/apps/nextcloud/config, and will store configuration settings for Nextcloud

Nextcloud Themes Dataset

Select the “apps/nextcloud” dataset and select “Add Dataset”

Populate the form with the following:

Name: themes
Compression Level: lz4
Enable atime: On

Leave the rest of the values as default and press “Save”. This creates the dataset /jailhouse/apps/nextcloud/themes

Create users and set permissions

Navigate to Accounts > Users, and press the big “+” to add a user:

Populate the resulting form as follows:

Username: mysql
Full Name: MySQL User
User ID: 88
New Primary Group: Checked
Enable Password login: No

Now press Save. Navigate back to your “apps” dataset: Storage > Pools, and expand jailhouse > apps > nextcloud. To edit the permissions, select the three dots in the rightmost column corresponding to each dataset, and select “Edit Permissions” as shown below:

Now, for each dataset we want to make the following changes:

db dataset:

User: mysql
Group: mysql

config dataset: Note that the ‘www’ user and group should already exist, there is no need to create them.

User: www
Group: www

themes dataset:

User: www
Group: www

Create an iocage jail:

Now it’s time to create the jail. This can be done with the web UI, however I prefer to use the command line interface, and so the rest of these instructions will be presented there. This guide, will therefore present the instructions for the command line interface. First, you’ll need to SSH into your FreeNAS host. Instructions on how to configure SSH are available here. The gist of this is that you’ll need to enable the SSH service in the FreeNAS UI and configure the public/private key pair for your user, and then make a connection. From a unix terminal (macOS, Linux), this will look like the following, assuming a FreeNAS host local IP of 192.168.0.9:

$ ssh root@192.168.0.9

If you’re using Windows, you’ll need to use PuTTy or Cygwin. Refer to the guide linked above for more detail. Once you have established a SSH connection, you’ll need to use the iocage command to create the jail as follows:

$ iocage create -n nextcloud -r 11.3-RELEASE ip4_addr="vnet0|192.168.0.10/24" defaultrouter="192.168.0.1" vnet="on" allow_raw_sockets="1" boot="on"

To provide some insight as to what this is doing; the -n flag allows the specification of the jail name, in this case “nextcloud”, the -r flag specifies the release of FreeBSD to be installed in the jail (Note that this version must be the same or lower than your version of FreeNAS. For example, If your FreeNAS version is 11.1, then you would need to pass 11.1-RELEASE as a parameter instead of 11.3-RELEASE; using 11.3-RELEASE would break the jail due to differences in the respective kernels), ip4_addr is the networking specification – in this case the IP/Mask for the jail (192.168.0.10/24), and the interface to use, vnet0. Set this IP value to something convenient to you on the subnet you wish it to be on – the selection is arbitrary, though if you’re new to this, it is advisable for simplicity that you choose an IP on the same subnet as your router. To illustrate this, if your router is 192.168.0.1, then choose an IP of the form 192.168.0.x, where x is a number between 0 and 254. The defaultrouter parameter specifies the router for your network; typically this will be 192.168.0.1 by default, but if it’s something else put that here. vnet=“on” enables the vnet interface, which is required as we previously specified vnet0 as the interface. allow_raw_sockets=“1” enables raw sockets, which enables the use of functions such as ping and traceroute within the jail, and enables interaction with various network subsystems. boot=“on” enables the jail to be auto-started at boot time. More detail on all of the parameters that can be used to configure a jail on creation can be found in the man page for iocage. If the jail doesn’t start automatically after issuing this command, start it manually:

$ iocage start nextcloud

Add storage to the iocage jail

As I mentioned previously, it’s possible to mount a device from one file system into another. This is done by creating an entry in the file system table (fstab) of the receiving file system. More information about fstab is available here. In our case, this enables data edited inside the jail to be stored outside the jail, so that if the jail needs to be destroyed or rebuilt, we still have the configuration data we need to get it back to the previous state with minimal effort. This is achieved using the fstab command.

The goal is to mount the datasets you created earlier into the jail, which can be achieved as follows:

$ iocage exec nextcloud mkdir -p /mnt/data
$ iocage exec nextcloud mkdir -p /var/db/mysql
$ iocage exec nextcloud mkdir -p /usr/local/www/nextcloud/config
$ iocage exec nextcloud mkdir -p /usr/local/www/nextcloud/themes
$ iocage fstab -a nextcloud /mnt/vault/cloud /mnt/data nullfs rw 0 0
$ iocage fstab -a nextcloud /mnt/jailhouse/apps/nextcloud/db /var/db/mysql nullfs rw 0 0
$ iocage fstab -a nextcloud /mnt/jailhouse/apps/nextcloud/config /usr/local/www/nextcloud/config nullfs rw 0 0
$ iocage fstab -a nextcloud /mnt/jailhouse/apps/nextcloud/themes /usr/local/www/nextcloud/themes nullfs rw 0 0

The format these take are:

$ iocage fstab -a jailname source_location destination_location nullfs (rw/ro) 0 0

where source_location is the dataset location on your FreeNAS host, and destination_location is the mount location within the jail. rw/ro refers to the permissions the jail has for the mounted dataset; rw is read/write and ro is read only. Choose ro if the jail needs to read the data but shouldn’t be able to alter it. Obviously, in the case of Nextcloud, we want to give all of these mounts read write access. The -a flag is to add an item to the jails fstab file. The -e flag can be used to edit an entry once made:

$ iocage fstab -e nextcloud

This will open the fstab file in vi (if you just entered, type :q! enter to quit). If you’re not familiar with vi, or prefer not to use it (the commands take some getting used to), this can be changed by using the setenv command with the EDITOR flag:

$ setenv EDITOR /usr/local/bin/nano

This will change the default editor to use the text editor nano for this session. Other alternatives include ee, emacs, vim. Choose one based on your own preferences and what you have installed. I will be using nano for this guide as it’s relatively intuitive to understand.

Set primary cache in FreeNAS UserSpace Shell

$ zfs set primarycache=metadata jailhouse/apps/nextcloud/db

This setting provides some optimisations specific to database storage, and should only be applied to your database directory. Since MariaDB has it’s own internal cache, it would be a waste of memory to cache the same thing in ZFS as well.

Further reading on the impact of tweaking this setting can be found on PatPro[1][2]. TLDR; Only ever set this to ‘metadata’ for database applications, and ‘all’ for everything else, otherwise you’ll have significant performance degradation.

Okay, now on to configuring the jail!

Jail Setup

Confirm that the jail has been set up and is running by running:

$ iocage list

iocage list will present a table that looks like the following:

+-----+--------------+-------+--------------+----------------+
| JID |     NAME     | STATE |   RELEASE    |      IP4       |
+=====+==============+=======+==============+================+
| 1   | nextcloud    | up    | 11.3-RELEASE | 192.168.0.10   |
+-----+--------------+-------+--------------+----------------+

We can now use the name field to enter the jail using the following command:

$ iocage console nextcloud

This will spawn the default shell (in my case it was csh), and you should be presented with something similar to the following:

root@freenas:~ $ iocage console nextcloud
FreeBSD 11.3-RELEASE-p7 (FreeNAS.amd64) #0 r325575+ca0f1a6ba25(HEAD): Tue Apr 21 20:46:20 UTC 2020

Welcome to FreeBSD!

Release Notes, Errata: https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/
Security Advisories:   https://www.FreeBSD.org/security/
FreeBSD Handbook:      https://www.FreeBSD.org/handbook/
FreeBSD FAQ:           https://www.FreeBSD.org/faq/
Questions List: https://lists.FreeBSD.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions/
FreeBSD Forums:        https://forums.FreeBSD.org/

Documents installed with the system are in the /usr/local/share/doc/freebsd/
directory, or can be installed later with:  pkg install en-freebsd-doc
For other languages, replace "en" with a language code like de or fr.

Show the version of FreeBSD installed:  freebsd-version ; uname -a
Please include that output and any error messages when posting questions.
Introduction to manual pages:  man man
FreeBSD directory layout:      man hier

Edit /etc/motd to change this login announcement.
root@nextcloud:~ $

Okay, so what we’re going to do here is set up what’s known as a FAMP stack. This is a derivation of the LAMP stack, which is a popular web server environment configuration. LAMP is an acronym for Linux Apache MySQL PHP. In this case, we’re obviously not using Linux, so this becomes the FAMP stack; FreeBSD, Apache, MySQL and PHP.

Install required packages

Now that the pkg repository has been updated, we can go ahead and install the necessary packages. The packages we will install are as follows:

nano: a text editor
wget: a download client
ca_root_nss: The Mozilla bundle of root certificates to enable https connections to be verified
Apache 2.4: the web server to make your next cloud instance visible in the web ui
MariaDB: The mysql database package
Nextcloud: the cloud application!
Redis: caching package

You can install these by running the following commands:

$ pkg update
$ pkg install nano
$ pkg install wget ca_root_nss
$ pkg install apache24
$ sysrc apache24_enable=yes
$ service apache24 start
$ pkg install mariadb104-server
$ sysrc mysql_enable=yes

Set up MySQL (MariaDB)

Before continuing, we’ll need to modify the MySQL configuration to create a socket in the right location. Open /usr/local/etc/mysql/my.cnf as follows:

$ nano /usr/local/etc/mysql/my.cnf

Now find the line that shows:

socket  = /var/run/mysql/mysql.sock

Modify it to match the following:

socket  = /tmp/mysql.sock

Now save and exit (Ctrl + X). Now start the MySQL service and go through the set up process:

$ service mysql-server start
$ mysql_secure_installation --socket=/tmp/mysql.sock

NOTE: If you get the following error at this point:

ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: NO)

Follow this procedure: 1. Press Ctrl + C to stop the script 2. Enter the following command to stop the mysql server

$ /usr/local/etc/rc.d/mysql-server stop

Then enter the following command:

$ mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables & 
$ /usr/local/etc/rc.d/mysql-server start

Once again stop the script by pressing Ctrl + C
Re-run the wizard script

$ mysql_secure_installation

This should resolve this issue. Provide the following answers to the prompts:

Enter current password for root (enter for none):

Press enter as there is no password

Switch to unix_socket authentication [Y/n] y
Set root password? [Y/n] y
New password:

Enter a new password of your choice (don’t forget it!)

Re-enter new password:

Re-enter the password

Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y
Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y
Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y

MariaDB is now configured. At this stage, the installer should have created a user named ‘mysql’, and a group named ‘mysql’ within the jail, with UID=88 and GID=88 respectively. You’ll recall earlier in the guide, we created a mysql user and group with these UID and GID. It is imperative that the UID and GID of the user and group created earlier on the FreeNAS host, and the user and group created during the mysql installation within the jail match. If they don’t, you will run into permission issues, so go ahead and change the ID of the user and group on the FreeNAS host if this is the case for you.

Installing Nextcloud

Now, It’s time to install Nextcloud. Previous iterations of this guide made use of FreeBSDs package manager pkg to do this. The motivation behind this was to make it easy to upgrade. Unfortunately, this was not my experience, predominantly because:

Using the web updater caused a disconnect between the pkg version and the actual version of Nextcloud
Running the upgrade process failed consistently
The pkg distribution of Nextcloud didn’t maintain stable streams of major Nextcloud versions. To illustrate this, Nextcloud presently maintains versions 17, 18 and 19. nextcloud-php74 only provides an option to install Nextcloud 19, so as soon as another major version is released, you would be forced to upgrade. This presents difficulties in upgrading to the latest version if you had fallen behind. Since Nextcloud doesn’t allow upgrading across multiple major versions, being able to install or upgrade to releases in each of the currently supported major versions is important.

With this in mind, the method I’m now proposing is a manual installation. This will ideally allow the web updater to be used effectively, and in the event that the web updater doesn’t work, Nextcloud maintains a large archive of versions to allow you to choose specifically what you want to install or use to upgrade.

The first step is to download the latest Nextcloud release and it’s associated hash into the /tmp directory:

root@nextcloud:~ $ cd /tmp
root@nextcloud:/tmp $ wget https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/latest.tar.bz2
root@nextcloud:/tmp $ wget https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/latest.tar.bz2.sha512

If you’re new to *nix type systems, these file extensions may look strange to you. .tar.bz2 files are known as compressed tarballs. The .tar component of the file extension indicates an uncompressed archive, and the .bz2 portion indicates that it has been compressed using the bzip2 algorithm. In short, they’re compressed archives (similar to zip), however on *nix systems they maintain file system parameters such as names, timestamps, ownership and access permissions. Now, confirm that the file you downloaded hasn’t been corrupted or tampered with by comparing it against the hash:

root@nextcloud:/tmp $ shasum -a 512 -c latest.tar.bz2.sha512
latest.tar.bz2: OK

If the result you get is OK, then you can move on. Otherwise, attempt to re-download the latest Nextcloud release. Now, uncompress the archive to /usr/local/www/nextcloud as follows:

root@nextcloud:/tmp $ tar -xf latest.tar.bz2 -C /usr/local/www

Unfortunately the archive was not created with the user ownership we need for this directory, so lets go ahead and change the owner to the www user:

root@nextcloud:/tmp $ chown -R www:www /usr/local/www/nextcloud

Installing PHP

The following command installs PHP 7.4 and the packages that Nextcloud requires to run:

$ pkg install php74 php74-bz2 php74-ctype php74-curl php74-dom php74-exif php74-fileinfo php74-filter php74-gd php74-iconv php74-intl php74-json php74-ldap php74-mbstring php74-opcache php74-openssl php74-pdo php74-pdo_mysql php74-pecl-APCu php74-pecl-imagick php74-pecl-redis php74-posix php74-session php74-simplexml php74-xml php74-xmlreader php74-xmlwriter php74-xsl php74-zip php74-zlib php74-bcmath php74-gmp

To use a newer version of PHP, these packages will need to be replaced with the appropriate version. An example might be that when PHP 7.5 is released and you want to upgrade, you would remove php74-bz2 and install php75-bz2.

Installing Redis

Now install Redis as follows:

$ pkg install redis
$ sysrc redis_enable=yes
$ service redis start

The function of the previous commands should have been relatively self explanatory. To provide a little more detail, “pkg update” downloads the latest list of packages in the repository, “pkg install” installs a package, “sysrc” adds an item to rc.conf, which in this case ensures that these services start on boot, and “service start” starts a given service.

Now that we have everything we need installed, lets get configuring!

Configure MySQL

$ mysql -u root -p

Enter the password you made for root during the MariaDB 10.1 Setup. Then enter each of the following commands one by one:

CREATE DATABASE nextcloud;
CREATE USER 'nextcloud_admin'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-password-here';
GRANT ALL ON nextcloud.* TO 'nextcloud_admin'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit

Where ‘your-password-here’ is the password you just used to log in to mysql. It’s important that you include the semi-colon ‘;’ at the end of each statement. If you don’t it won’t know when to terminate each command.

Configure Apache for PHP with php-fpm

Many other guides on this and similar topics suggest the use of mod_php to configure Apache to handle php files, however Apache recommends the use of proxy_fcgi and php-fpm above all other recipes. This is due to its ability to enable diagnosis of php problems more quickly, and significantly reduce the memory footprint of the httpd server as it can facilitate more scalable threaded MPM’s such as event or worker. This is in contrast to mod_php, which poses some difficulty in maintaining a thread-safe php library. If this is not done, child processes are prone to memory leaks which are likely to consume large amounts of RAM and deplete the available system resources. Additionally, mod_php has certain vulnerabilities that allow uninitialised memory to be turned into executable code. This vulnerability is mitigated by using FastCGI and php-fpm.

php-fpm should have been installed along with php when you installed Nextcloud, so lets go ahead and add it to the startup script (rc.conf) and start the php-fpm service:

$ sysrc php_fpm_enable=yes
$ service php-fpm start

Now lets enable the proxy_fcgi modules. Open the Apache config file:

$ nano /usr/local/etc/apache24/httpd.conf

Search (Ctrl + W) for and uncomment the following two lines (remove the leading ‘#’) to enable fastCGI:

LoadModule proxy_module libexec/apache24/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_fcgi_module libexec/apache24/mod_proxy_fcgi.so
LoadModule rewrite_module libexec/apache24/mod_rewrite.so

Save and quit

Ctrl + X
y
enter

Now reload Apache gracefully:

$ apachectl graceful

This ensures that whenever a php file is loaded, Apache will use the php installation to parse the contents (with the appropriate VirtualHost entry, discussed later). Without this, the php file will download without loading – not very useful. For more information and different configuration options available for php-fpm, see the Apache documentation.

Create a test Virtual Host File

The virtual host file handles the site specific configuration. This will be discussed in more detail later for the Nextcloud specific configuration. For now, lets just create a test vhost configuration so we can test our php configuration. Create a new vhost file:

$ nano /usr/local/etc/apache24/Includes/test.conf

Copy and paste the following

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "/usr/local/www/apache24/data"
    ServerName 192.168.0.10
    ProxyPassMatch ^/(.*.php(/.*)?)$ fcgi://127.0.0.1:9000/usr/local/www/apache24/data/$1
    DirectoryIndex /index.php index.php
</VirtualHost>

Change the ServerName directive to match the IP you chose for this jail, then Save and Exit (Ctrl + X).

Configure php.ini

$ cd /usr/local/etc

Create php.ini by copying the php.ini-production file (a template with production appropriate security configuration) to a new file named php.ini:

$ cp php.ini-production php.ini

Now, edit php.ini:

$ nano /usr/local/etc/php.ini

Use the search command in nano (Ctrl + W) to uncomment and make sure the following parameters have these values. Comments can be removed by deleting the “;” at the beginning of the line:

cgi.fix_pathinfo=1
date.timezone=Country/City

SEE: http://php.net/manual/en/timezones.php for the timezone relevant to you. An example would be Australia/Sydney

post_max_size = 1999M
upload_max_filesize = 1999M
memory_limit = 512M

Uncomment and update the following values as well, which provide the php configuration for caching data:

opcache.enable=1
opcache.enable_cli=1
opcache.interned_strings_buffer=8
opcache.max_accelerated_files=10000
opcache.memory_consumption=128
opcache.save_comments=1
opcache.revalidate_freq=1

Save and Exit:

Ctrl + X
Y
ENTER

Restart Apache and php-fpm

$ service php-fpm restart
$ service apache24 restart

Test the php configuration

Navigate to /usr/local/www/apache24/data:

$ cd /usr/local/www/apache24/data
$ nano info.php

Paste the following into info.php

<?php
phpinfo(); //display all info
?>

This is a simple function that will display all php info for testing purposes. Save and exit:

Ctrl + X
Y
ENTER

Now, open a browser and navigate to http://JAIL_IP/info.php, where JAIL_IP is the IP you gave to this jail when you created it using iocage create, for example http://192.168.0.10/info.php. You should see a page displaying information about your PHP installation. If this works, congratulations! If it doesn’t, go back over the previous steps and try to work out where you’ve gone wrong.

Nextcloud configuration

Configure Apache for Nextcloud

Nextcloud will have been installed to /usr/local/www/nextcloud, which is not the default web root for apache (place where apache looks for index.php). This will need to be changed to the Nextcloud directory so that the Nextcloud web UI can be loaded. You can do this by editing apache’s configuration file:

$ nano /usr/local/etc/apache24/httpd.conf

Change the following two lines

DocumentRoot "/usr/local/www/apache24/data"
<Directory "/usr/local/www/apache24/data">

DocumentRoot "/usr/local/www/nextcloud"
<Directory "/usr/local/www/nextcloud">

Now enable the .htaccess file within this block. The changes you’ve just made should yield a block that looks as follows:

DocumentRoot "/usr/local/www/nextcloud"
<Directory "/usr/local/www/nextcloud">
    #
    # Possible values for the Options directive are "None", "All",
    # or any combination of:
    #   Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks SymLinksifOwnerMatch ExecCGI MultiViews
    #
    # Note that "MultiViews" must be named *explicitly* --- "Options All"
    # doesn't give it to you.
    #
    # The Options directive is both complicated and important.  Please see
    # http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/core.html#options
    # for more information.
    #
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks

    #
    # AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
    # It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:
    #   AllowOverride FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
    #
    AllowOverride None

    #
    # Controls who can get stuff from this server.
    #
    Require all granted
</Directory>

To enable the .htaccess file to be used for configuration, change the AllowOverride value to ‘all’:

AllowOverride all

Save and Exit (Ctrl + X).

Permissions

Ensure the installation folder and data folders have the correct permissions so that you can read and write configuration settings, files, and perform updates.

chown -R www:www /usr/local/www/nextcloud /mnt/data

This command changes the ownership recursively of the specified folder (folder and all sub folders) to user “www” and group “www”. The arguments are:

chown -R user:group /path/to/directory

Create a VirtualHost definition for Nextcloud

A Virtual Host (or vhost) definition determines how a server processes an incoming request. This is where a range of configuration options for a site can be set, depending on both the IP and port which a request comes through on. A Virtual Host definition begins with the directive, which takes both an IP and a port as a parameter. As an example, the following definition processes requests for IP 192.168.0.10 on port 80:

<VirtualHost 192.168.0.10:80>

For our purposes, we will use a wildcard (*) for the IP, which means that our vhost definition will be evaluated for all IPs, but we will specify port 80 specifically, which is the port used for HTTP traffic. There are two types of vhost matching, IP-based matching and Name-based matching. Because we’re accepting all IP addresses in this configuration, we’re relying on the ServerName field for Name-based matching.

For these examples, I’m going to use mydomain.com, and the subdomain cloud.mydomain.com. If for example you’re using a DDNS (more on this later), you might replace all instances of cloud.mydomain.com with something like cloud.no-IP.org. Navigate to the apache Includes directory:

cd /usr/local/etc/apache24/Includes

First, lets remove the configuration file we created earlier; we won’t need it anymore.

$ rm /usr/local/etc/apache24/Includes/test.conf

Now, create the new site configuration file:

$ nano cloud.mydomain.com.conf

Add the following content to the file:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "/usr/local/www/nextcloud"
    ServerName cloud.mydomain.com
    <FilesMatch \.php$>
        SetHandler "proxy:fcgi://127.0.0.1:9000/"
    </FilesMatch>
    DirectoryIndex /index.php index.php
</VirtualHost>

Remember to replace cloud.mydomain.com with the domain relevant to you. Save and Exit (Ctrl + X). Now, lets discuss what’s going on here. The first line, DocumentRoot, defines the “root”, or top level directory from which to serve content. This means that using the URL http://cloud.mydomain.com will direct a user to files contained within this path; in this case /usr/local/www/nextcloud. Additionally, subdirectories within the DocumentRoot directive will be accessible as a path specification to the URL. As an example, lets assume there is a directory /usr/local/www/nextcloud/data, containing a file test.php. This would be accessible from http://cloud.mydomain.com/data/test.php. It’s important that the DocumentRoot points to the top level of the Nextcloud installation, as this is where index.php lies, which will present the Nextcloud user interface.

The ServerName is relatively self descriptive – this is the domain name of your server. It’s important to note that this name must have a valid DNS entry. This means that either this server is available on the Internet, and can be navigated to, OR there is a host entry in your routers DNS Resolver to direct queries to this URL to your web server IP. Alternatively, if this server is only going to be available on your local network, you can replace this with your servers local IP, i.e.:

ServerName 192.168.0.10

To be clear here:

If your domain is available on the internet, cloud.mydomain.com must resolve to a public IP
If your domain is only available locally, cloud.mydomain.com must resolve to a local IP
OR, it must be a local IP.

The next directive, <FilesMatch>, matches all files containing .php in the title and assigns the fastCGI proxy module we set up earlier as the handler. This allows us to use php files, and serve php content using php-fpm.

More reading on Virtual Host definitions are available in the Apache documentation [3] [4] [5].

Test your configuration

Restart Apache:

$ service apache24 restart

Now, navigate to http://JAIL_IP/, i.e. http://192.168.0.10/ again to confirm you can see the setup screen for Nextcloud. If you can, well done! We’re most of the way there.

Web Configuration

Set up your admin account with a username and password you choose, then populate the fields as follows:

Data folder = /mnt/data
Database user = nextcloud_admin
Database password = MADEUP_PASSWORD_FROM_BEFORE
Database name = nextcloud
Database host = localhost:/tmp/mysql.sock

Add external domain as a trusted domain

In the terminal, navigate to the Nextcloud config file:

$ nano /usr/local/www/nextcloud/config/config.php

This should look similar to the following:

<?php
$CONFIG = array (
  'instanceid' => 'ocp08umeaycm',
  'passwordsalt' => 'OReCjQueLIb0X7mwn33XiklPPPdE/4',
  'secret' => 'RlWiGbC46jxnfK00Mrjp5NHlYySls8YkaGyJKngG3IkNyJ3K',
  'trusted_domains' =>
  array (
    0 => '192.168.0.10',
  ),
  'datadirectory' => '/mnt/data',
  'dbtype' => 'mysql',
  'version' => '19.0.0.12',
  'overwrite.cli.url' => 'http://192.168.0.10',
  'dbname' => 'nextcloud',
  'dbhost' => 'localhost:/tmp/mysql.sock',
  'dbport' => '',
  'dbtableprefix' => 'oc_',
  'mysql.utf8mb4' => true,
  'dbuser' => 'nextcloud_admin',
  'dbpassword' => 'Default123!',
  'installed' => true,
  'updater.release.channel' => 'stable',
);

Add your domain name to the trusted domains array. You can do this either manually, or with the command below, replacing the domain with whatever is appropriate for you:

root@nextcloud:~ $ su -m www -c 'php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ config:system:set trusted_domains 1 --value="cloud.mydomain.com"'

The result of this looks like the following:

<?php
$CONFIG = array (
  'instanceid' => 'ocp08umeaycm',
  'passwordsalt' => 'OReCjQueLIb0X7mwn33XiklPPPdE/4',
  'secret' => 'RlWiGbC46jxnfK00Mrjp5NHlYySls8YkaGyJKngG3IkNyJ3K',
  'trusted_domains' =>
  array (
    0 => '192.168.0.10',
    1 => 'cloud.mydomain.com',
  ),
  'datadirectory' => '/mnt/data',
  'dbtype' => 'mysql',
  'version' => '19.0.0.12',
  'overwrite.cli.url' => 'http://192.168.0.10',
  'dbname' => 'nextcloud',
  'dbhost' => 'localhost:/tmp/mysql.sock',
  'dbport' => '',
  'dbtableprefix' => 'oc_',
  'mysql.utf8mb4' => true,
  'dbuser' => 'nextcloud_admin',
  'dbpassword' => 'Default123!',
  'installed' => true,
  'updater.release.channel' => 'stable',
);

The line of interest here is within the trusted_domains array:

1 => 'cloud.mydomain.com',

Fix the annoying Apache errors

To get rid of the following error message when starting and stopping the Apache server:

AH00558: httpd: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1. Set the 'ServerName' directive globally to suppress this message
Syntax OK
Stopping apache24.
Waiting for PIDS: 80591.
Performing sanity check on apache24 configuration:
AH00558: httpd: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1. Set the 'ServerName' directive globally to suppress this message
Syntax OK
Starting apache24.
AH00558: httpd: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1. Set the 'ServerName' directive globally to suppress this message when stating apache do the following:

Open the Apache configuration file:

$ nano /usr/local/etc/apache24/httpd.conf

Search for the phrase “ServerName”, and enter your jails ip and port 80 such that it appears as follows:

ServerName JAIL_IP:80

ServerName 192.168.0.10:80

Uncomment this line, and the message should no longer appear. To test this, restart apache

$ service apache24 restart

This should produce a clean restart message:

Performing sanity check on apache24 configuration:
Syntax OK
Stopping apache24.
Waiting for PIDS: 12933.
Performing sanity check on apache24 configuration:
Syntax OK
Starting apache24.

Configure Cron jobs:

Cron is one of the most useful utilities in FreeBSD. It’s a utility that runs in the background and regularly checks “/etc/crontab” for tasks to execute and searches “/var/cron/tabs” for custom crontab files. These files are used to schedule tasks which cron runs at the specified times. Each entry in a crontab defines a task to run, and is known as a cron job. There are two types of configuration files, the system crontab, and the user crontab.

A crontab can be edited with the command

$ crontab -u <user> -e

In this case, we will configure the crontab of the “www” user, and add an entry to run the nextcloud cron script. Before we do this, lets change the environment editor to nano.

$ setenv EDITOR nano
$ crontab -u www -e

Add the following (assuming it’s blank, if not just add the job). The crontab header describes what each field in the cronjob represents, and is courtesy of squarism.

# minute (0-59),
# |     hour (0-23),
# |     |       day of the month (1-31),
# |     |       |       month of the year (1-12),
# |     |       |       |       day of the week (0-6 with 0=Sunday).
# |     |       |       |       |       commands
  */15      *       *       *       *       /usr/local/bin/php -f /usr/local/www/nextcloud/cron.php

Save and Exit (Ctrl + X), and the www crontab should be configured.

Caching and Redis

Redis is an in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache and message broker. This will provide performance improvements in terms of accessing your data. To find out more, read the Redis Documentation. Lets update redis.conf to run on the unix socket. Execute the following command:

$ nano /usr/local/etc/redis.conf

Inside this file, find the “port” value and change it from its default value to 0. This will stop Redis from listening on a TCP port so we can configure it to listen on a unix socket.

port 0

Additionally, uncomment the following by removing the “#” in front of each statement and changing the values as appropriate:

unixsocket /var/run/redis/redis.sock
unixsocketperm 770

And then confirm that the following statement is uncommented (No leading ‘#’):

bind 127.0.0.1

This ensures that Redis can only operate on the local interface, as a security precaution. Save and Exit (Ctrl + X).

Now, restart the service

$ service redis restart

Now, confirm Redis is in the feedback list by running the following command:

$ ls -al /var/run/redis

You should see redis.sock in the feedback list as follows:

srwxrwx---  1   redis   redis   0   MMM     D   HH:MM   redis.sock

If you run into troubles here, please consult the Nextcloud documentation and the Redis Documentation on configuring Redis.

Now, install the following packages:

$ pkg install php74-pecl-redis
$ pkg install php74-pecl-APCu

These packages are extensions providing an API to allow php to communicate with the Redis database, and also for user caching using APC. Note that the versions of these packages need to match the PHP version you have installed. Lets adjust the Redis and caching configuration using the following commands. Note that these are order specific:

$ su -m www -c 'php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ config:system:set redis host --value="/var/run/redis/redis.sock"'
$ su -m www -c 'php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ config:system:set redis port --value=0 --type=integer'
$ su -m www -c 'php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ config:system:set memcache.local --value="\OC\Memcache\APCu"'
$ su -m www -c 'php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ config:system:set memcache.locking --value="\OC\Memcache\Redis"'

These commands switch user to the user “www”, where the su flag -m leaves the environment unmodified. The -c flag specifies a command to be run within the new user shell. In this case, it runs the program “occ”, and passes some configuration options as a parameter. See the su man page for more information.

Now, add the www user to the redis group to allow it to access the redis socket:

$ pw usermod www -G redis

Restart the Apache service:

$ service apache24 restart

At this stage, your Nextcloud server should be ready to go for local network use. However, there may be some security warnings present in the Administration panel. Some common advisories include:

The database is missing some indexes. Due to the fact that adding indexes on big tables could take some time they were not added automatically. By running “occ db:add-missing-indices” those missing indexes could be added manually while the instance keeps running. Once the indexes are added queries to those tables are usually much faster.

This can be rectified by executing:

$ su -m www -c 'php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ db:add-missing-indices'

Some columns in the database are missing a conversion to big int. Due to the fact that changing column types on big tables could take some time they were not changed automatically. By running ‘occ db:convert-filecache-bigint’ those pending changes could be applied manually. This operation needs to be made while the instance is offline.

This can be rectified by executing:

$ su -m www -c 'php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ db:convert-filecache-bigint'

Beyond this, there are a range of security considerations that will be dealt with in the remainder of the guide. These are very important, especially if you intend to open the server to the web.

Security

Given that your new private cloud is likely to house a lot of your sensitive data, security is a paramount consideration, especially if you’re planning on making it visible to the internet. Here I will discuss a number of security considerations.

Nextcloud recommends a number of steps be taken to harden your server: 1. Give PHP read access to /dev/urandom 2. Enable hardening modules 3. Place data directory outside of the web root 4. Disable preview image generation 5. Use HTTPS 6. Redirect all unencrypted traffic to HTTPS 7. Enable HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) 8. Use proper SSL configuration 9. Use a dedicated domain for Nextcloud 10. Ensure that your Nextcloud instance is installed in a DMZ 11. Serve security related headers by the Web server

There are a number of useful sites to help you test the security of your nextcloud instance, here are a few: – Nextclouds own security scanner – SSL Labs – Mozilla Observatory

Make sure you evaluate the security of your site with at least one of these tools after making the changes below; you don’t want all of your data to be vulnerable. nachoparker of Own Your Bits does an excellent breakdown of the results you’re likely to see from these platforms, and offers methods to rectify some of the common issues.

I’ll now discuss each of the above hardening tips and how this has/can be implemented in FreeNAS.

Give PHP read access to /dev/urandom

This should be available by default, but to confirm, enter the following command:

$ ls -l /dev/urandom

This should return the following

lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  6 Nov 25 10:43 /dev/urandom -> random

The part of interest here is “lrwxr-xr-x”. Ignoring the leftmost “l”, this is a representation of the directory permissions, in three groups of “rwx”; one each for the owner (user), owner (group), and other. In this case, the owning user is root, and the owning group is wheel. Since the Nextcloud user, “www”, falls into neither of these groups, it is part of the “other” set of permissions. This means we’re most interested in the rightmost three characters. In this case, these are “r-x”. This means that any user has the permissions to read from this directory, and execute files in this directory, but not to write to this directory. Since “www” can read, this requirement is satisfied.

If this is not the case, however, run the following command:

$ chmod o+r /dev/urandom

chmod changes a files modes. The arguments passed here are o for other users and +r to add read.

If you want more detail on how permissions in unix, or more specifically FreeBSD work, here is some background reading.

Enable hardening modules

Mandatory Access Control (MAC)

The Nextcloud documentation recommends the use of hardening modules such as SELinux. SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux) is a Linux kernel security module, that provides a mechanism for supporting access control security policies, including mandatory access controls. FreeBSD is obviously not Linux, and so does not include the SELinux modules. However, it does have it’s own system called Mandatory Access Control. This allows an administrator to ensure that a user will not be permitted to change security attributes at will. All user utilities, programs and scripts are required to work within the constraints of the access rules provided by the selected security policy modules. The Nextcloud Documentation provides some configuration advice for SELinux, namely:

Enable updates via the web interface (don’t do this for FreeBSD)
Disallow write access to the whole web directory
Allow access to a remote database
Allow access to LDAP server
Allow access to remote network
Allow access to network memcache
Allow access to SMTP/sendmail

At the time of writing, I’m not certain how to reliably implement this with MAC in FreeBSD, and so is considered beyond the scope of this guide. This may form the content of a future blog post on the topic.

Enable Common Technical Controls

There are a number of system hardening modules that FreeBSD offers at install time. Unfortunately, since this is a jail, we were not presented with these options. The options are as follows:

Hide processes running as other users
Hide processes running as other groups
Disable reading kernel message buffer for unprivileged users
Disable process debugging facilities for unprivileged users
Randomize the PID of newly created processes
Insert stack guard page ahead of growable segments
Clean the /tmp filesystem on startup
Disable opening syslogd network socket (disables remote logging)
Disable SendMail service

Andrew Volpe of BSD Adventures suggests that these should all be enabled unless there is a good reason not to. An example of a good reason is that if you have a remote logging server, you would want to disable option 8 (so that opening syslogd network sockets is enabled). We will configure these as follows. First, open the kernel parameter configuration file:

$ nano /etc/sysctl.conf

Paste the following values into the file:

security.bsd.see_other_uids=0
security.bsd.see_other_gids=0
security.bsd.unprivileged_read_msgbuf=0
security.bsd.unprivileged_proc_debug=0
kern.randompid=$(jot -r 1 9999)
security.bsd.stack_guard_page=1

This enables options 1-6. To enable options 7-9, run the following commands:

$ sysrc clear_tmp_enable=YES
$ sysrc sendmail_enable="NONE"
$ sysrc sendmail_submit_enable="NO"
$ sysrc sendmail_outbound_enable="NO"
$ sysrc sendmail_msp_queue_enable="NO"
$ sysrc syslogd_flags="-c -ss"

It’s important to note that the majority of these should have these values set already by default, but this ensures that these settings will have the values we want. Additionally, Nextcloud does not require SendMail to be enabled to send mail; it has its own libraries for this.

Tamper Detection

Andrew Volpe of BSD Adventures also suggests the use of a tamper detection package to keep track of any changes made to configuration files in the event an unauthorised user gains access and tries to change your server configuration, or even just when a valid user makes changes. This can be achieved with the AIDE package:

$ pkg install aide

Then, once installed, the configuration options can be customised using /usr/local/etc/aide.conf. The default options should do a reasonable job of securing the jail. If you want to make modifications beyond the default, you can learn how to customise the configuration using the official AIDE documentation. Now, to finish the installation/configuration, navigate to the aide database directory and run the following commands:

$ cd /var/db/aide
$ aide --init
$ mv databases/aide.db.new databases/aide.db

To compare the database to the current configuration files, run the following command

$ aide

This will give you an output identifying any differences. If you run this immediately after installing, you should get a statement to the following effect:

AIDE found NO differences between database and filesystem. Looks okay!!

Unfortunately, to reset the recorded differences, you need to create a new database and replace aide.db with it. To simplify this process, it can be automated! To implement this, we’ll need to create a script to create the new database, archive the old database, and replace it with the new one. We can then have the script email you the change log, so you can be notified if someone has tampered with files. The mailing portion is optional, however there would be nothing to stop a malicious actor from altering the aide database if your only copy is stored locally within the jail, so this is recommended. Lets create this script, courtesy of Bob Aiello:

$ mkdir -p /scripts/aide
$ nano /scripts/aide/chkaide.sh

Paste the following:

#! /bin/sh
#chkaide.sh - Bob Aiello, modified for FreeBSD by Samuel Dowling
MYDATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d`
MYFILENAME="Aide-"$MYDATE.txt
UPDATE_NAME="aide_update.txt"
/bin/echo "Aide check !! `date`" > /tmp/$MYFILENAME
/usr/local/bin/aide --check > /tmp/myAide.txt
/bin/cat /tmp/myAide.txt|/usr/bin/grep -v failed >> /tmp/$MYFILENAME
/bin/echo "**************************************" >> /tmp/$MYFILENAME
/usr/bin/tail -20 /tmp/myAide.txt >> /tmp/$MYFILENAME
/bin/echo "****************DONE******************" >> /tmp/$MYFILENAME
/usr/bin/mail -s"$MYFILENAME `date`" john.smith75@gmail.com < /tmp/$MYFILENAME
/usr/local/bin/aide --update >> /tmp/$UPDATE_NAME
mv /var/db/aide/databases/aide.db /var/db/aide/databases/archive/aide-$MYDATE.db
mv /var/db/aide/databases/aide.db.new /var/db/aide/databases/aide.db

Change the email john.smith75@gmail.com to the recipient email you would like these change logs sent to. Save and Exit (Ctrl + X).We need to create a directory for the archived logs, and change the permissions so that it can be executed by the root user:

$ mkdir /var/db/aide/databases/archive
$ chmod 700 /scripts/aide/chkaide.sh
$ chown root:wheel /scripts/aide/chkaide.sh

This script essentially creates a text file containing the output of the aide --check command, and emails the contents to you. It then updates the database so that each email will only contain the changes since the last time you received an email. Now lets create a cronjob so that this can be run

$ crontab -e

Add the following entry:

06 01 * * * /scripts/aide/chkaide.sh

This will set the chkaide script to run at 1:06 AM every day. Now, this won’t work just yet. First we need to ensure a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) is installed. If you already have one installed, you can skip this step.

Installing a Mail Transfer Agent

One option for an MTA would be to use FreeBSD’s default, SendMail. However, due to security concerns associated with SendMail, we will be using Postfix instead. You’re welcome to use another MTA such as Exim if you would prefer, however Postfix is what this guide will cover.

First, install postfix

$ pkg install postfix-sasl

During the installation, you’ll be prompted with the following:

Would you like to activate Postfix in /usr/local/etc/mail/mailer.conf [n]? y

Make sure you provide ‘y’ as the answer. Now, to make postfix the default mail client, make sure that sendmail has been disabled:

$ sysrc sendmail_enable="NONE"
$ sysrc sendmail_submit_enable="NO"
$ sysrc sendmail_outbound_enable="NO"
$ sysrc sendmail_msp_queue_enable="NO"

This should be the case from an earlier step, but confirm that these are the values. Add postfix to the startup sequence:

$ sysrc postfix_enable="YES"

Stop the sendmail service:

$ service sendmail stop

If it isn’t started, you may get a response similar to the following:

Cannot 'stop' sendmail. Set sendmail_enable to YES in /etc/rc.conf or use 'onestop' instead of 'stop'.
Cannot 'stop' sendmail_msp_queue. Set sendmail_msp_queue_enable to YES in /etc/rc.conf or use 'onestop' instead of 'stop'.

If you do, this means it’s already stopped, and you can move on. Start the postfix service:

$ service postfix start

Some extra configuration is needed as Sendmail is so ubiquitous that some software assumes it is already installed and configured. Check /etc/periodic.conf and make sure that these values are set to NO. If this file does not exist, create it with these entries:

$ nano /etc/periodic.conf
daily_clean_hoststat_enable="NO"
daily_status_mail_rejects_enable="NO"
daily_status_include_submit_mailq="NO"
daily_submit_queuerun="NO"

Save and Exit (Ctrl + X). FreeBSD uses /etc/mail/mailer.conf to map the expected Sendmail binaries to the location of the new binaries, and so we need to update this file to point to the right location. Note that this likely isn’t a necessary step if you deviated from the guide and installed postfix using ports, as this file is updated during the installation process. If you installed using pkg however (as this guide suggested), open the mailer configuration file:

$ nano /etc/mail/mailer.conf

Comment out the current entries, and paste the new binary locations below it. The file should end up looking like this:

# $FreeBSD: releng/11.2/etc/mail/mailer.conf 327765 2018-01-10 09:06:07Z delphij $
#
# Execute the "real" sendmail program, named /usr/libexec/sendmail/sendmail
#
#sendmail       /usr/libexec/sendmail/sendmail
#mailq          /usr/libexec/sendmail/sendmail
#newaliases     /usr/libexec/sendmail/sendmail
#hoststat       /usr/libexec/sendmail/sendmail
#purgestat      /usr/libexec/sendmail/sendmail

#
# Execute the Postfix sendmail program, named /usr/local/sbin/sendmail
#
sendmail        /usr/local/sbin/sendmail
send-mail       /usr/local/sbin/sendmail
mailq           /usr/local/sbin/sendmail
newaliases      /usr/local/sbin/sendmail

Save and exit (Ctrl + X). Navigate the postfix directory /usr/local/etc/postfix:

$ cd /usr/local/etc/postfix

Open the configuration file for editing:

$ nano main.cf

Search for the following phrase:

#alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases

Uncomment this line by removing the ‘#’ at the beginning. Now scroll to the end of the file (shortcut: Ctrl+_ , then Ctrl + V), and paste the following configuration parameters as suggested by Marin Nikolov:

# Manual configuration for Gmail

## SASL Options
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/usr/local/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd

## TLS Options
smtp_use_tls = yes
smtp_tls_security_level = encrypt
tls_random_source = dev:/dev/urandom
 
## Relay host
relayhost = [smtp.gmail.com]:587

Save and Exit (Ctrl + X). Note that the email address I’m configuring this email to be sent from will be gmail. If you prefer a different provider, your relayhost and port will change (587 is for TLS, 465 is for SSL), and you’ll have to use values appropriate for you. Now, set the appropriate permissions for the postfix directory:

$ postfix -c /usr/local/etc/postfix set-permissions

Create the alias maps:

$ newaliases
$ postalias /etc/aliases

Now we need to configure the gmail authentication settings. Create a new file for these settings:

$ nano /usr/local/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd

Add the following line:

smtp.gmail.com    <username>:<password>

Replace with your gmail email, i.e. user@gmail.com, and with the password for the account. Save and Exit (Ctrl + X). Now hash the file so postfix can use it:

$ postmap /usr/local/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd

Secure the file so that only the root user can read or edit it:

$ chmod 0600 /usr/local/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
$ chown root:wheel /usr/local/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd

And finally, you’ll need to enable “Less Secure Apps” in the Gmail application. Refer to the google documentation on allowing less secure apps to achieve this. Now all that’s left to do is confirm that everything works. Send a test email:

$ echo "Test Email Contents" | mail -s "Postfix Test Email" recipient_user@domain.com

Replace recipient_user@domain.com with the email address to receive the test email, and confirm that the email was received. It may also be worth inspecting the logs to ensure that no errors are present:

$ nano /var/log/maillog

Scroll to the end (Ctrl+_ , Ctrl + V) to view the most recent logs. If the test email doesn’t work, this is your first stop to debugging any errors you may have. Unfortunately due to the large variety of error messages, I can’t address them all and you’ll have to debug this yourself. For more information on mail functions, see the mail(1) man page.

Now, confirm that the aide script works by running it:

$ /bin/sh /scripts/aide/chkaide.sh

If you receive an email with the output, you know it’s working!

Postfix hardening

To further improve the security of your postfix configuration, Linux Audit suggests the following changes:

$ postconf -e disable_vrfy_command=yes
$ postconf -e inet_interfaces=loopback-only
$ postconf -e mynetworks="127.0.0.0/8 [::ffff:127.0.0.0]/104 [::1]/128"
$ postconf -e smtpd_helo_required=yes

disable_vrfy_command prevents others from being able to verify whether an email is a valid email on the system. Setting inet_interfaces to loopback-only means that postfix will only listen on the local interface, which is what we want because we are only interested in sending outgoing emails. Changing the mynetworks value to the network address of the local network prevents spammers from leveraging an open relay system in your client. The last configuration setting configures the smtpd daemon to require a “HELO” command, which will prevent communication with other mail servers that have either been improperly configured, or are spammers.

Place data directory outside of the web root

In our case, the web root is:

/usr/local/www/nextcloud

Our data directory is:

/mnt/data

Since data is not within the webroot hierarchy, this requirement is already satisfied.

Disable preview image generation

For high security deployments, Nextcloud recommends the disabling of preview generation for common file types. You’ll need to determine your own security requirements to determine whether this is worth enabling for you. Essentially, the risk is that in order to display thumbnails, a directory of these thumbnails needs to be maintained. Typically, these thumbnails don’t have the same permission settings as the files themselves, so it may be possible for a user to determine the contents of a file without having permission to access the file itself.

If this is something that you think might provide benefit to you, you can disable preview image generation as follows. First, open the Nextcloud config file:

$ nano /usr/local/www/nextcloud/config/config.php

Navigate to the end of the file, and right before the

);

statement, add the following:

'enable_previews' => false,

so the end of the config file should be similar to the following:

    ...
    'theme' => '',
    'loglevel' => 2,
    'enable_previews' => false,
);

Preview image generation can be re-enabled by changing the value of ‘enable_previews’ to ‘true’.

SSL/TLS

Due tot he interralated nature of items 5-8, they will all be dealt with in this section, where we will discuss the configuration of HTTPS/SSL/TLS for your domain. Note that if you only plan on using this locally (not remotely, over the internet), it is still good practice to use SSL, however it is less necessary as your threat profile is diminished. Configuring TLS for local use if you don’t have a domain name is a different process, where you will have to self sign a certificate, and so it won’t be addressed here. This part assumes that you have a public domain pointing at your web server (i.e. you can access cloud.example.com from the internet). This is critical, as certbot will not be able to issue a certificate if your domain is only available on your LAN. Some Dynamic DNS providers will give you a free subdomain; scroll down to the section dealing with DDNS for more information before undertaking this step, if that’s something you’re interested in.

The first step in configuring HTTPS is to set up a jail to run a reverse proxy. Follow the guide that I wrote on the subject, and when you get to the necessary step, populate /usr/local/etc/nginx/vdomains/cloud.example.com.conf in the reverse proxy jail with the following server block:

server {
        listen 443 ssl http2;

        server_name cloud.example.com;
        access_log /var/log/nginx/cloud.access.log;
        error_log /var/log/nginx/cloud.error.log;

        include snippets/example.com.cert.conf;
        include snippets/ssl-params-intermediate.conf;

        location / {
                include snippets/proxy-params.conf;
                proxy_pass http://192.168.0.10;
        }
        location /.well-known/carddav {
                return 301 $scheme://$host/remote.php/dav;
        }
        location /.well-known/caldav {
                return 301 $scheme://$host/remote.php/dav;
        }
}

Replace the server_name directive and proxy_pass address as appropriate for your Nextcloud server. This will forward all requests to your Nextcloud server. Importantly, this configuration also includes overrides for service discovery of the CalDAV and CardDAV services as suggested by the Nextcloud documentation.

When you’ve completed this, you’ll need to set the reverse proxy as a trusted proxy so that your Nextcloud instance can be accessed by it. Execute the following command, replacing the IP value with the IP of your reverse proxy jail:

root@nextcloud:~ $ su -m www -c 'php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ config:system:set trusted_proxies 0 --value="192.168.0.11"'

Now, if you want to force the server to only use HTTPS (and I recommend that you do), run the following command:

root@nextcloud:~ $ su -m www -c 'php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ config:system:set overwriteprotocol --value="https"'

Note that this means that your Nextcloud instance won’t be available at the jails IP anymore, so if you need that feature, don’t set the overwriteprotocol field.

If you don’t want to configure a reverse proxy to enable HTTPS, a previous version of this guide addresses how to do that. Note however, that this is no longer maintained as it is no longer the recommended process.

Use a dedicated domain for Nextcloud

Using a dedicated domain, such as cloud.domain.com instead of domain.com/nextcloud, offers a number of benefits associated with the Same-Origin-Policy. This is primarily that it preventing clients from reading responses from different domains, which is important in preventing malicious code in other tabs you may have executing on your Nextcloud instance. Hendrik Brummermann illustrated this with a good example in his Stack Overflow answer:

Assume you are logged into Facebook and visit a malicious website in another browser tab. Without the same origin policy JavaScript on that website could do anything to your Facebook account that you are allowed to do. For example read private messages, post status updates, analyse the HTML DOM-tree after you entered your password before submitting the form.

It’s obvious that giving any other tab you have open permission to act as your user is undesirable.

Ensure that your Nextcloud instance is installed in a DMZ

A DMZ, or demilitarized zone, is a physical or logical subnetwork that contains and exposes external facing services to an untrusted network such as the internet. The purpose of this is to add an additional layer of security to a LAN. This is achieved by placing a firewall between the LAN and the DMZ, limiting the exposure to the LAN if the DMZ is compromised. See here for more detail. One possible configuration for this is depicted below:

In essence, this is a process that doesn’t provide any additional security to your Nextcloud instance directly. In general, it would, however, provide a second line of defence to prevent access to the rest of your LAN if the Nextcloud instance is compromised. In the case of running Nextcloud in a FreeNAS jail, the efficacy of this is in question. According to iXsystems, the entire LAN accessible to the FreeNAS host would be routable by a compromised jail, making this segregation of jail from host an exercise in futility.

For these reasons, and due to the uncertainty around the benefit this would actually have to our configuration, we will skip the implementation of a DMZ.

Nextcloud has been kind enough to ensure a range of basic security headers as part of the default environment, including: – X-Content-Type-Options: no sniff – Prevents browsers from interpreting text files as JavaScript – X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block – Instructs browsers to enable their browser side Cross-Site-Scripting filter – X-Robots-Tag: none – Instructs search machines not to index these pages – X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN – Prevents Nextcloud from being embedded within an iframe from a different domain – Referrer-Policy: no-referrer – Instructs browser not to send referrer information along with requests to any origin

For optimal security, these can be served by the web server to enforce them on response. To do this, open the apache configuration file:

$ nano /usr/local/etc/apache24/httpd.conf

Now, ensure that the following two lines are uncommented (remove the ‘#’ from the beginning of the line as necessary):

LoadModule env_module libexec/apache24/mod_env.so
LoadModule headers_module libexec/apache24/mod_headers.so

Save and Exit (Ctrl + W). Restart the web server to implement these changes:

$ service apache24 restart

It is important to note that at the time of writing and in the current configuration, Nextcloud will fail the Content Security Policy tests on the security testing websites listed earlier. This is due to the fact that it allows ‘unsafe-eval’. Currently, there is not a fix to this that won’t break your Nextcloud server. However, a fix to this has been implemented in Nextcloud 15, so there’s nothing that needs to be done here.

Configure DDNS updates:

Now, if you’re self hosting, and you have a residential internet plan with your ISP, your IP address is likely not static. If it is static, you can disregard this. What this means is that your ISP may periodically change your public IP. This can be problematic if you’re hosting a web server, as the DNS Servers will not update as your IP changes, breaking the link to your web server. To address this, there are two alternatives. The first is to use a Dynamic DNS (DDNS) service and use either the FreeNAS DDNS service or your router to keep it updated, or update the DNS servers directly. Free examples of DDNS providers include No-IP, Free DNS and Easy DNS, which may also provide you with a domain – I know that No-IP does. In lieu of buying domain name, the domain provided by the DDNS provider will be sufficient, and this applies to the entirety of the previous instructions that have dealt with domain names. If you already own a domain name that you want to use, you just need to add a CNAME record for the DDNS domain to the DNS record for your domain. As an example, if your DDNS domain is cloud.no-IP.org, you would add a record pointing from cloud.mydomain.com to cloud.no-IP.org. Since this is very specific to each users configuration and registrar etc., I won’t address any more here.

However, I use Route 53, so I’ll discuss how to manually update the IP in your A record for your cloud domain using Route 53 and the AWS command line interface (CLI) tools. For this, you will need your Hosted Zone ID and the Record Set name. Will Warren provides a great guide and bash script that you can use to achieve this.

First, create a new directory called scripts, and a subdirectory for update-route53 in your root directory, i.e:

$ mkdir -p /scripts/update-route53

The -p flag allows you to create both of these directories at once. Now, create the script:

$ nano /scripts/update-route53/update-route53.sh

Copy the following shell script, courtesy of Will Warren, into the file:

#!/usr/local/bin/bash

# (optional) You might need to set your PATH variable at the top here
# depending on how you run this script
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin

# Hosted Zone ID e.g. BJBK35SKMM9OE
ZONEID="enter zone id here"

# The CNAME you want to update e.g. hello.example.com
RECORDSET="enter cname here"

# More advanced options below
# The Time-To-Live of this recordset
TTL=300
# Change this if you want
COMMENT="Auto updating @ `date`"
# Change to AAAA if using an IPv6 address
TYPE="A"

# Get the external IP address from OpenDNS (more reliable than other providers)
IP=`dig +short myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com`

# Handle for current date
DATE=`date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'`

function valid_ip()
{
    local  ip=$1
    local  stat=1

    if [[ $ip =~ ^[0-9]{1,3}.[0-9]{1,3}.[0-9]{1,3}.[0-9]{1,3}$ ]]; then
        OIFS=$IFS
        IFS='.'
        ip=($ip)
        IFS=$OIFS
        [[ ${ip[0]} -le 255 && ${ip[1]} -le 255
            && ${ip[2]} -le 255 && ${ip[3]} -le 255 ]]
        stat=$?
    fi
    return $stat
}

# Get current dir
# (from http://stackoverflow.com/a/246128/920350)
DIR="$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" && pwd )"
LOGFILE="/var/log/update-route53.log"
IPFILE="$DIR/update-route53.ip"

if ! valid_ip $IP; then
    echo "$DATE     Invalid IP address: $IP" >> "$LOGFILE"
    exit 1
fi

# Check if the IP has changed
if [ ! -f "$IPFILE" ]
    then
    touch "$IPFILE"
fi

if grep -Fxq "$IP" "$IPFILE"; then
    # code if found
    echo "$DATE     IP is still $IP. Exiting" >> "$LOGFILE"
    exit 0
else
    echo "$DATE     IP has changed to $IP" >> "$LOGFILE"
    # Fill a temp file with valid JSON
    TMPFILE=$(mktemp /tmp/temporary-file.XXXXXXXX)
    cat > ${TMPFILE} << EOF
    {
      "Comment":"$COMMENT",
      "Changes":[
        {
          "Action":"UPSERT",
          "ResourceRecordSet":{
            "ResourceRecords":[
              {
                "Value":"$IP"
              }
            ],
            "Name":"$RECORDSET",
            "Type":"$TYPE",
            "TTL":$TTL
          }
        }
      ]
    }
EOF

    # Update the Hosted Zone record
    aws route53 change-resource-record-sets
        --hosted-zone-id $ZONEID
        --change-batch file://"$TMPFILE" >> "$LOGFILE"
    echo "" >> "$LOGFILE"

    # Clean up
    rm $TMPFILE
fi

# All Done - cache the IP address for next time
echo "$IP" > "$IPFILE"

Replace the ZONEID and RECORDSET values with values relevant to your AWS Hosted Zone. This script essentially uses the “dig” command to identify your current IP address, and update the record set for your domain with the return value of this IP address. For this to work, there are a few requirements. First, you need dig installed. FreeBSD does not ship with dig, so you’ll need to install it using the following command:

$ pkg install bind-tools

Secondly, if, like me you route all of your WAN traffic over a VPN, you’ll need to make sure this jail does not route over the VPN. If you don’t, the script will pull the VPN IP and not your WAN IP, which will not direct to your server (unless your VPN provider supports port forwarding; mine doesn’t). Now, you need to add this script as a cron job so it runs every 30 minutes.

$ crontab -e

Add the following line:

*/30 * * * * /scripts/update-route53/update-route53.sh

You will be able to view all of the changes to your ip in the log file that is created by this script at /var/log/update-route53.log.

How much does it cost?

There are a range of free DDNS providers, and so this may be the cheapest option for you if you don’t already have a Route53 Hosted Zone. The Amazon Route 53 Pricing Page indicates that a new hosted zone will cost you $0.50/month. I already have a Route53 hosted zone associated with my domain, so this was no additional cost to me and makes things simpler by not introducing additional services.

AND THAT’S IT! YOU’RE DONE! If everything works correctly, give yourself a pat on the back because this was a pretty involved process. If you’ve noticed any errors with this guide, or if you think certain steps could be improved with more clarity, or you just have some feedback, please leave a comment to let me know.

Upgrading

Nextcloud recommends that you update your server regularly, for all minor and major releases. This will reduce the pain of upgrading later, as major releases cannot be skipped. There are two ways to upgrade based on the installation procedure we’ve followed:

Please refer to these links for up-to-date information on how to go through the process. Bear in mind that the majority of the commands listed in these guides are for Linux, and so will vary somewhat from what’s required in FreeBSD. If you go back through this guide, you should find exemplars of how these commands should be used to adapt them appropriately. One example of a difference is their usage of the www-data user; in FreeBSD this is the www user.

Using the web updater is a trivial process and so it is left as an exercise for the user. I will however, demonstrate an example of upgrading manually from 18.0.6 to 19.0.0. This is a major version upgrade, at the most recent minor version for version 18. This is the only condition from which you should attempt a major version upgrade. Additionally, it’s very important to make sure all of the apps you have installed are compatible with the version you’re aiming to upgrade to. This has been a cause of many failed upgrades for me in the past.

First, enter maintenance mode

root@nextcloud:~ $ su -m www -c 'php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode --on'

Back up your existing Nextcloud Server database, data directory and config.php file.

cd /tmp
root@nextcloud:/tmp $ rsync -Aahx --info=progress2 /mnt/data/ nextcloud-databkp_`date +"%Y%m%d"`/
root@nextcloud:/tmp $ rsync -Aahx --info=progress2 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/ nextcloud-dirbkp_`date +"%Y%m%d"`/
root@nextcloud:/tmp $ mysqldump --single-transaction -u root -p nextcloud > nextcloud-sqlbkp_`date +"%Y%m%d"`.bak

This will make copies of /mnt/data, /usr/local/www/nextcloud, and the MySQL database.

Download and unpack the desired Nextcloud Server release from https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/ into /tmp

root@nextcloud:/tmp $ wget https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/nextcloud-19.0.0.tar.bz2
root@nextcloud:/tmp $ wget https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/nextcloud-19.0.0.tar.bz2.sha512
root@nextcloud:/tmp $ shasum -a 512 -c nextcloud-19.0.0.tar.bz2.sha512
nextcloud-19.0.0.tar.bz2: OK

Stop your web server

root@nextcloud:/tmp $ service apache24 stop

In case you are running a cron-job for nextcloud’s house-keeping disable it by commenting the entry in the crontab file

root@nextcloud:/tmp $ crontab -u www -e

Modify the following entry by appending a #:

#  */15          *               *               *               *               /usr/local/bin/php -f /usr/local/www/nextcloud/cron.php

Rename your current Nextcloud directory:

root@nextcloud:/tmp $ mv /usr/local/www/nextcloud /usr/local/www/nextcloud-old

Unpack the new archive to the original location of the old server so that there once again exists /usr/local/www/nextcloud:

root@nextcloud:/tmp $ tar -xf nextcloud-19.0.0.tar.bz2 -C /usr/local/www

Copy your config.php file in to the new Nextcloud installation

root@nextcloud:/usr/local/www/nextcloud $ cp /usr/local/www/nextcloud-old/config/config.php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/config/config.php

If you are using 3rd party applications, it may not always be available in the upgraded Nextcloud instance. To check this, compare the list of apps in /usr/local/www/nextcloud with those in /usr/local/www/nextcloud-old, and copy any not present in /usr/local/www/nextcloud/apps from /usr/local/www/nextcloud-old/apps to /usr/local/www/nextcloud/apps.
If you’re using any 3rd party themes, make sure to copy them from /usr/local/www/nextcloud-old/themes to /usr/local/www/nextcloud/themes.
Update the file ownership and file permissions of your /usr/local/www/nextcloud directory:

root@nextcloud:/tmp $ chown -R www:www /usr/local/www/nextcloud
root@nextcloud:/tmp $ find /usr/local/www/nextcloud -type d -exec chmod 750 {} \;
root@nextcloud:/tmp $ find /usr/local/www/nextcloud -type f -exec chmod 640 {} \;

Restart the web server

root@nextcloud:/tmp $ service apache24 start

Launch the upgrade from the command line using the occ tool. Note that this must be executed from within the Nextcloud installation directory:

root@nextcloud:/tmp $ cd /usr/local/www/nextcloud
root@nextcloud:/usr/local/www/nextcloud $ su -m www -c 'php occ upgrade'

Re-enable the cron job that was previously disabled

root@nextcloud:/usr/local/www/nextcloud $ crontab -u www -e

Modify the entry by removing the # so that it looks as follows:

  */15          *               *               *               *               /usr/local/bin/php -f /usr/local/www/nextcloud/cron.php

Finally, turn maintenance mode off

root@nextcloud:/usr/local/www/nextcloud $ su -m www -c 'php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode --off'

Now, log in to the Administration dashboard and verify the new version number. At this point, you may have additional warnings such as:

Last background job execution ran 1 hour ago. Something seems wrong.

This can be ignored. This will be rectified within 15 minutes when the next cron job is executed.

The database is missing some indexes. Due to the fact that adding indexes on big tables could take some time they were not added automatically. By running “occ db:add-missing-indices” those missing indexes could be added manually while the instance keeps running. Once the indexes are added queries to those tables are usually much faster.

As before, execute:

root@nextcloud:/usr/local/www/nextcloud $ su -m www -c 'php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ db:add-missing-indices'

The database is missing some optional columns. Due to the fact that adding columns on big tables could take some time they were not added automatically when they can be optional. By running “occ db:add-missing-columns” those missing columns could be added manually while the instance keeps running. Once the columns are added some features might improve responsiveness or usability.

As discussed previously, execute:

root@nextcloud:/usr/local/www/nextcloud $ su -m www -c 'php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ db:add-missing-columns'

It’s possible that other warnings will appear. Follow the instructions provided in the warning using the syntax we have used for the occ command previously to rectify them. Additionally, if things go wrong, refer to the Nextcloud documentation on restoring from backup to restore the files we backed up earlier. Otherwise, refer to the Nextcloud documentation describing the manual upgrade process for additional information.

Debugging

During this process, you may run into errors that I have not addressed. My suggestion is that for your first port of call, check the logs. Here are the locations of some log files.

Nextcloud logs

/var/log/nextcloud/nextcloud.log

Apache logs

/var/log/httpd-error.log

These are the two most likely places an error will be logged. PHP errors will be logged in the Apache error log by default. The level of log detail for PHP can be configured in /usr/local/etc/php.ini. The level of log detail for Apache can be configured in /usr/local/etc/apache24/httpd.conf.

Use these logs to identify what the problem with your configuration is. Then, use some keywords from the error to search google and see if anybody else has found a solution to the problem. If you can’t find a solution, or you’re having trouble interpreting the solutions provided, make reference to the “Support” section at the end of this article and ask for help in one of the suggested locations.

From my experience, most of the errors I ran into were with configuring Redis. This manifested as an “Internal Server Error 500” in both instances. In the first instance, Redis was not running and I had not realised. You can check the status of a service using the following command:

$ service <service> status

This will tell you if it is running or not.

Support

There are a number of places you can seek help regarding any issues you might be having with Nextcloud on FreeNAS:

Nextcloud Forums
FreeNAS Forums
Reddit
1. r/nextcloud
2. r/freenas
Freenode IRC – server: irc.freenode.net, and the following channels
- #nextcloud
- #freenas
- #freebsd
- ##letsencrypt

I’ve found IRC to be a better platform for issues that need to be discussed in some detail, however the communities on the forums and also reddit are typically larger.

This guide is also hosted on GitHub. If you find any bugs or have any suggestions, please feel free to raise an issue, or submit your own pull request!

740 thoughts on “How to install Nextcloud on FreeNAS in an iocage jail with hardened security”

Kevin says:

December 12, 2018 at 12:47 pm

Wow very detailed. My only wish would be to use ngnix rather than apache for this if possible.

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  December 13, 2018 at 7:57 pm
  Unfortunately the overwhelming amount documentation for Nextcloud is for Apache. I’ll consider this as the topic of a future blog post, however these are the broad strokes of what you’ll need to look for in the mean time:
  - Configure php-fpm for nginx
  - Configure nginx to forward port 80 traffic to port 443 for SSL
  - Configure nginx SSL:
    ** Use a modern SSL Protocol, i.e. TLS v1.2
    ** Use a modern SSL CipherSuite
    ** Configure stock .htaccess options in nginx, such as headers to be passed.
  The last part of this is the most verbose, but Nextcloud do provide some documentation to help configure the configuration files
  
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2. Alek Lucky says:
  
  June 10, 2021 at 10:28 am
  
  Thanks for the very detailed guide Samuel! I probably spent a good week reading through it again and again before embarking on setting up Nextcloud 21.
  
  One question I have is that although I followed your steps to set up a ‘jailhouse’ dataset and the sub-directories, it appears that nextcloud jail was installed in the existing iocage that houses my UniFi and Plex jails. I really like your strategy for separating the stored data (nextcloud files, plex media, etc.) and the databases separately. Is there a way to migrate iocage and all of the jails to the SSD?
  
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G. Astmohn says:

December 17, 2018 at 1:58 am

Many thanks for the tutorial. I managed it until the security section where it reads:
“At this stage, your nextcloud server should be ready to go for local network use. There are, however, a range of security considerations that will be dealt with in the remainder of the guide. These are very important, especially if you intend to open the server to the web.”

However by trying to access my local nextcloud-ip I constantly get following error message in firefox (chrome dito):
“The page isn’t redirecting properly
Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.”

Where could I look for help, a internet search was not successful?

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  December 17, 2018 at 8:57 pm
  
  Hi there! At the bottom of the article I list a number of places for support. This isn’t an error I’ve come across, and without more information it will be difficult to help you debug. As a first step, my suggestion would be to go back through the previous steps to make sure everything is configured as it should be. You mention you run into issues at the “Security” section – did you have any issues configuring NC through the web ui? Or have you not been able to navigate to the nextcloud web ui at all? If not, were you able to see the php test page earlier in the steps? How have you configured the ServerName? Are the php-fpm and apache services running? (service apache24 status, service php-fpm status). Try to locate the specific location in the guide where things stop working. As a second step, if double checking your configuration doesn’t yield a solution, I’d suggest asking in the #nextcloud or #freenas IRC channels; you’ll be able to engage in a dialog with someone to help work through your specific problem. This is where I’ve found the most helpful support in solving problems 🙂
  
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Belakor says:

December 18, 2018 at 12:02 pm

I had the same issue as Astmohn. At the “Web Configuration” section I’m able to get to the NextCloud admin page for the initial setup, put in the correct data and click Finish Setup. However this eventually results in the redirection error Astmohn mentions and any further access to the NextCloud URL gets the same.

My searches turned up configuration issues that were not present in my http.conf (i.e. your instructions properly sets the values that all my research states are the source of this problem). Eventually I grew tired of trying to fix it and destroyed the jail to some day try again from a fresh start.

I have no doubt that the problem is related to some small issue with the apache configuration but I don’t have much experience with apache or web apps in general. The things that stuck out in my mind:

You mention you changed the pkg repo to latest branch (though you state it’s optional) and say that you did so to fix a bug. However you never elaborate on what bug you were resolving in this fashion. I suspect this may be part of the problem and intend to change to the latest branch with my next test to see if that’s the case. Would have been nice for at least some elaboration on the bug you are referring to so your readers could make a more informed decision on this step.
Domain name vs. IP. This one annoys me greatly with NextCloud because they seem to assume you are going to have a legitimate domain name and access your NC server from outside your network. I use a non-real domain name for my home network (lastname.home) to prevent any possible domain collisions and honestly as long as it resolves internally (which it does) then it shouldn’t matter. However NC config seems to dislike the use of a raw IP (I use a fixed IP for all my always-on services) and I wonder if it’s getting hung up on my non-standard domain name.

Interestingly when I access the NC web interface using the IP it displayed an initial page but then redirects and immediately dies with the redirect error again.

I’ll be giving your instructions another go here in the future with the latest pkg repo and see if that makes a difference.

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  December 18, 2018 at 5:39 pm
  
  Hmm, interesting! Given two of you have had the same issue, I’m going to give the installation another go myself to make sure the instructions are correct. It’s unlikely to be the issue I referenced; that was related to fresh installations of Nextcloud 14.0.1 not including the appropriate configuration for the ‘apps’ field in the config.php file, which was rectified in 14.0.1_1 iirc. Switching to the “latest” branch allowed me to pull 14.0.1_1 instead of 14.0.1. Since we’re on 14.0.4 now, this shouldn’t be a consideration. However, you make a good point so I’ll revise the post to include some discussion of this for troubleshooting purposes.
  
  With regards to the domain name and IP, you’re exactly right and I do provide this clarification in the article. You can enter any domain for these settings, including the local IP of the jail, provided that your DNS Server can resolve the jail IP. To use your example, lastname.home should work perfectly well if you have a DNS Resolver entry redirecting lastname.home to your jail IP, i.e. 192.168.0.10. In pfSense this can be configured in Services > DNS Resolver > Host Overrides > Add. If you do intend to access it this way, you would need to add lastname.home to your trusted domains as discussed in the article.
  
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  1. Garrett says:
    
    March 21, 2019 at 3:58 pm
    
    Just got bit with the redirect bug too. Chrome, Firefox, Safari
    
    Did the the step WEB CONFIGURATION then clicked finished setup and boom. Redirect hell
    
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    1. Garrett says:
      
      March 21, 2019 at 4:22 pm
      
      When I nano /usr/local/www/nextcloud/config/config.php
      It is way different than yours
      
      <?php
      $CONFIG = array (
      ‘instanceid’ => ‘redacted’,
      ‘passwordsalt’ => ‘redacted’,
      ‘secret’ => ‘redacted/’,
      ‘trusted_domains’ =>
      array (
      0 => ‘redacted’,
      ),
      ‘datadirectory’ => ‘/mnt/data’,
      ‘dbtype’ => ‘mysql’,
      ‘version’ => ‘15.0.0.10’,
      ‘overwrite.cli.url’ => ‘redacted,
      ‘dbname’ => ‘nextcloud’,
      ‘dbhost’ => ‘localhost:/tmp/mysql.sock’,
      ‘dbport’ => ”,
      ‘dbtableprefix’ => ‘oc_’,
      ‘mysql.utf8mb4’ => true,
      ‘dbuser’ => ‘nextcloud_admin’,
      ‘dbpassword’ => ‘redacted’,
      ‘installed’ => true,
      );
      
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      1. samuel.dowling says:
        
        March 21, 2019 at 4:57 pm
        
        Huh. That’s interesting. I’m guessing since you’re using Nextcloud 15.0.0, you’re on the quarterly branch (latest is at 15.0.5), which means that the issues I discuss above with respect to 14.0.1 aren’t fixed by a version upgrade. This must mean that it’s more specific to brnrd’s release than Nextcloud. To fix it, you have two options.
        
        Start the installation again (nuke the jail and remake it), but this time switch to the latest branch (can confirm this has worked for me many times), OR
        
        You could try to repair this installation by adding the following to your config.php file:
        
        'apps_paths' => array ( 0 => array ( 'path' => '/usr/local/www/nextcloud/apps', 'url' => '/apps', 'writable' => true, ), 1 => array ( 'path' => '/usr/local/www/nextcloud/apps-pkg', 'url' => '/apps-pkg', 'writable' => false, ), ),
        
        This should go BELOW
        
        <?php $CONFIG = array (
        
        and ABOVE
        
        ‘instanceid’ => ‘redacted’,
        
        Once you’ve done this, restart Apache and see if this fixes it (service apache24 restart). If it doesn’t, I’m not sure what the fix is. You could try debugging this yourself (a good place to start would be looking at the revisions to 14.0.1) or asking in the #freebsd (for freebsd pkg’s) or #httpd (for apache server) IRC channels. I’d suggest it might just be simpler to install from the latest branch though, rather than quarterly.
        
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      2. samuel.dowling says:
        
        March 21, 2019 at 10:59 pm
        
        Scratch what I’ve said; It’s not caused by the quarterly branch package. I’ve just been through a fresh install and I haven’t been able to reproduce your issues. I tested with both nextcloud-php71 and nextcloud-php72, both of which worked fine using the steps I’ve provided. Which nextcloud distribution did you install? Did you skip any steps? Also, where are your redirects trying to redirect to? In Firefox right click > Inspect element > Network tab. With this new window open, navigate to your nextcloud jail ip, and observe the file path in the “File” column
        
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      3. Garrett says:
        
        March 22, 2019 at 4:41 am
        
        Which nextcloud distribution did you install?
        — nextcloud-php72
        
        Did you skip any steps?
        — No but did have to use mkdir to make the fstab section to work. On a fresh install mnt/data, …/mysql, config, themes, are not created.
        
        I am going to start over, take everything I learned and try again this afternoon.
        
        Freenas version FreeNAS-11.2-U2.1
        
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      4. Garrett says:
        
        March 22, 2019 at 6:47 am
        
        Fresh Start with php 71 same redirect issue after finish setup.
        
        Redirect file:
        /index.php/apps/files
        
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      5. Garrett says:
        
        March 22, 2019 at 7:20 am
        
        Yet again I was missing stuff in the config so I did the ” You could try to repair this installation by adding the following to your config.php file:”
        Which fixed the redirect but gave me this error
        Internal Server Error
        
        The server was unable to complete your request.
        
        If this happens again, please send the technical details below to the server administrator.
        
        More details can be found in the server log.Internal Server Error
        
        The server was unable to complete your request.
        
        If this happens again, please send the technical details below to the server administrator.
        
        More details can be found in the server log.
        
        httpd-error.log
        [Thu Mar 21 12:55:44.801257 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 73653] AH00163: Apache/2.4.38 (FreeBSD) configured — resuming normal operations
        [Thu Mar 21 12:55:44.802019 2019] [core:notice] [pid 73653] AH00094: Command line: ‘/usr/local/sbin/httpd -D NOHTTPACCEPT’
        [Thu Mar 21 13:15:56.199095 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 73653] AH00171: Graceful restart requested, doing restart
        AH00558: httpd: Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1. Set the ‘ServerName’ directive globally to suppress this message
        [Thu Mar 21 13:15:56.207272 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 73653] AH00163: Apache/2.4.38 (FreeBSD) configured — resuming normal operations
        [Thu Mar 21 13:15:56.207293 2019] [core:notice] [pid 73653] AH00094: Command line: ‘/usr/local/sbin/httpd -D NOHTTPACCEPT’
        [Thu Mar 21 13:27:24.130109 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 73653] AH00169: caught SIGTERM, shutting down
        [Thu Mar 21 13:27:24.254491 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 80260] AH00163: Apache/2.4.38 (FreeBSD) configured — resuming normal operations
        [Thu Mar 21 13:27:24.254944 2019] [core:notice] [pid 80260] AH00094: Command line: ‘/usr/local/sbin/httpd -D NOHTTPACCEPT’
        [Thu Mar 21 13:35:23.695450 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 80260] AH00169: caught SIGTERM, shutting down
        [Thu Mar 21 13:35:23.838368 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 82076] AH00163: Apache/2.4.38 (FreeBSD) configured — resuming normal operations
        [Thu Mar 21 13:35:23.838802 2019] [core:notice] [pid 82076] AH00094: Command line: ‘/usr/local/sbin/httpd -D NOHTTPACCEPT’
        
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      6. samuel.dowling says:
        
        March 22, 2019 at 8:28 am
        
        The apache log doesn’t show anything of much use. Can you look at the contents of the nextcloud log to see if there’s anything there? it’s at /var/log/nextcloud/nextcloud.log. Also, when posting code, it formats much more nicely if you begin and end it with a triple back tick; ```
        
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      7. Garrett says:
        
        March 22, 2019 at 8:50 am
        
        /var/log/nextcloud/nextcloud.log.
        
        No log found in that location
        
        Should service httpd be running?
        service httpd status
        —httpd does not exist in /etc/rc.d or the local startup
        directories (/usr/local/etc/rc.d), or is not executable
        
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      8. samuel.dowling says:
        
        March 23, 2019 at 1:06 pm
        
        the httpd service is apache24. Try locating the nextcloud log: locate nextcloud.log; this should return the path where this file exists. If it doesn’t exist it will return blank to a new line.
        
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2. samuel.dowling says:
  
  December 18, 2018 at 8:33 pm
  
  Okay, so I just went through the guide again and surprisingly, it looks like 14.0.1 is still the current version in the quarterly branch so you were right, this was the issue. Switching to the latest branch resolves what you were experiencing. Incidentally, the latest branch is 15.0.0, and so I have made a couple of minor adjustments to ensure compatibility. I’ve tested the guide for 15.0.0, and everything seems to be working as expected. Pay special attention when it comes to configuring the nextcloud config.php file for use with Redis/APCu; this has been the main cause of the issues I’ve run into so far.
  
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  1. Ben F says:
    
    December 13, 2020 at 1:24 am
    
    I also have the ‘Internal Server Error issue’ . Followed steps exactly as above (save I have found I need to ensure FreeBSD 12.2 is installed on the jail as 11.3 appears to not work. Everything works fine up until your instruction to install php74-pecl-redis and php74-pecl-APCu (response is latest package already installed) and then after following the su -m www steps, I get ‘Internal Server Error
    The server was unable to complete your request.”. Am now stuck… any help would be really appreciated.
    
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T Nguyen says:

December 30, 2018 at 4:04 pm

First of all I would like to say thank you for creating this details guide !
I’m very new to all this stuff especially with the all the command. So please help!!
My question is: in the add storage to iocage jail section. What should I be entering for this specific command line (assuming I adopted the structure you used when creating all the datasets
iocage fstab -a jailname source_location destination_location nullfs (rw/ro) 0 0
would it be something like this:
iocage fstab -a nextcloud mnt/vault/cloud mnt/jailhouse/apps/nextcloud nullfs (rw/ro) 0 0

Also, is there any way that you could contact you directly because I know for sure I will be needing a lot help in the future. Thank you so much !!!

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  December 30, 2018 at 5:09 pm
  
  Hi there! If you’ve adopted the directory structure I use, I provide the exact commands you need to use immediately before the command you’ve just provided me. The commands you need to use are:
  
  $ iocage fstab -a nextcloud /mnt/vault/cloud /mnt/data nullfs rw 0 0 $ iocage fstab -a nextcloud /mnt/jailhouse/apps/nextcloud/db /var/db/mysql nullfs rw 0 0 $ iocage fstab -a nextcloud /mnt/jailhouse/apps/nextcloud/config /usr/local/www/nextcloud/config nullfs rw 0 0 $ iocage fstab -a nextcloud /mnt/jailhouse/apps/nextcloud/themes /usr/local/www/nextcloud/themes nullfs rw 0 0
  
  With regards to what you’ve proposed: iocage fstab -a nextcloud mnt/vault/cloud mnt/jailhouse/apps/nextcloud nullfs (rw/ro) 0 0
  
  You’re almost there, but not quite. With this, you’ve specified:
  – source_location: mnt/vault/cloud
  – destination_location: mnt/jailhouse/apps/nextcloud
  
  The source location is good, that’s what you would want to specify, but the destination location is wrong. This is because inside the jail, there is no directory /mnt/jailhouse/apps/nextcloud (this is the path on your FreeNAS host! Outside the jail!)
  
  What we want to do is specify a location within the jail, to make the content inside /mnt/vault/cloud available. In the commands I’ve provided above, this location within the jail would be /mnt/data (this will automatically be created). Hope this helps!
  
  With regards to direct contact, either here or the corresponding FreeNAS forum post are the best places to contact me for support for this guide. The benefit of using the FreeNAS Forums is that other people also might be able to provide support where I’m slow to reply.
  
  Hope this helps!
  
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  1. Garrett says:
    
    March 21, 2019 at 9:56 am
    
    “I’ve provided above, this location within the jail would be /mnt/data (this will automatically be created”
    
    I have had mostly success starting this guide but I have noticed the /mnt/data on my system was not automatically created. I was wondering how do I create it?
    
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    1. samuel.dowling says:
      
      March 21, 2019 at 11:15 am
      
      It’s created within your jail environment if you’ve used the fstab entries that I’ve specified. If you’re not within the jail, you won’t see it at /mnt/data. From the host, it would be located at /mnt/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/mnt/data/
      
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      1. Garrett says:
        
        March 21, 2019 at 12:35 pm
        
        When I run the fstab I get this message “Destination: /mnt/jailhouse/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/mnt/data does not exist!”
        
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      2. samuel.dowling says:
        
        March 21, 2019 at 1:42 pm
        
        Okay, time to start troubleshooting then. This shouldn’t happen. I suppose an easy fix to that immediate problem would be to create the directory from your host by executing mkdir /mnt/jailhouse/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/mnt/data, or just mkdir /mnt/data from within the jail. This might fix the issue; if it doesn’t it indicates that something bigger is going on with your fstab entries. Run iocage list to make sure that nextcloud shows up, and that its status is online.
        
        Following this, it would be prudent to confirm that your fstab entry is actually correct. Run iocage fstab -l nextcloud from your freenas host, and paste the output here. It should look like the following:
        
        root@freenas:~ # iocage fstab -l nextcloud +-------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | INDEX | FSTAB ENTRY | +=======+====================================================================================================================+ | 0 | /mnt/vault/cloud /mnt/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/mnt/data nullfs rw 0 0 | +-------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | 1 | /mnt/jailhouse/apps/nextcloud/db /mnt/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/var/db/mysql nullfs rw 0 0 | +-------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | 2 | /mnt/jailhouse/apps/nextcloud/config /mnt/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/usr/local/www/nextcloud/config nullfs rw 0 0 | +-------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | 3 | /mnt/jailhouse/apps/nextcloud/themes /mnt/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/usr/local/www/nextcloud/themes nullfs rw 0 0 | +-------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
        
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      3. Garrett says:
        
        March 21, 2019 at 3:19 pm
        
        The mkdir worked allowed me to finish my fstab
        Thanks !
        
        +——-+——————————————————————————————————————————+
        | INDEX | FSTAB ENTRY |
        +=======+==============================================================================================================================+
        | 0 | /mnt/jailhouse/apps/nextcloud/db /mnt/jailhouse/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/var/db/mysql nullfs rw 0 0 |
        +——-+——————————————————————————————————————————+
        | 1 | /mnt/jailhouse/apps/nextcloud/config /mnt/jailhouse/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/usr/local/www/nextcloud/config nullfs rw 0 0 |
        +——-+——————————————————————————————————————————+
        | 2 | /mnt/jailhouse/apps/nextcloud/themes /mnt/jailhouse/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/usr/local/www/nextcloud/themes nullfs rw 0 0 |
        +——-+——————————————————————————————————————————+
        | 3 | /mnt/digital-documents/cloud /mnt/jailhouse/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/mnt/data nullfs rw 0 0 |
        +——-+——————————————————————————————————————————+
        
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Andreas Berglind says:

January 8, 2019 at 6:02 pm

Hi,
I recently upgraded my FreeNAS to 11.2, which broke my Nextcloud so that SMB external storages no longer seem to work. If I follow this guide, will that installation include SMB support?
If not, do you know of a way to get it working?

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  January 8, 2019 at 7:15 pm
  
  Hi Andreas, Unfortunately not. All of my storage is local to my FreeNAS host, so this wasn’t something I had to explore. Having said that, it appears that this is additional configuration after the setup process, not something that needs to be established during the traditional setup procedure. My advice would be to refer to the documentation regarding the configuration; after a brief look, it seems to be relatively descriptive. You can view the documentation here: SMB/CIFS, Configuring External Storage. Good luck!
  
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Andreas Berglind says:

January 11, 2019 at 4:34 pm

Thanks for your reply. I just installed NC 15 following your guide. That worked very well, thank you so very much for a well written guide. It´s now among my bookmarks 🙂
I am having one problem left to solve, and I thought I´d ask you if maybe you have seen it before or can understand what is happening.

It´s the configuration of postfix. I can´t get it to work. I´ve been over the steps a dozen times, and I can´t find anything wrong.

I´m trying to send an email from nc@domain.com to user@domain.com using tls and port 587. The only place I´ve entered the sender email address is as username in /usr/local/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd.

When sending the test email I get this error:
Username nc@domain.comand sender root@nextcloud.localdomain doesnt match (in reply to MAIL FROM command)).
Why is it using root@nexcloud.localdomain as sender? Am I supposed to change the sender address somewhere other than /usr/local/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd?

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Andreas Berglind says:

January 11, 2019 at 4:43 pm

Nevermind. it worked once i set everything up in Settings in the GUI. I was so focused on the terminal it didn´t appear to me until now.
Thanks again!

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Dominic Schaefer says:

January 13, 2019 at 6:01 am

THIS is brilliant!
This is the best guide I have seen on iocage/nextcloud.
Not only does it work flawlessly (I installed nextcloud 15 using PHP7.2) but the security bit is invaluable.

Thanks a lot for this!

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Andreas Berglind says:

January 14, 2019 at 5:49 am

Hi again.
I have a new question. Why is it necessary to do upgrades via console instead of the web based one? What will break if I use the web based one instead?
I never updated pkg to tha latest branch, if that matters…

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  January 14, 2019 at 8:26 am
  
  Hi Andreas,
  
  It’s more a semantic thing than anything else. If you install with the package manager, you should keep it maintained with the package manager. I have experimented with web updates, and the minor update I tested on appeared to work, but the package manager went out of sync and didn’t receive any new information about the update. You’re welcome to try, but be aware you may run into issues down the road. That’s not to say that upgrading via the console is a walk in the park either; I seem to run into issues every time I do that as well. It doesn’t seem to be a polished process in either case. An alternative to what I’ve presented in this guide is to not use FreeBSD ports, or the package manager pkg, and just download Nextcloud from their website directly. I would imagine that you would use the web updater to stay up to date this way, but it wasn’t the path I took so I can’t provide any specific advice.
  
  Not switching to the latest branch shouldn’t impact you at all (i.e. staying on quarterly, provided you’re not running 14.0.1 as discussed in the guide) except to say that obviously you’re not going to receive updates as quickly. Quarterly in fact. if you want to switch to the latest branch you can follow the instructions I provide at any stage and then run the upgrade commands. At the moment the pkg repo is at 15.0.0, and I’m expecting 15.0.1 or 15.0.2 in the next few days.
  
  Cheers.
  
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Neil Feltham says:

January 15, 2019 at 5:05 am

This has got to be one of the most comprehensive install guide that I have read. Will definitely be giving it a go over the weekend. Thank you for sharing….

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Kyle Silcox says:

January 17, 2019 at 5:07 am

I rarely comment on blogs but i wanted to say that i really appreciate the effort and detail you put into this guide! It fit my exact scenario and allowed me to quickly rebuild my Nextcloud instance better than it was before! i especially appreciate the explanations as to why the commands are being ran. A very helpful guide!!

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Michael says:

January 24, 2019 at 7:23 pm

This install guide is by far the best I was able to find to install Nextcloud on FreeNAS in a jail.
There are only two errors /informations I cannot fix.
Nextcloud complains that the webserver is not configured correctly to be able to resolve “/.well-known/caldav” and “/.well-known/carddav”.
I know the document root is not the apache default.
The documentation I followed is this https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/15/admin_manual/issues/general_troubleshooting.html#service-discovery
I tried to patch the .htaccess in the nextcloud directory as described but this did not work.

It would be great if you could help me and maybe you it is woth to extend the guide in this point.

Many thanks especially for this very helpful guide

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  January 24, 2019 at 7:53 pm
  
  Hi Michael, from memory the CalDAV and CardDAV settings to suppress the warnings you’re getting are indeed contained within the .htaccess file that ships with Nextcloud by default. If my recollection is correct, then this means that something you’ve done is interfering with this. In my guide, I specify setting the AllowOverride directive to ‘all’, i.e. “AllowOverride all”, which should allow apache to use the .htaccess file – did you do this? If not, do this and see if that resolves your issue. If it doesn’t, then, did you use a virtual host entry from another site? Some of the examples I’ve seen have “AllowOverride None” in them, which will override the change in httpd.conf. Also, have you made sure that all of the paths are correct and pointing to the Nextcloud webroot (/usr/local/www/nextcloud)? As far as the guide goes, I’ve confirmed that the steps work to enable the .htaccess file a number of times, so I’d suggest you go back through the steps to make sure you haven’t missed anything.
  
  Cheers
  
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  1. Enioh says:
    
    June 8, 2019 at 12:09 am
    
    Hi, I’ve been following this manual and issues:
    
    Your web server is not properly set up to resolve “/.well-known/caldav”.
    Your web server is not properly set up to resolve “/.well-known/carddav”.
    
    were solved by uncommenting:
    
    LoadModule rewrite_module libexec/apache24/mod_rewrite.so
    
    from:
    
    /usr/local/etc/apache24/httpd.conf
    
    This item is explained in section “SSL” from this manual.
    
    Because, without this, the rewrites that .htaccess nextcloud provides, won’t work – at least, in my case.
    
    P.s: Samuel.Downling, to gain a better understanding of this, is it possible for you to test it with ” LoadModule rewrite_module libexec/apache24/mod_rewrite.so” commented to confirm this error? And, if it’s confirmed, I suggest that you update the section “Configure Apache for Nextcloud” with a remark to uncomment this rewrite_module. Thanks.
    
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    1. samuel.dowling says:
      
      June 8, 2019 at 12:31 am
      
      Hi Enioh,
      
      Everything in the guide worked as written for me with no errors as of Nextcloud 15.0.1. I haven’t updated to the latest version yet, so it’s possible that there are differences between my guide and what’s required by the newer versions. I’m hoping to get a chance to sit down and upgrade in the next few weeks, so if I run into the same issues I’ll be sure to update the guide 🙂
      
      Cheers,
      
      Sam
      
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Edmond says:

January 30, 2019 at 12:06 pm

Awesome guide, thanks. I’ve configured postfix per your instructions and rechecked it, however I’m getting the following errors when running # echo “Test Email Contents” | mail -s “Postfix Test Email” johndoe@gmail.com

Do you have any idea if I’m missing something?

Jan 29 17:51:22 nextcloud postfix/pickup[34700]: 6BB70221A3: uid=0 from=
Jan 29 17:51:22 nextcloud postfix/cleanup[39094]: 6BB70221A3: message-id=20190130016722.6BB70221A3@nextcloud.localdomain
Jan 29 17:51:22 nextcloud postfix/qmgr[34701]: 6BB70221A3: from=root@nextcloud.localdomain, size=362, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Jan 29 17:51:22 nextcloud postfix/smtp[39096]: 6BB70221A3: SASL authentication failed; server smtp.gmail.com[74.125.20.109] said: 535-5.7.8 Username and Password not accepted. Le$
Jan 29 17:51:23 nextcloud postfix/smtp[39096]: 6BB70221A3: to=johndoe@gmail.com, relay=smtp.gmail.com[74.125.20.108]:587, delay=0.86, delays=0.06/0.02/0.78/0, dsn$

It looks like its trying to send from root@nextcloud.localdomain instead of the user name in /usr/local/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd

What am I missing

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  January 31, 2019 at 6:39 pm
  
  Hi Edmond, reading through the log snippet you’ve posted, it says “SASL authentication failed; server smtp.gmail.com[74.125.20.109] said: 535-5.7.8 Username and Password not accepted”. It seems like you’re getting a response from the gmail smtp server telling you that you’ve put in an incorrect username and password. No need to worry about the root@nextcloud.localdomain, this is just your local user and jail host name. If you enter in a valid username/password combination you should be good to go. Cheers.
  
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  1. Phil says:
    
    February 6, 2019 at 3:01 pm
    
    Hello Samuel! This is an amazing tutorial. I too am having the same issue with the SASL authentication failed. I’ve doubled checked the username and password. All are good. I’ve tried it with using less secure apps and with an app specific password. Still no luck. How can I troubleshoot?
    
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    1. samuel.dowling says:
      
      February 6, 2019 at 3:48 pm
      
      Hi Phil, honestly I’ve never run into this issue before so I’m not able to provide you with a solution unfortunately. It doesn’t seem to be specific to Nextcloud or FreeBSD, but perhaps it is specific to postfix and gmail. This thread seems to indicate that the log may provide you with a link that provides more detail about the problem with the authentication (I can see that this is present in Edmonds log snippet, but is truncated by the text editor – see the Username and Password not accepted. Le$; here $ means that there’s more to the line). Unfortunately it seems that you’ve tried the solutions presented in the linked thread, but my suggestion would be to have a look through var/log/maillog to see what errors postfix is giving you, and explore solutions to those errors individually. If you can find the Learn more at 530 5.5.1 https://support.google.com/mail/?p=WantAuthError statement, perhaps it would be worth going to this link and seeing what description it gives you of the error messages. At the end of the article, I provide a few places that you can go for more detailed support. As an example, the #postfix IRC channel has a population of 317 at the time of writing; here would be a good place to start asking questions. IRC is where I go for support with issues like these; the people there are typically very knowledgable, and some are willing to help work through a problem.
      
      Edit: Have you made sure to re-run $ postmap /usr/local/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd after changing your credentials? It’s critical that you do this; it re-creates sasl_passwd.db, which is how the credentials are read by postfix.
      
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      1. Phil says:
        
        February 9, 2019 at 2:31 pm
        
        Thanks Samuel. Still working on the email piece, but I have everything else working. Fantastic guide! I can’t thank you enough for all of the effort you put into this.
        
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2. Rob says:
  
  July 8, 2019 at 4:12 pm
  
  I ran into this problem as well, as a result of typing in the wrong user. I had to edit
  smtp.gmail.com user@gmail.com:password112
  
  and then rerun this
  postmap /usr/local/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
  
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  1. berni says:
    
    January 3, 2021 at 4:40 am
    
    needed to make the same adjustment. no “<” and “>” are needed
    
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Scott Flowers says:

February 5, 2019 at 8:01 am

I ran through this tutorial using NextCloud 15 on FreeNAS 11.2-RELEASE-U1. The only things I deviate from were I created the jail using the gui in FreeNAS, I created the storage locations manually via the zfs command, and I used DHCP for the jail IP because I use DHCP reservations on my network instead of static IPs. For DNS, I used ddns.net with a CNAME from my own domain. The letsencrypt test command works if your server is accessible over HTTP first by its DNS name before you try to get the certificate.

Thanks for a great howt0.

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  February 6, 2019 at 8:44 am
  
  Nice one! I’m glad you could deviate from what I presented, adjust it for your needs and get it working. Cheers 🙂
  
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duke says:

February 6, 2019 at 5:33 am

Thank you very much for this. I went through multiple tutorials and this has been the most educational and least frustrating. You explained everything very clearly.

Cheers Mate

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  February 6, 2019 at 8:45 am
  
  I’m glad you found it useful!
  
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Andrew Lamarra says:

February 8, 2019 at 1:10 pm

Excellent post! I used this to migrate my Nextcloud from a Raspberry Pi to a FreeNAS jail.

Just one question. I found periodic.conf in /etc/defaults/
Should I modify the one in there?

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  February 8, 2019 at 5:33 pm
  
  Hi Andrew, no you don’t want to modify /etc/defaults/periodic.conf. This is the system default as per hier(7) and isn’t intended to be modified. You just want to create a new one in /etc/, i.e. /etc/periodic.conf. Hope this helps.
  
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Phil says:

February 10, 2019 at 4:00 am

Been working great. This machine is just a practice run for me to learn on. I don’t have a UPS for this machine. I had a brief power failure. Freenas boots ok, nextcloud wont start up. What steps do i need to take to troubleshoot? This is the error message that popped up when I tried to start nextcloud from the jails interface in Freenas:

Error: concurrent.futures.process._RemoteTraceback:
“””
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/concurrent/futures/process.py”, line 175, in _process_worker
r = call_item.fn(*call_item.args, **call_item.kwargs)
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/worker.py”, line 128, in main_worker
res = loop.run_until_complete(coro)
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/asyncio/base_events.py”, line 468, in run_until_complete
return future.result()
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/worker.py”, line 88, in _run
return await self._call(f'{service_name}.{method}’, serviceobj, methodobj, params=args, job=job)
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/worker.py”, line 81, in _call
return methodobj(*params)
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/worker.py”, line 81, in _call
return methodobj(*params)
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/schema.py”, line 668, in nf
return f(*args, **kwargs)
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/plugins/jail.py”, line 542, in start
iocage.start()
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/iocage_lib/iocage.py”, line 1654, in start
callback=self.callback
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/iocage_lib/ioc_start.py”, line 66, in __init__
self.__start_jail__()
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/iocage_lib/ioc_start.py”, line 391, in __start_jail__
silent=self.silent)
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/iocage_lib/ioc_common.py”, line 81, in logit
_callback(content, exception)
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/iocage_lib/ioc_common.py”, line 64, in callback
raise callback_exception(message)
RuntimeError: mount_nullfs: /mnt/vault: No such file or directory
jail: /sbin/mount -t nullfs -o rw /mnt/vault/cloud /mnt/Vault/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/mnt/data: failed

“””

The above exception was the direct cause of the following exception:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/main.py”, line 161, in call_method
result = await self.middleware.call_method(self, message)
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/main.py”, line 1109, in call_method
return await self._call(message[‘method’], serviceobj, methodobj, params, app=app, io_thread=False)
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/main.py”, line 1046, in _call
return await self._call_worker(serviceobj, name, *args)
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/main.py”, line 1073, in _call_worker
job,
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/main.py”, line 1004, in run_in_proc
return await self.run_in_executor(self.__procpool, method, *args, **kwargs)
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/main.py”, line 989, in run_in_executor
return await loop.run_in_executor(pool, functools.partial(method, *args, **kwargs))
RuntimeError: mount_nullfs: /mnt/vault: No such file or directory
jail: /sbin/mount -t nullfs -o rw /mnt/vault/cloud /mnt/Vault/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/mnt/data: failed

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  February 10, 2019 at 11:12 am
  
  Hi Phil,
  
  Looking at the Tracebacks you’ve provided it looks like fstab can’t find the dataset’s you’ve specified, so when it tries to mount your host dataset into the jail it’s throwing an error. Specifically, the cause of your issue is the line
  RuntimeError: mount_nullfs: /mnt/vault: No such file or directory.
  I’ve noticed that the last line in each traceback;
  jail: /sbin/mount -t nullfs -o rw /mnt/vault/cloud /mnt/Vault/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/mnt/data: failed
  has two different dataset names. For the first path specification you’ve used /mnt/vault, and the second you’ve used /mnt/Vault. Is it possible you forgot to capitalise the “V” in “Vault” for the first path in your fstab entry for this mount? You can edit this by running the following commands from your FreeNAS hosts shell:
  $ setenv EDITOR nano
  $ iocage fstab -e nextcloud
  Then make the appropriate changes. My guess (you might have to adapt this for your actual circumstances) is that the entry should look like this:
  /mnt/Vault/cloud /mnt/Vault/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/mnt/data nullfs rw 0 0
  Hope this helps!
  
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  1. Phil says:
    
    February 10, 2019 at 12:58 pm
    
    Hello Samuel!
    Thank you for responding and helping. I admit I am a newbie here. I understand very little. I made the changes you mentioned. You are correct. The one mistake I did make is using the capital V when I created the pool. I did make those changes. It looks like I have a deadlock error. What might cause that?
    
    Error: concurrent.futures.process._RemoteTraceback:
    “””
    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/concurrent/futures/process.py”, line 175, in _process_worker
    r = call_item.fn(*call_item.args, **call_item.kwargs)
    File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/worker.py”, line 128, in main_worker
    res = loop.run_until_complete(coro)
    File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/asyncio/base_events.py”, line 468, in run_until_complete
    return future.result()
    File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/worker.py”, line 88, in _run
    return await self._call(f'{service_name}.{method}’, serviceobj, methodobj, params=args, job=job)
    File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/worker.py”, line 81, in _call
    return methodobj(*params)
    File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/worker.py”, line 81, in _call
    return methodobj(*params)
    File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/schema.py”, line 668, in nf
    return f(*args, **kwargs)
    File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/plugins/jail.py”, line 542, in start
    iocage.start()
    File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/iocage_lib/iocage.py”, line 1654, in start
    callback=self.callback
    File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/iocage_lib/ioc_start.py”, line 66, in __init__
    self.__start_jail__()
    File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/iocage_lib/ioc_start.py”, line 391, in __start_jail__
    silent=self.silent)
    File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/iocage_lib/ioc_common.py”, line 81, in logit
    _callback(content, exception)
    File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/iocage_lib/ioc_common.py”, line 64, in callback
    raise callback_exception(message)
    RuntimeError: mount_nullfs: /mnt/Vault/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/mnt/data: Resource deadlock avoided
    jail: /sbin/mount -t nullfs -o rw /mnt/Vault/cloud /mnt/Vault/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/mnt/data: failed
    
    “””
    
    The above exception was the direct cause of the following exception:
    
    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/main.py”, line 161, in call_method
    result = await self.middleware.call_method(self, message)
    File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/main.py”, line 1109, in call_method
    return await self._call(message[‘method’], serviceobj, methodobj, params, app=app, io_thread=False)
    File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/main.py”, line 1046, in _call
    return await self._call_worker(serviceobj, name, *args)
    File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/main.py”, line 1073, in _call_worker
    job,
    File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/main.py”, line 1004, in run_in_proc
    return await self.run_in_executor(self.__procpool, method, *args, **kwargs)
    File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/main.py”, line 989, in run_in_executor
    return await loop.run_in_executor(pool, functools.partial(method, *args, **kwargs))
    RuntimeError: mount_nullfs: /mnt/Vault/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/mnt/data: Resource deadlock avoided
    jail: /sbin/mount -t nullfs -o rw /mnt/Vault/cloud /mnt/Vault/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/mnt/data: failed
    
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    1. samuel.dowling says:
      
      February 10, 2019 at 1:21 pm
      
      Phil, this is difficult for me to debug because I don’t have all the details about your system that would require me to help. On the face of it, this error is caused by “nullfs avoiding a deadlock of the system by doing a duplicate mount”. One possible cause for this would be trying to mount the same directory twice; did you replace the existing fstab entry with what I suggested, or just add it to what was already there?
      
      In tackling these problems in the future, often the easiest way is just to google the error message you’re getting. In this case the error you’re interested in is indicated by the line beginning with RuntimeError. Simply analysing this line and googling “Resource deadlock avoided FreeNAS” provided a number of links that indicated what the problem may be. That’s all I’m doing! Also, as I’ve mentioned in the blog post, the #freenas IRC channel is immensely helpful for these kinds of questions – people are able to help debug in real time, and are much more knowledgeable than I am 🙂
      
      I suspect that this is an issue with the fstab file, and it’s entries. If worst comes to worst, you could just delete the contents of this file (using iocage fstab -e nextcloud as discussed before), and go over the section of the guide addressing the construction of these mounts again, paying special attention to the differences in naming conventions between your configuration and mine. You may also need to reboot your system to free any locked resources, or manually unmount the rogue entry. I would suggest a reboot is the simpler way to go though.
      
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      1. Phil says:
        
        February 11, 2019 at 9:36 am
        
        Hello Samuel! Thank you for all of the help. I ended up doing a clean install of FreeNas and ran through your tutorial again. All is well! Scored well on the test sites. Amazing tutorial! Thank you!
        
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Magnus Roos says:

February 12, 2019 at 12:01 am

Hi Samuel,

Fantastic guide and very nice work! I installed on my freenas machine in a jail without problem and got A+ security rating from the nextcloud scan.

I’m wondering if you have any tips or recommendation on how I can use a reverse proxy jail to put nextcloud behind one. I asking mainly about changing my current configuration of the nextcloud jail so it works with a reverse proxy.

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  February 12, 2019 at 9:21 pm
  
  Hi Magnus, Unfortunately, I’ve never set up a reverse proxy jail so no advice to give. I did find this thread on the FreeNAS forums that might be helpful though 🙂 Hope it helps, good luck! Cheers
  
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Phil says:

February 13, 2019 at 12:46 pm

Hi Samuel. Just a quick question. I’d like to reboot my server, any potential issues I need to look out for while I do this?

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  February 13, 2019 at 7:42 pm
  
  Nope! It’s probably a good idea to reboot to identify any misconfigurations you may have (if you have them) anyway 🙂
  
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KevDog says:

February 14, 2019 at 2:00 am

Hi Samuel

Great guide by the way. I must have taken forever to write it up. I not sure I would have had the patience, however thanks.

That said I’d like to touch on a few points since it took me about 2 whole days to set some things up that are a little different than yours. I’m on FreeNAS 11.2

I installed nextcloud-php72 and can say that everything is working. I didn’t try nextcloud-php73
I really enjoyed the way you described your dataset layout. In your guide when you mounted the respective directories in the jail, I just wanted to let you know this can be done also within the FreeNAS GUI. I’m not much of a GUI guy however when directories are manually mounted on the command line, they never show within the FreeNAS GUI. It’s helpful months later to go back to the GUI and see what directories are mounted since I usually forget the command line statements. I’m specifically referring to the iocage fstab portion of the guide
Mysql — arg!!! How many times can I say I messed this portion up after forgetting the passwords. Not to fear however, this process can totally be undone. This isn’t the only command so I would suggest the user may want to google however
mysql -e “drop database nextcloud” -p
will drop the entire database table for nextcloud. The following statement will also drop the nextcloud_admin user from the database
DROP USER ‘nextcloud_admin’@’localhost’
If you totally forget the root password to the mysql database (yep did that to,) it can be reset as well. I’d refer to the bottom section of this link of google the process. There is a lot of tutorials:
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/resetting-permissions.html
redis — Yikes – Major stumbling block here. I had to chown a few of the files and change attributes. I pick this up through tail -f /var/log/nextcloud
chown redis:wheel /tmp/redis.sock
chmod 777 /tmp/redis.sock
chown redis:wheel /usr/local/etc/redis.conf
chmod 777 /usr/local/etc/redis.con
sudo service redis restart
— Side note to all users. Watching log files are unfortunately a necessary evil when installing these things because things break. What I like to do is pop open at least 2 terminal windows and either use ssh or the jail exec (Jail#) bash to login to the jail. Within one terminal window you can enter the commands as set in this guide. Within either the 1 or 2 additional terminal windows I use the command tail -f which puts the realtime output onto the screen. Its really helpful.
Note on my directory structure. The guide is written so the principle domain name is linked to nextcloud. In my particular installation, I didn’t want my website to be served like this. Using the domain name mydomain.com as an example, I wanted http://www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com to be linked to the “main” website, and nextcloud.mydomain.com to actually be linked to the nextcloud installation. I took me a while to figure this one out, however its totally possible to do this.
Within /usr/local/www there is a nextcloud directory which will serve as the DocumentRoot for nextcloud.mydomain.com
Also within /usr/local/www I created a subdirectory called main which will serve as the DocumentRoot for http://www.mydomain.com (and mydomain.com).
Within the /usr/local/etc/apache24/Includes directory, I needed to actually create two files nextcloud.mydomain.com.conf and mydomain.com.conf. I pretty much followed all of your statements but had to make the following changes to get things to work:
Within the mydomain.com.conf – change if to something like this (assuming SSL is installed):

ServerName http://www.mydomain.com
ServerAlias mydomain.com

DocumentRoot “/usr/local/www/main”

Redirect permanent / https://www.mydomain.com/

ServerAdmin @.com
ServerName http://www.mydomain.com
ServerAlias mydomain.com
DocumentRoot /usr/local/www/main #<—-Notice the directory — this can be changed to the directory or directory mount that holds the main website files
…… <—————————- This means include all the other stuff after these statements

Within the nextcloud.mydomain.com.conf file I did something like:

ServerName nextcloud.mydomain.com

DocumentRoot “/usr/local/www/nextcloud”

Redirect permanent / https://nextcloud.mydomain.com/

ServerAdmin @.com
ServerName nextcloud.mydomain.com
DocumentRoot /usr/local/www/nextcloud #<—–Notice the directory for this subdomain
…….. <——-Put all other config statements here

I wanted to touch on the LetsEncrypt section. Another very painful step. I wasn’t using Amazon or any DNS resolver so this section wasn’t working for me. Some tips however. Personally I bought a domain name and have it registered with noip.com. I have the following domains — http://www.mydomain.com, mydomain.com and nextcloud.mydomain.com. The all resolve however to the same IP address since I’m running a home server on FreeNAS. I’m using the FreeNas DynamicDNS client to update these domains. I had a previous old webserver which I set up LetsEncrypt certs and I copied the entire directory to /usr/local/etc/letsencrypt. Just to be sure that within this directory there are subdirectories called accounts, archive, csr, keys, live, renewal, renewal-hooks. Whether you are copying the certs or creating them from scratch you need to also however create a couple of subdirectories for either the activation or renewal process to work. (This is probably why you mentioned the process didn’t work for you).

Within /usr/local/www/main (If you have this directory structure you have to do this):
mkdir -p /usr/local/www/main/.well-known
mkdir -p /usr/local/www/main/.well-known/acme-challenge
chown -R www:www /usr/local/www/main

Within /usr/local/www/nextcloud:
mkdir -p /usr/local/www/nextcloud/.well-known
mkdir -p /usr/local/www/nextcloud/.well-known/acme-challenge
chown -R www:www /usr/local/www/nextcloud
After making these directory structures, you can then either create or renew the letsencrypt certificates.
Admittedly this isn’t the only way to do this, however what I wanted was for my http://www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com certs to be associated with mydomain .com (which the DocumentRoot for this domain is /usr/local/www/main) and the nextcloud.mydomain.com to be associated with nextcloud.mydomain.com (which the DocumentRoot for this domain is /usr/local/www/nextcloud). What is needed however is for the .well-known/acme-challenge directory structure to be in place for what ever domains and webroots you are associating with you certificates or the process will fail.
After I copied my letsencrypt directory to the new server, I needed to forward ports 80 and 443 to the router to point at the machine and then reran something similar to the following to allow the certs to be setup for my particular structures:
certbot certonly –cert-name mydomain.com -d mydomain.com, http://www.mydomain.com, nextcloud.mydomain.com

I also tested the security of my ssl setup at https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltes. Based on your settings and the link for the Mozilla site I received A+. Thanks for your tips

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Markus says:

February 14, 2019 at 6:13 am

Thank you very much for this guide, in particular for the stating the reasonings for your configuration steps in detail.
However, I’m currently quite doubtful which approach I should take for installing Nextcloud on FreeNAS 11.2 for a small private family cloud (eg. syncing contacts, backing up images from the smartphone and so on). Although I have some experience on Linux systems I’m rather new to FreeNAS/BSD. And it seems to me that at the moment the FreeNAS community is missing a real roadmap for Nextcloud. There is the Nextcloud plugin, the danb35 installation script, your excellent guide and the idea of using a Docker VM with a Nextcloud template. All very confusing. Do you know anything about the status of the plugin? Does it include any of your security considerations? Have you ever considered to get involved in the maintenance of the plugin?

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  February 14, 2019 at 2:47 pm
  
  Hi Markus,
  
  As far as installation alternatives you’ve essentially hit the nail on the head; these are the options you have. This isn’t specific to Nextcloud though; you have these options for most programs that you would install on FreeNAS. It comes down to what you’re looking to get out of it I guess; manual installation using the method I’ve presented gives you some confidence about what you’re installing and you’ll know exactly what security precautions have been taken – you can then add or remove from this as you see appropriate for your use case. You’ve correctly identified that this is somewhat less obvious in the case of the plugin. I’ve never used the plugin, so I can’t really comment on it’s current status, but I know that it has previously been subject to a poor maintenance schedule, and has fallen behind the release schedule by quite a margin. By all accounts this isn’t presently the case, but it’s something to consider. If you’re not interested in having the manual control and understanding provided by configuring everything yourself, danb35’s script is a good solution. At least with this script you’ll have much broader support and an ability to fix any configuration issues in a more traditional way (it’s just a FreeBSD jail; you can find support for this in the freebsd community); problems with the plugin can be difficult to identify and fix (at least for me), and are less straight forward to rectify if you’re relying on the plugin maintainer to make changes.
  
  Plugin maintenance is something I’ve not had any exposure to, so it’s not something I’m presently considering. I am considering adding some of the security configurations to danb35’s script, but I have a lot of other things on my plate to keep me busy at this stage 🙂 Hope this helps.
  
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  1. Markus says:
    
    February 24, 2019 at 9:12 am
    
    Hi Samuel,
    Guess what: If followed your guide and it works perfectly. I’m on FreeNAS 11.2 and tried to always use the latest packages: mariadb10.3, php7.3, nextcloud 15 and everything runs fine. I only had problems to get py36-certbot running probably because I just don’t get it how python 3.6 is activated. Nonetheless py27-certbot works.
    Thank you very much, Markus
    
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Andrew Lamarra says:

February 14, 2019 at 9:39 am

Hi Sam, one other question I have. You stated, “The second, “jailhouse”, is a 500GB Samsung SSD, and is the pool I store all of my jails on so that they benefit from the faster IO operations an SSD affords.” But later you say, “The remaining dataset is the ‘iocage’ dataset. This is created automatically when you create a jail, so you don’t need to worry about doing anything here, however it is important to note that this is where the local storage for your iocage jails is held.” So I’m a little confused about your configuration. Do you actually store the jails in the “jailhouse” pool or the “iocage” dataset? Thanks!

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  February 14, 2019 at 3:00 pm
  
  Hi Andrew, In my configuration the iocage dataset is stored under the jailhouse root dataset of the jailhouse pool. The jailhouse pool is associated with the SSD. Each pool will have a root level dataset associated with it with the same name. You might have to specify the jail root to be the jailhouse pool. Does this clear things up? I’ve realised the directory structure in the post is a bit misleading so I’ve fixed that up. Cheers
  
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  1. Andrew Lamarra says:
    
    February 15, 2019 at 1:48 am
    
    That helps a LOT. Thanks for responding to everyone’s questions. You’re awesome!
    
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Josh says:

February 14, 2019 at 10:02 am

Thanks for this extremely detailed note.

One quick thing I’ll leave here for anyone else who is wondering – the well thought out configuration for mail in this guide means you can simply use the same sendmail service in your mail settings for NextCloud

https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/15/admin_manual/configuration_server/email_configuration.html

Great for getting emails sent out to new users!

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Oscar says:

February 17, 2019 at 3:21 pm

I may have missed something, but under the “…” menu for the nextcloud datasets that I’ve created, I do not have “Edit Permissions”. The available choices are, from top to bottom: “Add Dataset”, “Add Zvol”, “Edit Options”, “Delete Dataset”, and “Create Snapshot.” Any ideas?

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1. Oscar says:
  
  February 17, 2019 at 3:25 pm
  
  I’ve answered my own question. If you create the nextcloud datasets within the “iocage” dataset, as I mistakenly did, then apparently there is no “Edit Permissions” option. So, I will delete and recreate these sets outside of “iocage”. I am, however, confused: why wouldn’t we want to create the jail first, then use the directory structure that exists within the jail?
  
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  1. samuel.dowling says:
    
    February 17, 2019 at 4:02 pm
    
    Hi Oscar, as I discuss (perhaps later) in the guide, the reason we use a directory structure outside of the jail is so that the data we’re storing is independent of the jail. If you used the jail directory structure all your data would be erased every time you nuked the jail. This way, if you have to upgrade your jail, or misconfigure it irreparably, it’s trivial to create a new jail and be back up and running relatively quickly. Note that the jail directory structure is deleted when a jail is deleted. Of course, you’re welcome to forge your own path as well; this was just how I preferred to set it up.
    
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Side2005 says:

February 20, 2019 at 8:24 am

I’m going to IaaC this tutorial with Ansible. Wish me luck!

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Fire-Dragon-DoL says:

February 27, 2019 at 6:49 pm

Based on recent nextcloud updates, I think you should add also this command to the guide:
su -m www -c ‘php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ db:convert-filecache-bigint’

The settings page of nextcloud requested it.

Thanks for the guide!

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  February 27, 2019 at 10:24 pm
  
  Yep! Good idea, I’ll add it to the list of things I have to do 🙂
  
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  1. Andrew Lamarra says:
    
    February 28, 2019 at 1:09 am
    
    I may be wrong, but I think this is only necesessary if you’re upgrading from Nextcloud 12.
    
    https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/stable/admin_manual/maintenance/upgrade.html?highlight=convert%20filecache%20bigint#upgrading-to-nextcloud-13
    
    https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/stable/admin_manual/configuration_database/bigint_identifiers.html?highlight=convert%20filecache%20bigint
    
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    1. samuel.dowling says:
      
      February 28, 2019 at 8:07 am
      
      I don’t think it’s that straight forward. I had to do the same conversion upgrading from 14.0.3 to 15.0.1. I’ll have to do some testing to see when it’s required.
      
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2. Phil says:
  
  March 9, 2019 at 3:17 am
  
  Where in the update process would I add this command?
  
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  1. samuel.dowling says:
    
    March 9, 2019 at 8:50 am
    
    At the end. Once you’ve got everything else set up and working, if you navigate to Settings > Overview in the web browser and see an error message indicating that this command needs to be run (The error message literally has the command you need to run in it), then you’ll need to run this command to upgrade your database schema.
    
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    1. Phil says:
      
      March 9, 2019 at 1:05 pm
      
      Thanks Samuel. Do I type the command just as Fire-Dragon-DoL has it? Do I need to add quotes?
      
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      1. samuel.dowling says:
        
        March 9, 2019 at 2:57 pm
        
        Yes, just as he has it. It runs a command as the www user. The quotes allow you to be explicit about what command to run as www, namely everything contained by the quotes.
        
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ANDRZEJ says:

March 5, 2019 at 9:53 am

Many thanks for this really grat guide!
I just recently did an upgrade from Freenas 11.0 to 11.2 which sort of broke all of my warden jails so I decided not to maintain these soon to be obsolete ones anymore and jump the iocage train instead.
This made me switch some of the apps I used to newer/better alternatives (eg. Transmission>qBittorrent) and also set up a Nextcloud from scratch as i want to know what’s happening under the hood especially when things are facing the interwebs.
Your guide really helped me a lot – mainly the security hardening part which I found very coprehensive and straightforward.
Can’t see any donation option on your site so as a thank you I’ll post some info on problems I had to deal with during the process and which I think someone may find useful.

Nextcloud installation breaks after a HTTP 504 “Gateway Timeout” error.

– Uninstall the nextcloud pkg and remove its configuration
– In MariaDB execute:
DROP USER ‘nextcloud_admin’@’localhost’;
DROP DATABASE nextcloud;
Then start again from setting up the DB and installing Nextcloud

Postfix configuration

– Do not use google aliases like username+alias@gmail.com to log in to gmail account
– Try to send a test email and look closely at postfix log, If everything is fine with the configuration it should eventually say that you need to issue an application specific password for Nextcloud’s Postfix in your Google Account’s “Security” tab.
– Update the sasl_passwd file to include google app specific password and re-run postmap /usr/local/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd

(This one is network setup specific for those who are on the routers without reverse NAT)
After setting up the SSL certificate and forcing HTTPS connection you will loose possibility to connect to Nextcloud locally via its IP address as when trying to connect you will be redirected to Nextcloud’s HTTPS domain name and the connection will eventually fail.

– Add another port (eg. 7777) to /usr/local/etc/apache24/httpd.conf on which you will connect to Nextcloud via local IP (eg. 192.168.0.7):
…
Listen 80
Listen 443
Listen 7777
….

Add a vhost declaration to your domain config in /usr/local/etc/apache24/Includes/your_domain.conf:

ServerName 192.168.0.7
DocumentRoot “/usr/local/www/nextcloud”

SetHandler “proxy:fcgi://127.0.0.1:9000/”

DirectoryIndex /index.php index.php

Now you should be able to connect both locally using 192.168.0.7:7777 as well as from the web using Nextcloud’s domain name.

Bigint conversion the proper way (using occ maintenance mode):
su -m www -c ‘php /usr/local/www/apache24/data/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode –on’
su -m www -c ‘php /usr/local/www/apache24/data/nextcloud/occ db:convert-filecache-bigint’
su -m www -c ‘php /usr/local/www/apache24/data/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode –off’
Watch closely for typos and if you happen to set up Nextcloud using Freenas jails shell and you want to copy some of the code from this guide to text files on Nextcloud storage using Windows PC and then “cat >>” this code to your config files – remeber to clean the text files from Windows specific hidden characters.

– show hidden chars:
cat -e /mnt/data/admin/files/file.txt
– install converter:
pkg install unix2dos
– remove hidden chars:
dos2unix /mnt/data/admin/files/file.txt

In my case everything else went smooth (even the cert issuing part) on Nextcloud 15 / php 7.2.15 / openssl 1.0.2o / apache 2.4.38 / python 2.7.15
Thanks again Samuel for your work!

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Mike says:

March 6, 2019 at 6:30 am

Great guide , I actually had it up and running for a short bit, but when I get to CACHING AND REDIS now the site just comes up with

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator if this error reappears multiple times, please include the technical details below in your report.
More details can be found in the webserver log.

I’ve looked into the logs and there wasn’t anything in it.

Apache error

[proxy_fcgi:error] [pid 54466] [client 192.168.10.254:8673] AH01071: Got error ‘PHP message: PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘array’ (T_ARRAY), expecting ‘)’ in /usr/local/www/nextcloud/config/config.php on line 12\n’
[Tue Mar 05 20:13:30.992060 2019] [proxy_fcgi:error] [pid 54468] [client 192.168.10.254:8675] AH01071: Got error ‘PHP message: PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘array’ (T_ARRAY), expecting ‘)’ in /usr/local/www/nextcloud/config/config.php on line 12\n’
[Tue Mar 05 20:13:31.759532 2019] [proxy_fcgi:error] [pid 54469] [client 192.168.10.254:8676] AH01071: Got error ‘PHP message: PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘array’ (T_ARRAY), expecting ‘)’ in /usr/local/www/nextcloud/config/config.php on line 12\n’

I’m not 100% where I went wrong after the initial configuration and install it was all working I’m sure I stuffed something up somewhere I installed PHP72 on the box left me scratching my head any pointers would be appreciated. Thanks again.

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1. Kevdog says:
  
  March 6, 2019 at 6:57 am
  
  It looks like your config.php file is messed up. Probably missing a semicolon or parentheses. Did you try looking at the file closely?
  
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Mike says:

March 6, 2019 at 11:16 am

Hey Kevdog,
you were totally right my friend, I missed the ‘domain.com’, after 1 => i’m such an idiot, I was in there like 10 times to and just didn’t notice thanks a lot everyone up and running, onto securing it now thanks again.

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1. Not a hacker says:
  
  March 7, 2019 at 1:40 am
  
  No need to secure it…
  
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Michael says:

March 12, 2019 at 3:01 am

Fantastic, detailed walkthrough article. It is hard to find how-to articles that go into the how’s and why’s of what given settings are. I’m sure it took you a lot of extra time to include the extra detail, but not only do I now have Nextcloud migrated from being hosted on a Raspberry Pi to my FreeNAS box I understand more of the inner workings as well. A+, thank you very much

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David says:

March 18, 2019 at 3:49 am

I’m sorry to ask a silly question but i get as far as imputing the following code:

su -m www -c ‘php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ config:system:set redis host –value=”/tmp/redis.sock”‘

but it gives me the error:

Could not open input file: /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ

if i try to move forward with the next step it keeps giving me this error.

if it helps to solve this, i think a part of my problem is that i imputed the following 2 lines first but forgot to change it to php72.

$ pkg install php71-pecl-redis
$ pkg install php71-pecl-APCu

i went back and changed it to php72 and reimputed the 2 lines but i think the damage has been done. can anyone help me with this.

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  March 18, 2019 at 6:43 am
  
  A couple of things to check:
  1. Are you copying the command directly from the post? You should. In what you’ve posted here, you just have -value, it should be --value
  2. Do you actually have Nextcloud installed? Navigate to /usr/local/www/nextcloud to see if the program occ is actually present, i.e:
  
  $ cd /usr/local/www/nextcloud
  $ ls -l
  
  Try to find occ in the resulting list. If nextcloud isn’t installed, nothing will appear at this point. It’s possible that by uninstalling php71-pecl-redis and php71-pecl-APCu, necessary packages to nextcloud were also removed, or nextcloud was removed. It might be worth just starting over again to avoid some of these debugging headaches.
  
  Cheers.
  
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  1. David says:
    
    March 18, 2019 at 3:03 pm
    
    Thank you for the info Samuel. i copied the command directly from the post but if it needs the — i will insert it when i try it again. Also, when i paste the commands you gave me it does not show the occ, so it looks like i have to start over on this =(. thank you for all your help, you are awesome!
    
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Naufal says:

March 19, 2019 at 11:36 pm

root@bgnas:~ # iocage list
+—–+———–+——-+————–+————+
| JID | NAME | STATE | RELEASE | IP4 |
+=====+===========+=======+==============+============+
| 2 | nextcloud | up | 11.1-RELEASE | 10.0.0.230 |
+—–+———–+——-+————–+————+
root@bgnas:~ # jexec 2 tcsh
root@nextcloud:/ # ee /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf
^[ (escape) menu ^y search prompt ^k delete line ^p prev li ^g prev page
^o ascii code ^x search ^l undelete line ^n next li ^v next page
^u end of file ^a begin of line ^w delete word ^b back 1 char ^z next word
^t top of text ^e end of line ^r restore word ^f forward char
^c command ^d delete ESC-Enter: exit
=====line 11 col 48 lines f ===========================

$FreeBSD: releng/11.1/etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf 320745 2017-07-06 17:22:33Z gjb $

#

To disable this repository, instead of modifying or removing this file,

create a /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf file:

#

mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos

echo “FreeBSD: { enabled: no }” > /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf

#

FreeBSD: {
url: “pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/latest”,
mirror_type: “srv”,
signature_type: “fingerprints”,
fingerprints: “/usr/share/keys/pkg”,
enabled: yes
}

“/etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf” 16 lines, 503 characters
root@nextcloud:/ # pkg update
The package management tool is not yet installed on your system.
Do you want to fetch and install it now? [y/N]: y
Bootstrapping pkg from pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD:11:amd64/latest, please wait…
pkg: Error fetching http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD:11:amd64/latest/Latest/pkg.txz: No address record
A pre-built version of pkg could not be found for your system.
Consider changing PACKAGESITE or installing it from ports: ‘ports-mgmt/pkg’.
root@nextcloud:/ # pkg: Error fetching http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD:11:amd64/latest/Latest/pkg.txz: No address record
pkg:: Too many arguments.
root@nextcloud:/ # A pre-built version of pkg could not be found for your system.
A: Command not found.
root@nextcloud:/ # Consider changing PACKAGESITE or installing it from ports: ‘ports-mgmt/pkg’.
root@nextcloud:/ # pkg install nano
The package management tool is not yet installed on your system.
Do you want to fetch and install it now? [y/N]: y
Bootstrapping pkg from pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD:11:amd64/latest, please wait…
^C
root@nextcloud:/ # ping pkg.FreeBSD.org
ping: cannot resolve pkg.FreeBSD.org: Host name lookup failure
root@nextcloud:/ # vi /etc/resolv.conf

Generated by resolvconf

search com
nameserver 10.0.0.201
nameserver 10.0.0.202
nameserver 8.8.8.8

~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
:q
root@nextcloud:/ # ifconfig
lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 16384
options=600003<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,RXCSUM_IPV6,TXCSUM_IPV6>
inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128
inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000
nd6 options=21<PERFORMNUD,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
groups: lo
epair0b: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
options=8
ether 02:ff:60:ba:b5:82
hwaddr 02:05:a0:00:06:0b
inet 10.0.0.230 netmask 0xff000000 broadcast 10.255.255.255
nd6 options=1
media: Ethernet 10Gbase-T (10Gbase-T )
status: active
groups: epair

Dear,
I am new to these iocage configuration but I stuck up here while following ur methed. I feel i am not able to connect internet or Free BSD package repository. somthing wrong while creating VNET.
please guid. Now I have to install all
following
$ pkg update
$ pkg install nano
$ pkg install apache24
$ sysrc apache24_enable=yes
$ service apache24 start

$ pkg install mariadb102-server
$ sysrc mysql_enable=yes
$ service mysql-server start
$ mysql_secure_installation

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  March 20, 2019 at 10:08 pm
  
  Hi Naufal,
  
  This isn’t something I can effectively help you debug in this forum. It looks like your analysis of this is right; it looks like your jail doesn’t have internet connectivity. Some steps you can take are to try to ping your name servers, i.e. ping 8.8.8.8 to see if you get a response, and then see if you can contact the freebsd servers: nslookup freebsd.org, and if neither of those work, see if you can ping your Freenas host or router, ping 192.168.0.2 (replace with freenas ip), ping 192.168.0.1 (replace with router ip). It might be worth executing ifconfig on your freenas host to see if the jail vnet interface is present in bridge0 along with your network interface. In my case, my network interface is igb0, yours might be different. If it’s not there, you’ll need to add your network interface to the bridge so your jails have internet access. This is all speculation on my part though, if you want to resolve this I’d really recommend visiting the freenas forums or the #freenas IRC channel.
  
  Good luck!
  
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Kevdog says:

March 20, 2019 at 10:05 am

Hey Samuel

I know about the upgrade options however I’m pretty much trying to stick to the freebsd of pkg update cycle and not upgrade through nextcloud itself. I recently saw some my packages for nextcloud were pushed and installed through pkg. I’m now presented with this option through nextcloud — https://imagebin.ca/v/4amQEKNji7Vj

Is there anything specific I need to do at this point like put occ in maintainence mode or anything prior to proceeding? I’m asking because upgrades have screwed my prior install before in the distant past.

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  March 20, 2019 at 9:56 pm
  
  Kevdog,
  
  My experience with the upgrade procedure is that it hasn’t been smooth, and I think you might have to accept some risk in breaking your installation (hence the advice to back everything up before attempting in the image you linked). Putting your installation in maintenance mode does seem prudent, especially if you have other users using your cloud service. The problems I’ve had in the past have been related to app configuration not updating properly; I’m not sure if this was an issue with the freebsd pkg or Nextcloud itself, though. I wish I had better advice for you, but it’s not a process I’ve had a significant amount of experience with yet 🙂 Good luck!
  
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kevdog says:

March 22, 2019 at 1:00 pm

Question since I can’t seem to find an answer. I upgraded nextcloud and now I’m getting within the apps section – says no apps found for your version. https://pasteboard.co/I6xj80H.png

I’m not sure what to do. I restarted the apache24, redis, and php-fpm services.

Personal rant — nextcloud updating sucks!! The system seems very easy to break. Nextcloud not very robust.

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  March 23, 2019 at 1:28 pm
  
  I feel you dude. I had issues when I last upgraded to 15.0.0. As far as apps go, prior to updating there is a check done to make sure there is a compatible app version for the proposed upgrade:
  
  This indicates that all of the apps that I have installed are compatible with 15.0.5, but you probably have a more expansive set of apps installed, which is where the problems are arising. Nextcloud’s robustness seems to be it’s primary disadvantage. It was something that I hadn’t really considered too closely when writing this guide, and so it may in fact be better to install it directly from nextcloud’s distribution rather than from pkg. You could then just use the web updater, which seems like it may provide a better upgrade experience (I have limited experience with this though, and I have heard that it has been not-so-great in the past; it seems like these issues may have been fixed but I’m really not sure).
  
  Regardless, to help solve your current problem, you can go through the problem apps configuration xml in /usr/local/www/nextcloud/apps-pkg/<name of app here>/appinfo/info.xml. Have a poke around and see if you can identify what’s wrong there. What fixed an issue in the past for me was that this file had a max-version="14" property, which caused errors upgrading to 15. Changing it allowed me to start nextcloud up and get everything working, but it triggered integrity check warnings, as the hashes of these files no longer matched the files because I edited it. I never worked out a solution to this, but I suspect it would have involved installing each app again from source so that the hashes matched what was listed and the integrity checks passed.
  
  Moving forward though, I strongly suggest checking out the #nextcloud IRC channel on freenode. There are a number of very knowledgable and helpful users you can have a real time dialogue with about problems there; this is usually my first stop for support when things go wrong that I don’t know anything about.
  
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David says:

March 24, 2019 at 7:59 am

Hi Team, after getting everything working, i did a restart on my Freenas server and now the nextcloud iocage will not start. any ideas why?

root@freenas:~ # iocage list
+—–+———–+——-+————–+———–+
| JID | NAME | STATE | RELEASE | IP4 |
+=====+===========+=======+==============+===========+
| – | nextcloud | down | 11.1-RELEASE | 10.0.0.15 |
+—–+———–+——-+————–+———–+
root@freenas:~ # iocage start nextcloud
* Starting nextcloud
+ Start FAILED
mount_nullfs: /mnt/cloud: No such file or directory
jail: /sbin/mount -t nullfs -o rw /mnt/cloud /mnt/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/mnt/data: failed

root@freenas:~ #

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  March 24, 2019 at 9:10 am
  Hi David,
  
  Head to your terminal and type
```
root@freenas:~ # ls /mnt/cloud
```
  I think you’ll find that you don’t have a dataset named this. In the guide I provide, it’s /mnt/vault/cloud, where vault is the name of the pool that the cloud dataset lives on. You can edit the fstab for nextcloud by running:
```
root@freenas:~ # setenv EDITOR nano
root@freenas:~ # iocage fstab -e nextcloud
```
  Make the necessary changes, try to restart the jail:
```
root@freenas:~ # iocage start nextcloud
```
  Then restart your NAS to make sure that these changes will persist moving forward.
  
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  1. David says:
    
    March 25, 2019 at 5:08 am
    
    That worked perfectly. thank you so much Samuel! you are a rock star at this!
    
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    1. David says:
      
      March 26, 2019 at 1:49 pm
      
      So after i updated the fstab i was able to start up the Jail again and i looked like i was able to access nextcloud but after i restarted my freenas server the jail still comes up and its running but i can no longer access my nextcloud. I have tried restarting my Jail and restarting freenas but with no luck.
      I’m stuck in the trouble shooting process and i can use some guidance on this.
      
      Here is what i have to help with this. please let me know what other info i can provide you.
      
      root@freenas:~ # iocage list
      +—–+———–+——-+————–+———–+
      | JID | NAME | STATE | RELEASE | IP4 |
      +=====+===========+=======+==============+===========+
      | 4 | nextcloud | up | 11.1-RELEASE | 10.0.0.15 |
      +—–+———–+——-+————–+———–+
      
      root@nextcloud:/ # service -e
      /etc/rc.d/cleanvar
      /etc/rc.d/netif
      /etc/rc.d/newsyslog
      /etc/rc.d/syslogd
      /etc/rc.d/virecover
      /etc/rc.d/motd
      /usr/local/etc/rc.d/redis
      /usr/local/etc/rc.d/postfix
      /usr/local/etc/rc.d/php-fpm
      /usr/local/etc/rc.d/mysql-server
      /usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache24
      /etc/rc.d/cron
      
      root@nextcloud:/ # /var/log/nextcloud/nextcloud.log
      /var/log/nextcloud/nextcloud.log: Permission denied.
      
      root@nextcloud:/ # /var/log/httpd-error.log
      /var/log/httpd-error.log: Permission denied.
      
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      1. samuel.dowling says:
        
        March 26, 2019 at 2:24 pm
        
        Hi David, can you be more explicit about what you mean by “can no longer access my nextcloud”? What’s the nature of your inability to access; authentication? Can’t get the the web ui? You can’t see any files? What are the symptoms.
        
        Looking through the logs are what you want to do, so good start there. The problem is you’ve just specified a directory without an application, which is why you’re getting Permission denied.. Change you commands to:
        
        root@nextcloud:/ # nano /var/log/nextcloud/nextcloud.log root@nextcloud:/ # nano /var/log/httpd-error.log
        
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David says:

March 26, 2019 at 2:46 pm

Sorry for not being specific. i’m not able to access the web ui ether by the HTTPS site or by typing in the Jail IP address.

thank you for clarifying nano. I was able to pull up both logs but the first one “nextcloud.log” was blank. however this is what the “httpd-error.log” is showing:

[Sat Mar 23 11:20:15.625039 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 57360] AH00163: Apache/2.4.38 (FreeBSD) configured — resuming normal operati$
[Sat Mar 23 11:20:15.625240 2019] [core:notice] [pid 57360] AH00094: Command line: ‘/usr/local/sbin/httpd -D NOHTTPACCEPT’
[Sat Mar 23 11:32:49.986022 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 57360] AH00171: Graceful restart requested, doing restart
AH00558: httpd: Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1. Set the ‘ServerName’ directive gl$
[Sat Mar 23 11:32:49.988657 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 57360] AH00163: Apache/2.4.38 (FreeBSD) configured — resuming normal operati$
[Sat Mar 23 11:32:49.988664 2019] [core:notice] [pid 57360] AH00094: Command line: ‘/usr/local/sbin/httpd -D NOHTTPACCEPT’
[Sat Mar 23 11:40:21.506731 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 57360] AH00169: caught SIGTERM, shutting down
[Sat Mar 23 11:40:21.568723 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 58895] AH00163: Apache/2.4.38 (FreeBSD) configured — resuming normal operati$
[Sat Mar 23 11:40:21.568923 2019] [core:notice] [pid 58895] AH00094: Command line: ‘/usr/local/sbin/httpd -D NOHTTPACCEPT’
[Sat Mar 23 11:40:59.954695 2019] [proxy_fcgi:error] [pid 58896] [client 10.0.0.12:63840] AH01071: Got error ‘Primary script unknown\n’
[Sat Mar 23 11:41:11.834753 2019] [proxy_fcgi:error] [pid 58897] [client 10.0.0.12:63839] AH01071: Got error ‘Primary script unknown\n’
[Sat Mar 23 11:46:16.582755 2019] [proxy_fcgi:error] [pid 58920] [client 185.235.245.21:33644] AH01071: Got error ‘Primary script unknown$
[Sat Mar 23 11:54:12.727978 2019] [proxy_fcgi:error] [pid 58921] [client 213.81.189.88:39175] AH01071: Got error ‘Primary script unknown\$
[Sat Mar 23 11:56:20.608675 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 58895] AH00169: caught SIGTERM, shutting down
[Sat Mar 23 11:56:20.670193 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 60338] AH00163: Apache/2.4.38 (FreeBSD) configured — resuming normal operati$
[Sat Mar 23 11:56:20.670376 2019] [core:notice] [pid 60338] AH00094: Command line: ‘/usr/local/sbin/httpd -D NOHTTPACCEPT’
[Sat Mar 23 12:02:33.831677 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 60338] AH00169: caught SIGTERM, shutting down
[Sat Mar 23 12:02:33.892662 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 60731] AH00163: Apache/2.4.38 (FreeBSD) configured — resuming normal operati$
[Sat Mar 23 12:02:33.892865 2019] [core:notice] [pid 60731] AH00094: Command line: ‘/usr/local/sbin/httpd -D NOHTTPACCEPT’
[Sat Mar 23 12:10:06.097636 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 60731] AH00169: caught SIGTERM, shutting down
[Sat Mar 23 12:10:06.157707 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 60949] AH00163: Apache/2.4.38 (FreeBSD) configured — resuming normal operati$
[Sat Mar 23 12:10:06.157909 2019] [core:notice] [pid 60949] AH00094: Command line: ‘/usr/local/sbin/httpd -D NOHTTPACCEPT’
[Sat Mar 23 13:50:12.089278 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 60949] AH00169: caught SIGTERM, shutting down
[Sat Mar 23 13:50:12.156588 2019] [ssl:warn] [pid 65295] AH01882: Init: this version of mod_ssl was compiled against a newer library (Ope$
[Sat Mar 23 13:50:12.165242 2019] [ssl:warn] [pid 65296] AH01882: Init: this version of mod_ssl was compiled against a newer library (Ope$
[Sat Mar 23 13:50:12.165294 2019] [ssl:warn] [pid 65296] AH01873: Init: Session Cache is not configured [hint: SSLSessionCache]
[Sat Mar 23 13:50:12.167213 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 65296] AH00163: Apache/2.4.38 (FreeBSD) OpenSSL/1.0.2k-freebsd configured — $
[Sat Mar 23 13:50:12.167237 2019] [core:notice] [pid 65296] AH00094: Command line: ‘/usr/local/sbin/httpd -D NOHTTPACCEPT’
[Sat Mar 23 13:53:19.511197 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 65296] AH00169: caught SIGTERM, shutting down
[Sat Mar 23 13:53:19.579399 2019] [ssl:warn] [pid 65389] AH01882: Init: this version of mod_ssl was compiled against a newer library (Ope$
[Sat Mar 23 13:53:19.588815 2019] [ssl:warn] [pid 65390] AH01882: Init: this version of mod_ssl was compiled against a newer library (Ope$
[Sat Mar 23 13:53:19.590617 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 65390] AH00163: Apache/2.4.38 (FreeBSD) OpenSSL/1.0.2k-freebsd configured — $
[Sat Mar 23 13:53:19.590639 2019] [core:notice] [pid 65390] AH00094: Command line: ‘/usr/local/sbin/httpd -D NOHTTPACCEPT’
[Sat Mar 23 13:58:59.548214 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 65390] AH00169: caught SIGTERM, shutting down
[Sun Mar 24 12:07:24.685236 2019] [ssl:warn] [pid 53014] AH01882: Init: this version of mod_ssl was compiled against a newer library (Ope$
[Sun Mar 24 12:07:24.699021 2019] [ssl:warn] [pid 53015] AH01882: Init: this version of mod_ssl was compiled against a newer library (Ope$
[Sun Mar 24 12:07:24.700922 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 53015] AH00163: Apache/2.4.38 (FreeBSD) OpenSSL/1.0.2k-freebsd configured — $
[Sun Mar 24 12:07:24.700953 2019] [core:notice] [pid 53015] AH00094: Command line: ‘/usr/local/sbin/httpd -D NOHTTPACCEPT’
[Sun Mar 24 12:11:26.157426 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 53015] AH00169: caught SIGTERM, shutting down
[Sun Mar 24 12:13:24.488585 2019] [ssl:warn] [pid 3395] AH01882: Init: this version of mod_ssl was compiled against a newer library (Open$
[Sun Mar 24 12:13:24.498179 2019] [ssl:warn] [pid 3396] AH01882: Init: this version of mod_ssl was compiled against a newer library (Open$
[Sun Mar 24 12:13:24.499759 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 3396] AH00163: Apache/2.4.38 (FreeBSD) OpenSSL/1.0.2k-freebsd configured — r$
[Sun Mar 24 12:13:24.499796 2019] [core:notice] [pid 3396] AH00094: Command line: ‘/usr/local/sbin/httpd -D NOHTTPACCEPT’
[Sun Mar 24 12:22:26.381658 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 3396] AH00169: caught SIGTERM, shutting down
[Sun Mar 24 12:22:31.549252 2019] [ssl:warn] [pid 9808] AH01882: Init: this version of mod_ssl was compiled against a newer library (Open$
[Sun Mar 24 12:22:31.558508 2019] [ssl:warn] [pid 9809] AH01882: Init: this version of mod_ssl was compiled against a newer library (Open$
[Sun Mar 24 12:22:31.560092 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 9809] AH00163: Apache/2.4.38 (FreeBSD) OpenSSL/1.0.2k-freebsd configured — r$
[Sun Mar 24 12:22:31.560133 2019] [core:notice] [pid 9809] AH00094: Command line: ‘/usr/local/sbin/httpd -D NOHTTPACCEPT’

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  March 26, 2019 at 8:34 pm
  
  What’s the error message you get when you go to the browser? Internal Server error? Too many redirects? Could not find the web page? Nothing much in the logs is standing out to me – SIGTERM indicates that apache is crashing/restarting but the last log is March 24; 2 days ago. You could try increasing the log verbosity to see if anything extra falls out.
  
  My suggestion would be to visit the #nextcloud channel in IRC though, some of those guys are likely to be better positioned to help, I can’t see much going on at this point. Can you ping your jail ip from outside? Can you ping your router from the jail? Can you ping google?
  
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  1. David says:
    
    March 26, 2019 at 10:04 pm
    
    March 24 was the last day it worked for me. the error i get when i try to pull up the web page with the IP or the HTTPS is:
    
    This site can’t be reached 10.0.0.15 took too long to respond.
    Try:
    
    Checking the connection
    Checking the proxy and the firewall
    Running Windows Network Diagnostics
    ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT
    
    When i try to ping the IP address it says the following which is pretty confusing. its like it can ping it, but it pulls a different IP address. here is what the ping shows:
    
    C:\Users\David>ping 10.0.0.15
    
    Pinging 10.0.0.15 with 32 bytes of data:
    Reply from 10.0.0.12: Destination host unreachable.
    Reply from 10.0.0.12: Destination host unreachable.
    Reply from 10.0.0.12: Destination host unreachable.
    Reply from 10.0.0.12: Destination host unreachable.
    
    Ping statistics for 10.0.0.15:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
    
    how would i go about increasing the log verbosity to see if anything extra falls out?
    
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    1. samuel.dowling says:
      
      March 26, 2019 at 10:33 pm
      
      This looks like it’s a problem with the networking for the jail, not something specific to nextcloud. Try pinging your router and computer from inside the jail to confirm. I’m guessing that 10.0.0.12 is your router? I think this message means that there’s no route from your router to the jail – strange. I’m not sure how to fix this to be honest; the Freenas forums or #freenas on IRC are your best bets.
      
      Not that you’ll need it now, but iirc the log verbosity can be changed in php.ini for php related error messages, and httpd.conf for apache related messages.
      
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      1. David says:
        
        March 27, 2019 at 2:37 am
        
        that is so strange. you are right, i’m not able to ping out of the Jail. i will need to figure this one out. Thank you so much again for your help.
        
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martin says:

March 26, 2019 at 7:19 pm

Hey, I have tried to follow your instruction to the point and sadly I ran into any number of issues
1. Order of creating virtual folders + wont work at the early stage you suggested since nextcloud dont exists yet
2. Ran into the same issues of not being able to connect to the nextcloud interface once entering the initial details
( browser throws unreachable…. same as others brought forward)
(Somehow I managed to find a workaround, but forgot what I did atm 🙁 )
3. Biggest headache I had was when installing php71-pecl-redis & php71-pecl-APCu
Installing these packages blew away my entire nextcloud installation *i.e nextcloud itself
Only thing remaining what the config and .htaccess
* I think I understand whats happening, but a bit of warning would have been nice.
— what happened: 1. I initially opted for php72 and without really thinking I applied 71 resulting in that the entire nextcloud blew away.
I managed to recover by taking a copy of the config and .htaccess and then reinstalling nextcloud as per your earlier instruction. – That brought nc back but with lost *in particular .htaccess
So reapplied my backup and everything was back.

Now stuck on the email sendout using chkaide.sh. It wont work under nc, but do work under root.
Nothing mentioned who/what should run this so wonder if its meant to be a scheduled job under nc or under root?
The test “echo “Test Email Contents” | mail -s “Postfix Test Email “xxx@domain.com” dont send out anything under nc *log keep complaining about “Domain of sender address root@nextcloud.localdomain does not exist”
Doing the same thing ssh into root and it works, but the shell script still wont work under root

Still trying to work out bigint issues and “/.well-known/caldav” reported in nc – struggling with that
Doco points to oc command and that throws “not found”

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  March 26, 2019 at 8:26 pm
  Hi Martin,
  
  Everything is to be run as root. When you log in via jexec <JID> tcsh, you’re automatically logged in as the root user, so I’m not sure what you’re doing but you should follow the guide exactly to make sure it works. With regards to the chkaide.sh script, what is the error you get? What do you mean when you say it “won’t work”?
  
  As far as the big int issues, you run the command as specified in the error message, or more verbosely:
```
su -m www -c ‘php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode –on’
su -m www -c ‘php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ db:convert-filecache-bigint’
su -m www -c ‘php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode –off’
```
  The caldav issue is due to apache not using the .htaccess file provided by nextcloud; go back to the section in the guide addressing enabling .htaccess and make sure all the settings are as specified.
  
  Also, if the occ executable isn’t in your nextcloud directory, i.e. at /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ, then it sounds like your installation may be broken. If this is the case, I’d suggest starting again.
  Cheers.
  
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  1. martin says:
    
    March 27, 2019 at 12:23 am
    
    thanks for the bigint update = will try that later
    
    As for the mail sendout…
    1. followed all your instructions within the jail jexec where folder and script got created – Just assumed that would be 100% tied to nextcloud without risking interfering with existing stuff
    So effectively the script and location is within the nc containter
    When I tried to run the echo test and script this is thrown
    Mar 26 13:13:05 nextcloud postfix/postfix-script[94794]: starting the Postfix mail system
    Mar 26 13:13:05 nextcloud postfix/master[94796]: daemon started — version 3.3.3, configuration /usr/local/etc/postfix
    Mar 26 13:17:12 nextcloud postfix/pickup[94797]: 9CBF325B35: uid=0 from=
    Mar 26 13:17:12 nextcloud postfix/cleanup[95248]: 9CBF325B35: message-id=20190326051712.9CBF325B35@nextcloud.localdomain
    Mar 26 13:17:12 nextcloud postfix/qmgr[94798]: 9CBF325B35: from=root@nextcloud.localdomain, size=46479, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
    Mar 26 13:17:12 nextcloud postfix/smtp[95250]: warning: database /usr/local/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd.db is older than source file /usr/local/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
    Mar 26 13:17:12 nextcloud postfix/smtp[95250]: 9CBF325B35: to=redacted, relay=smtp.iinet.net.au[203.0.178.192]:587, delay=0.17, delays=0.03/0.03/0.09/0.02, dsn=5.0.0, status=bounced (host smtp.iinet.net.au[203.0.178.192] said: 553 #5.1.8 Domain of sender address root@nextcloud.localdomain does not exist (in reply to MAIL FROM command))
    Mar 26 13:17:12 nextcloud postfix/cleanup[95248]: C7F1425B37: message-id=20190326051712.C7F1425B37@nextcloud.localdomain
    Mar 26 13:17:12 nextcloud postfix/bounce[95252]: 9CBF325B35: sender non-delivery notification: C7F1425B37
    Mar 26 13:17:12 nextcloud postfix/qmgr[94798]: C7F1425B37: from=<>, size=48651, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
    Mar 26 13:17:12 nextcloud postfix/qmgr[94798]: 9CBF325B35: removed
    
    I tried to run it as root outside the jail and the echo command worked fine, but the script obviously required me to qualify inside the nc container – but if, like you suggested this should reside at a root level, then I guess it makes sense – script and folder creations should in effect be /scripts/aide/ vs /mnt/JailSSD/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/scripts/aide/
    Does the same apply for aide installation or… ? Installed aide within the nc jail
    
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  2. martin says:
    
    March 27, 2019 at 12:53 am
    
    Just posted a reply to this but now its gone???
    Anyways…
    thanks for the hints on sorting the db issues.
    As for the error thrown when running the script, this is what thrown back when issuing the echo and running the script within the nc container
    
    It works on a root level, but the script wont resolve anything
    cloud postfix/postfix-script[94794]: starting the Postfix mail system
    Mar 26 13:13:05 nextcloud postfix/master[94796]: daemon started — version 3.3.3, configuration /usr/local/etc/postfix
    Mar 26 13:17:12 nextcloud postfix/pickup[94797]: 9CBF325B35: uid=0 from=
    Mar 26 13:17:12 nextcloud postfix/cleanup[95248]: 9CBF325B35: message-id=20190326051712.9CBF325B35@nextcloud.localdomain
    Mar 26 13:17:12 nextcloud postfix/qmgr[94798]: 9CBF325B35: from=root@nextcloud.localdomain, size=46479, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
    Mar 26 13:17:12 nextcloud postfix/smtp[95250]: warning: database /usr/local/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd.db is older than source file /usr/local/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
    Mar 26 13:17:12 nextcloud postfix/smtp[95250]: 9CBF325B35: to=<[edited]@[edited].com>, relay=smtp.[edited][x.x.x.x]:587, delay=0.17, delays=0.03/0.03/0.09/0.02, dsn=5.0.0, status=bounced (host smtp.[edited].[edited][xxx.x.x.xxx] said: 553 #5.1.8 Domain of sender address root@nextcloud.localdomain does not exist (in reply to MAIL FROM command))
    Mar 26 13:17:12 nextcloud postfix/cleanup[95248]: C7F1425B37: message-id=20190326051712.C7F1425B37@nextcloud.localdomain
    Mar 26 13:17:12 nextcloud postfix/bounce[95252]: 9CBF325B35: sender non-delivery notification: C7F1425B37
    Mar 26 13:17:12 nextcloud postfix/qmgr[94798]: C7F1425B37: from=<>, size=48651, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
    Mar 26 13:17:12 nextcloud postfix/qmgr[94798]: 9CBF325B35: removed
    
    As per most recent reply, tried to move the script out of the nc container into root level *same directory structure) but that throws this….
    root@freenas[/scripts/aide]# /bin/sh /scripts/aide/chkaide.sh
    /scripts/aide/chkaide.sh: /usr/local/bin/aide: not found
    /scripts/aide/chkaide.sh: /usr/local/bin/aide: not found
    mv: rename /var/db/aide/databases/aide.db to /var/db/aide/databases/archive/aide-2019-03-26.db: No such file or directory
    mv: rename /var/db/aide/databases/aide.db.new to /var/db/aide/databases/aide.db: No such file or directory
    root@freenas[/scripts/aide]#
    
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    1. samuel.dowling says:
      
      March 27, 2019 at 9:42 am
      
      Okay, to clarify, everything I describe runs as root within the nextcloud jail. aide is installed within the jail, checkaide.sh is at /scripts/aide within the jail (so absolute path is /mnt/JailSSD/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/scripts/aide/ – but you should not be using this; at no point do I indicate that you should leave the jail). The postfix configuration is undertaken within the nextcloud jail. The issue you’re getting at the end there is that aide is not installed on the freenas host; which makes sense because that’s not where it should be installed.
      
      Did you configure postfix to use a gmail account?
      
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      1. Martin says:
        
        March 27, 2019 at 10:30 am
        
        Installing inside the nc container (jail) is exactly what I did, but like I said the “echo…” test and script throws errors in the log pointing to “root@nextcloud.localdomain does not exist ”
        The script runs, but wont send out the email.
        
        qmail or not…? No, I did not use qmail – thought I would be able to use my own private mail and provider (which still works performing the “echo…” test outside the jail (root), but again throws the “root@nextcloud.localdomain does not exist ” when running it inside the nc jail.
        
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      2. samuel.dowling says:
        
        March 27, 2019 at 11:25 am
        
        You probably can use another email provider, but there is likely different configuration required to what I’ve presented. It looks like FreeNAS uses sendmail, so if you set your email up through the GUI it either uses that or their own implementation, which is also possible, and neither of these are postfix like I use in my guide. My advice would be to set up a gmail account specifically for server based notifications, and use that. Or don’t, but I’m afraid I don’t know enough about configuring MTA’s to help you get that working sorry.
        
        If you do want to go down the rabbit hole and work out how to configure this for your provider, this is where I would start.
        
        Good luck!
        
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martin says:

March 27, 2019 at 12:43 am

Just moved the script out of the nc container same directory structure, but @ root level
output:
root@freenas[/scripts/aide]# /bin/sh /scripts/aide/chkaide.sh
/scripts/aide/chkaide.sh: /usr/local/bin/aide: not found
/scripts/aide/chkaide.sh: /usr/local/bin/aide: not found
mv: rename /var/db/aide/databases/aide.db to /var/db/aide/databases/archive/aide-2019-03-26.db: No such file or directory
mv: rename /var/db/aide/databases/aide.db.new to /var/db/aide/databases/aide.db: No such file or directory
root@freenas[/scripts/aide]#

BTW. sent some stuff across in my previous reply pointing out my email to the world – anyway to edit posts or…?

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1. Martin says:
  
  March 27, 2019 at 7:34 pm
  
  Reinstalled everything and keep running into issues with mariadb – service refuse to start up now.
  Blown away the jail to start from scratch, but issue persist.
  Right now I decided to blow the jail away and apply my most recent config that dont include nextcloud – started the installation process and same issue
  Just refuse to start and Im buggered if I can figure out why.
  maria error log show…
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] InnoDB: The first innodb_system data file ‘ibdata1’ did not exist. A new tablespace will be created!
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] InnoDB: Mutexes and rw_locks use GCC atomic builtins
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] InnoDB: Uses event mutexes
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] InnoDB: Compressed tables use zlib 1.2.11
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] InnoDB: Number of pools: 1
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] InnoDB: Using generic crc32 instructions
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] InnoDB: Initializing buffer pool, total size = 128M, instances = 1, chunk size = 128M
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] InnoDB: Completed initialization of buffer pool
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] InnoDB: Setting file ‘./ibdata1’ size to 12 MB. Physically writing the file full; Please wait …
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] InnoDB: File ‘./ibdata1’ size is now 12 MB.
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] InnoDB: Setting log file ./ib_logfile101 size to 50331648 bytes
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] InnoDB: Setting log file ./ib_logfile1 size to 50331648 bytes
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] InnoDB: Renaming log file ./ib_logfile101 to ./ib_logfile0
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] InnoDB: New log files created, LSN=45786
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] InnoDB: Doublewrite buffer not found: creating new
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] InnoDB: Doublewrite buffer created
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] InnoDB: 128 out of 128 rollback segments are active.
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] InnoDB: Creating foreign key constraint system tables.
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] InnoDB: Creating tablespace and datafile system tables.
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] InnoDB: Creating sys_virtual system tables.
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] InnoDB: Creating shared tablespace for temporary tables
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] InnoDB: Setting file ‘./ibtmp1’ size to 12 MB. Physically writing the file full; Please wait …
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] InnoDB: File ‘./ibtmp1’ size is now 12 MB.
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] InnoDB: Waiting for purge to start
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] InnoDB: 10.3.13 started; log sequence number 0; transaction id 7
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] Plugin ‘FEEDBACK’ is disabled.
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [ERROR] Could not open mysql.plugin table. Some plugins may be not loaded
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [ERROR] Can’t open and lock privilege tables: Table ‘mysql.servers’ doesn’t exist
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [Note] Server socket created on IP: ‘::’.
  2019-03-27 17:22:14 0 [ERROR] Fatal error: Can’t open and lock privilege tables: Table ‘mysql.user’ doesn’t exist
  
  Any assistance sorting this would be highly appreciated – its driving me nuts atm – failing this I will blow the entire nas away and start again – something I dont want 🙁
  
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  1. samuel.dowling says:
    
    March 27, 2019 at 7:51 pm
    
    Are you deleting your datasets and re-creating them when starting again? If not, your db files will be persistent and are probably interfering with the set up of the new database. Until you have something worth restoring, it’s probably best to nuke the datasets you mount into the jail with fstab to get a clean start. I.e: /mnt/vault/cloud, /mnt/jailhouse/apps/nextcloud/db, /mnt/jailhouse/apps/nextcloud/config, /mnt/jailhouse/apps/nextcloud/themes. After you do have something worth restoring, you would have to go through the restoration process: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/14/admin_manual/maintenance/restore.html
    
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    1. martin says:
      
      March 27, 2019 at 10:53 pm
      
      hm, yes, I’ve nuked everything except the directories vault/ (keeping predefined cloud)* jailhouse/apps/nextcloud/* (keeping existing directories *config, themes & db)
      All directories 100% cleaned up – yet service refuse to start
      Tried this like 5 times now, and finally resorted to reverted to a clean config – but same issue persist
      No idea whats going on here – In effect theres nothing left tied to nextcloud jail (starting to think theres something outside affecting this now *but no idea why and have followed these instruction to the letter (over and over again 🙁 )
      
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      1. samuel.dowling says:
        
        March 27, 2019 at 10:58 pm
        
        Im confused, are you saying you have or havent deleted the db dataset? If you havent, you should
        
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      2. Martin says:
        
        March 27, 2019 at 11:06 pm
        
        Just decided to take u up on the idea of nuking everything *including the apps/config, db and themes.
        No issues deleting the config and themes pool – BUT the db throws “ERROR deleting dataset”
        hm… something is hogging this directory causing issues *like initial post describing my issues starting mariadb
        This error using the web interface dont give me anything but the “Error deleting dataset”
        Moving up one level trying to do the same with the nextcloud pool results in the same error
        Owner of the apps/nextcloud is root
        weirdly enough the owner of the db was “user” = tried to change that to root, but still cant delete either pools
        
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martin says:

March 27, 2019 at 11:10 pm

I have * and I did!!!! I left the folders though – now managed to delete the entire apps/nextcloud structure and will try to re-create everything from scratch again – hopefully it sorts itself

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1. Martin says:
  
  March 27, 2019 at 11:57 pm
  
  once I removed the pools and started again it seem to work *as far as starting the maria service * – trust the rest would work out
  
  A bit weird that pools empty ones would cause issues, but who knows …. I sure tell tale of something driving someone up the wall throwing things – weird
  
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  1. samuel.dowling says:
    
    March 28, 2019 at 6:20 am
    
    As mentioned earlier, they werent empty. They contain the files necessary to restore an existing nextcloud installation. Deleting them meant you could start fresh
    
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  2. martin says:
    
    March 28, 2019 at 9:43 pm
    
    Ok, Finally back on track – experienced the same issue with redirect issue once entered the cloud initial setup
    Work around was to: su -m www -c “php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ app:enable twofactor_backupcodes”
    That fixed the issue and I could proceed with setting things up inside nc
    
    Another really weird issue I came across is the fstab frequently dropping all its definition
    * Actually what happens is that the fstab gets corrupt where previous definitions ends up in a long string that wont be recognized by the system start
    Common thing seem to be when you add nested folders and/or decide to edit a mount point – Had this happening like 10 times now where I had to re-create most mount points.
    Usually one or two def still linger where the rest end up in a loooooong string inside the fstab
    * possible a bug
    Simple test:
    1. create a folder inside the jail and create a mount point using iocage
    2a. add another nested folder and point that to a different location and add the mount point
    *Disaster!!!!
    1. create a folder inside the jail and create a mount point using iocage
    2. enter the web interface for the jail and bring up the mount points – then edit one of them by renaming the jail folder
    * Disaster!!!!
    Results in fstab entries being screwed up
    
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Kevdog says:

March 28, 2019 at 11:09 pm

@Martin
I’m glad you got the nextcloud issue resolved. Just a few things — the directory structure under /usr/local/www/nextcloud should always be www:www. Sometimes if you edit files as a different user, your editor will save the file under a different user — for example su will save the files as root:root or root:wheel. You need to make sure if youre having issues the file permissions and ownerships are correct

In terms of the mount point disaster. I can’t say for certain what your issue is. I can only offfer something else you may want to try. I created all my datasets within the FreeNAS gui itself, and not on the command line. By creating all the mount points within the FreeNAS gui and then sharing the selected datasets with the jail as configured through the gui, I never actually had to edit any fstab files. In my limited experience, jails can be kind of tricky to use. Although the iocage fstab commands should always technically “work”, if things are done manually on the command line, they don’t always show up within the freenas gui. I’ve found by doing mounting most of the datasets using the FreeNas gui, the mountpoints seem more robust. I have no explanation why using the GUI is more robust since behind the scenes I believe it is using the same fstab commands, other than it just seems to be more reliable in my experience.

If you are having issues with fstab mount points becoming corrupted, why don’t you try sharing the dataset (or mountpoint) using the GUI rather then using the iocage fstab commands. After you try this, I’m OK if you tell me my idea is full of s**t.

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1. martin says:
  
  March 29, 2019 at 10:10 am
  
  Its actually the gui that is corrupting t he fstab – NOT the iocage command itself.
  
  Still have some issues to sass out though.
  Like putting nc in maintenance mode.
  When I run the command: su -m www -c ‘php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode –on’
  It throws back an error: Too many arguments, expected arguments “command”.
  
  I also struggle with how I could mount pools that in effect should be owned by individual users *accessible from both local file systems and nextcloud.
  Adding a mount point and then map it to a group tied to a user makes it visible to user logged on to nc. But its only READ ONLY access.
  The other way around would be to copy old shared content across to the users container inside nc i.e vault/cloud//files/
  That would make the content fully accessible by the user logged on to nc.
  Problem with this approach is that any content created from within nc ends up with www:www (owner/group) that prevent the user from modifying any of the files from outside nc
  I would also need to create a SMB share to the folder structure vault/cloud//files/
  But permission would be a major issue
  In effect I want a private user shares to be fully manageable by set users from within nc and outside where content created from with nc should have the user and owner (not www:www as it is now)
  
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  1. martin says:
    
    March 29, 2019 at 4:09 pm
    
    Ok, Think I worked the shares out – simply need to enforce the ownership as part of the SMB share creation under the aux (force user = www) – Then I can set the ownership to the user in question with a group of www as part of the pool creation – works! – happy with that – Now both the user using the nc cloud app as well as user switching to their smb share over the local network can work freely with whats there
    
    My next challenge is to secure the nc and change it to use https (not familar with apache when it comes to this – quite simple setting it up on lighttpd that I used in the past – but now theres new challenges with different ways of doing things – never ends does it 😉
    
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Martin says:

March 30, 2019 at 7:35 pm

yea – all hm most actually good
One small issue that screws with my head

When logging on using my public ip i.e https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:port and I want to recover a lost password, no email is sent through to the user.
Doing the same via my local ip works perfectly

Sending a test email as admin from the public gateway works as well

What is going on with that????

User have valid email registered and nothing ends up in a spam folder *dont think the email is being sent at all
Checked the nc logs and nothing indicating any errors or issues

suggestions…?

Sort of become an important feature for users to recover/reset lost passwords using the public gateway

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  March 30, 2019 at 7:39 pm
  
  Sorry mate, looks like you’ve hit a point beyond my expertise. I’d recommend heading over to the Nextcloud forums or #nextcloud in IRC.
  
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  1. Martin says:
    
    March 30, 2019 at 7:44 pm
    
    ok – cheers
    
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Alpha says:

March 31, 2019 at 4:42 am

I have only had to run this installation once and everything works like a charm. It is the best instruction I have read so far in the internet. On everything. Hands down.

Only thing missing is that I now get two notifications:

This instance is missing some recommended PHP modules. For improved performance and better compatibility it is highly recommended to install them.
imagick

Some columns in the database are missing a conversion to big int. Due to the fact that changing column types on big tables could take some time they were not changed automatically. By running ‘occ db:convert-filecache-bigint’ those pending changes could be applied manually. This operation needs to be made while the instance is offline. For further details read the documentation page about this.
filecache.mtime
filecache.storage_mtime

If these could be fixed…I’ll get a whole keg not just a beer 🙂

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  March 31, 2019 at 10:59 am
  Hi Alpha, to resolve the bigint conversion issue, execute the following commands:
```
su -m www -c 'php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode –on'
su -m www -c 'php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ db:convert-filecache-bigint'
su -m www -c 'php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode –off'
```
  To resolve the imagick issue, I’m pretty sure you just install the imagick php package for the php version you chose, i.e. pkg install php72-pecl-imagick, changing php72 for whatever is relevant for you (make sure you’re inside the jail). I’m pretty sure this was the solution when I resolved it for myself; these are things on my backlog to add to the guide when I get time, but I’ve been pretty swamped recently so I just haven’t had a chance.
  
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2. Markus says:
  
  March 31, 2019 at 5:48 pm
  
  Hi together, regarding the imagick issue I suggest to wait for another nextcloud update. Imagick has some security issues and the developers want to remove the hint in the Info page of NC. ->Google
  
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Maxime says:

March 31, 2019 at 8:59 am

Good evening !

Thank you for your post, it’s actually very helpful, can’t find better.

Everything is very well explicated…but…yes there is a but (unfornately just for me I guess).

I try to find a solution by myself but I can’t find anything on the Web, hope you’ll could help me.

So, I followed all your instructions and I cannot reach my NextCloud page by HTTPS on my domain. Everything worked fine in local at the beginning but I can’t even connect to my page locally.

Here is my httpd-error.log :
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.640184 2019] [core:info] [pid 91289] AH00096: removed PID file /var/run/httpd.pid (pid=91289)
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.640234 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 91289] AH00169: caught SIGTERM, shutting down
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.791370 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91550] AH01887: Init: Initializing (virtual) servers for SSL
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.791666 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91550] AH01914: Configuring server subdomain.mydomain.com:443 for SSL protocol
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.791683 2019] [ssl:debug] [pid 91550] ssl_engine_init.c(1748): AH10083: Init: (subdomain.mydomain.com:443) mod_md support is unavailable.
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.791848 2019] [ssl:debug] [pid 91550] ssl_engine_init.c(478): AH01893: Configuring TLS extension handling
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.792007 2019] [ssl:debug] [pid 91550] ssl_util_stapling.c(868): AH01960: OCSP stapling initialized
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.792415 2019] [ssl:debug] [pid 91550] ssl_util_ssl.c(476): AH02412: [subdomain.mydomain.com:443] Cert matches for name ‘subdomain.mydomain.com’ [subject: CN=subdomain.mydomain.com / issuer: CN=Let’s Encrypt Authority X3,O=Let’s Encrypt,C=US / serial: 0323374E984CE4C11536F2B0F3115BCAC378 / notbefore: Mar 30 17:24:12 2019 GMT / notafter: Jun 28 17:24:12 2019 GMT]
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.792435 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91550] AH02568: Certificate and private key subdomain.mydomain.com:443:0 configured from /usr/local/etc/letsencrypt/live/subdomain.mydomain.com/fullchain.pem and /usr/local/etc/letsencrypt/live/subdomain.mydomain.com/privkey.pem
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.792755 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91550] AH01876: mod_ssl/2.4.38 compiled against Server: Apache/2.4.38, Library: OpenSSL/1.0.2o-freebsd
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.812073 2019] [socache_shmcb:debug] [pid 91551] mod_socache_shmcb.c(398): AH00821: shmcb_init allocated 32768 bytes of shared memory
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.812101 2019] [socache_shmcb:debug] [pid 91551] mod_socache_shmcb.c(412): AH00822: for 32680 bytes (32768 including header), recommending 2 subcaches, 10 indexes each
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.812117 2019] [socache_shmcb:debug] [pid 91551] mod_socache_shmcb.c(449): AH00824: shmcb_init_memory choices follow
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.812131 2019] [socache_shmcb:debug] [pid 91551] mod_socache_shmcb.c(451): AH00825: subcache_num = 2
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.812145 2019] [socache_shmcb:debug] [pid 91551] mod_socache_shmcb.c(453): AH00826: subcache_size = 16336
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.812159 2019] [socache_shmcb:debug] [pid 91551] mod_socache_shmcb.c(455): AH00827: subcache_data_offset = 256
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.812173 2019] [socache_shmcb:debug] [pid 91551] mod_socache_shmcb.c(457): AH00828: subcache_data_size = 16080
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.812187 2019] [socache_shmcb:debug] [pid 91551] mod_socache_shmcb.c(459): AH00829: index_num = 10
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.812205 2019] [socache_shmcb:info] [pid 91551] AH00830: Shared memory socache initialised
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.812226 2019] [socache_shmcb:debug] [pid 91551] mod_socache_shmcb.c(398): AH00821: shmcb_init allocated 512000 bytes of shared memory
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.812240 2019] [socache_shmcb:debug] [pid 91551] mod_socache_shmcb.c(412): AH00822: for 511912 bytes (512000 including header), recommending 32 subcaches, 88 indexes each
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.812255 2019] [socache_shmcb:debug] [pid 91551] mod_socache_shmcb.c(449): AH00824: shmcb_init_memory choices follow
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.812269 2019] [socache_shmcb:debug] [pid 91551] mod_socache_shmcb.c(451): AH00825: subcache_num = 32
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.812282 2019] [socache_shmcb:debug] [pid 91551] mod_socache_shmcb.c(453): AH00826: subcache_size = 15992
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.812296 2019] [socache_shmcb:debug] [pid 91551] mod_socache_shmcb.c(455): AH00827: subcache_data_offset = 2128
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.812310 2019] [socache_shmcb:debug] [pid 91551] mod_socache_shmcb.c(457): AH00828: subcache_data_size = 13864
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.812324 2019] [socache_shmcb:debug] [pid 91551] mod_socache_shmcb.c(459): AH00829: index_num = 88
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.812407 2019] [socache_shmcb:info] [pid 91551] AH00830: Shared memory socache initialised
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.812423 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91551] AH01887: Init: Initializing (virtual) servers for SSL
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.812437 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91551] AH01914: Configuring server subdomain.mydomain.com:443 for SSL protocol
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.812452 2019] [ssl:debug] [pid 91551] ssl_engine_init.c(1748): AH10083: Init: (subdomain.mydomain.com:443) mod_md support is unavailable.
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.812633 2019] [ssl:debug] [pid 91551] ssl_engine_init.c(478): AH01893: Configuring TLS extension handling
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.812652 2019] [ssl:debug] [pid 91551] ssl_util_stapling.c(868): AH01960: OCSP stapling initialized
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.813067 2019] [ssl:debug] [pid 91551] ssl_util_ssl.c(476): AH02412: [subdomain.mydomain.com:443] Cert matches for name ‘subdomain.mydomain.com’ [subject: CN=subdomain.mydomain.com / issuer: CN=Let’s Encrypt Authority X3,O=Let’s Encrypt,C=US / serial: 0323374E984CE4C11536F2B0F3115BCAC378 / notbefore: Mar 30 17:24:12 2019 GMT / notafter: Jun 28 17:24:12 2019 GMT]
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.813087 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91551] AH02568: Certificate and private key subdomain.mydomain.com:443:0 configured from /usr/local/etc/letsencrypt/live/subdomain.mydomain.com/fullchain.pem and /usr/local/etc/letsencrypt/live/subdomain.mydomain.com/privkey.pem
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.813413 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91551] AH01876: mod_ssl/2.4.38 compiled against Server: Apache/2.4.38, Library: OpenSSL/1.0.2o-freebsd
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.815156 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91552] proxy_util.c(1925): AH00925: initializing worker proxy:reverse shared
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.815192 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91552] proxy_util.c(1982): AH00927: initializing worker proxy:reverse local
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.815247 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91552] proxy_util.c(2033): AH00931: initialized single connection worker in child 91552 for ()
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.815428 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91553] proxy_util.c(1925): AH00925: initializing worker proxy:reverse shared
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.815458 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91553] proxy_util.c(1982): AH00927: initializing worker proxy:reverse local
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.815507 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91553] proxy_util.c(2033): AH00931: initialized single connection worker in child 91553 for ()
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.815777 2019] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 91551] AH00163: Apache/2.4.38 (FreeBSD) OpenSSL/1.0.2o-freebsd configured — resuming normal operations
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.815807 2019] [mpm_prefork:info] [pid 91551] AH00164: Server built: unknown
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.815849 2019] [core:notice] [pid 91551] AH00094: Command line: ‘/usr/local/sbin/httpd -D NOHTTPACCEPT’
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.815865 2019] [core:debug] [pid 91551] log.c(1568): AH02639: Using SO_REUSEPORT: no (1)
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.815881 2019] [mpm_prefork:debug] [pid 91551] prefork.c(918): AH00165: Accept mutex: flock (default: flock)
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.816043 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91554] proxy_util.c(1925): AH00925: initializing worker proxy:reverse shared
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.816069 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91554] proxy_util.c(1982): AH00927: initializing worker proxy:reverse local
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.816115 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91554] proxy_util.c(2033): AH00931: initialized single connection worker in child 91554 for ()
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.816275 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91555] proxy_util.c(1925): AH00925: initializing worker proxy:reverse shared
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.816301 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91555] proxy_util.c(1982): AH00927: initializing worker proxy:reverse local
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.816348 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91555] proxy_util.c(2033): AH00931: initialized single connection worker in child 91555 for ()
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.816663 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91556] proxy_util.c(1925): AH00925: initializing worker proxy:reverse shared
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.816689 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91556] proxy_util.c(1982): AH00927: initializing worker proxy:reverse local
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.816733 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91556] proxy_util.c(2033): AH00931: initialized single connection worker in child 91556 for ()
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:06.560526 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91552] [client 81.49.167.221:57804] AH01964: Connection to child 0 established (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:06.596909 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91553] [client 81.49.167.221:57805] AH01964: Connection to child 1 established (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:07.006621 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91557] proxy_util.c(1925): AH00925: initializing worker proxy:reverse shared
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:07.006685 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91557] proxy_util.c(1982): AH00927: initializing worker proxy:reverse local
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:07.006737 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91557] proxy_util.c(2033): AH00931: initialized single connection worker in child 91557 for ()
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:08.068583 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91558] proxy_util.c(1925): AH00925: initializing worker proxy:reverse shared
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:08.068642 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91558] proxy_util.c(1982): AH00927: initializing worker proxy:reverse local
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:08.068694 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91558] proxy_util.c(2033): AH00931: initialized single connection worker in child 91558 for ()
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:08.068825 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91559] proxy_util.c(1925): AH00925: initializing worker proxy:reverse shared
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:08.068883 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91559] proxy_util.c(1982): AH00927: initializing worker proxy:reverse local
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:08.068927 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91559] proxy_util.c(2033): AH00931: initialized single connection worker in child 91559 for ()
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:25.501091 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91554] [client 81.49.167.221:57806] AH01964: Connection to child 2 established (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:44.406529 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91555] [client 81.49.167.221:57807] AH01964: Connection to child 3 established (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:45.229783 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91560] proxy_util.c(1925): AH00925: initializing worker proxy:reverse shared
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:45.229842 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91560] proxy_util.c(1982): AH00927: initializing worker proxy:reverse local
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:45.229894 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91560] proxy_util.c(2033): AH00931: initialized single connection worker in child 91560 for ()
[Sat Mar 30 23:44:03.310910 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91556] [client 81.49.167.221:57808] AH01964: Connection to child 4 established (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)
[Sat Mar 30 23:44:03.901537 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91744] proxy_util.c(1925): AH00925: initializing worker proxy:reverse shared
[Sat Mar 30 23:44:03.901611 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91744] proxy_util.c(1982): AH00927: initializing worker proxy:reverse local
[Sat Mar 30 23:44:03.901666 2019] [proxy:debug] [pid 91744] proxy_util.c(2033): AH00931: initialized single connection worker in child 91744 for ()
[Sat Mar 30 23:44:06.587670 2019] [ssl:debug] [pid 91552] ssl_engine_io.c(1370): (70007)The timeout specified has expired: [client 81.49.167.221:57804] AH02007: SSL handshake interrupted by system [Hint: Stop button pressed in browser?!]
[Sat Mar 30 23:44:06.587740 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91552] [client 81.49.167.221:57804] AH01998: Connection closed to child 0 with abortive shutdown (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)
[Sat Mar 30 23:44:06.694884 2019] [ssl:debug] [pid 91553] ssl_engine_io.c(1370): (70007)The timeout specified has expired: [client 81.49.167.221:57805] AH02007: SSL handshake interrupted by system [Hint: Stop button pressed in browser?!]
[Sat Mar 30 23:44:06.694942 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91553] [client 81.49.167.221:57805] AH01998: Connection closed to child 1 with abortive shutdown (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)
[Sat Mar 30 23:44:22.215315 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91557] [client 81.49.167.221:57810] AH01964: Connection to child 5 established (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)
[Sat Mar 30 23:44:25.509141 2019] [ssl:debug] [pid 91554] ssl_engine_io.c(1370): (70007)The timeout specified has expired: [client 81.49.167.221:57806] AH02007: SSL handshake interrupted by system [Hint: Stop button pressed in browser?!]
[Sat Mar 30 23:44:25.509238 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91554] [client 81.49.167.221:57806] AH01998: Connection closed to child 2 with abortive shutdown (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)
[Sat Mar 30 23:44:41.120410 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91558] [client 81.49.167.221:57815] AH01964: Connection to child 6 established (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)
[Sat Mar 30 23:44:44.416981 2019] [ssl:debug] [pid 91555] ssl_engine_io.c(1370): (70007)The timeout specified has expired: [client 81.49.167.221:57807] AH02007: SSL handshake interrupted by system [Hint: Stop button pressed in browser?!]
[Sat Mar 30 23:44:44.417080 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91555] [client 81.49.167.221:57807] AH01998: Connection closed to child 3 with abortive shutdown (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)
[Sat Mar 30 23:45:00.022003 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91559] [client 81.49.167.221:57833] AH01964: Connection to child 7 established (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)
[Sat Mar 30 23:45:03.349918 2019] [ssl:debug] [pid 91556] ssl_engine_io.c(1370): (70007)The timeout specified has expired: [client 81.49.167.221:57808] AH02007: SSL handshake interrupted by system [Hint: Stop button pressed in browser?!]
[Sat Mar 30 23:45:03.349995 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91556] [client 81.49.167.221:57808] AH01998: Connection closed to child 4 with abortive shutdown (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)
[Sat Mar 30 23:45:18.926668 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91560] [client 81.49.167.221:57838] AH01964: Connection to child 8 established (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)
[Sat Mar 30 23:45:22.307392 2019] [ssl:debug] [pid 91557] ssl_engine_io.c(1370): (70007)The timeout specified has expired: [client 81.49.167.221:57810] AH02007: SSL handshake interrupted by system [Hint: Stop button pressed in browser?!]
[Sat Mar 30 23:45:22.307513 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91557] [client 81.49.167.221:57810] AH01998: Connection closed to child 5 with abortive shutdown (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)
[Sat Mar 30 23:45:37.831702 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91744] [client 81.49.167.221:57855] AH01964: Connection to child 9 established (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)
[Sat Mar 30 23:45:41.154260 2019] [ssl:debug] [pid 91558] ssl_engine_io.c(1370): (70007)The timeout specified has expired: [client 81.49.167.221:57815] AH02007: SSL handshake interrupted by system [Hint: Stop button pressed in browser?!]
[Sat Mar 30 23:45:41.154365 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91558] [client 81.49.167.221:57815] AH01998: Connection closed to child 6 with abortive shutdown (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)
[Sat Mar 30 23:45:56.737935 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91552] [client 81.49.167.221:57858] AH01964: Connection to child 0 established (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)
[Sat Mar 30 23:46:00.030865 2019] [ssl:debug] [pid 91559] ssl_engine_io.c(1370): (70007)The timeout specified has expired: [client 81.49.167.221:57833] AH02007: SSL handshake interrupted by system [Hint: Stop button pressed in browser?!]
[Sat Mar 30 23:46:00.030970 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91559] [client 81.49.167.221:57833] AH01998: Connection closed to child 7 with abortive shutdown (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)
[Sat Mar 30 23:46:18.987485 2019] [ssl:debug] [pid 91560] ssl_engine_io.c(1370): (70007)The timeout specified has expired: [client 81.49.167.221:57838] AH02007: SSL handshake interrupted by system [Hint: Stop button pressed in browser?!]
[Sat Mar 30 23:46:18.987583 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91560] [client 81.49.167.221:57838] AH01998: Connection closed to child 8 with abortive shutdown (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)
[Sat Mar 30 23:46:37.834633 2019] [ssl:debug] [pid 91744] ssl_engine_io.c(1370): (70007)The timeout specified has expired: [client 81.49.167.221:57855] AH02007: SSL handshake interrupted by system [Hint: Stop button pressed in browser?!]
[Sat Mar 30 23:46:37.834725 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91744] [client 81.49.167.221:57855] AH01998: Connection closed to child 9 with abortive shutdown (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)
[Sat Mar 30 23:46:41.111877 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91553] [client 81.49.167.221:57862] AH01964: Connection to child 1 established (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)
[Sat Mar 30 23:46:56.856564 2019] [ssl:debug] [pid 91552] ssl_engine_io.c(1370): (70007)The timeout specified has expired: [client 81.49.167.221:57858] AH02007: SSL handshake interrupted by system [Hint: Stop button pressed in browser?!]
[Sat Mar 30 23:46:56.856687 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91552] [client 81.49.167.221:57858] AH01998: Connection closed to child 0 with abortive shutdown (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)
[Sat Mar 30 23:47:00.017634 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91554] [client 81.49.167.221:57864] AH01964: Connection to child 2 established (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)
[Sat Mar 30 23:47:41.194563 2019] [ssl:debug] [pid 91553] ssl_engine_io.c(1370): (70007)The timeout specified has expired: [client 81.49.167.221:57862] AH02007: SSL handshake interrupted by system [Hint: Stop button pressed in browser?!]
[Sat Mar 30 23:47:41.194668 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91553] [client 81.49.167.221:57862] AH01998: Connection closed to child 1 with abortive shutdown (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)
[Sat Mar 30 23:48:00.039653 2019] [ssl:debug] [pid 91554] ssl_engine_io.c(1370): (70007)The timeout specified has expired: [client 81.49.167.221:57864] AH02007: SSL handshake interrupted by system [Hint: Stop button pressed in browser?!]
[Sat Mar 30 23:48:00.039755 2019] [ssl:info] [pid 91554] [client 81.49.167.221:57864] AH01998: Connection closed to child 2 with abortive shutdown (server subdomain.mydomain.com:443)

It seems that my problem is linked to my SSL, I can’t figure how. Let’s Encrypt seems working perfectly.

Hope someone could help me, thank you !

P.S : Sorry for my poor english. Be french and be stuck on this problem for hours don’t help for this 😀

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  April 1, 2019 at 8:53 pm
  Hi Maxime, I’m not sure what’s causing your problem unfortunately, nothing really stands out in your logs aside from perhaps:
```
[Sat Mar 30 23:47:41.194563 2019] [ssl:debug] [pid 91553] ssl_engine_io.c(1370): (70007)The timeout specified has expired: [client 81.49.167.221:57862] AH02007: SSL handshake interrupted by system [Hint: Stop button pressed in browser?!]
```
  or perhaps
```
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.791683 2019] [ssl:debug] [pid 91550] ssl_engine_init.c(1748): AH10083: Init: (subdomain.mydomain.com:443) mod_md support is unavailable.
[Sat Mar 30 23:43:01.791848 2019] [ssl:debug] [pid 91550] 
```
  I’ve never run into either of these issues though so I’m not going to be much help. I’d advise heading over to the #httpd channel on IRC; they’ll be able to help you work through it.
  
  Cheers
  
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  1. Maxime says:
    
    April 5, 2019 at 5:47 pm
    
    Good morning !
    
    I found the solution during this week. It’s not link to NextCloud at all, it was an hairpinning.
    
    If you meet the same problem as me, try to connect to your subdomain.domain.com from Tor or your cellphone in 4G. If it’s working on it but not on your local network, you have an hairpin problem.
    
    To solve this, I had to change my router, hope you will not have to do this.
    
    Thank you very much for your help anyway
    
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thunderboltcutter says:

March 31, 2019 at 12:55 pm

Any ideas on what’s causing this error?

mount_nullfs: /mnt/jailhouse: No such file or directory
jail: /sbin/mount -t nullfs -o rw /mnt/jailhouse/apps/nextcloud/db /mnt/BigDrive1/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/var/db/mysql: failed

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  March 31, 2019 at 1:47 pm
  
  Sure, it doesn’t look like you have a dataset named jailhouse; did you set up your directory structure the same way I described? It looks like you need to replace the instances of jailhouse with BigDrive1
  
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  1. thunderboltcutter12 says:
    
    April 1, 2019 at 12:10 pm
    
    I see the mistake now. I changed jailhouse to BigDrive1 all the way through but a made the mistake of doing the first mount point like the example, so I had 5 mount points instead 4. Everything was working until I installed the last freenas update then it broke. Now I can’t delete the mount point using the GUI. The error I get is “name ‘collections’ is not defined”. It looks like I’m stuck until the next update comes out.
    
    https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/nameerror-name-collections-is-not-defined-after-update.74058/
    
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    1. Kevdog says:
      
      April 2, 2019 at 1:48 am
      
      @Thunderboltcutter12
      Do you have spaces in the names of your directories?
      
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      1. thunderboltcutter says:
        
        April 4, 2019 at 11:04 am
        
        Nope no spaces.
        
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David says:

April 5, 2019 at 4:38 am

Good afternoon,

I can use some help with my current problem with this install. I have eavrything working great and all is well except when i try to up load a file that is 35 gigabytes nextcloud. i have tried uploading via a WebDAV mapped drive and the web interface but it keeps telling me that the file is too large. the steps i took to resolve this is to update the $ nano /usr/local/etc/php.ini and change the size values below to 50G

post_max_size = 50G
upload_max_filesize = 50G

then i restart Apache and php-fpm

$ service php-fpm restart
$ service apache24 restart

but it still will not take the 35 gb file. any advice on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  April 5, 2019 at 2:02 pm
  
  David, I suspect that because we enabled the use of .htaccess files, the default values in the nextcloud .htaccess is overriding what’s in php.ini. Try opening /usr/local/www/nextcloud/.htaccess and adjust the same parameters you need to here, reload the server and see if there are any changes. I also remember reading somewhere that changes may take up to 5 mins to propagate.
  
  Cheers
  
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  1. David says:
    
    April 5, 2019 at 10:37 pm
    
    Thank you Samual for info on the .htaccess file. i did the changes you suggested reset the server and waiting 10 min but it still is not letting me upload large files. can you take a look at the file below and see if there is anythign else i can cange on it that would posably make this work? Does it have anything to do with the Memory_limit 512M?
    
    Let browsers cache WOFF files for a week
    
    Header set Cache-Control “max-age=604800”
    
    php_value upload_max_filesize 50G
    php_value post_max_size 50G
    php_value memory_limit 512M
    php_value mbstring.func_overload 0
    php_value always_populate_raw_post_data -1
    php_value default_charset ‘UTF-8’
    php_value output_buffering 0
    
    SetEnv htaccessWorking true
    
    php_value upload_max_filesize 50G
    php_value post_max_size 50G
    php_value memory_limit 512M
    php_value mbstring.func_overload 0
    php_value default_charset ‘UTF-8’
    php_value output_buffering 0
    
    SetEnv htaccessWorking true
    
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Thomas says:

April 11, 2019 at 4:33 am

Hello Samuel,
This is by far the best Guide to install Nextcloud on freenas.

Actually everything worked very well until the end.

But after the login on the GUI I get a forwarding error.

The GUI redirects me to http://www.mydomain.com/Apps/files/ and I get the error message of the redirection error.

What could be the reason?

Thomas

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  April 11, 2019 at 2:08 pm
  Thomas, can you post the contents of your config.php file? I suspect it’s missing the appropriate apps-pkg redirects. Explicitly, make sure it contains this at the top:
```
 'apps_paths' =>
  array (
    0 =>
    array (
      'path' => '/usr/local/www/nextcloud/apps',
      'url' => '/apps',
      'writable' => true,
    ),
    1 =>
    array (
      'path' => '/usr/local/www/nextcloud/apps-pkg',
      'url' => '/apps-pkg',
      'writable' => false,
    ),
  ),
```
  This should go BELOW
```
<?php
 $CONFIG = array (
```
  and ABOVE
```
‘instanceid’ => ‘redacted’,
```
  Also, can you share the details of your installation method? I.e., did you install from the quarterly or latest branch? Did you install nextcloud-php71, nextcloud-php72, or nextcloud-php73? Any other information that would describe some of the choices you made when installing would also be appreciated.
  
  Cheers
  
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  Reply
  1. Thomas says:
    
    April 12, 2019 at 2:27 am
    
    Hi Samuel,
    at first, thanks for your help.
    I’ve installed nextcloud-php71-
    
    I’ve forget to paste the following part in config.php.
    ‘apps_paths’ =>
    array (
    0 =>
    array (
    ‘path’ => ‘/usr/local/www/nextcloud/apps’,
    ‘url’ => ‘/apps’,
    ‘writable’ => true,
    ),
    1 =>
    array (
    ‘path’ => ‘/usr/local/www/nextcloud/apps-pkg’,
    ‘url’ => ‘/apps-pkg’,
    ‘writable’ => false,
    ),
    
    After I’ve added this I get an “Internal Server Error” Message from my Nextcloud GUI.
    No Login possible anymore.
    
    Here is my config.php:
    I’ve removed the passwords and domain.
    
    <?php
    $CONFIG = array (
    ‘apps_paths’ =>
    array (
    0 =>
    array (
    ‘path’ => ‘/usr/local/www/nextcloud/apps’,
    ‘url’ => ‘/apps’,
    ‘writable’ => true,
    ),
    1 =>
    array (
    ‘path’ => ‘/usr/local/www/nextcloud/apps-pkg’,
    ‘url’ => ‘/apps-pkg’,
    ‘writable’ => false,
    ),
    ),
    ‘logfile’ => ‘/var/log/nextcloud/nextcloud.log’,
    ‘memcache.local’ => ‘\OC\Memcache\APCu’,
    ‘instanceid’ => ‘oc7a4ybhff7f’,
    ‘passwordsalt’ => ‘xxx’,
    ‘secret’ => ‘xxx’,
    ‘trusted_domains’ =>
    array (
    0 => ‘192.168.1.10’,
    1 => ‘mydomain.com’,
    ),
    ‘datadirectory’ => ‘/mnt/data’,
    ‘dbtype’ => ‘mysql’,
    ‘version’ => ‘15.0.5.3’,
    ‘overwrite.cli.url’ => ‘http://192.168.1.10’,
    ‘dbname’ => ‘nextcloud’,
    ‘dbhost’ => ‘localhost:/tmp/mysql.sock’,
    ‘dbport’ => ”,
    ‘dbtableprefix’ => ‘oc_’,
    ‘mysql.utf8mb4’ => true,
    ‘dbuser’ => ‘nextcloud_admin’,
    ‘dbpassword’ => ‘xxx’,
    ‘installed’ => true,
    ‘redis’ =>
    array (
    ‘host’ => ‘/tmp/redis.sock’,
    ‘port’ => 0,
    ),
    ‘memcache.local’ => ‘\OC\Memcache\APCu’,
    ‘memcache.locking’ => ‘\OC\Memcache\Redis’,
    ‘enable_previews’ => false,
    );
    
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    1. samuel.dowling says:
      
      April 12, 2019 at 7:48 pm
      
      Thomas,
      
      That’s progress. I’d suggest looking in the nextcloud log to see if anything stands out. Everything in your config.php file looks okay, though you might have some luck changing the instances of APCu to Redis. The log should indicate if there are any errors with caching though.
      
      Cheers
      
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      Reply
    2. Pyrocumulous says:
      
      February 21, 2020 at 4:26 pm
      
      Hi Thomas,
      Did you ever get this redirecting error figured out? My situation is similar to yours and Garrett’s . I’m trying to install nextcloud 17.0 using nextcloud-php72 on FreeNAS 11.2. I had a completely working installation but then I realized my fstab wasn’t correctly configured (like Garrett’s problem earlier) so I uninstalled apache24 and nextcloud so I could re-install them in the correct location. Everything was going OK and I was able to get through the web configuration again but I haven’t been able to get to the login screen. I added the apps_paths redirects in my config.php file as Samuel suggested but I still get an internal server error. If I don’t include that app_paths section then I can’t load the login page due to redirect errors ( e.g., http://www.mydomain.com/Apps/files/).
      
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      Reply
      1. Pyrocumulous says:
        
        February 23, 2020 at 10:58 am
        
        I think I figured it out, at least for my particular situation. When I specified a static jail IP I had an endless redirect problem. When I specified DHCP for the nextcloud jail and gave it a static IP in pfSense, then it worked.
        
        Thanks, Samuel, for the excellent tutorial!
        
        PS- this might save someone some time too someday. When I followed the fstab steps ($ iocage fstab -a nextcloud /mnt/vault/cloud /mnt/data nullfs rw 0 0) I used tab to auto-complete the source directories. That left a trailing backslash on the source directory (e.g., “/mnt/vault/cloud/”) which seemed to cause issues like what Garrett described around 21 March 2019. When I rebuilt the mounting table without those unintentional trailing slashes then everything worked as expected.
        
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Adrien says:

April 12, 2019 at 4:14 am

Hello,

Many thanks for this tuto that was very helpful!!
I’ve just got one question/problem : with certbot, it appears that if you do a permanent redirect with the http (:80) on the VirtualHost to HTTPS, certbot cannot renew the certificate (“failed authorization procedure” error). Is there a way to let the certificate renew without having to desactivate temporarily SSL?

Thanks again!

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  April 12, 2019 at 7:50 pm
  
  Not to my (limited) knowledge Adrien. This sounds like a good question for the ##letsencrypt IRC channel though. As mentioned in the blog, I renew via DNS so this isn’t a problem that I’ve had to tackle.
  
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Kristopher Baker says:

April 15, 2019 at 7:16 am

Hi, Samuel!

EXCELLENT guide – I found it incredibly helpful!

I’m running into just one small issue that I cannot figure out, despite a couple of hours of trial-and-error and experimenting.

Here’s a quick rundown of my setup:
NextCloud 15
Running on FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE-p9
Duck DNS DynDNS Service with Port Forwarding Working

I have two Apache rules in a configuration file:

ServerName DuckDNS_address
Redirect permanent / https://DuckDNS_address
and

ServerAdmin me@here.com
ServerName server_name

SetHandler “proxy:fcgi://127.0.0.1:9000/”

DirectoryIndex /index.php index.php
DocumentRoot “/usr/local/www/nextcloud”
SSLCertificateFile correct_path
SSLCertificateKeyFile correct_path
SSLEngine on

Header always set Strict-Transport-Security “max-age=15552000; >

When I first start apache, and I use either http://DuckDNS_address or https://DuckDNS_address, it works (always directing to https://DuckDNS_address) from either within my network or from outside of it. However, after about 20 seconds, the UI will no longer resolve from within my network, but it continues to work fine from outside my network.

If I add an additional directive in the CONF file, matching the local IP address of the NextCloud instance (and port 80), I can get it to work internally. However, this causes a problem with mobile devices: I either have to use the local address and not have the instance work outside my network) or the DuckDNS address (and not have the instance work while I’m connected to my local network).

I can reliably reproduce this behavior, but cannot for the life of me figure out what might be failing. I’d be grateful for any help or guidance!

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  April 15, 2019 at 7:55 am
  
  It seems like the issue is that you can only have one specification of server address for your server. The way I dealt with this was to, instead of using the IP address of the external server, use the DNS name. i.e. cloud.ddns.net (or whatever it is). This should resolve correctly when you’re outside of your home network. To make it accessible from within your home network as well, add a DNS Resolver entry to your router (assuming you use pfSense!) such that any internal dns query to cloud.ddns.net returns your servers internal address, i.e. 192.168.0.10. This just means that your router intercepts your DNS request and provides you with the preferred internal IP rather than the external IP.
  
  Hope this helps.
  
  Cheers.
  
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Parrish says:

April 16, 2019 at 2:01 pm

Hi Samuel,

Thank you for putting in the effort to write this excellent guide. I got everything installed and configured but once I got to the Nextcloud setup screen on my browser, entered all the credentials and tried to ‘Finish Setup’ I received a ‘Can’t create or write into the data directory /mnt/data ‘ error. I triple checked the entire setup and can’t find my mistake. I entered the ‘chown -R www:www /usr/local/www/nextcloud /mnt/data’ command to set permissions but I wonder if maybe there is there another directory that needs permissions?

I’d be very grateful for any insights you could provide.

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  April 16, 2019 at 3:15 pm
  
  Hi Parrish, you can list the permissions associated with all directories in mnt by passing the -l flag to ls, i.e: ls -l /mnt/. This should show you all of the rwx permissions for each directory inside /mnt. Ideally, you want /mnt/data to have at least rwx------ permissions (first three listed is owner, second three is group, third three is other), or some variation thereof where either the www user OR the www group has write permission, so rwxrwxr-- or something similar. It’s hard for me to explain how the permissions work in this format, so it might be easier if you just read the documentation on FreeBSD permissions. If the www user doesn’t have rw permissions on the folder, you can use the chmod command to edit these. For your data directory I’d suggest 770 (rwxrwx---) would probably be appropriate (this means that anyone in the www user or group is able to read, write or execute, but users outside of this group can’t read, write or execute anything), so you can execute chmod -R 770 /mnt/data, and this will apply these permissions recursively to all files in the /mnt/data directory.
  
  This shouldn’t have been required if you followed the way I set the datasets up, but if you had existing datasets you wanted to use then its possible you may not have had the correct permissions already on the dataset. If this doesn’t solve your issue, I’d suggest heading to the #freenas, #freebsd or #nextcloud channels in IRC for support, as it won’t be easy for me to help troubleshoot in this format.
  
  Cheers.
  
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Costis says:

April 27, 2019 at 7:04 am

Hello Samuell,

I am following your guide and until now it is working like a charm! I am at the point of configuring the 15Min Cron Job for the www user. You are describing the configuration direct in the shell. Would there be any differences planing the same Cron Job through the FreeNAS-GUI, or even just ticking the dialog-box in the Preferences of the Nextcloud-GUI?

Many regards

Costis

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  April 27, 2019 at 10:22 pm
  
  Hi Costis, I’m not sure! I’ve never set it using either of these methods, but I’d be keen to hear what you find out if you give it a go 🙂 Let me know!
  
  Cheers
  
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  1. Costis says:
    
    May 4, 2019 at 12:22 am
    
    Hi Samuel,
    
    I tried both methods, through the FreeNAS GUI and through Shell (as you describe on this page). In the first case I kept getting the warning from nextcloud, that no cronjob was recorded for over 24Std. With the shell configuration there are no warnings anymore.
    
    Meanwhile Nextcloud ist configured and running with letsencrypt certificate according to your guide (I could skip the Route 53 part), although at the beginning I lost access to nextcloud over the local IP and “cloud.mydomain.com”. It worked after changing port forwarding in the router from 80->80 which, as you said was needed for certbot, to 80->443 for SSL. This I don’t understand completely. I thought the following lines in the cloud.medomain.com.config file should take care of that(?) Am I doing something wrong?
    
    DocumentRoot “/usr/local/www/nextcloud”
    ServerName cloud.mydomain.com
    Redirect permanent / https://cloud.mydomain.com/
    
    …(rest configuration)…
    
    Many Greetings
    
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    1. samuel.dowling says:
      
      May 4, 2019 at 6:30 pm
      
      Hi Costis,
      
      Perhaps I’m not understanding you properly – I don’t talk about a GUI configuration at all, but I’m glad it’s working after configuring it using the shell. With regards to the port forwarding, what I advocate is WAN:80 -> LAN:80 and WAN:443 -> LAN:443, not WAN:80 -> LAN:443. You’re correct, the redirect in the vhost is sufficient to direct the user to an SSL socket, but when your router receives a request for the site over port 443, you need to make sure that the request is directed to the correct host, over port 443 as well.
      
      Hope this helps.
      
      Cheers
      
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Tony D says:

April 30, 2019 at 9:14 am

When I execute the command…

certbot certonly –webroot -w /usr/local/www/nextcloud -d cloud.mydomain.com
.
..I receive the error…

certbot: Command not found.

I am attempting this on Freenas 11.2 with your instructions amended only to use PHP 7.2 instead of 7.1 from the guide. I have removed the certbot package and reinstalled, as well as restarted the entire jail, but I receive the same error when I execute above command. Any help/ideas?

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  April 30, 2019 at 12:20 pm
  Hi Tony,
  
  This means that Certbot isn’t installed. Try running the installation command again: pkg install py27-certbot. Pay special attention to any messages you’re given during the installation process. I just spun up a new jail and confirmed that the package isn’t broken or anything, so all you should have to do is install it and the certbot command should be available.
  
  If this still doesn’t work, run ls -l /usr/local/bin/*certbot*. This should list all installed programs containing ‘certbot’ in the name. Doing this on my system shows:
```
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   11 Apr  3 10:31 /usr/local/bin/certbot -> certbot-2.7
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  393 Apr  3 10:31 /usr/local/bin/certbot-2.7
```
  This means that what pkg install py27-certbot is actually installing is certbot-2.7. It then creates a symbolic link to certbot. Perhaps this symbolic link creation is failing in your installation, so you might be able to try replacing certbot with certbot-2.7, i.e. certbot-2.7 certonly ....
  
  Hope this helps.
  
  Cheers.
  
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  1. Tony D says:
    
    May 1, 2019 at 2:33 am
    
    Thanks so much. That was exactly the problem.
    
    BTW, I was able to use an A name on Cloudflare for DynDNS with the script found here…
    
    https://github.com/jonegerton/cloudflare-ddns/blob/master/cf-ddns.sh
    
    …with the thing to note about the script being that the cfhost entry has to be in the subdomain.domain.com format and not just the entry name. Then add it to crontab with the line…
    
    */5 * * * * bash {set file location here}/cf-ddns.sh >/dev/null 2>&1
    
    …to update every 5 minutes. If there’s no change in public IP (it’s cached), no requests are sent.
    
    Also, I was finally able to get certbot and LetsEncrypt to succeed by manually creating the <.well-known> folder in the webroot (…/www/nextcloud/.well-known) and manually setting the ownership to www:www
    
    Thanks for the help and I hope this extra info helps someone else, if you want to add it to the guide.
    
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  2. Kevin Hilton says:
    
    May 3, 2019 at 5:00 am
    
    Yea certbot is now installed on freebsd versions as certbot-2.7. I suppose there is a certbot-3.5 but I haven’t checked (2.7 refers to python version (2.7 or 3.5 respectively)). I had to create a symbolic link since at least with my install certbot was not linked to certbot-2.7. The question was answered above so I guess I’m late to the game.
    
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    1. samuel.dowling says:
      
      May 3, 2019 at 10:32 am
      
      Strange that you had to do this manually – as I said, I spun up a new jail to test installation of the certbot package and the symbolic link was created automatically. To anybody struggling with this, you can create the symbolic link for python 2.7 with the following command (replace 2.7 with 3.x as required):
      
      ln -s /usr/local/bin/certbot /usr/local/bin/certbot-2.7
      
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Sulayman says:

May 9, 2019 at 3:00 am

Hello i followed your steps with php7.2 and worked perfectly. now i have 2 questions if you are able to help me with.
1. when i open the jail i get you have mail how can i view that mail ?
2. i only have 1 jail in DMZ im able to push publicly how can i have other virtual hosts ? i downloaded wordpress in /www/wp and created wp.domain.com.conf with the same code you have for nextcloud but changed the diricitory but i got “You don’t have permission to access / on this server.”

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  May 9, 2019 at 5:18 pm
  Hi Sulayman,
  1. type mail at the terminal prompt within the jail
  2. My setup doesn’t tell you to put your jail in a DMZ, and in fact suggests that this may be a futile effort to begin with. If you want to use multiple web servers within the same jail, there are a number of ways to achieve this. First is by name or port virtual host entries. Refer to the documentation on how to achieve this. The second (perhaps better?) way to do this would be to set up a reverse proxy. Have a read of the documentation and see how you go. I’ve never done either though, so I’m not an expert on this. I run all of my web servers in separate jails, and my only publicly facing one is nextcloud.
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Mike says:

May 9, 2019 at 5:20 am

Hey everyone, i’ve got all the way to the last part of the install go to the local ip to continue the setup of nextclould but get this not sure where i have gone wrong.
<?php
/**
*
* Your webserver seems to be not configured to use PHP or PHP is not installed.
* Please contact your administrator or follow our documentation:
* https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/13/admin_manual/installation/source_installation.html
*
* @copyright Copyright (c) 2016, ownCloud, Inc.
*
* @author Georg Ehrke oc.list@georgehrke.com
* @author Joas Schilling coding@schilljs.com
* @author JÃ¶rn Friedrich Dreyer jfd@butonic.de
* @author Lukas Reschke lukas@statuscode.ch
* @author Morris Jobke hey@morrisjobke.de
* @author Robin Appelman robin@icewind.nl
* @author Sergio BertolÃn sbertolin@solidgear.es
* @author Thomas MÃŒller thomas.mueller@tmit.eu
* @author Vincent Petry pvince81@owncloud.com
*
* @license AGPL-3.0
*
* This code is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
* it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3,
* as published by the Free Software Foundation.
*
* This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
* but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
* MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
* GNU Affero General Public License for more details.
*
* You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3,
* along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/
*
*/

require_once DIR . ‘/lib/versioncheck.php’;

try {

require_once __DIR__ . '/lib/base.php';
OC::handleRequest();

} catch(\OC\ServiceUnavailableException $ex) {
\OC::$server->getLogger()->logException($ex, array(‘app’ => ‘index’));

//show the user a detailed error page OC_Template::printExceptionErrorPage($ex, 503);

} catch (\OC\HintException $ex) {
try {
OC_Template::printErrorPage($ex->getMessage(), $ex->getHint(), 503);
} catch (Exception $ex2) {
try {
\OC::$server->getLogger()->logException($ex, array(‘app’ => ‘index’));
\OC::$server->getLogger()->logException($ex2, array(‘app’ => ‘index’));
} catch (Throwable $e) {
// no way to log it properly – but to avoid a white page of death we try harder and ignore this one here
}

//show the user a detailed error page OC_Template::printExceptionErrorPage($ex, 500); }

} catch (\OC\User\LoginException $ex) {
OC_Template::printErrorPage($ex->getMessage(), $ex->getMessage(), 403);
} catch (Exception $ex) {
\OC::$server->getLogger()->logException($ex, array(‘app’ => ‘index’));

//show the user a detailed error page OC_Template::printExceptionErrorPage($ex, 500);

} catch (Error $ex) {
try {
\OC::$server->getLogger()->logException($ex, array(‘app’ => ‘index’));
} catch (Error $e) {
http_response_code(500);
header(‘Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8’);
print(“Internal Server Error\n\n”);
print(“The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request.\n”);
print(“Please contact the server administrator if this error reappears multiple times, please include the technical details below in your report.\n”);
print(“More details can be found in the webserver log.\n”);

throw $ex; } OC_Template::printExceptionErrorPage($ex, 500);

}
should i just delete the jail and start again as i’ve retraced my steps everything is running i can get the php info up left me scratching my head a bit

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  May 9, 2019 at 5:23 pm
  
  Hi Mike, I’ve never seen this error before unfortunately. I’d recommend starting again, and if it persists, seek help in #nextcloud or #php channels on IRC. This isn’t an easy forum to help you debug the issues you’re having. One thing you could check is the apache error log, and make sure the config.php file for nextcloud matches what I’ve detailed.
  
  Cheers.
  
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Marthinus says:

May 10, 2019 at 5:03 pm

Has anyone had problems upgrading to Version 16 of nextcloud? I see it’s available, but I am a bit reluctant to take the plunge…

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  May 10, 2019 at 6:57 pm
  
  I haven’t yet, but It’s probably prudent to wait until 16.0.1 is released, .0 versions are risky because the bugs haven’t been discovered and patched yet. Also, I haven’t had great experiences upgrading nextcloud. My last upgrade broke a couple of apps, and getting it working again resulted in an integrity error because the app hashes didn’t match. Proceed with caution!
  
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  1. Marthinus says:
    
    May 10, 2019 at 7:34 pm
    
    Agreed, thank you.
    
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Costis says:

May 11, 2019 at 2:36 am

Hi Martinus,

I installed Version 16 fresh (no upgrade) with Samuel’s guide for 14/15 without problems.

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Phil says:

May 12, 2019 at 4:15 am

Hello Samuel. This has been working great for months. I moved into a new house over the weekend and now have a new internet provider. I have my DNS updated to my new external ip.

My question is how do i go about updating my nextcloud internal ip? Do I use the FreeNas Gui or do I need to SSH?

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  May 12, 2019 at 11:29 am
  Hi Phil,
  
  I’m not sure what you mean by updating the ‘nextcloud internal IP’; Are you talking about the LAN IP of your FreeNAS host or your jail? The jail should have a static IP as per the first steps in the guide when we created it, specifically this command:
```
iocage create -n nextcloud -r 11.2-RELEASE ip4_addr="vnet0|192.168.0.10/24" defaultrouter="192.168.0.1" vnet="on" allow_raw_sockets="1" boot="on"
```
  This would have set the jail to have the IP 192.168.0.10. If you’re talking about your FreeNAS host, then you may need to make a static DHCP entry in your router.
  
  Cheers,
  
  Sam
  
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  1. Phil says:
    
    May 12, 2019 at 12:04 pm
    
    Sam,
    Yes correct. I didn’t explain it well. I’m talking about the the LAN IP of the nextcloud jail itself . I used the command you listed above when I first set everything up so it worked well, but I moved into a new house with a different internet provider so my LAN IP number format changed from 10.0.0.x (Comcast) to 192.168.1.x (WOW). So I wanted to change my Jail IP from the 10.0.0.x format to the 192.168.1.x format if possible.
    
    Hopefully that makes sense.
    
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    1. samuel.dowling says:
      
      May 12, 2019 at 12:53 pm
      
      Phil, as per the iocage documentation, the command you need is:
      
      root@freenas:~ # iocage set ip4_addr="vnet0|192.168.1.10/24" nextcloud
      
      Replace the IP with the IP you wish the jail to have. Also note that this is issued from the FreeNAS host, not inside the jail. I’ve never used this before though, so I hope it works 🙂
      
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Angelo Corbo says:

May 20, 2019 at 12:58 am

Hi Samuel,

An awesome guide. I’m grateful. I’m going through it, and got the point where I found an issue, not with your instructions, but my setup. The /vault/cloud/ share I want to be able to use with NextCloud, seats on a FreeNAS server and it’s mirrored (read only) from a DROBO NAS via Resilio Sync. The files are owned by the rslsync user and group (rslsync:rslsync) which presents a problem, because if I change user and group ownership to www, as your guide suggests, it would effectively break write access to Resilio Sync replication. I haven’t spent too long thinking about a work around,and I was curious as to your approach to such a problem. Regards, Angelo C.

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  May 20, 2019 at 11:08 am
  
  Angelo, it should be fine if you just add the www user to your rslsync group and give the group the same permissions as the user (774 or something). I wouldn’t advise keeping the permissions as read only though, this will probably present issues or significantly diminish the functionality you get out of nextcloud.
  
  Another alternative if you need rslsync to have read only privileges, would be to make www the owning user and group, and just let rslsync be a member of the other group, and give it read only privileges (i.e. www:www 774).
  
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Richard says:

June 6, 2019 at 10:20 pm

Hi Samuel

I got two things:
1. the title UPGRADING is spelled wrong 🙂
2. How can I remove this message:
The database is missing some indexes. Due to the fact that adding indexes on big tables could take some time they were not added automatically. By running “occ db:add-missing-indices” those missing indexes could be added manually while the instance keeps running. Once the indexes are added queries to those tables are usually much faster.
Missing index “twofactor_providers_uid” in table “oc_twofactor_providers”.
Missing index “version” in table “oc_whats_new”.
Missing index “cards_abid” in table “oc_cards”.
Missing index “cards_prop_abid” in table “oc_cards_properties”.

Thanks for your help!

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  June 7, 2019 at 5:47 pm
  Hi Richard,
  
  Thanks for noticing. I’ve updated it accordingly. With respect to the error message you’re getting, you just need to run the command it’s telling you to run as the php user. Namely:
```
su -m www -c 'php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ db:add-missing-indices'
```
  Cheers.
  
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Nic Greene says:

June 9, 2019 at 10:33 am

This is a great tutorial and I have it all working well on my localhost.

However, I do not understand enough to work out the following
To be clear here:

“If your domain is available on the internet, cloud.mydomain.com must resolve to a public IP
If your domain is only available locally, cloud.mydomain.com must resolve to a local IP
OR, it must be a local IP.”

My question is this – where could I find the needed guidance to set up an external domain “example.net” and point it to my nextcloud server. Obviously I want to set up SSL and whatever reverse DNS to accomplish this – but I seem to be missing this piece of the puzzle.

It’s probably obvious, but any help is aprecciated.

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  June 9, 2019 at 1:35 pm
  
  Hi Nic,
  
  To set up an external domain, you’ll first need to buy the domain name. You can do this through any domain registrar, but if you’re interested in following my guide specifically, it might be worth buying it through AWS. Then, you need to configure that domain name to point at your public IP address. With Amazon Web Services, this can be achieved by placing your public IP in an A record for the domain using Route 53. When configuring DDNS in the guide, I do talk about this briefly.
  
  Alternatively, you could use a service such as DynDNS or NoIP which will provide you with a free subdomain (example: nic.noip.com), which you can use to point at your public IP. As discussed in the guide, it’s important that you configure Dynamic DNS, as most ISPs only provide residential users with a temporary, dynamic IP address. A Dynamic DNS (DDNS) service changes the IP address to which it points when the ISP allocated you a new public IP address.
  
  Hope this helps.
  
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  1. nic greene says:
    
    June 10, 2019 at 6:01 am
    
    Samuel,
    
    Thanks very much. I will try that route.
    
    The specific area of the guide that I believe this is very relevant to is the section on Virtualhost and the section on Adding external domain to NC.
    
    If you could let me know which config(s) have data in them relating to those two sections I think I would be able to figure the rest out. Will be using the Amazon solution you go over, have an external domain….
    
    Nic
    
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    1. samuel.dowling says:
      
      June 11, 2019 at 5:43 pm
      
      If you’re using AWS and Route 53, everything you need should be in the DDNS section. Otherwise, you can look for guides on setting up FreeNAS’s DDNS service to update an external DDNS service.
      Cheers
      
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      1. Nic Greene says:
        
        June 20, 2019 at 5:23 am
        
        Thanks Samuel! This is now fully operational!
        
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      2. nic greene says:
        
        June 29, 2019 at 3:13 pm
        
        One little bug:
        
        I cannot get the update-route53.sh to run – I get
        update-route53.sh: 27: Syntax error: “(” unexpected
        and I cannot figure what I did wrong.
        Rebuilt the root crontab and the other two cron tasks – cerbot and checkaide are running fine.
        Any suggestions?
        Everything else is running flawlessly.
        
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      3. samuel.dowling says:
        
        July 2, 2019 at 12:03 pm
        
        Hi Nic, what’s the crontab command that you’re using, and where are you reading this error? Note that this script needs to be executed with bash, but it looks like you’re trying to execute it with /bin/sh. A couple of things to check:
        1. Make sure the shebang is present at the top of update-route53.sh file, i.e. the very first line is:
        
        #!/usr/local/bin/bash
        
        Second, make sure that bash is present in /usr/local/bin/bash, i.e.
        
        ls /usr/local/bin/bash
        
        If it’s not present (I think it should be by default, I don’t remember having to install it and I tested this guide multiple times just following the instructions here), but if it’s not, you can install it with
        
        pkg install bash
        
        Then, to test it’s working you can execute the following commands:
        
        cd /scripts/update-route53 ./update-route53.sh
        
        or, more explicitly:
        
        /usr/local/bin/bash /scripts/update-route53/update-route53.sh
        
        Hope this helps.
        
        Cheers,
        
        Sam
        
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    2. nic greene says:
      
      July 8, 2019 at 5:35 am
      
      Samuel,
      
      Once again, many thanks.
      
      I installed BASH, it was indeed missing, don’t know why…
      
      In any case – it looks like all is working, except, I cant inspect my crontabs – when I look for crontab as root it shows up as empty. I’m sure there is a simple reason for this.
      
      Appreciate your patient advice.
      
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      1. samuel.dowling says:
        
        July 17, 2019 at 5:50 am
        
        When you say you can’t inspect your crontab, what do you mean? How are you trying to inspect it? crontab -e should display the crontab as currently installed for the user you’re logged in as (root in this case)
        
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      2. nic greene says:
        
        July 18, 2019 at 8:58 am
        
        Samuel,
        
        Thanks – not sure what I did, but yes opening the Tab as root I repasted the three cron tasks and they all seem to be working fine now. In short, everything is working now!
        
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Daniel Richardson says:

June 11, 2019 at 12:47 pm

Hey, I had a power cut recently, and my install of nextcloud 15 is stuck in maintenance mode. nothing I have tried has fixed my issue.
When I go to the web ui I get a page stating that the server was unable to complete my request and that more details can be found in the log. I’m not sure where to find the log.

When I connect via the android app I get a notification at the top sating that the server is in maintenance mode.

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  June 11, 2019 at 5:28 pm
  Hi Daniel, you can turn maintenance mode off by executing the following from the jail shell (provided you installed using my guide, otherwise fix the path to occ as appropriate):
```
su -m www -c 'php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode –off'
```
  It’s a bit strange that it doesn’t tell you it’s in maintenance mode from the web ui though, so it would definitely be worth checkout out the logs to see what’s going on. I have a list of the log locations at the end of the post, under ‘Support’
  Cheers.
  
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  1. Daniel Richardson says:
    
    June 11, 2019 at 5:54 pm
    
    Thanks for the reply Samuel, but that command didn’t seem to work. ended up throwing an error
    
    root@nextcloud:/ # su -m www -c ‘php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode -off’
    An unhandled exception has been thrown:
    RedisException: Connection refused in /usr/local/www/nextcloud/lib/private/RedisFactory.php:84
    Stack trace:
    #0 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/lib/private/RedisFactory.php(84): Redis->connect(‘127.0.0.1’, 6379, 0)
    #1 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/lib/private/RedisFactory.php(100): OC\RedisFactory->create()
    #2 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/lib/private/Memcache/Redis.php(42): OC\RedisFactory->getInstance()
    #3 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/lib/private/Memcache/Factory.php(136): OC\Memcache\Redis->__construct(‘327952c145e682d…’)
    #4 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/lib/private/Server.php(861): OC\Memcache\Factory->createLocking(‘lock’)
    #5 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/3rdparty/pimple/pimple/src/Pimple/Container.php(118): OC\Server->OC{closure}(Object(OC\Server))
    #6 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/lib/private/AppFramework/Utility/SimpleContainer.php(117): Pimple\Container->offsetGet(‘OCP\Lock\ILocki…’)
    #7 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/lib/private/ServerContainer.php(132): OC\AppFramework\Utility\SimpleContainer->query(‘OCP\Lock\ILocki…’)
    #8 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/lib/private/AppFramework/Utility/SimpleContainer.php(165): OC\ServerContainer->query(‘OCP\Lock\ILocki…’)
    #9 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/3rdparty/pimple/pimple/src/Pimple/Container.php(114): OC\AppFramework\Utility\SimpleContainer->OC\AppFramework\Utility{closure}(Object(OC\Server))
    #10 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/lib/private/AppFramework/Utility/SimpleContainer.php(117): Pimple\Container->offsetGet(‘LockingProvider’)
    #11 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/lib/private/ServerContainer.php(132): OC\AppFramework\Utility\SimpleContainer->query(‘LockingProvider’)
    #12 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/lib/private/Server.php(1804): OC\ServerContainer->query(‘LockingProvider’)
    #13 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/lib/private/Files/View.php(116): OC\Server->getLockingProvider()
    #14 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/lib/private/Server.php(221): OC\Files\View->__construct()
    #15 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/3rdparty/pimple/pimple/src/Pimple/Container.php(118): OC\Server->OC{closure}(Object(OC\Server))
    #16 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/lib/private/AppFramework/Utility/SimpleContainer.php(117): Pimple\Container->offsetGet(‘OCP\Encryption\…’)
    #17 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/lib/private/ServerContainer.php(132): OC\AppFramework\Utility\SimpleContainer->query(‘OCP\Encryption\…’)
    #18 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/lib/private/AppFramework/Utility/SimpleContainer.php(165): OC\ServerContainer->query(‘OCP\Encryption\…’)
    #19 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/3rdparty/pimple/pimple/src/Pimple/Container.php(114): OC\AppFramework\Utility\SimpleContainer->OC\AppFramework\Utility{closure}(Object(OC\Server))
    #20 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/lib/private/AppFramework/Utility/SimpleContainer.php(117): Pimple\Container->offsetGet(‘EncryptionManag…’)
    #21 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/lib/private/ServerContainer.php(132): OC\AppFramework\Utility\SimpleContainer->query(‘EncryptionManag…’)
    #22 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/lib/private/Server.php(1277): OC\ServerContainer->query(‘EncryptionManag…’)
    #23 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/lib/base.php(845): OC\Server->getEncryptionManager()
    #24 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/lib/base.php(730): OC::registerEncryptionWrapper()
    #25 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/lib/base.php(1068): OC::init()
    #26 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/console.php(46): require_once(‘/usr/local/www/…’)
    #27 /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ(11): require_once(‘/usr/local/www/…’)
    
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    1. samuel.dowling says:
      
      June 11, 2019 at 10:45 pm
      
      Hi Daniel, I’ve never seen this issue before so I’m not sure how much help I can be. A brief look into the issue indicates that it’s a socket issue with redis (used for caching your files for quick access). My suggestion would be to go back over the Redis section of the guide and make sure that all of your configuration files match what I’ve specified. I don’t think it’s likely, but perhaps it’s possible that your configuration was lost with the power outage? I’m not sure.
      
      As I said before though, check out the logs – that will likely tell you what’s going wrong specifically. Also, I recommend checking out the #freenas and #nextcloud channels on free node IRC for interactive help in debugging this. That’s where I go for help 🙂
      
      Cheers
      
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Thomas says:

June 21, 2019 at 11:55 pm

Hi all,
I’ve tried to renew the certificate of the certbot.
Unfortunately I get an error and don’t know how to fix it.
I’m not familiar with it.
But I think there is a problem with any config, because certbot try to fetch something on this domain: cloud.mydomain.com
My own domain is xxx.de.
Maybe someone can help me.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Thomas

root@nextcloud:/ # certbot renew
Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log

Processing /usr/local/etc/letsencrypt/renewal/xxx.de.conf

Cert is due for renewal, auto-renewing…
Plugins selected: Authenticator webroot, Installer None
Renewing an existing certificate
Performing the following challenges:
http-01 challenge for xxx.de
Waiting for verification…
Cleaning up challenges
Attempting to renew cert (xxx.de) from /usr/local/etc/letsencrypt/renew al/xxx.de.conf produced an unexpected error: Failed authorization procedure. xxx.de (http-01): urn:ietf:params:acme:error:connection :: The server could not connect to the client to verify the domain :: Fetching https://cloud.mydomain.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/xyz: dns :: DNS problem: NXDOMAIN looking up A for cloud.mydomain.com. Skipping.
All renewal attempts failed. The following certs could not be renewed:
/usr/local/etc/letsencrypt/live/xxx.de/fullchain.pem (failure)

All renewal attempts failed. The following certs could not be renewed:
/usr/local/etc/letsencrypt/live/xxx.de/fullchain.pem (failure)

1 renew failure(s), 0 parse failure(s)

IMPORTANT NOTES:
– The following errors were reported by the server:

Domain: xxx.de
Type: connection
Detail: Fetching
https://cloud.mydomain.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/xyz
dns :: DNS problem: NXDOMAIN looking up A for cloud.mydomain.com

To fix these errors, please make sure that your domain name was
entered correctly and the DNS A/AAAA record(s) for that domain
contain(s) the right IP address. Additionally, please check that
your computer has a publicly routable IP address and that no
firewalls are preventing the server from communicating with the
client. If you’re using the webroot plugin, you should also verify
that you are serving files from the webroot path you provided.

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  June 22, 2019 at 12:26 am
  Thomas, it sounds like when you ran through the guide you missed an instance of cloud.mydomain.com when replacing it with your own domain name. I’m not sure where this is located, but as a blunt tool, you could find it by running the following command from the nextcloud jail shell:
```
root@nextcloud:/ # grep -rnw '/' -e 'cloud.mydomain.com'
```
  This might take a few minutes to run, but at the end it will show you all the files in which this phrase appears. Once it’s finished, just replace cloud.mydomain.com in these files with your domain name, and try to renew the certificate again. See how you go, hope it helps.
  
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  1. Thomas says:
    
    June 22, 2019 at 5:34 pm
    
    Hi Samuel,
    unfrotunately the grep does not work.
    
    root@nextcloud:/ # grep -rnw ‘/’ -e ‘cloud.mydomain.com’
    grep: /tmp/mysql.sock: Operation not supported
    
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    1. samuel.dowling says:
      
      June 26, 2019 at 12:55 pm
      
      Hi Thomas,
      
      I’m not sure why you’re getting this; I don’t get the same behaviour on mine. Regardless, you could try narrowing your search path to /etc or /usr, i.e.:
      
      grep -rnw '/etc' -e ‘cloud.mydomain.com’
      
      The aim here is to find instances of ‘cloud.mydomain.com` so that you can replace them with your .de domain.
      
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      1. Thomas says:
        
        June 27, 2019 at 2:57 am
        
        Hi Samuel,
        I’ve found the failure in /usr/local/etc/apache24/Includes/xxx.conf
        
        Thanks a lot for your help!
        
        Thomas
        
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Richard Kraft says:

June 25, 2019 at 6:43 pm

Hi Samuel

thanks for keeping up at responding, I really appreciate it. I followed your tutorial but something that I seem not to get is the email section. Everytime I log into Nextcloud via SSH I get this:

root@freenas[~]# jexec 5 tcsh
You have mail.

But where is the mail and how can I read it?

Cheers

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  June 26, 2019 at 12:57 pm
  Hi Richard,
  You can view the mail by executing the mail(1) command from the Nextcloud shell:
```
mail
```
  Then select the message number to view the mail (See linked docs above for more detail). You’ll get mail here for things like security run outputs, and any errors that have been identified with the cron jobs you’ve set up.
  
  Cheers.
  
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  1. Richard Kraft says:
    
    July 25, 2019 at 2:09 am
    
    I am getting the same messages sent though to my email, don’t I?
    
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    1. samuel.dowling says:
      
      July 25, 2019 at 2:31 am
      
      No, the only mail being sent is what we specify above, ie the nightly aide summaries. A lot of what will be contained in the local mailbox will be system notifications. Have a look to confirm.
      
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Ashima says:

June 26, 2019 at 2:09 am

Hi Samuel,

Excellent Guide. Thank you for the wonderful work. Just have a small query :

I was reading in the nextcloud doc that we can map nextcloud data directory to local drive in windows. I used the following command but it fails.
net use Z: \192.168.1.99\nextcloud\remote.php\dav\files\USERNAME

But it fails to map.
When I use
net use Z: \192.168.1.99\nextcloud\

It gives me the prompt to enter username and password but just fails after that.
I am able to access through browser.
Also I am planning to buy a smart TV. Can I play movies stored in nextcloud data directory in the TV. What settings I need to do in nextcloud. What link should I use in the smart Tv to access it.

Regards,
Ashima

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  June 26, 2019 at 1:09 pm
  
  Hi Ashima, this is well beyond the scope of my guide. I don’t use windows or a smart tv, so I’m not able to provide any advice on how to achieve what you’re asking. I don’t keep any media in Nextcloud; I have additional, separate datasets for my media. I then host a PLEX server in a separate jail and use the client applications to view the content. I find this a much cleaner solution than what you’re proposing, so it might be worth looking into. The FreeNAS forums provide a lot of discussion on configuring plex, so head over there and check it out.
  
  An SMB share might provide the functionality you’re after RE: mapping drives, but I only access it through the Nextcloud client, and from macOS no less, so I’m not sure how to help you with windows.
  
  Cheers
  
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anders says:

June 27, 2019 at 12:11 am

Hi,
Thanks for your job, it’s very interesting. I have a question. Why your Apps dataset is in your SSD and not in your vault. Your SSD is a SPOC. If your SSD craches, you will need to recreate all your netxtcloud’s database or do you have script backup to avoid it ?

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  June 27, 2019 at 1:25 am
  
  No, you’re right. This is a weakness of my current design. My intention has been to mirror the SSD for some redundancy, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. A backup script is probably a prudent idea while I sort myself out 🙂
  
  Cheers.
  
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  1. anders says:
    
    June 27, 2019 at 11:17 pm
    
    Ok, do you have poor performance if you move your Apps dataset to your raid pool ?
    
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Phil says:

June 30, 2019 at 3:04 am

Hello Samuel! I really do appreciate this guide and all of your help over the last few months! Something new has popped up. I’m hoping you can help.
Each night at 1:05 I receive my Aide email with the database changes. Normally there is little to no changes, but over the last 4 weeks or so I’m seeing these added entries regarding lets encrypt:

f++++++++++++: /usr/local/etc/letsencrypt/csr/0030_csr-certbot.pem
f++++++++++++: /usr/local/etc/letsencrypt/csr/0031_csr-certbot.pem
f++++++++++++: /usr/local/etc/letsencrypt/keys/0030_key-certbot.pem
f++++++++++++: /usr/local/etc/letsencrypt/keys/0031_key-certbot.pem

Each day the number sequence goes up. My Let’s Encrypt cert isn’t due to expire until 7/11. I’m not sure if it’s tied to that or not. Any ideas what might be going on here? As always thanks for the help!

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  July 2, 2019 at 12:12 pm
  
  Hi Phil,
  
  I’m not sure about this specifically; it might be worth going to ##letsencrypt on IRC to work out what’s going on if you think this warrants the effort. I don’t see messages like this at the same frequency that you do, though a quick inspection indicates that there are 17 such certificate signing requests in the folder you indicated on my machine. Bear in mind that the cronjob we added will attempt to renew your certificate twice a day, so perhaps there’s something about your site configuration that lets it generate CSR’s on a daily basis? I’m really not sure. This is a LetsEncrypt issue though, so definitely check out IRC or their forums if you want to dig into it further
  
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  1. Phil says:
    
    July 4, 2019 at 12:03 pm
    
    Thanks Samuel, as always, for the feedback.
    
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Phil says:

July 7, 2019 at 12:44 am

Hello Samuel. Another question. How do I go about backing up this installation? You mention
The config folder
The data folder
The theme folder
The database

How do I restore these items? Thank you sir!

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  July 17, 2019 at 5:52 am
  
  Phil, I’ll refer you to the nextcloud docs on this one: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/14/admin_manual/maintenance/restore.html
  
  Essentially, you’ll have to mount the configuration directories into the same location for nextcloud to read (using fstab as per the guide), and then restore the database configuration using the instructions in the documentation linked.
  
  Cheers
  
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  1. Phil says:
    
    July 20, 2019 at 2:45 pm
    
    Thanks Samuel. So from the documentation, I’m looking at the following command:
    
    mysqldump –single-transaction -h [server] -u [username] -p[password] [db_name] > nextcloud-sqlbkp_date +"%Y%m%d".bak
    
    A few noob questions:
    1. Based on your guide, is the server name Nextcloud
    2. Is the db-name MariaDB?
    3. How do I specify where this backup is saved?
    
    Thanks Samuel
    
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    1. samuel.dowling says:
      
      July 28, 2019 at 11:33 am
      
      Phil,
      
      Host name is ‘localhost’
      
      Username is ‘nextcloud_admin’
      
      Password is as specified by you
      
      db_name is ‘nextcloud’
      
      This is all detailed under the ‘Configure MySQL’ heading for reference. The way this has been configured (in the guide I provide at least) has been to store the database information in the following dataset:
      /mnt/jailhouse/apps/nextcloud/db
      This is external to your nextcloud jail, so it serves as the database backup. Without having looked at this procedure in detail, I would imagine that all that’s required would be to import this database dataset into a fresh mysql (MariaDB in this case) installation.. It looks like the command you’re looking to run is designed to backup the current database; I’m not sure that’s required. Having said that, happy to be wrong. Like I said, I haven’t looked at it in any great detail.
      
      Hope this helps.
      
      Cheers
      
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      1. Phil says:
        
        July 28, 2019 at 3:33 pm
        
        Samuel,
        Thank you for your help. I really appreciate it. All is updated to 16.0.3 and working well.
        
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gio says:

July 8, 2019 at 7:13 am

I can’t get past this her

root@VolTank1[~]# iocage fstab -a nextcloud /mnt/VolTank1/cloud /mnt/data nullfs rw 0 0
Destination: /mnt/VolTank1/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/mnt/data does not exist or is not a directory.
root@VolTank1[~]#

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  July 17, 2019 at 5:48 am
  gio, to run this command you might need to stop the jail if it’s running. Otherwise you could try creating the directory manually, though you shouldn’t need to:
```
mkdir /mnt/VolTank1/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/mnt/data
```
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David says:

July 9, 2019 at 6:51 am

Hi Samuel, i have been running nextcloud for 3 months and i love it. Your tutorial and help has been amazing and i cannot praise you and your site enough. I wanted to ask your advice on upgrading. I see that under “Version” it is now prompting me to upgrade to Nextcloud 16.0.2 under the stable channel. If I click the “Open Updater” button, will it work with this install/do you foresee any issues with doing this, or should I leave well enough alone and just keep it at 15.0.5?

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  July 17, 2019 at 5:46 am
  
  Hi David,
  
  I’ve had problems upgrading in the past, and one downside of the methodology that I’ve presented is that using the web updater puts the freebsd package and installed version out of sync. Because of this, I’d recommend using pkg upgrade to upgrade your nextcloud package, and then following the printed instructions to upgrade the installation using occ. As mentioned, I’ve had issues with the before though and the upgrade process doesn’t seem especially stable, so I can’t provide any further advice. I’m still on 15.0.1.
  
  Cheers.
  
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Richard Kraft says:

July 11, 2019 at 3:28 pm

Hi Samuel

When trying to log in via the browser I am getting a warning and am being told that it is an unsecure connection:

NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID
Subject: worldwidehustle.dynu.com

Issuer: Let’s Encrypt Authority X3

Expires on: 28.06.2019

Current date: 11.07.2019

PEM encoded chain:

Then it follows some garble 🙂 Why isn’t the certificate renewed, any idea?

Cheers

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  July 17, 2019 at 5:43 am
  Richard,
  
  You can confirm whether certbot has successfully renewed your certificate by running the following command:
```
openssl x509 -enddate -noout -in /usr/local/etc/letsencrypt/live/cloud.mydomain.com/fullchain.pem
```
  If the date printed is a date in the past, then certbot is having an issue renewing your certificate. You can try to renew manually by executing:
```
certbot renew
```
  If the date is a date in the future, then you likely just need to restart Apache:
```
service apache24 restart
```
  Hope this helps. Cheers
  
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  1. Richard Kraft says:
    
    July 24, 2019 at 11:17 am
    
    Hi Samuel
    
    “certbot renew” didn’t work and I got the following error:
    
    root@nextcloud:/ # certbot renew
    Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log
    
    Processing /usr/local/etc/letsencrypt/renewal/worldwidehustle.dynu.com.conf
    
    Cert is due for renewal, auto-renewing…
    Plugins selected: Authenticator webroot, Installer None
    Renewing an existing certificate
    Performing the following challenges:
    http-01 challenge for worldwidehustle.dynu.com
    Waiting for verification…
    Cleaning up challenges
    Attempting to renew cert (worldwidehustle.dynu.com) from /usr/local/etc/letsencrypt/renewal/worldwidehustle.dynu.com.conf produced an unexpected error: Failed authorization procedure. worldwidehustle.dynu.com (http-01): urn:ietf:params:acme:error:connection :: The server could not connect to the client to verify the domain :: Fetching https://worldwidehustle.dynu.com.well-known/acme-challenge/ECJJhrZguVc0b8IhUmWlieuGtLAIFlYgilHhTA1S3TY: Invalid host in redirect target “worldwidehustle.dynu.com.well-known”. Check webserver config for missing ‘/’ in redirect target.. Skipping.
    All renewal attempts failed. The following certs could not be renewed:
    /usr/local/etc/letsencrypt/live/worldwidehustle.dynu.com/fullchain.pem (failure)
    
    All renewal attempts failed. The following certs could not be renewed:
    /usr/local/etc/letsencrypt/live/worldwidehustle.dynu.com/fullchain.pem (failure)
    
    1 renew failure(s), 0 parse failure(s)
    
    IMPORTANT NOTES:
    – The following errors were reported by the server:
    
    Domain: worldwidehustle.dynu.com
    Type: connection
    Detail: Fetching
    https://worldwidehustle.dynu.com.well-known/acme-challenge/ECJJhrZguVc0b8IhUmWlieuGtLAIFlYgilHhTA1S3TY:
    Invalid host in redirect target
    “worldwidehustle.dynu.com.well-known”. Check webserver config for
    missing ‘/’ in redirect target.
    
    To fix these errors, please make sure that your domain name was
    entered correctly and the DNS A/AAAA record(s) for that domain
    contain(s) the right IP address. Additionally, please check that
    your computer has a publicly routable IP address and that no
    firewalls are preventing the server from communicating with the
    client. If you’re using the webroot plugin, you should also verify
    that you are serving files from the webroot path you provided.
    
    I am using a DynDNS service dynu.com.
    
    Hope this helps to figure out what’s wrong. I also would like to send you some beer for all your help 😉
    
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    1. samuel.dowling says:
      
      July 28, 2019 at 11:23 am
      
      Richard, it looks like you’re using a http challenge. As I mention in the blog post, I struggled to get this to work and found it easier to use a DNS challenge instead. I believe http challenge makes a request to port 80 to find the challenge key, but in the configuration I’ve specified HTTP requests are forwarded to HTTPS; you may need to play around with this. Also, try the suggested fixes in the error message as appropriate.
      
      For more specific help, I’d recommend checking out ##letsencrypt on IRC. It’s an unofficial support channel, and is relatively slow, but the folks there seem pretty knowledgable. I don’t share the same configuration as you unfortunately, so I’m not sure I can be too much help.
      
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      1. Richard Kraft says:
        
        August 7, 2019 at 8:35 am
        
        Hi Richard
        
        I cannot get it working for the life of me… 🙁 Is there a possibility, you could adapt the acme.sh instructions here https://www.ixsystems.com/community/resources/lets-encrypt-with-freenas-11-1-and-later.82/
        
        together with the dynu.com setup described here under #24 ?
        
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Richard says:

July 12, 2019 at 4:55 am

My gallery preview is wicked slow so I wanted to use https://github.com/rullzer/previewgenerator but when I try to run occ config:app:set previewgenerator squareSizes –value=”32 256″ I get an error: occ command not found…

What am I doing wrong?

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  July 17, 2019 at 5:35 am
  Hi Richard,
  
  This command needs to be executed from the nextcloud web root, where the occ program is located:
```
/usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ
```
  The command you probably want to run is as the www user though (this can be run from any directory as the path to occ is absolute):
```
su -m www -c 'php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ config:app:set previewgenerator squareSizes –value="32 256"'
```
  Cheers
  
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James says:

July 15, 2019 at 8:10 am

A brilliant article Samuel thank you. I’ve had success all the way through except for scheduling the automatic renewal of certbot with “0 0,12 * * * /usr/local/bin/python3.6 -c ‘import random; import time; time.sleep(random.random() * 3600)’ && /usr/local/bin/certbot renew –quiet”.
I’ve modified the script due to using nextcloud with php 3.6 however in using the code I get a Pattern not found message. Any idea?

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1. Richard Kraft says:
  
  July 16, 2019 at 6:52 am
  
  +1, same here.
  
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2. samuel.dowling says:
  
  July 17, 2019 at 5:31 am
  James, I assume you mean python 3.6 not php 3.6, and this is probably why it’s not working. Have you got python3.6 installed? Otherwise, I’d suggest that your modifications aren’t python3.6 compliant. This cronjob just runs the renewal script at some random time after the 0th and 12th hours of a day. You could just exclude python completely and change it to the following:
```
0 0,12 * * * /usr/local/bin/certbot renew --quiet
```
  Or, use it as I’ve listed in the guide.
  
  Cheers.
  
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Anh Thy H Nguyen says:

July 16, 2019 at 7:13 am

Hey Samuel. I’ve tried your guide and was able to get it working locally. But now I wanted to make it online and configure it so that friends and family can access it from outside of my local network too. I have read on some stuff about route 53 and I’m planning on buying a domain and configure the DNS there too. Is there anything that I need to configure after buying the domain name on route 53. I have no idea about hosted zone and how to map my ip address to the domain name that I’m about to purchase. Anything I can read up more on to get a better understand. Thank you!

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Krautmaster says:

July 16, 2019 at 10:25 pm

is it possible or does it male sense to have it like this:

physical router 192.168.3.1
physical hyperv host 192.168.3.2 (server 2019 datacenter)
freenas 192.168.3.3 (VM, LSI passthrough, handling all storage stuff)
virtual firewall (pfsense) 192.168.3.5 -> DMZ -> reverse proxy VM (192.168.178.*) -> VMs webserves 1-X- & iocage of Freenas VM)
?
I use to have a seperate machine to manage my domains and to do https2 (reverse proxy).

I might need to attach 2 virtual Lan adapters then to the FreeNas VM so the iocage gets its own (which is connected to the provate DMZ lan )

Suggestions?

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Krautmaster says:

July 19, 2019 at 6:46 pm

how to add collabora office then?

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  July 28, 2019 at 11:44 am
  
  Hi Krautmaster, I’ve never been through the process of configuring collabora unfortunately, so I’m not able to provide any specific advice. I’d recommend checkout out the FreeNAS forums though; I’ve seen the topic mentioned a number of times there.
  
  Cheers.
  
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TheMadScientist says:

August 7, 2019 at 2:10 pm

THANK YOU!!!
I have been beating my head against the wall to get Nextcloud working and this awesome set of instructions got me there and even got my https and SSL working.

I’ve tried the plugin and the semi-automated script from github. I think the scrpt was too automated so when it went wrong because of my setup, I couldn’t figure out where.

BTW, I installed Nextcloud 16.0.3 and php 7.3 using these instructions. Apache 2.4.39. Worked like a champ.

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1. samuel.dowling says:
  
  August 7, 2019 at 5:24 pm
  
  perfect, I’m glad you got it working 🙂
  
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2. TheMadScientist says:
  
  August 23, 2019 at 3:12 pm
  
  I did hit one snag. It was running great, but then I restarted the jail, and I got the dreaded Nextcloud screen saying an error occurred, and the NextCloud server logs it were filled with Redis connection refused errors.
  The first work around I found was I could ssh into the jail and run:
  redis-server
  as root, and that got NextCloud working again (until the next time jail was restarted). This was sub-optimal , because I did not want Redis running with root privileges, not to mention having to ssh in whenever the jail got re-started. For the record, I do not recommend anyone do this, except to see if you have the same symptoms as I did, and it is NOT a permanent fix (read on for the actual fix).
  What I did eventually find in the iX community forums (thanks to dureal99d) was that the newer version of Nextcloud does not need the line:
  ‘memcache.locking’ => ‘\OC\Memcache\Redis’,
  in the config file for redis to work.
  So I commented it out, and viola Nextcloud is working again, even after I re-booted the server completely just to make sure.
  Again, many thanks to Samuel.Dowling for this incredibly detailed guide!
  I would suggest that for NextCloud 16 at least that users DO NOT RUN this command listed in the guide:
  su -m www -c ‘php /usr/local/www/nextcloud/occ config:system:set memcache.locking –value=”\OC\Memcache\Redis”‘
  Not sure if the line is needed for NextCloud15.
  Also, to get certbot to work, I had to install a different version than what the guide states (following the directions on certbot.org for FreeBSD):
  pkg install py36-certbot
  Using the version in the guide gave me errors (sorry don’t remember the specific errors now).
  
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Richard Kraft says:

August 7, 2019 at 4:06 pm

Hi Samuel

For some reason, I messed up my installation and cannot access the GUI anymore, neit

Create Your Datasets

Storage Dataset

Application Dataset

Nextcloud Application Data Dataset

Nextcloud Database Dataset

Nextcloud Configuration Dataset

Nextcloud Themes Dataset

Create users and set permissions

Create an iocage jail:

Add storage to the iocage jail

Set primary cache in FreeNAS UserSpace Shell

Jail Setup

Install required packages

Set up MySQL (MariaDB)

Installing Nextcloud

Installing PHP

Installing Redis

Configure MySQL

Configure Apache for PHP with php-fpm

Create a test Virtual Host File

Configure php.ini

Test the php configuration

Nextcloud configuration

Configure Apache for Nextcloud

Permissions

Create a VirtualHost definition for Nextcloud

Test your configuration

Web Configuration

Add external domain as a trusted domain

Fix the annoying Apache errors

Configure Cron jobs:

Caching and Redis

Security

Give PHP read access to /dev/urandom

Enable hardening modules

Mandatory Access Control (MAC)

Enable Common Technical Controls

Tamper Detection

Installing a Mail Transfer Agent

Postfix hardening

Place data directory outside of the web root

Disable preview image generation

SSL/TLS

Use a dedicated domain for Nextcloud

Ensure that your Nextcloud instance is installed in a DMZ

Serve security related headers by the Web server

Configure DDNS updates:

How much does it cost?

Upgrading

Debugging

Support

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