The problem child for me right now is a game built in node.js that I’m trying to host/fix. It’s lagging at random with very little reason, crashing in new and interesting ways every day, and resisting almost all attempts at instrumentation & debugging. To the point most things in DevTools just lock it up full stop. And it’s not compatible with most APMs because most of the traffic occurs over websockets. (I had Datadog working, but all it was saying was most of the CPU time is being spent on garbage collection at the time things go wonky–couldn’t get it narrowed down, and I’ve tried many different GC settings that ultimately didn’t help)
I haven’t had any major problems with Nextcloud lately, despite the fragile way in which I’ve installed it at work (Nextcloud and MariaDB both in Kubernetes). It occasionally gets stuck in maintenance mode after an update, because I’m not giving it enough time to run the update and it restarts the container and I haven’t given enough thought to what it’d take to increase that time. That’s about it. Early on I did have a little trouble maintaining it because of some problems with the storage, or the database container deciding to start over and wipe the volume, but nothing my backups couldn’t handle.
I have a hell of a time getting the email to stay working, but that’s not necessarily a Nextcloud problem, that’s a Microsoft being weird about email problem (according to them it is time to let go of ancient apps that cannot handle oauth2–Nextcloud emailer doesn’t support this, same with several other applications we’re running, so we have to do some weird email proxy stuff)
I am not surprised to hear some of the stories in this thread, though. Nextcloud’s doing a lot of stuff. Lots of failure points.
This has been a serious concern of mine. In the event that I prematurely die I have everything set up with automatic updates, so that hopefully my family can continue to use the self-hosted services without me.
Nextcloud will not stop shitting the bed. I’d give it a few months at most if I died, at which point my family would likely turn back to Google Drive.
I’m looking for a more reliable alternative, even if it’s not as feature-rich.
If you’re ok with just file storage sftpgo has been solid for me for years now. Does sftp ftp and WebDAV (like nextcloud). Webui isn’t as pretty but it’s fast. Mobile apps will be various sync apps with sftp or WebDAV support. On Android folder sync pro is pretty good for keeping documents and pictures backed up
I’ve told my wife and family that if something happens to me, they need to start migrating all their stuff off my self-hosted services to cloud services because its a matter of time before something fails and nobody’s around who knows or cares to fix it.
My oldest kid is a senior in highschool and is starting to show some interest in Linux and this kind of stuff. I’m hopeful that I can change my tune soon and maybe have one of the kids to share a hobby with!
The way that they do updates doesn’t make automated updates very easy. There are usually a few little nagging things that have to be done or changed and they don’t always seem to be the same. I just update manually and make sure I’ve got a good backup of all my family’s files.
I won’t update without first creating an image of the server to roll back to. Like others on here, the web updater almost always fails and goes into maintenance mode and I have to ssh in to fix it.
Having said that, functionally, I have no issues. Only when upgrading does the whole thing shit the bed.
What we need is something that is a) Private (not saying nc isn’t) b) Independent of any judicial government c) P2P and ultra redundant d) Run by a true non-profit (not like openAI) e) Massively distributed, process wise and storage wise f) OS independent, written in pure C or Rust.
I’ve just finally and fully spun down a proxmox server I’ve been running and updating as my home lab for six years.
Every major update seemed to break something. Upgrades were always a roll of the dice as to whether it would even boot. It’s probably at least partially my fault for using an old R710 and running docker directly on the OS instead of within a container, but it was still by far my least reliable piece of kit.
The last apt update removed sudo, and I can’t be arsed to rebuild, so I’ve moved the critical bits to a fleet of SBCs. Powering that fucker down was a huge relief.
My wonderful MongoDB powered, old as fuck mFi vm. It’s running on Ubuntu 14 because that’s the last supported version and Ubiquiti abandoned this shit decades ago. It’s set to restore and reboot once a month. That usually keeps shit working lol
I really don’t understand all those posts: I use nginx, apparmor, partially even modsecurity, I use collabora office official debian package, face recognition, email, update regularly (waiting for major upgrades for every app I use to be updated), etc. and literally never had a problem in the last 5 years except for my own experiment. True, only 5 people use my instance, but Nextcloud is rock solid for me
I was trying for the 3rd time to install the collabora office app in nextcloud. I think it’s hilarious they know it’s going to time out and they give you a bogus command to run to fix it. So unnecessarily irritating.
Likewise. I have been running it for years, almost no problem that I can think of. My setup is pretty vanilla, Apache, MySQL. It’s running in a container behind a reverse proxy. I keep it as up to date as possible. Only 3 people use mine, and I don’t use very many apps: files, notes, bookmarks, calendar, email.
None. I don’t make a habit of keeping “misbehaving” apps around. If I can’t get to the bottom of a specific issue that app is getting the boot from my stable.
The new Linuxserver.io docker image at the very least has solved the annoying update cycle NextCloud has and seems to have fixed the need to do that every few months. I haven’t ever had it die but I don’t push it hard and I keep the plugins to a minimum because I just don’t trust it and it doesn’t run all that well.
I gave up on owncloud just before it became nextcloud because it kept breaking every time I updated it.
Wallabag is similar for me now. I’m stuck on a slightly out of date version because I can’t get newer ones to run. Everything else I self host is painless though.
I wish there were an alternative in a sane programming language that I could actually contribute to. For some reason PHP is extremely sparse in its logging and errors mostly only pop up on the frontend. Having to debug errors after an update and following some guide to edit a file in the live env that sets a debugging variable, puts the system in maintenance mode and stores additional state in the DB is scary.
Plus PHP is so friggin slow. Nextcloud takes noticeable time to load nearly anything. Even instances hosted by pros that only host nextcloud are just slow.
I run a k3s Kubernetes cluster on a single KVM host(multiple VMs). Honestly I do not care a single f*ck about that machine nor k3s itself. I update once a year, do not have any documentation written nor IaC somewhere. I always forget how I configured the networking stuff for example. But that machine runs my critical services flawlessly without a single crash in like 3 years. So no I cannot relate.
It is fine, but then again I update it often too late which is actually pretty bad. The problem is Nextcloud pushes new features and a high frequency schedule of releases with those at an alarming rate of speed. Perhaps for corporate environments it is not as big of a deal as a professional team can fix obscure bugs with their knowledge and experience on their mirrored test servers, but home users don’t have these resources available and public community knowledge and bug fixes need time which that release schedule hinders.
I still wouldn’t say it is bad by default, simply because somehow it runs pretty stable for me since a decade. Updates are a pain though with many breaking changes and little bugs.
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