Nextcloud on LEDE?

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

I have a Linksys WRT1900ACS v2 (currently running LEDE Reboot 17.01.1) and I would like to install Nextcloud, attach an external hard drive and thereby have my router acting as a personal cloud storage server too.

The WRT1900ACS v2 has a 1.6 GHz dual-core ARM processor and has over 90% of memory not used, pretty much ok to run nexcloud.

Nextcloud requires the installation of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP and nextcloud itself to run, including an SSL certificate.

Has anyone tried and succeeded at this.

2

I never tried nextcloud, but I did experiment in the past with owncloud. From an installation point of view, it should not be very different as far as I read about the nextcloud project.

Have a look at: https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/owncloud

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https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/owncloud

Hint: I've installed OwnCloud on an TP-Link TL-WR2543ND, using lighttpd and sorry, it's dead slow! :frowning:

— unknown

I've also installed it on a more powerful TP_Link TL-WDR3500 but it's still very slow, 4-5 secs per page…

— motherjoker 2014/06/05 15:41

Use a decent server or at least a raspberry pi 3. Don't forget, the Linksys is a router an not a pc/server!!!!

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The linksys is a much more modern and powerful router. I think it should run nextcloud just fine. It depends on expectations I guess. How many concurrent users, how big files etc. Remote access using 3G or 4G from a phone or tablet. Upload bandwidth available, since a lot of use still have asynchronous speeds.

Of course running it on a server or bigger NAS makes sense if you expect to use it a lot.

5

I think both slow down the performance a lot and he also wants to use the linksys as a router a the same time.

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have you installed nextcloud on this router?

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No. Like I said, never tried Nextcloud. Given the routers specs I think it will run just fine. I tried owncloud in the past on a netgear R7000. Can't compare that router, or the more modern linksys the OP mentioned with the older single core slower MIPS from the OpenWRT wiki. The wiki I mentioned just so the OP has some references about how to try and install nextcloud.

I even agree with you that for a lot of stuff it's better to offload things to a proper server. Some might even argue to put all the router functions into a proper server and use the home-variety wifi-router just as access points.

But, for me, part of the Linux in Embedded Devices experience is to teach those (in my case usually cheap) devices new tricks. So given only the resources I would try if I had the need for a cloud type of service. Since we can only speculate, which I tried to point out in my previous post, it really depends on how many users, bandwidth available, performance expectations. If the OP is using SQM on a high bandwidth line, maybe there are no resources available at all. But if he doesn't use or need that, maybe his routers CPU is close to idle most of the time.

Again just my 50 cents in trying to be helpful.

8

okay.
Let's ask the OP:
How many users will be using this cloud?
What are your expections regarding perfomance? Which nextloud features you will use?
What else do you have in mind for this router? How fast is your internet connection?

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Hi there, nice discussion picking up :slight_smile:

I really know what you mean by servers, I have installed NextCloud on data centre rack servers back at my place of work.

What caught my interest to install NextCloud on my LEDE powered WRT1900ACS v2 was to make better use of the router. Currently I only use 10% at max of its capacity, which is on 247 and has a USB and eSATA port not used.

Number of users - a family of four.
Data about 2TB on external drive. I have a tutorial that I posted to NextCloud community on how to transfer the initial mass data transfer in a blink "so to say" without eating up bandwidth, etc. It is coming in handy to alot of users especially those with SoCs, like pi systems.
Past the initial sync, the new files will be syncing with NextCloud.
At home I am now using VDSL which is fine for what I need.
Apart from routing and adblocking I will only use NextCloud.

I was of the opinion to use Apache2 instead of lighttpd. Need to check compliance with LuCI.

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which capacity? Memory or CPU? Don't look only on the free memory, the cpu load is also interessting.
Adblocking uses a lot of memory and cpu, during the update for the blacklists.
I think apache isn't the right choice. And I personally would use nextlcloud with mysql on the router.

How about you install nextcloud and give us a report?

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@rj-45 I would post a step by step tutorial if successful :slight_smile: NextCloud would need some acceleration like memcached to work with Apache or Ngnix. I am not sure about lighttpd.

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ciao!
how are you?

i have a small server, that's where i run the db, php and nextcloud and many things,
the router is only good for ipv6, wol, samba, openvpn.

i think it is not good to put everything on a router a small nas,

a small server with like 8 gigs and ssd, maybe a 2 tera hdd for backup and like 2 cores it give you miracles!

besides in acme.sh or letsencrypt i can use valid SSL as well, it's sweet.

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I'm sure @rj-45 will agree: if you are running a small server already, maybe better to move OpenVPN to there as well. Most likely you will get better VPN speeds. The same for Samba: run that where your files are stored, which is on your server together with the "cloud" data.

But, if you want to use the limited resources of a higher end consumer grade router, which happens to have even an eSata connector, why not try to use it. The OEM envisioned people using it as small NAS with their own firmware. So using Lede can tweak/fine tune performance to the point that performance is acceptable. Sharing 2TB of data to a mobile device (phone/tablet) is a lot, but putting your own documents (PDF etc) in your own cloud might make sense. Anything much larger will probably be painful due to the lack of upload speed over the VDSL and a hotspot/4G connection.

Again, its about expectations. Trying to get this to work is "free" not counting time spend (it's a hobby, right). The external HD most of us have lying around somewhere. And it will not break the bank in electricity bills.

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@drbrains you are right about this. I would not imagine to transfer 2TB data from user devices via the mobile/desktop app to the NextCloud be it a rack server, DC or like in this case an end device with an external HD plugged in. For the initial data transfer I would use rsync as per my tutorial here

@patrikx3 I know what you mean but even in Data Centers we are limiting the amount of physical devices with the use of integrated systems, VR, etc. Even factory firmware of the Linksys WRT1900ACS v2 allows NAS so in theory LEDE with NextCloud should do the job very well.

15

well, i just bought a server for like 385 USD and I got it. It was too much hassle.
I just router for some cron jobs, security with fail2ban, samba, openvpn, upnp, wake on lan, he.net ip6 tunnel, it's awesome, i even use node with the latest 8, but that's the end, it is only for webooks and scripts that are easier than bash.

NextCloud is awesome on a small server!!!! It is also using Redis, so it is super fast.

plus:
NodeJs 6,7,8
Luci Theme Darkmatter

For me a router is a router and a server is a server.
I tried a lot, but I chose this. It's cool WRT has tons of packages, but is not needed. But every human have their own style. :slight_smile:

Though, in my packages, I still have NGINX and PHP 7, just not using. Maybe, when I have more servers, I will split the proxies via the routers NGINX, I don't know... But that would be the most. I wouldn't put Bind9 in on a router...

But LEDE is super cool awesome.

AHH! And one more things, you think it has free in the router, but it is not, it is caching all the data and code so it's faster.

The WRT uses the memory:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        513604     484144      29460       3756     130788     201112
-/+ buffers/cache:     152244     361360
Swap:     10485756        104   10485652

You put tons of packages, it will be just slow. I got now idea you have free 90% memory totally empty. It would be some bug.

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Currently drafting and evaluating an installation plan :wink:

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@patrikx3 this is the available memory on my WRT1900ACS

root@LEDE:~# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        513604      47996     465608       1080       2176       8200
-/+ buffers/cache:      37620     475984
Swap:            0          0          0

I have over 465mb free

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ciao!
how are you?
wow, then you dont use it a lot, the kernel bufffer everything as much free memory if free, it would be not smart to not use the free memory for buffer, since faster then loading from the hdd, you mean what i mean?

patrik

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AFAIK that is a normal amount of memory use, for a bare router.

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Note: I do not yet install owncloud/nextcloud on my WRT1900ACS v2, but have plans to do it in few months.
And just few tips what I want to use:

  • nginx + fpm-php
  • SQLite for DB (I think it's enough for family rare using)
  • disable all unused features
    I have the same setup on very tiny server (like amd64 1.6Gz2cores) on other place and it works well.
    Beside ownloud there are a lot of more stuff on it.
    So I think it should be ok for single instance owncloud/nextcloud on ARM 1.6G    2 as well.

I will make report if have success for that :wink: