WD Labs, Raspberry Pi, ownCloud and Snappy Ubuntu
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Hi all,
You might remember we were working with Western Digital on an #ownCloud #RaspberryPi device! Well, it took a bit longer than planned but our first testing images are ready. By the end of next week our first batch of 30 test devices will be available for sale, followed by another batch of 50 about a month later while we gear up for a small production run of 500.
Future versions (including the 500 production run) will probably also be available for other Pi like devices including Beagle Board and Banana Pi. We choose Raspberry Pi as base device as it's so ubiquitous and we'll be building on Snappy Ubuntu Core 16.04 (pre-beta!) as that provides a great base for a device like ours, with its transactional upgrades, embedded focus and wide user base and support in the industry.
Want to provide a safe home for your own data? This is the time to get involved and help us test and improve this!
I just published a blog here and you can grab the images directly here. There are three images there: one for the SD card (the bootable), one for the hard drive (the larger one) and a two-in-one for testers without hard drive (the largest image). Scripts are here, that's also where contributions can go
As many of you have experience with performance tuning, I'm hoping we can get some help with making the Pi faster for serving ownCloud!
Enjoy and let us know what you think of it.
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This is really cool.
Other then just for fun where do you see this being used?
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@coliver said:
This is really cool.
Other then just for fun where do you see this being used?
Directly on hardware for some of the WD NAS products, perhaps?
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If versioning is enabled by default, and users are protected from crypto-ware through versioning - I see this as a huge plus.
Install the sync client on a machine... the sync more or less takes backups.. when crypto-ware hits them.. they go to ownCloud and roll back.
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@Dashrender said:
If versioning is enabled by default, and users are protected from crypto-ware through versioning - I see this as a huge plus.
Install the sync client on a machine... the sync more or less takes backups.. when crypto-ware hits them.. they go to ownCloud and roll back.
But that could be done with a pi or a NAS.
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@coliver said:
@Dashrender said:
If versioning is enabled by default, and users are protected from crypto-ware through versioning - I see this as a huge plus.
Install the sync client on a machine... the sync more or less takes backups.. when crypto-ware hits them.. they go to ownCloud and roll back.
But that could be done with a pi or a NAS.
Sure, it's done in software - but does anyone offer that today? Maybe I'm over thinking this.. ownCloud is just looking to be the software to provide this functionality.
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@Dashrender said:
If versioning is enabled by default, and users are protected from crypto-ware through versioning - I see this as a huge plus.
Install the sync client on a machine... the sync more or less takes backups.. when crypto-ware hits them.. they go to ownCloud and roll back.
Versioning is enabled be default. As for rolling back? That is a bit harder.
Currently, versioning is on a file level in ownCloud. There is no way to rollback a folder to a previous version.
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Depending how long the old versions are kept, that shouldn't be a problem. Though I could see it now. user gets hit with crypto-crap... they roll back their current in use files manually, but not everything. 5 years later they decide they want to look at something old.. bam it doesn't work - will they remember that they need to roll that file back to get to a working copy?
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@Dashrender said:
Depending how long the old versions are kept, that shouldn't be a problem. Though I could see it now. user gets hit with crypto-crap... they roll back their current in use files manually, but not everything. 5 years later they decide they want to look at something old.. bam it doesn't work - will they remember that they need to roll that file back to get to a working copy?
You can get around that by keeping a limited number of versions of a file. Say... 5 or 6... and keep them indefinitely.
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@dafyre said:
@Dashrender said:
Depending how long the old versions are kept, that shouldn't be a problem. Though I could see it now. user gets hit with crypto-crap... they roll back their current in use files manually, but not everything. 5 years later they decide they want to look at something old.. bam it doesn't work - will they remember that they need to roll that file back to get to a working copy?
You can get around that by keeping a limited number of versions of a file. Say... 5 or 6... and keep them indefinitely.
Oh right, sure! but that doesn't help the home user's memory years down the road - as I mentioned... it's fine as long as you roll the whole thing back now.. but if you have to manually roll everything back... then you're only going to roll things back that you need.. and worry about the rest when that time comes - and hope you remember that you have to do that.
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yeah, the versioning history is file specific and not a security thing.
Ubuntu's Snap tech perhaps could be made that way, or something like btrfs snapshots but those have a cpu and memory overhead.
These images are specifically made for the Raspberry Pi + Western Digital PiDrive (see here for info). WD wants to sell a special ownCloud edition of the PiDrive with ownCloud preinstalled and asked the ownCloud community to create an image for it - we took the challenge
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I like the idea of the challenge, but like coliver, I'm wondering what the end goal is? Is this consumer based or business based? I could see buying a NAS that has ownCloud on it, plug in and go... but for consumers? Just wondering?
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@Dashrender said:
I like the idea of the challenge, but like coliver, I'm wondering what the end goal is? Is this consumer based or business based? I could see buying a NAS that has ownCloud on it, plug in and go... but for consumers? Just wondering?
A decent NAS with RAID 1... or a bigger one with RAID 6 (Thinking something like a Buffalo Terrastation)... That'd be pretty nifty. ALthough you'd still need to back it up.
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@dafyre said:
@Dashrender said:
I like the idea of the challenge, but like coliver, I'm wondering what the end goal is? Is this consumer based or business based? I could see buying a NAS that has ownCloud on it, plug in and go... but for consumers? Just wondering?
A decent NAS with RAID 1... or a bigger one with RAID 6 (Thinking something like a Buffalo Terrastation)... That'd be pretty nifty. ALthough you'd still need to back it up.
Sure, but SMBs could get away from having a local server, and just a NAS, and that NAS could back itself up to a cloud service.
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@Dashrender for us the end goal is to provide something for home users, way cheaper and more flexible than a NAS.
The idea of backup to a cloud service - YES YES YES
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@jospoortvliet said:
@Dashrender for us the end goal is to provide something for home users, way cheaper and more flexible than a NAS.
The idea of backup to a cloud service - YES YES YES
A slightly more robust product would cover much of the SMB very well.
Think Raspberry Pi 3, ownCloud 9, CentOS 7 on ARM, tiny RAID 1 enclosure with SATA drives and good backup options. Only slightly more than you have here already, and it would easily be the "go to" NAS replacement for the twenty and fewer user SMB market.
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@scottalanmiller True, if/when it grows a bit stronger this could be a SMB platform as well. The new enclosure we work on can handle 2 7mm hard drives, thus even offering RAID posibilities.
But the Raspberry platform itself (1, 2 or 3) doesn't have SATA capabilities and probably won't get that. I'm still hoping/waiting for a platform which does have that, yes, you're right that SATA is really a big boost for performance. So would be 1Gbit ethernet...
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@jospoortvliet said:
@scottalanmiller True, if/when it grows a bit stronger this could be a SMB platform as well. The new enclosure we work on can handle 2 7mm hard drives, thus even offering RAID posibilities.
But the Raspberry platform itself (1, 2 or 3) doesn't have SATA capabilities and probably won't get that. I'm still hoping/waiting for a platform which does have that, yes, you're right that SATA is really a big boost for performance. So would be 1Gbit ethernet...
Yeah for SMB, 1 Gb ethernet and SATA would be required.
Great idea though... no more windows server - this would handle most needs.
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Also could be easily built in to ReadyNAS and Synology products. ownCloud could be nearly ubiquitous almost overnight.
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