Best posts made by Stardenver

@micmc 2nd this. I have several domains for different purposes but I don't like to deal with several mailbox. Would like to receive all mails to all domains within the same mailbox. Hope to see this feature one time in the future.

@Kubernetes said in Storage Box vs HDD for volumes:

Currently I am trying to do exactly the same. But I have problems to get the Storage Box as internal Storage in Nextcloud. How exactly did you do that?

I mounted the storage box as volume and assigned that volume to nextcloud in the settings (within cloudron - not in nextcloud) so it has access to it. I then installed the external storage app and added the volume to Nextcloud as local storage.

So 3 steps actually (which I will repeat):

1. mount as volume in cloudron settings
2. add volume to nextcloud in the cloudron apps settings for nextcloud
3. add volume as local storage within nextcloud settings

hope this helps

Gives me a bit of a headache to see this app. I mean.. its okay. You like the app, use it. Just wanted to share my opinion. I was using ttrss like 2 or 3 years ago and had a problem. I went to their support forums but couldn't really believe what I saw.

Lets just say that the developer behind ttrss is very special. As a german I may react a bit sensitive to this topic, but the developer created a gas chamber in his support forum where he deports all users who dare to criticize him or the app.

People just asked why the app is so bloated or asked him, if he thinks that a gas chamber is a appropriate category. Others talked about problems they had with their installation and well.. they all ended up in the gas chamber.

So maybe thats something you guys may want to remember in case you need to decide between ttrss, freshrss and other solutions.

@necrevistonnezr I am okay with the webinterface. I like the scroll to mark as read feature. But I must confess I don't often use it. I read like 95% or more of all post on my iPhone using a reader app that connects to freshrss.

Also the are readers for Windows and Mac that can connect and if I remember right, themes are available as well.

Hi all

Coming from Yunohost I'd like to set up my server the right way, right from the beginning. My bare metal server comes with 2x HDD in RAID 1 for storage and 2x SSD in RAID 1 for system, apps, etc.

On Yunohost I installed the system on the SSD array for max speed and modified the Nextcloud config to use the HDD array for /data. That way all apps did run fast while Nextcloud provided me plenty of storage.

So my question is, if there is some sort of best practice for this on Cloudron? Should I simply do it the same way? Or is there some sort of storage management within Cloudron that gives me some options to assign additional storage to apps? I am trying to get a good balance between speed and storage.

I could replace the SSD drives with 2 other HDD and build an array of 4x Enterprise SAS HDD. Just not sure if I will bottleneck the whole system that way. Anybody here running Cloudron on a HDD only system?

Thank you all for any feedback on this.

PS: I will use the server for mails, Mastodon, Nextcloud and maybe some "lower" apps like pastebin or freshrss.

Hi all

As I am pretty happy with Cloudron, I am considering moving my mails from Google Workspace to my Cloudron Instance. Before doing this, I would like to hear about your experiences with it. I did run my own mailservers before, but actually I was using rspamd instead and it fells like I am a bit less in control when it comes to mail-handling in Cloudron.

Are you happy with how the mail server works? What about spam? Any problems? I do have a few domains and some of them are pretty old and therefor I am always getting a few spam mails. In general I receive like 30-50 mails per day and another 20-30 spam mails. At least thats the amount of spam ending up in my spam folder. Don't know about bounced spam mails.

Can some of you guys share your experience with Cloudron as a main mail-server?

Thanks all

@jdaviescoates said in Storage Box vs HDD for volumes:

@Stardenver said in Storage Box vs HDD for volumes:

use nextcloud encryption

I've read elsewhere on here that using Nextcloud encryption is a bad move because apparently "it's a joke"

Not really. Its useless within Nexloud as your hoster could still access your installation or even get his hands on your encryption keys. But it prevents external storage providers from looking into your files.

So everyone with access to your server could somehow read your files, but external storages like Google Drive, AWS, Dropbox, etc don't have access to your server files and keys and therefor can't spy onto your files. So it prevents Google and Co from reading your files.

Its a solution to protect your "outsourced" files and not those that are stored directly on your server.

@subven said in How to calculate required hw specs?:

you still will run into trouble sending mails to MS/Office365, GMX/WEB.de and so on Take a look at the free tiers some SMTP offer and track your daily/monthly mail volume. Also remember you can always upgrade

thats not of a big problem, as I have other solutions besides this server, just in case. Also I rarely send mails, while on the other hand I receive a lot. But like 99% of all mails are incoming mails. I will still run some tests with several providers.

@jdaviescoates I did some quick and dirty tests and so far it seems to be okay. I received mails in my Gmail account and in several others from some small and mostly german providers. Mails arrive at my webhoster.

As I don't have an MS365 account I tested outlook.com Mail was accepted from server but was moved into spam folder. I marked it as no spam and next mail arrived. Guess thats okay for me. I also checked mails with attachments (pdf).

As I already mentioned, I am sending very few mails and like 99% are incoming mails. So its okay for me.

@humptydumpty said in pricing too high:

@timconsidine said in pricing too high:

Maybe bear in mind that for many self-hosters (and Cloudron is all about self-hosting)

In spirit, maybe. In reality, Cloudron (and in extension, the CR community) caters to "developers" more than it does to the average Joe. Also, I've noticed many open source projects and developers continue to use big-tech and closed source software (Cloudflare, Google, Discord, Github, etc.). Screw big tech but is Paypal where we draw the line?

It just feels like cherry picking since the essence of self-hosting is to break away from big-tech and to preserve our data privacy and control.

Well, while you are right with what you said I don't see any big difference between PayPal and your cc provider except the fact that with PP its just one company getting your data while cc payments involve 3 parties. So from that pov PP may even be more privacy friendly (just in comparison. PP isn't privacy friendly in general). Cloudron is using a payment solution and they will - of course - get all your data. Your card is from VISA or Mastercard and therefor they will also receive a lot of your data. Last but not least your bank which handed the card to you and fulfills the payment. Don't know about your country but here in Germany a lot of people use debit cards instead of credit cards and therefor every payment requires a back-check with your bank-account and even though you may be using a real cc, a lot of data will be shared and saved from every of those 3 parties.

@3246 I assume the procedure is identical in Hetzner VPS and their bare metal servers?

Hi all

I don't really understand how Cloudron is utilizing processor cores. Will I benefit from CPUs with lower speed/frequency per core but more cores? Or should I prefer a CPU with less cores but a higher frequenzy per core/thread?

Thanks all

Hi all

If you could choose between 960GB Datacenter NVMe and 1.92 TB Datacenter SATA SSD, which one would you pick?

I want to use it for a Cloudron instance with Mastodon, Nextcloud and a few "lower" apps like pastebin, url-shortener and maybe a private wordpress blog. I don't have any information regarding those SSD drives as the provider only states "datacenter NVMe" and "datacenter SATA SSD".

If the SATA would slow down everything noticeably, I would pick the smaller NVMe. But just in case there isn't any noticeable slow down, I'd go with SATA as its double the size.

Thanks for your input on this.

@BrutalBirdie said in Right setup for HDD/SSD mix:

@Stardenver said in Right setup for HDD/SSD mix:

Anybody here running Cloudron on a HDD only system?

Yep, one of my Backup Servers who is running +10x Minio apps for backup space with 10TB HDD space is running HDD only.
A restart can take some time, but with 10TB it is expected.

For such mixed systems I would always go for System SSD and Storage HDD.
But storage can also have part of the SSD.

In the end all is backuped somewhere in the clouds and if anything fails or needs to be changed just restore.
(To be able to have this kind of mindset is one of the best features imo :D)

Thank you very much for taking the time to answer me. I already figured out that its pretty easy to add several kinds of external storage to Cloudron. To be honest.. I am thinking about getting a cheaper server now and add some cloud storage to it. I am using as storage solution from a german provider and it worked pretty good in the past. So I guess I will go with SSD only and add additional storage by mountig this storage box to my server.

@BrutalBirdie Thanks for your reply. I will use the whole server just for myself. One Nextcloud user, one Mastodon user, etc

I will probably move my own blog over to the server and cancel my webhosting plan.

I am just not sure how much storage I will need and in case I will not see a difference in speed, I should probably go with the bigger storage

I have nothing to add here, but I am curious. Whats the reason for doing such? I can imagine that most other providers will still reject your mail due to its big size. Wouldn't it be easier and better to upload those files and share the link?

@BrutalBirdie said in How good is the mail server?:

The Improve message, they would like a HTML Version pfft nope, plain text only for me.

Guess its because this tool was used as a testing tool for newsletter senders. AFAIK its recommended to provide your spam (just kidding^^) in two versions (plain text and html).

@jdaviescoates I am not deep enough into this topic and can't say anything about problems or reasons to not use it within your Nextcloud installation - but I can tell for sure and by my own experience that it really keeps external providers from reading/scanning your files. I used it several times with different storage solutions and all files were encrypted and not accessible from within those external servers. So at least this part of it is working.

In case you stumble upon any more information or sources regarding this I would appreciate an update here, as this is really of an interesting topic.

Hi all

I know about the benefits of ECC RAM and actually we all know ECC is better than non-ECC and we could just forget about this topic^^

What I really wanna know is, how likely is a system without ECC going to fail or produce critical errors? My Cloudron server is for personal/private use only and actually all data will be backed up on several locations (homeserver, external HDD, external SSD, Online-Storage). So in case of a total data-lose I could recover all data. Its just that I want to avoid all the stress and downtime that comes with it, even though I could handle losing the server.

Money is a big point on this, as I am married and my wife doesn't think I need all those electronic gimmicks xD So right now I have to decide between ECC or better CPU und bigger storage. I would prefer the better CPU and storage but I don't know if its worth it, in case it will provide more problems to go down the non-ecc-road.

So.. anyone here has some experience with ecc systems compared to non-ecc? How likely is the non-ecc going to fail? Are there any statistics or sources with comparisons between those two options? Anything like x% of non-ecc-system failed within given years, etc.

I am really just trying to find out if ECC is more important than cpu-power and storage.

Thanks all for your input.

Hi all

I am about to get another server for my cloudron installation and I would like to spend as much money as needed, but don't overbuy in terms of overpowered hardware. Is there any way to calculate how much CPU power I would need? I am fine with some "buffer" but don't want to spend money I don't really need to spend.

Right now I am looking at some kind of older CPU inside a cheap server. Its a Xeon E3-1275v6. It comes with 64 GB ECC RAM. I will install Nextcloud, run a mail server for my wife and me and a Mastodon instance. Besides that I am planning on running a few small web-services like FreshRSS, Wordpress-Blog (personal) and Collabora for Nextcloud.

In case the hardware is powerful enough, I am thinking about running a minecraft server but I am okay if it doesn't work (for me and 2-3 friends). I would also like to run some small services like a personal git, haste or some other small services.

How can I calculate what kind of CPU I need? Like I said - everything is personal and only for my own usage (+wife). I don't expect many visitors on my blog (its more of a personal diary) and besides the minecraft server (3-4 players) all services will be used by just me.

thanks all for your input on this

@subven said in How to calculate required hw specs?:

This is overkill. Recycling old and cheap hardware is good but think about power consumption too! Running costs will eat up these savings quickly and I doubt you can utilize its potential.

Well.. server is running in a datacenter I don't pay anything additional for energy consumption. Its all included. I pay 50 EUR for this machine and thats a price I am willed to pay. Actually I was just afraid I'd have to pay more to get a more sufficient machine. They sell servers for 100, 200 or even more per month and thats still the lower end. Now it looks like its more than enough and I am okay paying 50 bucks.

Thanks for your reply

@subven You know what.. you are right. You convinced me that its really too much for what I need. Just canceled the order and went for a Netcup RS 2000 G9.5. Already set up everything and worked on IP reputation. But everything seems to look fine.

Thanks for your very helpful posts.

@jdaviescoates Thank you very much for your reply and my apologies for getting back to you that late. I was working on my server step by step and according the information I get here. Right now I am working on different storage solutions and therefor its time to look at what you quoted regarding S3. This seems to be very interesting, as its somehow cheap and fast.

I am already using Hetzner Storage Boxes. At first I used them to extend my storage for some bigger files I don't need to access that often - almost like some sort of cold storage. Because its working flawless and 3 EUR for 1TB is like super cheap, I got another one for backups only.

Have to dig into the S3 topic, but it looks very promising.

I think that if you use it for professional/company related things, 30/15 is nothing. If you use it for personal stuff and fun, the 30 may be challenging, in case you have a budget of just a few bucks per month - but still its a fair price.

I'd only wish there would be some more options. Like 1-year-contract but still monthly payments. Something like 30 per month, 15/m for 1 year and maybe 20 or 18 per month payment but contracted for a whole year.

I understand that yearly subscriptions give more financial flexibility and better calculations for Cloudron. Maybe there's a chance to mix monthly payments and yearly subscriptions in the future.

Another good feature would be if Paypal payments would work right out of the box and without manual request. Cause that way everyone could deal with PayPal and pay monthly or later and Cloudron still gets the full payment instantly.

@timconsidine Totally getting your point. But I would still prefer some ootb PayPal payment support due to the flexibility it gives. Cloudron gets full payment and customer still can pay later or in monthly rates.