Cloudron Forum

I'm a senior security consultant for a silicon valley company and I consult on network security for the U.S. Department of Defense.
I am very much in the "do it yourself" category digitally, but tempered with productivity/ease of use.
My background is System Administration, and I have no programming skills. But I'm learning!

@girish +1 for reboot button restore. A reboot has fixed many a mysterious hiccup.

I'm not a coder, I work in cyber security. I want to help you guys with Cloudron in any way I can.
What can I contribute?

Respectfully,

Will

@kimmy I'm not a developer, but I'll try to help.
But we were very surprised to see the limitations of only 5 users and only 2 apps ! Sorry if I missed something, is it well a self-hosted solution ?
It is a self hosted solution, but packaging and distributing the apps via the webstore costs resources, much like your two servers. Subscriptions help pay for the resources needed to keep everything running, and pay the developers so they can afford to keep working on this project.

We are a small collective of volunteer videos creator without any founds, renting 2 servers (one for cloudron and an other one for our hosted videos) is already an heavy cost, we didn't imagine that the subscription would be required to overpass this limitation even when we don't pass through the store to install an app. 15$ is good when it comes to host anything, are the backups hosted on your servers ?
I understand money can be tight! Maybe we can help you find cheaper servers. Many people here have experience getting the best prices for their servers. As for installing apps, the web store is the only way to do it. You can run your own Docker containers to run more apps outside of Cloudron,, but it is difficult and time consuming.

Also some apps required 2 apps (server and client) to works, but in any case if nothing is hosted on your server I don't understand this limitation for non-business usage.
It takes time and money to maintain all these apps, the work goes into integrating them with Cloudron to make it easy to manage. You can try to do it yourself for free, but is really hard. (I tried for a whole year)

Is there a way to overpass these limitations ?
Buy a subscription. Getting paid for hard work is a good thing, it keeps updates coming and makes the developers money so they want to work hard for us.

Also, I wonder how some apps can have a MIT licence, though the source app is a GNU GPL or AGPL licence, is really it legal ?
You don't understand open source licensing, so let me help out. Think of Amazon or Google or Microsoft Cloud services, you can run Linux or BSD on all of them, but their platforms are closed-source. Same thing here.

Maybe, an unlimited solution really self-hosted without the store but with manual installation in command lines could be a solution ?
You can do manual installation of everything Cloudron does and "make your own Cloudron" right now. From FreeIPA for LDAP, to Docker, to all the apps in the web store. You can run them all with docker if you have the skill. It is difficult, but it can be done.

Sorry if my questions may be too frank, but we feel like stuck with Cloudron and forced to pay lots more a service unreachable and that we already pay by self-hosting.
Questions are good! Maybe we can help you save money in other ways so you can afford the Cloudron subscription. If you are open we are here for you.

I didn't realize we had such a group of badasses here. Glad to learn a little more about each of you.

sounds insanely useful

@kimmy Hey Kimmy, I'm not a developer& and I am not affiliated with the project. I am just a user like you. I couldn't sleep so I thought I try to help

As for the politics of open source, the Cloudron developers post their code here: https://git.cloudron.io
Now read my message, I did not say you did not understand open source as a subject, merely open source licensing. To be honest, there are days I feel like I don't understand it either, so confusion understandable.
I can't speak to if it is right or wrong, but I can say that it is legal.

You use words like "forcing people to pay"
Nobody is forcing you to pay anything. If you want to learn DevOps and SysAdmin skills I'm all for it! Cloudron won't teach you those skills. You must put in the hard work and learn yourself, and ask questions on how best to learn.

"but for a collective unpaid and volunteer cause, nope it's kind of abusive."
So you have claimed charging for a product is abusive? Your volunteer work has nothing to do with paying for something of value. Do you pay for food? Do you pay for your servers? You exchange money, for things of value. Clearly you see what Cloudron does as valuable. Why are you unwilling to pay for that?

The communication of Cloudron is unclear and can be a kind of trap.
You are making it difficult to be patient and want to help you because you have a very bad attitude. The pricing is very clear.

"hard for a woman or every oppressed minority to give their opinion in developers communities"
Is it? We have many women members who ask questions all the time. I don't recall any women having issues posting here. I hope you can overcome your incorrect attitude and feel comfortable here.

I'm also a developer, a woman
How is this relevant? Nobody cares that you're a woman, a man, or an alien.

You have come into a new community and in very short order managed to be very offensive. Perhaps its a communication barrier. I will assume you don't mean any harm.

If you want to learn, devops, sysadmin, programming, etc... Every single thing Cloudron does, you can make yourself. It will take you a lot of work, but you will learn so much, and it is all free.
If you want a tool to use for your small team that can save you time, energy, and effort, pay for the value that it brings. That is the most honest thing in the world. You get value, the developers get paid. You pay for everything else in your life, why not this? You would be a poor customer, you want other people to work for you for nothing.

I came to you trying to help and you accused the developers of making pricing traps, of abusing you, and misquoting my reply to you in order to argue. This is very very poor manners for a person asking for help.

Try out notion, and then comment, you're being downvoted because you're speaking from a place of a lack of knowledge on the given topic. Your comments are not helpful on this specific topic because by your suggestions, it is obvious that you've never used notion.
I say this with love my friend, try out notion and see how different it is from other solutions in this space.

@jeau Decentralized Comms plus pirate radio station?! The revolution will be Cloudron haha

@nebulon My view is if it does not have "full" ldap, ldap should be taken out and left up to the admin to manage by hand, such as it is with other apps, like Ghost, or Monica.

Devs,
What is the deal with SSO in Cloudron? I know you guys have support, but is it something you are looking at implementing?
When I login to my work web portal, I have a Cloudron dashboard of apps, I log in once and boom I'm logged into everything. It's beautiful and easy to use. Any thoughts/roadblocks in implementing that here?
We use Okta, and hot damn is it nice.

@jimcavoli Agree, here here! 3 cheers for Cloudron devs!

Devs,
What's keeping bitwarden out of the store? Been running the fbartels version all day with no issues that were not my own fault.
As seemless as any other app that doesn't tie in with Cloudron SSO/LDAP.

@scooke Some apps support LDAP for logging in, some do not. When installing, you'll see "This app manages it's own users" or some such. Other apps will have a section where you can configure what groups or users have access to the app.

In short, yes!

That section is if you want to use your own external LDAP for authentication, think big companies that have existing infrastructure. For most of us, Cloudron's internal LDAP works fine.

Great work, you guys have been quiet, that usually means furious work is being done behind the scenes.

I worry about scope creep. Cloudron has limited dev time. It should be focused on it's core competencies. Asking for things so far out of scope of what Cloudron is aiming to be.

Email encryption is fundamentally broken and is security LARPing. Check out this article for more info.
Also, MS doesn't own Sendgrid or Mailjet

https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted.html

If you want encrypted comms, don't use email. It wasn't designed for that and PGP is old and broken.

Coffee or beer is your best bet!

@nebulon So butwarden RS is probably going to need more documentation than normal. So recommended parts:

• Go into detail on proper setup, invites, env configs, etc...
• Explain the admin panel and how to secure it (change the pw, proper settings, etc...)
• Recommend encrypting Cloudron backups due to them now containing the keys to the castle.
• Perhaps recommend offline backups for password database and how that would happen.

Its not a whole lot, but any of those details not configured properly could screw somebody hard, leaving vulnerable, or locked out of their passwords.

AWESOME work guys, I've been waiting on this one for a long time and it works better than expected!

Looks awesome!

https://wire.com/en/explore/
https://github.com/wireapp/wire-server

@JOduMonT What a great idea! I'm insanely busy this week but I'd love to get a list of recommendations together! Security cowboy is getting the job done!