Self-built NAS for Nextcloud hosting

With Google cutting its unlimited storage and ending the Play Music service, I decided to use my own Nextcloud more seriously.
In part because Google forced all its competitors out of the market, but mostly because I want to be independent of any cloudy services.

The main drawback of my existing Nextcloud setup, that I have written about here, was missing redundancy; the nice thing about putting your stuff in the cloud is that you do not notice if one of the storage devices fails – Google will take care of providing you with a backup copy of your data.

Unfortunately, the Intel NUC based build I used, while offering great power efficiency did not support adding a second HDD to create a fail-safe RAID1 setup. Therefore I had to upgrade.

As I still wanted to keep things power-efficient in a small form-factor, my choice fell on the ASRock DeskMini series. Here, I went with the AMD Variant (A300) in order to avoid paying the toll of spectre mitigations with Intel (resulting in just 80% of baseline performance).

The photos above show you the size difference, which is considerable – yet necessary to cram two 2.5″ SATA drives next to each other.
Here, keep in mind that while the NUC devices have their CPU soldered on, we are getting the standardized STX form-factor with the A300, which means you can replace and upgrade the mainboard and the CPU as you wish, while with a NUC you are basically stuck with what you bought initially.

The full config of the build is as follows and totals at about 270€

ASRock DeskMini A300
AMD Athlon 3000G
8GB Crucial DDR4-2666 RAM
WD Red SA500 NAS 500GB
Crucial MX500 500GB

Note, that I deliberately chose SSDs from different vendors to reduce the risk of simultaneous failure.
Also, while the 3000G is not the fastest AMD CPU, it is sufficient to host nextcloud and is still a nice upgrade from the Intel Celeron I used previously.
Furthermore, its 35W TDP nicely fits the constrained cooling options. Note, that you can limit for Ryzen 3/5 CPUs to 35W in the BIOS as well, so there is not need to get their GE variants.
However, for a private server you probably do not need that CPU power anyway, so just go with the Athlon 3000G for half the price.

Unfortunately, the A300 system is not designed for passive cooling and comes with a quite annoying CPU fan. To me the fan coming with the Athlon 3000G was less annoying, so I used that instead.
Anyway, you should set the fan RPM to 0% below 50° C in the BIOS, which results in 800 RPM and is unhearable while keeping the CPU reasonably cool.

Power Consumption

As the machine will run 24/7, power consumption is an important factor.

The 35W TDP gives us a upper limit of what the system will consume on persistent load – however the more interesting measure is the idle consuption as thats the state the system will be most of the time.

As I already tried some builds with different ARM architectures, we have some interesting values to compare to, putting the A300 build in perspective

Build	CPU	Idle	Load
Odroid U3	Exynos4412	3.7 W	9 W
Gigabyte BRIX	Intel N3350	4.5 W	9.6 W
A300	Athlon 3000G	6.8 W	33.6 W

While you can obviously push the system towards 35W by with multiple simultaneous users, the 7.3 W idle consumption is quite nice.
Keep in mind, that the A300 was measured with two SATA drives operating as RAID1. If you only use one you can subtract 1W – at which point it is only 1.5 W away from the considerably weaker NUC system.

You might now wonder, whether the load or the idle measure is closer to the typical consumption. For this I measured the consumption for 30 days, which totaled at 5.23 kWh – or 7.2 Watts.

Currently, the average price for 1 kWh is 0.32€, so the running the server costs about 1.67€/ Month. For comparison, Google One with 200 GB will set you off 2.99 €/ Month.

Power optimizations

To reach that 7.3 W idle, you need to tune some settings though. The most important one and luckily the easiest to fix is using a recent kernel.
If you are on Ubuntu 18.04, update to 20.04 or install the hwe kernel (5.4.0) – it saves you 4 Watts (11.3 to 7.3).

For saving about 0.5 watts, you can downgrade the network interface from 1Gbit to 100Mbit by executing

ethtool -s enp2s0 speed 100 duplex full autoneg on

Additionally, you can use Intels powertop to tune your system settings for power saving as

powertop --auto-tune

Beyond the Raspberry Pi for Nextcloud hosting

When using Nextcloud it makes some sense to host it yourself at home to get the maximum benefit of having your own cloud.

If you would use a virtual private server or shared hosting, your data would still be exposed to a third party and the storage would be limited as you would have to rent it.

When setting up a server at home one is tempted to use a Raspberry Pi or similar ARM based device. Those are quite cheap and only consume little power. Especially the latter property is important as the machine will run 24/7.

I was as well tempted and started my self-hosting experience with an ARM based boards, so here are my experiences.

Do not use a Raspberry Pi for hosting

Actually this is true for any ARM based board. As for the Pi itself, only the most recent Pi 4B has a decent enough CPU and enough RAM to handle multiple PHP request (WebCAL, Contacts, WebDAV) from different clients without slowdown.
Also only with the Pi 4B you can properly attach storage over USB3.0 – previously your transfer rates would be limited by the USB2.0 bus.

One might argue that other ARM based computers are better suited. Indeed you could get the decently equipped Odroid U3, long before the Pi 4B was available.
However, non-pi boards have their own set of problems. Typically, they are based on an Smartphone design (e.g. the Odroid U3 essentialy is a Galaxy Note 2).

This makes them plagued by the Android update issues, as these boards require a custom kernel, that includes some of the board specific patches which means you cannot just grab an Ubuntu ARM build.
Instead you have to wait for a special image from the vendor – and just as with Android, at some point, there will be no more updates.

Furthermore ARM boards are actually not that cheap. While the Pi board itself is indeed not expensive at ~60€, you have to add power-supply housing and storage.

Intel NUC devices are a great choice

While everyone was looking at cheap and efficient ARM based boards, Intel has released some great NUC competitors.
Those went largely unnoticed as typically only the high-end NUCs get news coverage. It is more impressive to report how much power one can cram into a small form-factor.

However one can obviously also put only little power in there. More precisely, Intels tablet celeron chips that range around 4-6W TDP and thus compete with ARM boards power-wise. (Still they are an order of magnitude faster then a Raspberry Pi)

Device	Power (Idle)	Power (load)
Odroid U3	3.7 W	9 W
GB-BPCE-3350C	4.5 W	9.6 W

Here, you get the advantages of the mature x86 platform, namely interchangeable RAM, interchangeable WiFi modules, SATA & m2 SSD ports and notably upstream Linux compatibilty (and Windows for that matter).

As you might have guessed by the hardware choice above, I made the switch already some time ago. On the one hand you only get reports for the by now outdated N3350 CPU – but on on the other hand it makes this a long term evaluation.

Regarding the specific NUC model, I went with the Gigabyte GB-BPCE-3350C, which are less expensive (currently priced around 90€) than the Intel models.

Consequently the C probably stands for “cheap” as it lacks a second SO-DIMM slot and a SD-card reader. However it is fan-less and thus perfectly fine for hosting.

So after 2 Years of usage and a successful upgrade between two Ubuntu LTS releases, I can report that switching to the x86 platform was worth it.

If anything I would probably choose a NUC model that also supports M.2/ M-Key in addition to SATA to build a software RAID-1.

Migrating from owncloud 9.1 to nextcloud 11

First one should ask though: why? My main motivation was that many of the apps I use were easily available in the nextcloud store, while with owncloud I had to manually pull them from github.
Additionally some of the app authors migrated to nextcloud and did not provide further updates for owncloud.

Another reason is this:

the graphs above show the number of commits for owncloud and nextcloud. Owncloud has taken a very noticeable hit here after the fork – even though they deny it.

From the user perspective the lack of contribution is visible for instance in the admin interface where with nextcloud you get a nice log browser and system stats while with owncloud you do not. Furthermore the nextcloud android app handles Auto-Upload much better and generally seems more polished – I think one can expect nextcloud to advance faster in general.

Migrating

For migrating you can follow the excellent instructions of Jos Poortvliet.

In my case owncloud 9.1 was installed on Ubuntu in /var/www/owncloud and I put nextcloud 11 to /var/www/nextcloud. Then the following steps had to be applied:

put owncloud in maintenance mode

sudo -u www-data php occ maintenance:mode --on

copy over the config.php

cp /var/www/owncloud/config/config.php /var/www/nextcloud/config/

adapt the path in config.php

# from 
'path' => '/var/www/owncloud/apps',
# to
'path' => '/var/www/nextcloud/apps',

adapt the path in crontab
```
sudo crontab -u www-data -e
```
adapt the paths in the apache config
run the upgrade script which takes care of the actual migration. Then disable the maintanance mode.
```
sudo -u www-data php occ upgrade
sudo -u www-data php occ maintenance:mode --off
```

and thats it.

Odroid U3 in the Nextcloud Box

Until now I used a microSD card for storage of my Owncloud setup. The drawback of doing so is that microSD cards only allow for so many writes until they die and go in a read-only mode.

Therefore the Nextcloud box is an attractive upgrade allowing to use a more failure proof HDD while still keeping everything inside the same housing.

The housing

The first thing to note is that the housing is much larger than one might think from the photos. See the comparison photo with the Odroid housing. Actually this should not be a surprise as the 2.5″ HDD alone is larger than the Odroid board.

Continue reading Odroid U3 in the Nextcloud Box

Secure Nextcloud Server

This article is about how to securely configure the machine where your Nextcloud/ Owncloud instance will be running.
Even if you set-up your connection with Owncloud in a secure way, your data still can be compromised by exploiting security flaws in the underlying architecture.

In the following we specifically will cover the underlying software stack and brute-force password hacking attempts.

Secure Own-/ Nextcloud setup

update 24.04.2017 – include Subject Alternative Name field
update 20.12.2017 – discuss Certbot as an alternative

While the Nextcloud Manual suggests enabling SSL, it unfortunately does not go into detail how to get a secure setup. The core problem is that the default SSL settings of Apache are not sane as in they do not enforce strong encryption. Furthermore the used default certificate will not match your server name and produce errors in the browser.

In the following a short guide how to manually set-up a secure Apache 2.4 server for Nextcloud will be presented.

Note: nowadays one can also use Certbot to automatically perform the steps below and validate your certificate so browsers accept it. However due to their certificate transparency policy, your host will be submitted to a public list. This may or may not be what you want.

Continue reading Secure Own-/ Nextcloud setup