In addition to webdav, how else can I share folders, possibly as a network drive?
The webdav is good, only very slow, even though it has a gigabit internal net, although if you know it, the request goes outside the net
It is important that users maintain security and access levels
Anything other than webdav?
Virtual Drive?
Last I heard, that project has not made much progress.
What do you mean by this?
He means that there’s no hairpin NAT/loopback, so internal LAN users utilize upload/download on the WAN of his network instead of just accessing the server directly.
Plex Media Server has this problem addressed, Nextcloud absolutely should as well. Not all routers support hairpin NAT, and with more and more people working remotely, and in the field, it makes a lot of sense to avoid saturating bandwidth needlessly.
You can solve this with a proper configuration of your internal DNS…
(or via hostsfile on the client if no DNS server is running)
*provided that your router can facilitate that configuration. For example, I’m using an AmpliFi HD, which is a fairly high-end router as it goes, yet I can’t do hairpin NAT. The trend is for the piece of software, be it Plex Media Server, or Resilio Sync, to figure it out, rather than for the router. There’s really no valid justification to not implement it when other projects have implemented it.
You also can’t edit hostfiles on every client device, iOS being the primary offender.
So nextcloud should fix the iOS lock-in? I guess nextcloud is aimed at corporate use. In such an environment you are running your own dns and can point it to the internal ip of the server. If it’s about private use at home you have to change the hosts on every of the 2-10 devices? Or live with the fact that your internet connection is used?
Don’t know if it’s worth to spend development power on that…
A lot of todays routers are suporting nat-loopback btw… including some fritz!box devices.
It isn’t an iOS-exclusive problem though. Nextcloud is aimed at a variety of usage scenarios. Being eco-friendly and not wasting resources uploading only to redownload it via your WAN is a logical thing to put development into.
It isn’t about “living with it” either, if my home devices running Nextcloud saturate my internet connection and it leaves no upload (and sometimes download) bandwidth for other purposes, that’s a problem with Nextcloud. Not a problem with iOS, not a problem with the router, it’s a shortcoming of Nextcloud itself when it can’t just sync directly to the server via the LAN, which it absolutely should be able to. Plex has a ‘Stream Brain’ for QoS with the WAN and LAN, Resilio figures out what is a local peer on the LAN etc.
This isn’t some fringe or niche thing, this is going to be common for the majority of home users, whether they’re aware of it or not, and with more people working from home, saturating the upload and killing VOIP calls of others (and myself) in the process is ridiculous. I’ve had to troubleshoot this for several people recently who are baffled as to why their Microsoft Teams calls are dropping out when someone else in their family is syncing photos to/from Nextcloud on their LAN across their devices.
In the UK and USA, what we’re generally given by ISPs is extremely limited, and quite a number of ISPs force you to use their router/modem solution if you want to receive the IPTV you’re paying for, or simply because there’s no other way to use your connection without it as it is locked down to the way that they want you to use it. You’re speaking from your own experiences and not through the broader lens of other countries.
Makes it pretty difficult to recommend Nextcloud if the problem is simply hand-waved. In the UK, kids are learning remotely because the schools are shut. A lot of people are working from home too. To have lessons and Zoom calls and whatever else drop because of Nextcloud is absolutely unacceptable. On the one hand, people recommend Nextcloud as a way to “own your data” and retain your privacy, on the other hand, it’s causing problems with these unprecedented times that we are living in.
You do the math: if each person in a household has a phone, a laptop/desktop, and a tablet, 1GB of data quickly becomes 3GB to sync between devices (1GB to the server itself, 2GB to the other two devices). If that folder is shared between the household members, it soon escalates out of control.
Ant that is exactley what I don’t want with a privacy focused software like nextcloud.
In the UK and USA, what we’re generally given by ISPs is extremely limited, and quite a number of ISPs force you to use their router/modem solution if you want to receive the IPTV you’re paying for, or simply because there’s no other way to use your connection without it as it is locked down to the way that they want you to use it. You’re speaking from your own experiences and not through the broader lens of other countries.
That’s not even needed for this usecase. The only thing you need is a local DNS resolver. The easiest way to achive your goal is probably a Raspberry Pi wit pi-hole on it. Pi-hole supports local DNS overrides easy configurable via web GUI.
Hairpin routing is a “feature,” not a feature. Most routers don’t allow it because it unnecessarily consumes a lot of bandwidth, and the larger the network, the worse it gets. If the server is more than one hop away, you’re now consuming bandwidth at the firewall interface and each link between it and both the internal server and client.
I consider it more like a design flaw when a router allows hairpin routing and has no option to disable it. It’s better (in my opinion) that the router block it so someone who would otherwise be unaware of the underlying issue can implement a proper solution. It represents a fundamental misconfiguration of the network.
Think for a moment how frequently people on this forum complain about performance issues on home setups. Many are caused by hairpin routing.
This is correct. Split-horizon DNS is the proper solution.
So you’re calling Nextcloud privacy-focused, others are calling it corporate-focused. It’s very much whatever anybody wants/needs it to be due to extensibility and configuration possibilities. Just because a specific configuration doesn’t suit one person/org’s needs doesn’t mean it won’t suit a lot of others. You don’t have to use it.
Been there and attempted that with Pi-Hole repeatedly as it should work on paper, but alas does not. You can’t resolve DHCP clients via Pi-Hole on an AmpliFi and plenty of other consumer routers, it simply provides the local IP of the router and does not resolve via the upstream DNS. And yes, this is something that I and others have raised with the respective manufacturers of their routers. “Configure with static IPs” I hear you cry, but this is beyond the grasp of a lot of people who buy a Pi or a pre-made Nextcloud box who this is affecting. I’m a nerd, but not everybody wants to learn a new hobby, they just want to learn/work from home and not be interrupted.
Hairpin NAT is a band-aid on the problem that Nextcloud could solve just like Plex Media Server and Resilio Sync have. Nobody said it was “ideal”, hence asking for a solution to be implemented within Nextcloud.
There are certainly companies that want to host their data themselves and for whom data security and privacy are important. I would go even further and say that most companies value it even more than private individuals. But I certainly wouldn’t mind if someone provides an app for this, that can be installed as an optional feature.
Been there and attempted that with Pi-Hole repeatedly as it should work on paper, but alas does not. You can’t resolve DHCP clients via Pi-Hole on an AmpliFi and plenty of other consumer routers, it simply provides the local IP of the router and does not resolve via the upstream DNS.
You have to use your Pi-hole as your DHCP server to make it work properly and you can either define your router or any public DNS server as upstream. Of course you should not use things like DoT or DoH in your browser then. And sorry if I have to say this, but the problem here is your AmpliFi router. These are known to not even offer the most basic configuration options. These are design objects for people who just want Wi-Fi. Any $50 Netgear router has more features. If you want to selfhost your own services, you have to use the aproperiate network gear to make it work, otherwise you are dependent to comercial services like Plex, where you have to register an account to make things work easy.
Besides of that I would never connect a server that is exposed to the internet internally to the same network, in which all the IO(I)T (Internet of (Insecure) Things 
) are located such as SmartTVs and whatever people think they have to connect to the Internet. A proper DMZ is a must and therefore all the consumer devices fall flat anyways. Nowdays I use a pfSense box as router wich of course can do all the things that are needed. But before I had simpley two routers in a cascade and a Pi-hole. While this of course was not ideal, it worked and my server was seperated from my homenetwork. A 60$ Ubiquity Edge Router X between your AmpliFi and your ISP-Router could do the same for you
Yes, I’m aware of all this with how the Pi-Hole is intended to be used, hence I am here. I’ve even paid several “experts” on several forums who all claim to know it all, but got nowhere, and the reasons are simple and I knew them all along.
You cannot disable the DHCP server on the AmpliFi without putting the AmpliFi into bridge mode, same goes for plenty of other consumer routers, especially ones provided by ISPs, which you generally can’t tinker with to any worthwhile extent. I have dug deeply into this topic, I have contacted both AmpliFi/Ubiquiti, and the manufacturers of other consumer routers, and even contacted ISPs regarding their own hardware on behalf of others.
The problem isn’t my AmpliFi router, I am merely the messenger for a lot of people experiencing the same issue. I am able to pick and choose any router I like, I have that luxury, but this isn’t about me. Colleagues, friends and family members in the UK and USA however are stuck using the heavily locked down router/modem combo provided by their ISP, ergo they are in exactly the same position as me having an AmpliFi, the only difference is that they cannot use anything else. Good luck convincing ISPs to offer an alternative.
By your logic, the problem is the area they live in and should move because there are cheaper areas with more flexible ISPs. I’m sure most of us would rather be in the EU using Fritz!Box than here in the UK, but that’s not how the cookie crumbles and here we are trying to resolve a problem rather than butt heads on a forum.
Netgear isn’t better than the throughput on an AmpliFi HD or Alien though, but that’s a wholly different topic. The limitations of the AmpliFi are quite commonplace in consumer routers these days, and compared to a lot of ISP-issued hardware, they’re comparably flexible, and no, I’m not saying they’re ideal, but for the most important of my personal needs, that was the only option available in the UK that currently received security updates. And yes, I used OPNsense and pfSense for years on end, but the issue is other people who are stuck with their ISP-issued hardware.
In regards to “wanting to self-host”, it’s not even that, plenty of colleagues, family and friends are federating between themselves, and with others. I can guarantee you that every one of these people would rather be in their office and not dealing with the frustration of trying to make working or learning from home OK for them without interrupting each other, but alas, times have changed and the world is a different place, and will be for a long time. I’m well aware that the UK’s handling of COVID-19 has been terrible, I don’t expect “normality” to return any time soon. This is the country that was daft enough to leave the EU. If there was infinite budgets, I’m sure people would be using premium cloud services (maybe they’re concerned about privacy too; only they would know). This is a country that’s said it will give 1m laptops to disadvantaged kids (read ‘in poverty’). As of 2019, 30% of the UK’s kids live in poverty (4m+). In January 2020, 1.4m kids were eligible for free school meals. Following the pandemic and people losing their jobs, that’s obviously gone up. I can tell you now that a good number of those people aren’t going to be buying new hardware and learning new skills to change how their LAN works, a Pi with a setup script on an SD card is probably the realistic limit. Even outside of that demographic, sorry, but the average middle-aged person working from home isn’t going to have the time nor the willpower to faff about restructuring their LAN, that is, if their ISP even allows them to use their own router, which they probably don’t because all they can afford is the cheap option with the locked down ISP-issued hardware.
We could butt heads over this for weeks to come, but it’s better to just accept that different people have different requirements that stem from a variety of factors, including socioeconomics. Have a good day and stay healthy mate.
Bridge Mode is a good thing, because it means you can put your own router behind it without have to deal with things like double NAT. Sure you loose the WifI of the ISP router and have to buy your own WiFi AP/router, but at least you can do that then.
In regards to “wanting to self-host”, it’s not even that, plenty of colleagues, family and friends are federating between themselves, and with others. I can guarantee you that every one of these people would rather be in their office and not dealing with the frustration of trying to make working or learning from home OK for them without interrupting each other, but alas, times have changed and the world is a different place, and will be for a long time. I’m well aware that the UK’s handling of COVID-19 has been terrible, I don’t expect “normality” to return any time soon. This is the country that was daft enough to leave the EU. If there was infinite budgets, I’m sure people would be using premium cloud services (maybe they’re concerned about privacy too; only they would know). This is a country that’s said it will give 1m laptops to disadvantaged kids (read ‘in poverty’). As of 2019, 30% of the UK’s kids live in poverty (4m+). In January 2020, 1.4m kids were eligible for free school meals. Following the pandemic and people losing their jobs, that’s obviously gone up. I can tell you now that a good number of those people aren’t going to be buying new hardware and learning new skills to change how their LAN works, a Pi with a setup script on an SD card is probably the realistic limit. Even outside of that demographic, sorry, but the average middle-aged person working from home isn’t going to have the time nor the willpower to faff about restructuring their LAN, that is, if their ISP even allows them to use their own router, which they probably don’t because all they can afford is the cheap option with the locked down ISP-issued hardware.
That doesn’t have much to do with the topic of the thread, and neither does the topic of the thread have much to do with the pandemic. At least not directly. Most people do not care for stuff like that. They used cloud services like Google, M365, iCloud etc before the pandemic and will do so after it’s over…
By your logic, the problem is the area they live in and should move because there are cheaper areas with more flexible ISPs. I’m sure most of us would rather be in the EU using Fritz!Box than here in the UK, but that’s not how the cookie crumbles and here we are trying to resolve a problem rather than butt heads on a forum.
No, they should complain to the ISPs and to the politicians, etc. But I doubt that enough people care, as long as Netflix, YouTube, TikTok and Clubhouse works fine. Sorry if that sounds a bit cynical… it is
We could butt heads over this for weeks to come, but it’s better to just accept that different people have different requirements that stem from a variety of factors, including socioeconomics.
Sorry if the whole thing came across as a bit instructive and unfriendly. First of all, English is not my first language (yes, I know lame excuses and secondly, this is a support forum and I am primarly here to find or offer solutions and not to disscuss things that unlikley gonna happen in a foreseeable future. But that doesn’t mean that I completely disagree. ISP restrictions annoy me too, only when asked who should solve them, we are not exactly the same opinion.
Have a good day and stay healthy mate.
You too mate. 