Sharing root directory

ℹ️ Support
#1

I recently installed Nextcloud. My situation is as follows: I need one account for some board members and a few accounts for some committees. I want the board to be able to directly access data stored by the committees. Ideally, the board would own a directory per committee and the committees would have this directory as their root directory, sort of like what the Unix tool chroot does. Alternatively, the committees would own their own root directory and would share it with the board.

Is a setup like this possible in Nextcloud? I can’t find an option to do this.

(Of course, the committees could have a single directory in their root and share that with the board, but then I would need to keep telling them to store everything inside that directory, which is not ideal.)

#2

This is not possible. There is a feature request on the ownCloud bugtracker (https://github.com/owncloud/core/issues/14049) but I didn’t find a related feature request for Nextcloud.

#3

That’s too bad. And how should I create a feature request for Nextcloud? Is it sufficient to change the category of this topic in ‘feature’, or does the community here prefer an issue on Github?

#4

There is no clear policy about where to put it. The forum is better for discussions about possible features, if it’s a clear defined feature, it’s easier to track on the bugtracker.

#5

Ok, thanks!

#6

Wait, I just learned that the ‘external storage support’ app allows me to mount Nextcloud directories. I tried to have the URL point to my own installation and to use the ‘username and password’ authentication mechanism to log in as a different user.

Should this in principle work? I’m getting “Sabre\DAV\Exception\ServiceUnavailable: HTTP/1.1 503 Storage is temporarily not available” fatal errors.

Sharing a local directory kind of works, but of course not with encryption enabled.

#7

You can mount external directories (but these are still subfolders, you can’t yet mount external folders as home-folder: https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues/3343).

Please don’t mount external storage from the Nextcloud data/-folder, this will certainly break stuff at some point. The data/-folder is considered to be exclusive for Nextcloud and no other process must change the files there.

#8

I know that this one is very old and probably not needed anymore, but if someone comes across it, symlinks might be the answer to the question.

#9

If you do this between e.g. 3 Users - A, B and C, then please be aware, that you need to rescan User B anc User C if User A makes changes…
Read more about: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/19/admin_manual/configuration_server/occ_command.html#scan

1 Like
#10

yep, filescan especially in combination with ldap-remnants and nfs/samba-shares can get a bit tricky, still hoping for a high performance self regenerating filecache somewhen :wink:

in this case filesystem_check_changes might be an option, i only use symlink for a worm-storage, that works so far

ever looked into performancedifference between mariadb and postgres by any chance?