I’m facing strange problems with one of my Nextcloud installations.
My setup:
- current nextcloud (31.0.7.1)
- docker image
- root server with separate data partition for this nextcloud
- access via haproxy with TLS termination
- clients are multiple windows (3.16.6) and android (unknown version string)
Two days ago the server ran out of diskspace. I solved this yesterday by increasing the partition, restarting the server and deleting all previews (using occ command) . While beeing out of space the clients kept trying to sync files but got errors. The setup is used by a friend of mine who organizes some holiday camps and is heavily working with files synced with nextcloud.
After solving the serverside error and restarting the server, the windows clients started refusing to connect to the server. They showed errors saying that the authentication was not successful and opened a browser to reauthenticate. Logging in with a browser was successful.
After granting access to the clients they just opened the browser again for authentification. So the clients started a kind of loop but never got access to the server again.
Then we created a new account with same memberships and shares and the clients were able to connect to this account. Meanwhile I had to whitelist the IP of the clients as they were obviously blocked by brute force protection.
We tried to connect with the “old” account again, while beeing connected with the new account, but the clients still refused to connect. Even deleting the new account and only trying the old one failed. This is tested on three computers.
Today we also experienced similar behaviour using the sync app on android but this might be related to brute force protection again. I whitelisted the IP of the mobile device but have no confirmation if it works again.
When adding a new account to the client we had to choose a new sync folder as the existing one was beeing used by the other account. Until here I understand this behaviour. But after deleting the old account as well as the new account, uninstalling the client and reinstalling it again, we still cannot choose the existing syncfolder. No matter what account we try to connect, the client says, the folder would already be in use by the client.
After doing some research I found a hint that we need to delete some folders (I’m using linux only so I have no clue how the windows client works, looks like or behaves in any way):
We didn’t delete these folders but renamed the folders under …\AppData.… and didn’t touch the existing folder “C:\Users<yourwindowsusername>\Nextcloud2” which contained all the locally synced (and partitially changed and unsynced) data.
But no matter what we did, the client refused to use this existing folder for a new sync account. Therefore we started to move some subfolders to the newly created Nextcloud3 folder to have them synced again. This worked anyhow but was a not so nice solution.
Especially when having this error on thre computers and at least two of them having locally changed and unsynced files.
Other clients from other people connected to other accounts are syncing without problems. At least what I can see in the logfile.
Now my questions:
- What could be the reason for the client not to connect with this account anymore?
- Are there any errors which could be “stored” serverside and prevent a sync client from connecting?
- How can we solve this error and make this account usable to the clients again?
- What do we have to do to choose an existing folder which is definetly not in use by the client for a new sync account?
Thanky for reading and for helping!!