Chad's Blog

This contains instructions on how to add new applications to your owncloud 8.1 server. I will give an example of adding Mozilla Sync 1.4 application. I am downloading the application using the command line. The server is Linux Ubuntu 14.04.02.

• Go to https://apps.owncloud.com/ and find the application you want to add. Find Mozilla Sync 1.4 application and go to it’s page.
• Go to it’s git page by clicking “Link”. It is located at the top of the page at Version Control: Link
• From the git page, copy the git link “HTTPS clone URL”. The link is https://github.com/owncloud/mozilla_sync.git
• From the terminal go to your apps directory in owncload (/var/www/cc.com/owncloud/apps).
• Download the application with:

sudo git clone https://github.com/owncloud/mozilla_sync.git

• View the directory and make sure the application is owned by your web server user “www-data”

ls -hl

• Change the ownership of the directory to www-data:www-data (user:group)

sudo chown www-data:www-data -R mozilla_sync/

• From owncloud menu, select Apps/Not enabled. Find the application Mozilla Sync 1.4 and select the “enable” button to activate the application.

The end.

When I tried to upgrade owncloud 8.04 to 8.1, the owcloud updater app did not work and said I was already at the highest version. However when I run

sudo dpkg -l owncloud*

I get that owncloud 8.1 is installed. Version 8.1 was installed to my /var/www/owncloud directory, however I run owncloud at /var/www/cc.com/owncloud. Here are my installation steps.

Backup owncloud folders: see https://blog.chadchenault.com/2015/07/20/updates-in-owncloud-8-ubuntu-linux/

Undo strong permissions and directory ownership for updates: https://blog.chadchenault.com/2015/07/20/updates-in-owncloud-8-ubuntu-linux/

Turn on Maintenance mode:

sudo -u www-data php /var/www/cc.com/owncloud/occ maintenance:mode –on

Rename current owncloud installation and save it in case you need to restore to it

cd /var/www/cc.com/

mv -v owncloud owncloud.8.04

Move owncloud 8.1 to /var/www/cc.com

cp -vR /var/www/owncloud /var/www/cc.com/

Copy old config.php to new files

cp -v /var/www/cc.com/owncloud.8.04/config/config.php /var/www/cc.com/owncloud/config/

Remove new data directory and restore old data dir

rm -vR /var/www/cc.com/owncloud/data

cp -av /var/www/cc.com/owncloud.8.04/data /var/www/cc.com/owncloud/

Undo strong permissions and directory ownership for updates: https://blog.chadchenault.com/2015/07/20/updates-in-owncloud-8-ubuntu-linux/

Restart you webserver

service apache2 restart

Run the owncloud upgrade

sudo -u www-data php /var/www/cc.com/owncloud/occ upgrade

“The upgrade operation takes a few minutes, depending on the size of your installation. When it is finished you will see a success message, or an error message that will tell where it went wrong.” source https://doc.owncloud.org/server/8.0/admin_manual/maintenance/upgrade.html

Here is the last two lines of output indicating success: “Update successful
Maintenance mode is kept active”

Reset your Strong Permissions: https://blog.chadchenault.com/2015/07/20/updates-in-owncloud-8-ubuntu-linux/

/usr/local/bin/owncloud.set.permissions.sh

Turn off Maintenance mode

sudo -u www-data php /var/www/cc.com/owncloud/occ maintenance:mode –off

The End!

 

Steps on performing an Owncloud update in version 8.x. This did not work when upgrading from 8.04 to 8.1. See post on upgrading between major versions.

backup data folders

Simply copy your config and data folder (or even your whole ownCloud install and data folder) to a place outside of your ownCloud environment. You could use this command:

rsync -Aaxv -delete /media/media.serv/owncloud/ /media/backup.serv/backup/temp/owncloud-dirbkp_`date +”%Y%m%d”`/

You must undo strong permissions and directory ownership for updates

https://doc.owncloud.org/server/8.0/admin_manual/maintenance/update.html

chown -Rv www-data:www-data /var/www/cc.com/owncloud

Run owncloud updater from administration menu

data backup done by owncloud. Here is your backup: /media/media.serv/owncloud/data/updater_backup/8.0.0.7-3a8eb931

from command line

must be run from owncloud folder

cd /var/www/cc.com/owncloud/

sudo -u www-data php occ upgrade

Reapply strong permissions on directories

reference: https://doc.owncloud.org/server/8.0/admin_manual/maintenance/update.html#setting-strong-permissions

/data, /apps, and /config are www-data:www-data; everything else root:www-data

my script to set permissions

/usr/local/bin/owncloud.set.permissions.sh

 

Server is Mythubuntu 14.04 with Ampache, Apache, WordPress, Postfix and Dovecot email, mythtv, and Owncloud software. This is a post on how to run a script on your server using Webmin. When I first start up my server, I have a LUKS encrypted hard drive (backup) that has to be mounted. I written a script to automate this task. The private key to unlock this disk is stored in my encrypted home folder, so I must login first to open my encrypted home folder and then unlock the backup drive. The script to run is shown below and is called “mount backup disk on startup” and is run from the webmin server.

The next image shows how to configure the command to run. This command must be run as root.

There is very little document on the custom commands for webmin.

I have installed software for converting text to speech in Ubuntu-gnome 15.04 linux. I did this to install voice menus for the rockbox firmare/software on my sansa clip+ audio player.

Installing the software

sudo apt-get install gespeaker

sudo apt-get install mbrola

Install mbrola english-us voices

sudo apt-get install mbrola-us*

voices are installed at /usr/share/mbrola

espeak data folder: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/espeak-data

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/espeak-data /usr/share/espeak-data

see data folder reference https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gespeaker/+bug/919577

espeak -v mb-en1 “Hello world, process, I am an Aggie”

mbrola: FATAL ERROR : cannot find file /usr/share/mbrola/voices/en1

sudo ln -s /usr/share/mbrola /usr/share/mbrola/voices

espeak -s 140 -v mb-us2 “process, I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth.'”

     or

espeak -s 140 -v us-mbrola-2 “process, I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth.'”

espeak -s 140 -v english-us ‘process, I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth.’

List installed english voices

espeak –voices=en

Documentation Location

/usr/share/doc

Additional information for improving espeak sound

http://www.freelists.org/post/nvda/Improving-the-sound-of-eSpeak

 

 

This is post is how to run a program from the terminal in the background so that it will continue to run even when the terminal window is closed. I use the nohup command to accomplish this. I have a server that I log into with ssh. I run a rysnc backup command to that copies data to a usb3, 2 GB external hard drive.  This can take several hours to complete. Sometimes I need to close my ssh session, for example to reboot my client computer, yet I don’t want the backup to stop. I am running linux, Ubuntu Gnome 15.04 and all commands are run from the terminal.

Example of no hup command

nohup nice -n20 bkup.offsite.cc.com.py > /dev/null 2>&1 &

I will break down what is happening.

nohup – prevents the commands following from stopping if the terminal window is closed

nice -n20 – runs the program bkup.offsite.cc.com.py at a lower priority for cpu resources to prevent other programs on the computer from slowing down

bkup.offsite.cc.com.py – the python backup program to execute

> /dev/null 2>&1 – This does not show error messages and output, nohup normally writes standard output to a file nohup.txt. When my output was written to nohup.txt, the file size was 1.2 GB!

& – puts the command in the background so that you can use the terminal for other tasks

To see the status of your running application run the following command:

jobs

Output will be:

[1]+  Running   nohup nice -n20 bkup.offsite.cc.com.py &

A good reference for working with jobs: http://linuxcommand.org/lc3_lts0100.php

Reference: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/32574/when-do-you-need-nohup-if-youre-already-forking-using?lq=1

Iphone IOS

Click on this link, http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/owncloud/id543672169?ls=1&mt=8, to open the owncloud client in the App Store. Download and instructions are here https://owncloud.com/products/mobileapps/.

Mac Laptop or Desktop running OSX Yosemite

Click on the following link to install the software https://owncloud.com/download#desktop-clients.

Download and instructions here https://owncloud.com/products/desktop-clients/. “Simply copy a file into the directory and the ownCloud desktop client does the rest. Make a change to the files on one computer, it will flow across the others using these desktop sync clients. Always have your latest files with you wherever you are.”

 

I have been getting multiple spam attempts on my wordpress blog in the comments section of my blog. These comments have not made it publicly to my blog because I have personally approve each users first comment before they can post a comment. All spam so far seems to come from automated attacks, and the attacks are daily by the same IP address. I have finally decided to do something about this.

I followed this post, http://www.wpoptimus.com/912/ban-ip-addresses-login-wordpress-dashboard/, and installed the plugins WP-Ban, and Login Security Solution.

wp-ban

Anti-spam

Anti-spam has worked great and requires the least effort. wp-ban works but requires you to manually block ips or domain names. I recommend starting with Anti-spam and only add wp-ban if needed. Anti-spam prevents bots (computer programs) from writing comments on your site. I have never had a real human leave a comment on my site. My site is configured that I have to manually approve the first comment by a person before it becomes visible on my site. Now that I have Anti-spam, my comments page is not filled up with spammers anymore. I like Anti-spam so much that I am giving them a donation.

Preventing Login Attacks

I have also added the login-security-solution plugin to block brute force login attacks. Its description is: “Security against brute force attacks by tracking IP, name, password; requiring very strong passwords. Idle timeout. Maintenance mode lockdown.”

I have installed Roundcube email on my server. I now can access my email server with a web browser. If you run your own email server, you should look at Roundcube as another way to access your email. The majority of my email reading uses Evolution, however this allows me to access my email at work or from other people’s computers. I found Roundcube to be easy to install and use. Thanks Roundcube!  http://roundcube.net/