Another upgrade in my self-hosted IT infrastructure.
Nextcloud is a self-hostable platform centred around file storage, providing a plug-in framework expandable to a broad range of services. It is one of the older hosting platforms, and unfortunately showing its age in several respects. I consider few of its default and plug-in apps to be of high quality. However, due to its popularity, stability and support it seems to make a good base for file storage services and connecting other services.
I have been running Nextcloud for years but so far only using it for one core stable service (contacts and calendar) and some experiments. This is partly because my deployment is an old, stale configuration, stuck on an old version. I need to update to a maintainable deployment.
There are a few ways to deploy Nextcloud. For this I will use MASH. It is not one of the “official” methods; it's a self-hosting framework from the author of the popular Matrix self-hosting framework.
The MASH Nextcloud doc says, after running the initial installation, we need to intervene, with a second ansible run to print some credentials, then an interactive cut-and-paste session, then a third ansible run to finish installation:
After installation, follow Nextcloud's setup wizard... choose any username/password for your account... choose PostgreSQL with the credentials you see after running just run-tags print-nextcloud-db-credentials
Once you've fully installed Nextcloud, adjust its default configuration (URL paths, trusted reverse-proxies, etc.) by running: just run-tags adjust-nextcloud-config
But we want to do this non-interactively: Infrastructure as Code. Nextcloud supports Installing from command line. On our server we can run the in-container equivalent of the occ command shown there:
I've been doing some upgrades on my home IT infrastructure. Twice recently I've been “got” by unfortunate backward-incompatible changes that were made in software I rely on. This one's in Traefik, which is otherwise pretty stable and reliable.
My certificates started expiring. That's when I noticed. The automatic renewal attempts were failing.
Briefly, the behaviour change affects Traefik “routers” (route configurations) that are intended as a full pass-through. When I originally set these up, the traffic they passed through included ACME challenges used for issuing TLS/SSL certificates. Some of these routes are routing a whole block of domain name-space to further Traefik instances which handle specific subdomains; some are routing to VMs running other services such as YUNoHost; and all these expect to manage their own certificates through the ACME protocol.
In our family we look after our own photos — we don't want Google or any other company deciding what we can and can't do with them.
In the past we used various desktop/laptop based open source viewer software, with storage on local disks. More recently we have been running the awesome open source PhotoPrism, with its smartphone-compatible web interface and photo library management features. Although PhotoPrism is impressive judged on its own merits, and has indeed allowed us to manage our photos ourselves, it's just not quite as usable as we'd wish.
Open letter, initially published by the petites singularités association, in French. Translation by OW2.
The European Union must keep funding free software
Since 2020, Next Generation Internet (NGI) programmes, part of European Commission's Horizon programme, fund free software in Europe using a cascade funding mechanism (see for example NLnet's calls). This year, according to the Horizon Europe working draft detailing funding programmes for 2025, we notice that Next Generation Internet is not mentioned any more as part of Cluster 4.
NGI programmes have shown their strength and importance to support the European software infrastructure, as a generic funding instrument to fund digital commons and ensure their long-term sustainability. We find this transformation incomprehensible, moreover when NGI has proven efficient and economical to support free software as a whole, from the smallest to the most established initiatives. This ecosystem diversity backs the strength of European technological innovation, and maintaining the NGI initiative to provide structural support to software projects at the heart of worldwide innovation is key to enforce the sovereignty of a European infrastructure. Contrary to common perception, technical innovations often originate from European rather than North American programming communities, and are mostly initiated by small-scaled organizations.
Previous Cluster 4 allocated 27 millions euros to:
I recently learned something new about those tweety birds we hear in the tall trees all along our school run, cycling or walking past the golf course. Near the school end, lots of coal tits, a name with which I was barely familiar. Near our end, lots of wrens. I had an idea that wrens were rare and secretive and tiny, so it had not occurred to me they were responsible for that noisy cheerful chatter. Perhaps it's hard to spot one but they're loudly singing.
These I learnt last week helped by an app named “whoBIRD” which, as you may guess, listens for bird calls and displays the most likely matches. It's delightful to identify real birds, and surprisingly successful if they're not too far away.
This article is about one particular step of the procedure for “flashing” a new android-compatible operating system onto a Samsung device to create a Freedom-Respecting Smart Phone or Tablet.
