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ownCloud 4 released
Version 4 of the ownCloud "personal cloud" system is out. "ownCloud
4 – built through active community support – adds innovative features like
file versioning, – which actively saves files, allowing users to “rollback”
to previous versions – and a new API — giving developers an easy, stable
and supported way to develop applications on top of ownCloud
capabilities." It also adds support for direct opening of ODF
documents and mounting of external filesystems like Dropbox or an FTP
server. See the release
announcement for more information.
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ownCloud 4 released Posted May 22, 2012 15:22 UTC (Tue) by cabrilo (guest, #72372) [Link]
ownCloud looks very promising. I thought about putting it on a Linode, but they (like most other VPS providers) give very little hard disk space at reasonable price, probably because they can't oversell it.
As soon as my Raspberry Pi arrives, I'll put it to good use :)
ownCloud 4 released Posted May 22, 2012 18:52 UTC (Tue) by job (guest, #670) [Link]
This kind of application is really better suited for thin, light servers that you keep on your home network. Especially when you store large media files such as movies and music. Storage is really cheap at home, just connect as many sata-disks as you'd like.
ownCloud 4 released Posted May 23, 2012 12:13 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>This kind of application is really better suited for thin, light servers that you keep on your home network. Especially when you store large media files such as movies and music. Storage is really cheap at home, just connect as many sata-disks as you'd like.
I couldn't disagree more.
This is exactly the kind of project which is least suited to storage on a home network; the appeal of cloud-storage is that it's always available, from anywhere, even if your house is struck by lightning while burning down, *and* you don't have to maintain your own server infrastructure.
ownCloud 4 released Posted May 24, 2012 13:25 UTC (Thu) by job (guest, #670) [Link]
Centrally hosted data storage may have better availability, but the cost is prohibitive. A home user today stores lots of large movies and photo archives which is better stored on the cheapest storage there is. There are plenty of good remote backup systems and users could even backup other users' data, which is where projects such as owncloud can help.
ownCloud 4 released Posted May 24, 2012 13:43 UTC (Thu) by spaetz (subscriber, #32870) [Link]
> Centrally hosted data storage may have better availability, but the cost is prohibitive.
Yes, as soon as you go over the 50GB limit cloud backup space starts to cost real money (at least for endusers small budgets). Being able to plug a cheap USB disk into your WLAN router and use that as webdav is nice and cheap if you can live with the kind of reliability it gives.
> users could even backup other users' data, which is where projects such as owncloud can help.
Isn't that what things like Wuala do? a P2P backup sytem?
ownCloud 4 released Posted Jun 9, 2012 9:47 UTC (Sat) by steffen780 (guest, #68142) [Link]
According to wiki, the p2p aspect is being discontinued. And it was and is proprietary, and therefore untrustworthy for encryption.
ownCloud 4 released Posted May 22, 2012 15:35 UTC (Tue) by xxiao (subscriber, #9631) [Link]
more or so it's starting like a SME storage server.
ownCloud 4 released Posted May 22, 2012 16:26 UTC (Tue) by aggelos (subscriber, #41752) [Link] Took a look at the encryption plugin and I gotta wonder what the point is. Encryption has to happen server side, so whoever controls the server trivially has access to all the data when you try to decrypt anything. The key is encrypted with the user's password (the unsalted hash of which is stored in the db, apparently?) and is generated by calling mt_rand(10000,99999) (a PRNG) 4 times in a row and concatenating, so offline attacks should work just fine. Am I misreading the code? What's the usecase here?
ownCloud 4 released Posted May 22, 2012 19:56 UTC (Tue) by ledow (guest, #11753) [Link]
I'm not sure the password is stored unsalted to be honest. The hash looks pretty unusual to me and doesn't correspond to anything I could generate with SHA1 or MD5, for example.
That said, the encryption is still useless anyway, because if you read the files from the server, it's only a small step to compromise anyway.
It's worth deploying on a SSL-only server so that you don't transmit your password or data transparently, but if it's on your own server (kinda the point of "owncloud"), I'd assume you had access to everything anyway. Part of the reason I like the idea - I don't have to rely on DropBox or similar to release my files if something goes wrong.
ownCloud 4 released Posted May 22, 2012 20:04 UTC (Tue) by aggelos (subscriber, #41752) [Link]
No, the password is hashed (they use http://www.openwall.com/phpass/, which transparently generates a salt and stores it along w/ the hash).
Like you though, I still don't see what this toy encryption (there are other problems too) has to offer, other than checking an Encryption [x] checkbox.
ownCloud 4 released Posted May 22, 2012 20:34 UTC (Tue) by AlexHudson (subscriber, #41828) [Link]
Presumably it's to go alongside the external storage options. It may not do much if someone hacks your owncloud, but it means you can trust your external storage isn't readable.
ownCloud 4 released Posted May 22, 2012 21:18 UTC (Tue) by aggelos (subscriber, #41752) [Link]
Not with this implementation you can't :/
ECB Posted May 23, 2012 6:47 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
Looks like electronic codebook mode. AKA "I don't know what I'm doing" mode.
As Wikipeda handily illustrates with a picture of Tux, ECB doesn't do what you naively expect (because it can't) even when provided with a high quality block cipher primitive and a strong key.
There are a bunch of hard problems that ownCloud ought to want to solve. But solving already hard problems with PHP isn't going to happen, so they seem to have satisfied themselves with making it customisable, you can have the Wrong Thing™ in any flavour and colour scheme you like.
ownCloud 4 released Posted May 28, 2012 9:35 UTC (Mon) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
why not? (i honestly want to know as i hoped to use this)
ownCloud 4 released Posted Jun 28, 2012 20:23 UTC (Thu) by MarkWilliamson (guest, #30166) [Link]
You can create shared web links to files give downloads to people without logins; I guess maybe if you could encrypt stuff before doing so that would have usecases.
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