Hello, hello!

We are indeed making some progress, today I will be going over the install process for ownCloud 8.0.2 and walking you through the best practices.

Configure static IP address

Do not leave your machine to grab an IP from DHCP, I suggest you have a spreadsheet that lists all IP addresses within your subnet and there status (free/used/reserved). Doing this has helped me keep my network organized and no more dang IP conflicts!

Using your favorite text editor, open the interface file which is located in /etc/network/interfaces

I have already reserved a IP address in my list so that is won’t get used anywhere else, I suggest you do that same. Under the primary network interface comment is where you want to put your static address.

Once you have entered this information, save your changes (in nano it is CTRL + X) and exit the text editor. At this point it would be a good idea to reboot the machine to insure it does come back up with the correctly set static IP address.

Installing ownCloud 8.0.2

First thing to do is add ownCloud’s repo to apt-get by doing the following command:

If you intend on using apt-get for future updates for ownCloud then I suggest saving the key by doing the following:

Once you have created your repo file and optionally downloaded/saved the key, do the following:

You should see something similar to below…

You will be asked for confirmation, enter Y and let’s get this ball rolling!

During the install process, you will be asked to set a password for the root user for MySQL, I suggest a strong password here and be sure that you keep record of it because we will need it when we configure ownCloud.

Once apt-get is finished downloading all of the bits bring up your favorite

Web browser and go to http://YOURSERVERNAME/owncloud and you will be greeted with the setup page.

At this time, fill in the blanks including the password that you had setup during the install process for mysql and hit Finish Setup.

The setup process will take a few minutes so do not navigate away from the page and let it process. Once the setup finishes you will enter the main dashboard for your user account.

On the top right, click your username and go to the Admin section, from here lets clear up some of the warnings that ownCloud might be complaining about.

 

Resolving the “PHP charset is not set to UTF-8” warning

Let’s jump back into our SSH session and edit the relevant php.ini file that this warning is referring to. Open up /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini in your favorite editor again and search for the phrase “default_charset”. (CTRL + W in nano)

 

Once you find it, remove the colon in front of it to uncomment and after that is done, restart apache2 and refresh the admin page to get rid of the warning.

Here are the commands that I used to achieve this:

Resolving the security warning

You are accessing ownCloud via HTTP. We strongly suggest you configure your server to require using HTTPS instead.

In order to enable HTTPS, we must first enable SSL and assign a certificate to use. To create a self-signed certificate, do the following:

Enable SSL in Apache2

Create Certificate

At this time you will be prompted to enter a bunch of information regarding the certificate, if this is going to be a private server that only you use then feel free to make up and/or leave some fields blank. Here is what I filled out:

Next step is to configure the SSL site for apache2, to do this open the site configuration file and lets edit a few details:

These are the settings that you need to add/change:

Once your certificate is created, restart apache2 and HTTPS/SSL should be working on your ownCloud and you should no longer see the warning in the admin dashboard.

While we are at it, let’s enforce HTTPS by enabling the following options

What these options do is if you go to the HTTP version (plaintext) of your ownCloud, it will automatically redirect you to the HTTPS version.

Recommended ownCloud Apps

Server-side Encryption

To enable this, login as a admin user and go to the Apps section. From there, go to the Not Enabled section.

At this point your ownCloud installation should be fully functional via the web interface or client. What I did on my machines is instead of installing the ownCloud client, I opted to map the drive. To do this in Windows, bring up command prompt as administrator and enter in the following command:

I did something similar on my Macbook Air as well by connecting to the server and mounting the weddav folder associated with my account.

Additional Steps

Port forwarding – If your ownCloud instance is sitting behind a firewall and you need to access it externally, you will need to create a policy on your firewall/router to allow traffic to/from your ownCloud server using TCP 443.

DNS records – I currently use Namecheap as my domain name provider and made a new A record to point owncloud.uglyvpn.com to my external IP address. This process took close to 10hrs to complete but can take up to 48hrs for all DNS changes to propagate around the world.