OwnCloud 7 installation and configuration on Debian 7 (Wheezy)

Installation and configuration of ownCloud 7 on Debian 7 (Wheezy)

Version 1.0
Author: Srijan Kishore

This document describes how to install and configure ownCloud 7 on Debian 7. I will also describe how to connect to the ownCloud Server's data with Ubuntu 14.04 desktop and windows 7 machine. ownCloud provides access to your data through a web interface or WebDAV while providing a platform to easily view, sync and share across devices—all under your control. ownCloud’s open architecture is extensible via a simple but powerful API for applications and plugins and works with any storage.

1 Preliminary Note

This tutorial is based on Debian 7 server, so you should set up a basic Debian 7 server installation before you continue with this tutorial. The system should have a static IP address. I use 192.168.0.100 as my IP address in this tutorial and server1.example.com as the hostname. Again I have  192.168.0.101 as IP address of Ubuntu 14.04 Desktop and server2.example.com as the hostname. I will be using the user=srijan for the installation and configuration. I will also show the ownCloud sharing options with windows machine, so I have working Windows 7 machine too.

2 Installation of ownCloud 7

ownCloud is a web application that can store and serve content from a centralized location, much like Dropbox. The difference is that ownCloud 7 allows you to host the serving software on your own machines, taking the trust issues out of putting your personal data someone else's server.

We will first download the release key associated with the ownCloud software:

cd /tmp
wget http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/isv:ownCloud:community/Debian_7.0/Release.key
apt-key add - < Release.key

Then we can add the ownCloud 7 repository as follows:

echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/isv:/ownCloud:/community/Debian_7.0/ /' >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/owncloud.list

Finally, update the package database and install ownCloud:

apt-get update
apt-get install owncloud

3 ownCloud 7 configuration on Debian Wheezy

Further we need to install Mysql to get the configurations as follows:

apt-get install mysql-server

It will ask for password input, just enter your desired password there.

We will be configuring our ownCloud server to take advantage of the more robust MySQL database instead of the SQLite default implementation. To do so, we must configure MySQL first as:

mysql -u root -p

Put the Mysql password which you selected before, & create a database for ownCloud in Mysql prompt:

CREATE DATABASE owncloud;

Assign privileges to a new MySQL user to handle database operations for ownCloud:

GRANT ALL ON owncloud.* to 'owncloud'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'database_password';

exit

Now, if you go to your IP address or domain name followed by "/owncloud" in your browser, you will see a page that looks like this:

Click on Storage & database:

Now select MySQL/MariaDB and create an admin account as in my case I have choosen owncloud as my admin account and a desired password for that user:



In the lower tab below the MySQL/MariaDB give the entry of the username=owncloud password=database_password databasename=owncloud.

Then press Finish setup.

4 Mounting the ownCloud 7 share with Ubuntu 14.04

We can mount the shared point with the other machines, here I will show you the way to process to moint it through WebDAV tools in another Ubuntu Desktop machine. There are two methods to use ownCloud 7 as a client in Ubuntu Desktop.

• Manual mount by giving entries installing davfs2

• By installing ownCloud 7 client

I will explain both of them, you can use any of them to mount.

4.1 Manual mount through davfs2

I am running the command on my second machine server2.example.com:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install davfs2

We will allow non-root users to mount and unmount the WebDAV shares by typing:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure davfs2

Moving ahead I will be adding my username=srijan to WebDAV group:

 sudo usermod -aG davfs2 srijan

We want to make the permanent mount point in server2.example.com, so I will give the following entries in the /etc/fstab:

sudo vi /etc/fstab

Now in user=srijan's home drive I will create directories, one to mount the share point and another to hold the configurations details:

mkdir ~/owncloud

 mkdir ~/.davfs2

Further create a file as:

vi ~/.davfs2/secrets

192.168.0.100/owncloud/remote.php/webdav owncloud database_password

Ensure that the file is writable by only you by using the file manager or by issuing the following command:

chmod 600 ~/.davfs2/secrets

Now we will mount it as follows:

mount owncloud/

Note: The given credentials will be used further, so please take a note of it:

Username: owncloud
Password: database_password

Further if you find any permissions error in the folder then change the folder permission as owner of the user:

chown -R srijan:srijan owncloud/

To automatically mount the folder on login at server2.example.com, add the mount ~/owncloud command to the ~/.bashrc file.

vi ~/.bashrc

[...]
mount ~/owncloud

After mounting successfully you can get some error Resource temporarily unavailable and Certificate warnings then it can be removed as follows:

• For Resource temporarily unavailable:

vi /etc/davfs2/davfs2.conf 

[...]
use_locks 0

• For Certificate warnings:
  

If you use a self-signed certificate, you will get a warning. If you are willing to take the risk of a man in the middle attack, run this command instead:

echo "y" | mount ~/owncloud > /dev/null 2>&1

4.2 ownCloud 7 client installation by ownCloud 

Open link and select the distribution Ubuntu 14.04, further in your Ubuntu Desktop put the commands:

cd /tmp
wget http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/isv:ownCloud:desktop/xUbuntu_14.04/Release.key
sudo apt-key add - < Release.key 

sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/isv:/ownCloud:/desktop/xUbuntu_14.04/ /' >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/owncloud-client.list"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install owncloud-client

It will install ownCloud-client in the Ubuntu 14.04 Desktop. Thats it open ownCloud-client

Put the server path as 192.168.0.100/owncloud and then put your credentials of username=owncloud  and password=database_password



Further if you are using it without https theen you can ignore the error and move ahead:



Again:



Then it will map the ownCloud with your dekstop:



And then finally all data will get synced:

5 Mounting the ownCloud 7 share with Windows 7

We can access the data from ownCloud 7 server on a window machine also. There are many methods to this, you can check this link for them. I will explain two of them.

1. I will be using the ownCloud clients for that. Open link and download the windows client from here

Simply install the client and it will work for you.

Enter the details http://192.168.0.100/owncloud:

Again give your credentials(  user=owncloud and password=database_password) which we have settup while installing the ownCloud 7 and the window will appear:

You can open the local folder to access the files locally.

2. Cyberduck ver 4.5.

There is another method to access the ownCloud 7 server. I will be using Cyberduck for that. For this you need to install it from this URL.

Download the installer and install it simply by doing next --next.

Cyberduck has a very nice user interface.

Enter the credentials & connect 192.168.0.100/owncloud/remote.php/webdav with user=owncloud and password=database_password:

Give the credentials and it will connect.

6 Links

• ownCloud 7 : https://owncloud.com/
• Cyberduck : http://cyberduck.io/?l=en
• Debian : https://www.debian.org/