Nethserver 7.3 is very powerful and it can be an “all in one” server.
Now missing a piece to make Nethserver a complete Cloud server: an office WEB like GDocs or O365.
An online editor for docs and spreadsheet it would be great (with an app for mobile).
There are many projects:
Collabora Online: Nextcloud is in partnership with Collabora. I’ve found a docker but the implementation is not so simply;
Open365 a new opensource project;
Open Xchange OX Documents;
OnlyOffice.
Anyone has tested some of theese or other solutions?
I have tested various options (including OX Documents, Kopano and OnlyOffice) and only experimented with Collabora + Nextcloud, but as you have stated, installation of docker is a pain to setup (especially if you are using a custom kernel or a version earlier then 3.10)
As a christmas present, I have ordered and am waiting for an ARM based single board computer (Lamobo / Banana Pi BPI-R1 ‘smart-router’) to be delivered. I am intending to experiment and try to install Nextcloud, Docker and Collabora on this device.
I have written a fairly long comment about the possibilities of integrating a unified office and communication solution within another thread (re: any opinions about Pydio, also have a look at this post).
I have just been watching a YouTube demo of Open365 and whilst exploring their Git repository, I have realised that this project is being developed by the same people that produced the eyeOS GUI / web based ‘cloud desktop’ interface (a project that has been around since 2008, I was very interested in this project at the time and did spend quite a long period experimenting with it).
I am going to be interested to see how this development progresses over the next couple of months / year. (I have just added their RSS feed to my desktop aggregator application)
I agree the web applications can be a great tool to form a counter to Googles G-Suite and MS Office365. Especially in educational environments.
It would be great to have the collabora online environment available out of the box in nextcloud.
Hi @denis.robel,
Firstly, I am really encouraged to see other users taken an interest in non-Intel based SOC devices and trying to employee these devices work as servers, as well as including these devices into existing infrastructures.
I did do some experimenting and did successfully get NS working with the BPI-R1, however due to the state of the ARM version of NS (as of the present time) and the current issues around an official EPEL repository, in the end I decided to use an image of the more matured ARM version of Debian (Bananian – Debian Jessie – kernel ver: 3.4.113-armv7) with this device.
As an existing user of Webmin, I have included the Webmin suite (Webmin, Usermin and the GPL version of Virtualmin) to administrate this device.
I have been able to incorporate a full LAMP stack onto this device (running both Joomla and version 12 of Nextcloud), as well as including Dovecot, OpenVPN, Squid, Postfix and other tools (including Shorewall, hostapd, fail2ban, bmon, tshark, nmap, midnight commender and various other utilities). – At this moment I am having a few teething problems with LDAP but hope to resolve these issues soon.
Also, I am considering adding Collabora Office into this device and incorporating Collabora into NextCloud.
As the ARM version of NS only includes the standard networking modules (ie. the DHCP, DNS and SSH modules), which is great if you want to use this device as a gateway or firewall but is lacking some of the more advanced features that is included within the x86_64 version of NS (E-mail server, openVPN / IPSec, Jabber etc.) but is (as of present time) a bit underwhelming when compared with the x86_64 version of NS.
I did manage to incorporate integrated switching both with CentOS and Debian – my network setup is as follows:-
eth0.101 (LAN / connected to router): static IP (10.0.0.2 / 24)
br0 (bridge): connecting both the 4 ethernet ports (eth0.102) and wireless (WLAN) for public access (using static address: 10.0.1.1 / 24).
DNS / Name Servers on: 10.0.0.1 (router address), 127.0.0.1
DHCP on br0 (range: 10.0.1.50 - 10.0.1.255)
Considering that this device comes with an A20 Cortex-A7 duel core CPU (running at 1Ghz per core) and only 1GB of RAM, this device is running fairly smoothly (obviously, depending on which applications that you may want to have running on this device - you may experience performance issues).
If you are intending to buy this device, due to the heat output and to increase longevity of this device, it would be wise to consider adding a heatsink to the CPU and the ethernet chips (I used a 20x20x5mm aluminium heatsink for the CPU and a 12x12x5mm copper heatsink for the ethenet chipset).
Also I have used a 16GB Sandisk Ultra TF / micro SSD Card (reporting as 14.84 GiB or 1519616 MiB) that contains a boot partition (128 MiB), root partition (11.82 GiB or 12101 MiB) and a swap partition (1.50 GiB or 1536 MiB) – as stated above, there is only 1GB of physical RAM, so adding a swap partition is somewhat useful.
I would suggest that when purchasing a micro SSD card, to be careful and only buy from authorised / trusted vendors, as there are a lot of cheap knock-off / fake cards that claim to be faster then they actually are (caveat emptor ).
I also kept 1.5GiB (1536 MiB) non partitioned at the end of this disk. In theory this empty space should prolong the life of the micro SSD.
As stated within another post (So, what are you working on? - 22 May 17), I have included a case-less SSD SATA drive (128GB - reporting 118GiB or 120831 MiB), which is split into three 40GiB (38911 MiB) partition (home, separate storage and a backup partition), as well as 1GiB (1024 MiB) free space (to maximise longevity of the disk) – The partition structure may change at a later date.
I have also incorporated a EC-Technology B30224 battery (22400mAh) with a converted USB to LiPo cable to act as a sort of UPS device and to make the Banana portable, which gives me approx 2.5 days of battery power when fully charged (whilst this is not the best usage of this style of powerbank, due to the not finding suitable vendors that can supply large 3.7v lithium batteries within the UK and the fact that I had this battery laying about doing nothing – it will do for the moment).
As stated within the other post, I have also brought a SIM800L GSM / GPRS (which I am intending to use to connect to the Internet and therefore freeing up the separate ethernet port, which will be attached to my internal server infrastructure) and a Adafruit PCF8523 real time clock module, which with the battery will make the Banana ultra portable).
I have yet to attached the GSM and RTC modules to the banana, as well as to configure the GPIO interface.
Personally, I am interested with SOC devices with more then 2 ethernet ports (prefer 4 or more ports on the device) and a WiFi interface, I am aware of a newer version the Banana Pi BPI (the R2 model, which includes a MediaTek MT7623N, quad core CPU and 2GB of RAM, as well as a 12V / 2A rounded DC power port).
My only real issue with the Banana BPI device (apart from only having a micro USB that is used as a 5V power input) is that there is a few unnecessary ports (such as the Infrared and OTG USB ports).
Personally I would also like this device not to have a HDMI port (this port is useful for the initial installation of Linux onto the micro SSD but is made redundant due to the usage of SSH and the Webmin interfaces). If necessary, these ports could be removed from the board using a SMD reworking station / hot air gun at a later stage.
@denis.robel,
I hope that I have given you some ideas, would be interested to know which device(s) you are going to choose and what sort of results you get.
@kunstlust,
Within a previous comment, I suggested having a look at Clearfog devices, but the Banana R2 is a significant improvement when compaired to the previous model.
Unfortunately, my kernel experiences are too small to port the centos, but I would like to help you to test it, I’ve put up with it, unfortunately the number of images is still very small, which is a pity, the hardware is great and 2 SATA make it to small home servers and routers.
@kunstlust,
Earlier this year / late last year, I did play around with ARM version of OpenSuse and CentOS (can’t remember the URLs of the images but a quick search should provide some results).
Also, it maybe worth your time experimenting with Armbian (a ARM version of Debian).
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