Uberspace is one of the lesser known free hosters around. True to their claim ‘Hosting on Asteroids’, they offer free-of-charge hosting for everybody – for a month. Though they have extremely extensive documentation in their wiki, ownCloud Infinite Scale wasn’t yet documented there. And since tools like ownCloud Infinite Scale require some configuration specific to Uberspace, here’s a little how-to, to get it started.
Getting started with ownCloud Infinite Scale on Uberspace
Go to the Ubernauten website and register. The first month is free-of-charge, after that Uberspace has a pay-what-you-want product with a minimum of 5 Euro. It is perfect for testing and running your first ownCloud Infinite Scale setup. Enter your e-mail address, your favorite subdomain name (I used ‘ocis’ for this blogpost) and confirm. That’s it, you’re ready to go. Please note the fqdn name of the server the Ubernauten give you, in my case it was hamal.uberspace.de.
You can now try to login via SSH, but that will fail because you haven’t set a password or a SSH-Key.:
ssh
The authenticity of host ‘hamal.uberspace.de (95.143.172.250)’ can’t be established.
ED25519 key fingerprint is SHA256:LGidXSzKaOcgBJWPtGEd049A5CDXIUIeqTz3IU/tU2I.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no/[fingerprint])? yes
Warning: Permanently added ‘hamal.uberspace.de,95.143.172.250’ (ED25519) to the list of known hosts.
Password:
Password and SSH Key can be entered here (also linked from your datasheet). As you can see in the screen shot, OpenID is also an option. For security, you should use either SSH-Key or Open ID, not the password option. Upload your key, and login again:
# ~/.ssh> ssh
Last failed login: Sun Feb 7 19:30:15 CET 2021 from 37.4.224.245 on ssh:notty
There was 1 failed login attempt since the last successful login.
Last login: Sun Feb 7 19:15:09 2021
Welcome to Uberspace 7!
Current version: 7.9.0.0
Manual: https://manual.uberspace.de/en/
Watch out for changes at: https://manual.uberspace.de/en/changelog.html
Follow us on Twitter for updates: https://twitter.com/ubernauten
Is something unclear or does not work as expected?
=> check the server status: https://is.uberspace.online
=> reach out to our team:
[ocis@hamal ~]$
Now it’s time to download ownCloud Infinite Scale from our download server, for example, with curl:
[ocis@hamal ~]$ curl https://download.owncloud.com/ocis/ocis/stable/2.0.0/ocis-2.0.0-linux-amd64 --output ocis
(…)
[ocis@hamal ~]$ chmod +x ocis
[ocis@hamal ~]$
Okay, time to start ownCloud Infinite Scale with ./ocis server, says Owncloud’s manual. But not on Uberspace – where we find some rather special conditions:
- You don’t have root access
- A firewall blocks all ports other than 80,21,22,443 and maybe some more that webdevs need
- ownCloud Infinite Scale needs port 9200 to be accessible.
NginX to the rescue!
Uberspace provides a proxy server that may reroute incoming requests to your local port 9200 – which is where ownCloud Infinite Scale is listening. So unless we have configured this proxy, the blank Ubernauten default html screen will be visible on ocis.uber.space. Thank God it’s all well documented in the Uberspace Manual, so here’s the steps needed for that:
uberspace web backend set / --http --port 9200
… which configures nginX to forward all requests to port 9200 of the local machine. The command
uberspace web backend list
/ http:9200 => NOT OK, no service
lets you check the success of the command before. Since there’s no local service running to answer, it’s NOT OK, but configuring the port 9200 to be redirected to our little ubernauten server has worked.
Before we set up ownCloud Infinite Scale, we need some environment variables to be set aka exported:
[ocis@hamal ~]$ export OCIS_URL=https://ocis.uber.space
[ocis@hamal ~]$ export PROXY_TLS=false
[ocis@hamal ~]$ export PROXY_HTTP_ADDR=0.0.0.0:9200
[ocis@hamal ~]$ export PROXY_LOG_LEVEL=debug
[ocis@hamal ~]$ ./ocis server
With these lines you have told ownCloud Infinite Scale to listen to the desired URL, communicate through HTTP with the proxy and which address to listen on. We set the log level to debug, be sure to unset that once your system is up and running. The last export is a variable that the current ownCloud Infinite Scale version needs in order to display thumbnail previews for image files correctly. The command in the last line finally starts ownCloud Infinite Scale, you will see the following login window:
If you want to log in, use the default users as mentioned on the ownCloud documentation: Usage
Login to ownCloud Web
Open https://localhost:9200 and login using one of the demo accounts:
einstein:relativity
marie:radioactivity
richard:superfluidityThere are admin demo accounts:
moss:vista
admin:admin
As a test, you can now drag and drop files into ownCloud Infinite Scale. That’s it.
This how-to was originally published on Markus Feilner’s Blog. We thank Markus Feilner for the permission to repost the blog entry here.
