[BozemanLUG] Giving NextCloud a try... for video conferencing?

[Scott Dowdle]

Greetings,

This weekend I set up NextCloud on a Digital Ocean droplet I was already using as a minetest server.  I decided to go with the distro-provided package, which in this case is Fedora 32 and NextCloud 18.0.9.  In the upcoming Fedora 33 they have NextCloud 19.0.0.  Upstream NextCloud is at version 20.

Anyhoo... putting the thing through its paces, there were a few things I wanted to try out and my findings:

1) Web Interface - Drag-and-drop from a desktop environment file manager works just fine.  In this case KDE Plasma's Dolphin

2) Sync client - Fedora also packages the nextcloud-client and it basically lets you configure one or more directories as sync-directories... and you can set bandwidth limits for upload and download.  It does not act like a fuse filesystem... but in theory you can mount it as a webdav share and access it that way.  I haven't given that a try.  Past experience with webdav wasn't very favorable.

3) Document collaboration - How is the integration with LibreOffice Online and/or Collabora Online?  In NextCloud 18 they don't appear to have an App available in the AppStore for Collabora CODE.  They do offer it in NC19 and NC20.  I have installed NC19 on Fedora 33 and have varying degrees of success with it.  In 18, I enabled the Collabora Online DEMO service and that seems to work fine... with the drawback being there is a "DEMO" watermark on all of the documents.  On one F33 host, the Collabora CODE App worked fine.  On another, it just started up dozens of copies of itself, which seem to have all crashed so it started up more. After my fairly simple host had surpassed 300+ processes, I didn't want to keep going to I removed the application... after trying it several times after a few reboots.  The behavior on that host was easily repeatable.  I guess I'll stick with NC18 and the CO-DEMO server.  I did contact Collabora to ask about licensing their service but they said they aren't interested unless there are 100+ users.  Anything below that, they pointed me to CODE (Collabora Online Developer Edition).  BTW, NextCloud packages the CODE as an AppImage which is Linux distro agnostic.

4) Audio/Video conferencing with chat - Talk is name of their App.  I made Gary an account and on Sunday he found some time to give it a try.  It seemed to work quite well... with only two of us anyway.  We also did a bunch of screensharing... and it even still shows the camera feed of the screensharer... which I haven't noticed any of the other programs/services I've tried doing.  I think we chatted for about an hour and a considerable amount of that time there was a lot of uploading and downloading going on on my humble home network/ISP.  It would be interesting to try this with 3-5 users to see how well it scales.  While we were in-conference, I checked the resource usage on the NextCloud server and they hit was fairly minimal.

5) Upgrading the distro and NextCloud - Fedora 33 isn't GA yet, but is due in another week or two.  I was curious how well my Digital Ocean droplet would tolerate an pre-release upgrade.  I didn't want to mess up my working system so I shut down the VM and used their Snapshot feature to make a complete backup of the VM disk image... from which I made a new droplet.  On the second droplet, I upgraded didn't run into any issues.  The nextcloud package was upgraded from 18 to 19.  When I connected to the web interface it realized it had a number of applications to upgrade... and did so.  After the upgrade, it seemed to work fine... other than the previously mentioned issue with CODE not working and having to be abandoned.  I didn't get a chance to try out NC19 on F33 for very long as the main reason for the attempt was primarily to see if CODE would work or not.

So, I'm interested in testing the video conferencing feature with 3-5 people sometime prior to the next BozemanGLUG meeting...to see how well the system scales... and if it is usable or not.  If it works as well with 3-5 people as it did with 2, then I'm for switching to it for future meetings.

So, who might be interested in testing the video conferencing?  Let me know and I'll create a NextCloud account for you on the server and send you the details.

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
704 Church Street
Belgrade, MT 59714
(406)388-0827 [home]
(406)994-3931 [work]