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Building my personal cloud after 4 years

Roelof Jan Elsinga on February 12, 2020

Building my personal cloud after 4 years About 4 years ago I wrote my very first blog post "Researching home servers". In that post I ...
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Zachary Stone • Edited

I would love to hear an update when you expose this to the internet, what security measures you took, how much everything costs, and maybe a guide for someone like me who have been wanting to do this for a while now, but it's pretty new to setting up servers. Also, the link to the blog you wrote is broken.

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Roelof Jan Elsinga

Good catch, I fixed the link! I'll write an update next week because I've managed to expose it to the internet and took some basic security measures so far (SSL). I'll go into more detail in the next post about this.

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Zachary Stone

Awesome! Looking forward to that! I'm surprised there are not more posts about this. Thank you for pioneering the discussion

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Roelof Jan Elsinga

Of course, always happy to document my journey! Thank you for showing all this interest in this topic. I'm sure you'll like the follow-up as well!

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Diego

So how does the RPi handle the hard drive in terms of electrical power? I've always looked for active USB hubs for connecting HDDs to RPis, only complicating the setup and having a mess of wires. Have you done some research in terms of available power at the USB 3 port of the RPi vs HDD power needs?

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Roelof Jan Elsinga

I have looked at it, but the external hard drive that I'm currently using is powered separately. So it doesn't draw any power from the RPi. I do have a drive available that doesn't have its own power source, so I could test that for you!

I just wanted to be sure that the drive was available any time I needed it, so the external power source seemed to most logical solution to me.

It does add to the cable mess a little bit, but that's not something a few cable ties can't fix.

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Pedro E.

Cool!
I did something like this.
I used OpenVpn to Access the pi and "OwnCloud" that I'm running though docker.

What are you thinking of NextCloud ?

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Roelof Jan Elsinga

Great tip! I'm going to try that out. NextCloud is really nice. The setup was very easy and the user interface is clear. I haven't tried OwnCloud, but I've looked at it as an option. What are you thoughts on it? Is it good?

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Pedro E.

Owncloud has the app and the web just like nextCloud has. I used just a little to try and to see if it was going to work... so far was ok but did not used very much to say that will work all the functionalities and stuff..
I found two apps, there was one "free - someone did this one that was not owncloud" and the owncloud paid one.

About the OpenVpn, is a very easy setup, just run one script, answer the questions and its done. After you just need to port forward at your router the same port you put at the installation. And the connection sounds safe, it generates a certificate for you to connect, so you just import it at the OpenVpn app at your phone for example and its done.

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Roelof Jan Elsinga

That sounds really nice! I should see if that's something I can implement with NextCloud as well. I don't want to have to resort to whitelisting ip addresses or something like that. That would not work, as I'm permanently behind a VPN on my devices. Perhaps using an ssh connection or something like that would also work?

I'll definitely try the openvpn route, because that sounds great!

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Amber iX Europe

We're creating a technology called "Amber Anywhere", for NextCloud installed on Amber as home server exposing to the internet without changing network setting.

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manish srivastava

Wow great.... please share more

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Roelof Jan Elsinga

Here is the follow-up: dev.to/roelofjanelsinga/how-to-set...