Category: Website Admin

I posted over a year ago about installing and using Owncloud, a Dropbox type personal file-sync system complete with encryption.  It does, however, take a good deal of installation and specialized configuration.  And with every step of complexity causes more opportunities to mess something up royal and to bang my head against the wall in horrified disgust over my own incompetent button mashing.

Because of this, I almost immediately started searching for a new solution, and who should arrive but the glorious and golden haired savior of my file-syncing needs, BTSync.

All I required was three things when it came to file syncing:

1. Unlimited space
2. Completely free
3. Encrypted transmissions

BTSync does all this.  All of it, I say!

Unlimited?  Well I suppose that is up to interpretation, as I suppose each synced folder is limited to the filesystem on which it is being synced.  But for my purposes, completely unlimited.  As it takes no cloud storage system, and no cloud computing service to store the data (although there are proxies that at times act as middle men for transmissions) it means that the only machines that house that data are the machines that I authorize by use of the encryption “secret” key.   Keeping it secret.  Keeping it safe.

My own.

My precious.

Free?  They haven’t, and don’t plan to ever have a plan to charge.  So, in your face, Dropbox/Anybody Else.

Encrypted transmissions?  Although it uses BitTorrent transmission protocol, it is encrypted with up to a 40 byte encryption key.  I use 20 bytes, because I’m not greedy, and if the NSA really wants to crack that encryption, I don’t want to waste government funds!  Check out my PDFs, George HW Bush!  You won’t believe what kind of order forms I’ve been creating! (I’m pretending I’m in 80’s cold war America)

All in all, BTSync is the greatest.  Thank you, noble Torrent technology, for making my life amazing once again.  I salute you and your worldwide distributive ways.

After some research it became pretty clear that getting SSL to work with a private key would be simple.  You must make sure that openssl is installed, and yum installing it should do everything required to get that working.
# Generate private key
openssl genrsa -out ca.key 1024

# Generate CSR
openssl req -new -key ca.key -out ca.csr

# Generate Self Signed Key
openssl x509 -req -days 999 -in ca.csr -signkey ca.key -out ca.crt

# Copy the files to the correct locations
cp ca.crt /etc/pki/tls/certs
cp ca.key /etc/pki/tls/private/ca.key
cp ca.csr /etc/pki/tls/private/ca.csr
Then you have to tell Apache to use the new keys by editting the ssl.conf file.
vi +/SSLCertificateFile /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf

Add in lines:
SSLCertificateFile /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca.cr
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/pki/tls/private/ca.key

Once the correct SSL Certificates were installed, and the Apache service was restarted, the SSL kicked in.  Using a browser to access OwnCloud over https just started working.  All you have to do is accept the untrusted certificate when accessing the page. Once you tell your client to accept using that key, all functionality of the site will now operate the same, but will now use https, including downloading files through encrypted means.

The trouble, however, is that it is a private key, and therefore is automatically not trusted.  In order for any windows OwnCloud client to work, it has to be a trusted certificate.

The easiest way to trust a certificate in windows is to open Internet Explorer to the https url and click on the “Continue to webpage” option.  Once it’s using that certificate, it will say something along the lines of “Certificate Error” in the URL line.  Click on that, and it should allow you to “View Certificates” from which you can install the certificate and place it into a specific “store” called something along the lines of “Trusted Root Certificate Authorities” which will basically allow any kind of SSL communication using that certificate.
Once that’s installed on the windows client as a trusted certificate, the windows OwnCloud client was able to sync with the https URL.

OwnCloud is a DropBox-type file-sync system that is open source and free for use.
Implementing OwnCloud was troublesome for me at first, as it had moments where it was easy as pie, and moments where I lost the will to continue living in a world where I couldn’t control my own Linux machine.
The initial setup was fairly simple.  Getting the OwnCloud tar package and dropping it into the Apache DocumentRoot was simple enough.  Then I had to give Apache permissions for it with the ‘chown -r apache: /apache/document/root/owncloud’ command.
The PHP pages guide you the rest of the way, and with the newest version of OwnCloud handles everything with SQLite instead of giving you any options, which actually makes things easier
The problem came with me trying to fiddle with settings of OwnCloud once I had it installed.
For example, on my first installation attempt, I hadn’t really hammered out where I was planning on storing the files uploaded through OwnCloud, assuming that I could change it later.  When I attempted to switch that file location later through some mild config changing, the world collapsed in on itself and I suddenly could no longer log into the OwnCloud admin interface at all.
Despite my attempts to drop any SQLite tables associated with OwnCloud, I actually was not able to get OwnCloud working again until I reinstalled the operating system and started from scratch.  There may be tools associated with OwnCloud that can do this easily, but it was a serious keyboard pounding moment for me.
Owncloud is limited in its file size capabilities by your system’s PHP configuration.  You can change that configuration by editing the /etc/php.ini file and editing the upload_max_filesize and post_max_size variables to a larger size.  These are both usually limited to 10 megabytes and will usually show up as two separate lines like so:
upload_max_filesize = 10M
post_max_size = 10M
You should change these to be the maximum size that you expect for files that you will be syncing.  If you wanted to change it to one gigabyte limit you would use 1G instead of the 10M.  I arbitrarily set these to 4 gigabytes, and have had no issues with syncing xvid video files or other semi-large files.
Once that was complete, however, syncing directories with windows clients has been a snap.  The only other issue I had was getting everything working over SSL…