General problems with netbox

NextBox
1

Hi all,
I am very unhappy with my netbox. I bought it because it was advertised to work as a private cloud, I will be able to manage it easy and I can extend storage with external devices as much as I want. So I bought the netbox in a smaller version for about 400€ and an external 8TB device for about 150€. All with the mindset that I will have a good working alternative to iCloud, Googledrive and so on. Because the netbox is advertised as a personal cloud I never intended that only internal storage works. But this is too less because I want to configure it as multi user cloud for family and friends. Not possible so far. No working rights management on external device (every user can see every upload even they are devided in separte groups).
I tried to open a ticket for getting help with my configuration. No answer in between 10 days so far.
From my point of view it is a productive beta system and it does not work as it was intended. If I read some of the topics here in the forum, there are many problems for years now and the developement often concerns the PI itself as the problem.
I lost hope that this will work good in the next days or weeks. How can I get a refund? I do not ask if there is a possibility because 400€ is much too expensive for this solution! And neither on the shop page nor on the nextcloud page it was mentioned as a live beta or kickstarter project
In hope to get a quick answer here.

2

I am using my nextbox fine with multiple users, and an external disk used as a backup system. Everything works fine here…
The nextbox was a crowdfunding at the beginning (long ago) but it’s now an ordinary product…

3

Hello Herve5,

thanks for your answer.
For me it is the problem that the internal 200GB are not enough for a multi-user cloud solution. And the netbox advertised the possibility of using an external device. I did not read anywhere that it is only planned for doing backup jobs. For me it was simple the idea of having a 8TB cloud in my own network for family and friends. Also I hoped with the investment that I never would have to pay again for cloud space at Aplle / Google / Amazon.

4

The support answered me today and told me that it is not intended to use one external drive for more users. Has anybody of you a working multi-user cloud with one single external drive? On my externbal drive all users can see everything even if they are in separated user groups

5

Hey @Tobs83

sorry, but this is not an accurate description of what the support answered.
In fact it is possible to use an external drive for multiple users, you just have to correctly configure the “External Storages” app, Nextcloud app configurations are generally not within the scope of NextBox, it is simply not possible to cover this as support across the vast amount of available Nextcloud apps.

Nevertheless, please see:

In order to achieve what you are looking for:

  • please create a supported filesystem (others might also work, but are untested) on the hard-disk
  • create the following two (or more directories) /user1 & /user2 and make sure all is writable (on xfs/extX FS this means change uid/gid to 33 (www-data))
  • connect the hard-drive with the nextbox, mount it via the storage management, it should be available as /media/extra-1
  • create one external storage entry for each of the directories within the mounted hard-drive, like /media/extra-1/user1 and /media/extra-1/user2 and set permissions accordingly for these users
  • the directories should be available for each user

So you clearly do not need additional physical devices to create multiple “external storages” with different access permissions.

Hope this helps,
best

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