any Nextcloud experts?

[Phil Marsh]

Hi Aaron, Steven, Spiros, all,
Thanks for your advice. Here is my story from the start:
1. I have a nice circa 2016 Intel Supermicro 2U box for computation and
storage (12 drive bays with 10 6TB hard drives) whose name is thor and I'm
running a Nextcloud server on thor to serve up the files in /data. Since
thor is a nice 44core machine, it is still quite powerful and my go-to for
heavy computation loads (e.g. circuit simulations etc,,,). And thor has a
LOT of storage. Therefore, I didn't want to set up a separate machine just
for the Nextcloud server.
Yea, newer machines are much faster, but I suspect that they cost 10X as
much but give 5X or less the performance and I'm cheap. Could be wrong here?
Since I need to access and sync /data on thor using Nextcloud, I'm also
running a Nextcloud desktop sync client on thor.

2. After upgrading the Nextcloud sync client (call it the client from now
on) to v3.17.0, I found that the client was unable to access Nextcloud at
http://localhost/nextcloud. The webpage Nextcloud interface still worked OK
on thor to http://localhost/nextcloud but throws an https invalid ssl
security warning as expected. Attempts to connect the client to Nextcloud
on thor via http://localhost/nextcloud always failed and the client
logfiles always showed ssl errors.

3. Attempts to connect any Nextcloud client on my other machines on my LAN
to Nextcloud server on thor via http protocol also failed.

4. I have verified that my ssl certs on thor are up to date (from Let's
Encrypt) and working. This ssl cert hostname is say myhost.ddns.net (not
the actual name but an example).

5. Since the ssl certs work only for the hostname=myhost.ddns.net, I cannot
use the https protocol from localhost/nextcloud on thor and get the ssl
warning as discussed previously.

6. But I need the client on thor to access the Nextcloud server also on
thor. I ultimately need to go to the Nextcloud server via
localhost=127.0.0.1 to do that.

7. So I "fooled" the system by adding the line:
127.0.1.1 myhost.ddns.net
to my /etc/hosts file, where my actual domain host name replaces myhost.
Also, my Nextcloud server config.php file has myhost.ddns.net in the
trusted domains as:
'trusted_domains' =>
  array (
    0 => 'localhost',
    1 => 'myhost.ddns.net',
    2 => 'thor',

8. Then I connected my client on thor using the
https://myhost.ddns.net/nextcloud for the server name.

9. A whole bunch of files are syncing on thor's Nextcloud client now and
the client appears to be working. Hopefully, the sync will complete without
errors etc...

My best guess is that the Nextcloud client update to v3.17.0 broke the
client's ability to connect via http. I also read that this client lost the
ability to connect when the https is using a self-signed cert.

Thanks and best,
Phil




On Mon, Aug 18, 2025 at 2:13 PM Aaron D. Johnson <adj at fnord.greeley.co.us>
wrote:

> Phil Marsh writes:
> > Hi Aaron, I'm wondering if I should just scrap Nextcloud and go to
> > Syncthing.  I suspect Syncthing would be simpler and more robust and
> > I wouldn't be wasting disk space on having both the original data
> > and Nextcloud's version of the data on the same server.  What do you
> > use for filesync across machines?
>
> Again, I know nothing of Nextcloud.  And not familiar with Syncthing
> either.  For getting file contents in sync across two (or more)
> machines, I find that rsync meets my needs.  But you mentioned WebDAV,
> so I suspect I'm not really understanding what either Nextcloud or
> Syncthing do.  Perhaps a problem statement explaining what your use
> case is might be in order?  You're probably not the only person to
> have that need and others here may have some helpful experiences to
> share.
>
> - Aaron
>
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