I have messed around with OwnCloud several times in the past. My latest experimentation with it coincided with a need that my clients have run into several times. That would be affordable housing of their pictures.
As we all know most of the cloud companies such as Amazon, Google, and Dropbox will give you a small amount of free storage to get you hooked. 5 gigs for two out of three mentioned companies. When you go over your limit you then must make a decision about your pictures.
- Do you store them offline?
- Do you store some offline and some online?
- Do you use multiple free services?
- Do you pay for storage?
I don’t like to pay. I’m cheap that way but I feel that the money I save from things I don’t need can be put towards things that I do need.
This is where owncloud comes in. I could setup my own dropbox like server to sync stuff. I could do this locally or I could do this on a cloud server. Especially on one that I have on 24/7.
I utilize a lot of cloud resources due to my insanely huge electrical bills. Take your electric bill and times it by 5.6 and that is how much a person would be paying where I lived.
During these tests I figured I could use my server with zpanel installed on it to test out another owncloud setup. Prior to this I had it setup on a virtual machine on my desktop and on it’s own EC2 instance. All worked without a hitch.
Unfortunately, that didn’t happen with zpanel. I was constantly getting a blank screen when I clicked on anything on the user menu. I checked the logs and came up with this message: warning: shell_exec() has been disabled for security reasons
A little digging and I find out that this is a security issue with sushosin and it’s suppose to do that. One can disable this security but then you have a big hole in your webserver. I did disable the issue. I did it by commenting out the sushosin section in the vhost file for the specific domain I was working with. After that it worked fine.