[Owncloud] Hello :) What we are doing with ownCloud.

[Craig Sawyer]

Hi Everyone,

I just thought I would say hello, and briefly talk about what I'm doing
with ownCloud.

I work for a school district, and we have a need to share files from our
in-house financial system to end user Windows/Mac desktops. (They run a
remote X session, like NX for the actual PyQt financial app).

We have a need for something like DropBox, and I wrote my own in python,
but ended up having issues with the UI parts on Windows (I'm not a windows
developer, and I learned it's totally wacky).

I found ownCloud, and ended up porting most of what I needed to make
ownCloud work for us this past week. My original plan was just to steal
your UI and use my backend, but it seems your backend(ocsync) works just
fine, so I'm just using that(and then I can use your web UI too, bonus!).
We had 2 needs, not completely met:  1, email addresses as usernames, and
for our app servers to be able to sync user home dirs out to desktop
clients (well portions of their home dir on the app servers).

The backend-filesystem stuff that ownCloud does have seems to be largely
1-direction, and doesn't seem to get changes from the backend filesystem
back out to the desktop client. Rather than work on that problem (since
according to the docs, it's not something anyone wants to fix).

One option was to run Mirall on the app servers, but I don't need any UI on
the server side, and I need to be able to run hundreds of copies of ocsync
(1 per user), running Mirall per user seemed like a total waste of
resources.....
 I ported ocsync to python and running that as my ownCloud 'client' on my
user app servers against the ownCloud system, so now basically my app
servers are acting like a remote client, so everything gets synced up
bi-directionally, and makes it out to the desktop clients.

Unfortunately the ocsync command line doesn't allow @ characters in the
username (Mirall/desktop clients do just fine). The other reason for
writing my own python client like ocsync/Mirall.

The other thing I'm doing is rebuilding the desktop client with our
School/application branding, i.e. writing a desktop theme.  This is 90%
done, and out being tested now.

Anyways, I have notes on how I did everything, and can share my python
client code out, if anyone cares (I use ctypes to connect with libocsync).
It's not remotely cleaned up at this point, and since I've never used
ctypes before, I expect some bugs.  The code is now running on our test
instances, and should make production next week. :)

Now I have all of our developers using ownCloud, to do syncing across our
app servers, and their desktop machines. Hopefully by the end of this
month, I'll be deploying users into production.

Thank you all for your work on ownCloud, and keeping it easy enough that I
can go from not ever hearing of ownCloud to having it deployed (to only our
development team, but still) in a week!

I expect some scaling issues, as we reach into hundreds of users, such as
no indexes and FK's in the DB tables(something I noticed), but as I come
across these, I'll do my best to send patches in.

The clients are running the latest git repo's (roughly), and the ownCloud
server is running 4.5.7.

-Craig
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