ownCloud on RPi, by Jidoteki

A few weeks ago we heard about an interesting project launched by ownCloud and Western Digital.

The idea was to create a self-hosted hardware appliance using the Raspberry Pi hardware, combined with a WD USB drive, running the ownCloud software.

By browsing their mailing list and GitHub repository, we noticed a few people were interested in this project, but the level of involvement wasn’t very high.

We’ve been using ownCloud in our company since 2012, so we decided to take charge and build the solution ourselves.

We made it

Since building virtual (and hardware) appliances is our specialty, we completed our prototype in just one weekend (albeit a very rough prototype).

The ownCloud install/setup process is quite involved, so to automate everything, we had to really understand what happens behind the scenes, and take special care for all the edge-cases.

After a few weekends and iterations hacking on this project, using our existing technology, knowledge, and expertise, we managed to build something quite solid.

Features

The standard features of all our appliances are:

• In-memory, read-only, immutable OS
• Tiny OS footprint (40MB)
• Various Wifi drivers for USB devices
• Configure network settings through a Web-based GUI, console GUI, or plain text files on boot partition
• Embedded Jidoteki Admin API for remote management
• Embedded Jidoteki Admin UI for remote management
• Encrypted/signed update packages with atomic update process
• Delta updates (binary diffs) for update package size reduction (owncloud 8.2.2 -> 8.2.3 was only 2.9MB)
• Appliance, OS and updates work entirely offline (no internet required)
• IPv4 and IPv6 networking support
• SD card can be removed while the system is running
• 99% Open Source software

For ownCloud, we’ve also built-in:

• Automatic setup of USB drive
• Automatic occ install on first boot
• Automatic occ upgrade management with our update process
• Automatic reboot after update (running system is read-only)
• Automatic backup and restore of important files (config.php, apps, etc)
• Completely unmodified original owncloud archives (we never touch the sources)
• Persistent data, configs, DB, and backups stored on USB drive
• Avahi publishes owncloud.local
• Nginx web server
• SQlite database (perfectly suitable for a single RPi2 install)
• Final disk image is 72MB compressed

As mentioned earlier, we’ve thought of many various edge-cases, and accounted for them in our built-in scripts.

Video

To see it in action, watch the video below (excuse us for poor editing, that’s clearly NOT our specialty haha):

How to get it

Unfortunately, we have no plans to actually distribute this ownCloud build ;)

We simply wanted to highlight what we’re capable of doing.

We hope the community can band together and build a great Open Source product for ownCloud. Hopefully we’ve given some good ideas to ensure this project’s success. In the meantime, we’ll remain available for consulting projects of this nature.

If you’re currently running a SaaS business, and have a pressing need to sell it as a hardware or software appliance, feel free to contact usso we can discuss, and potentially work together.