Samba/Nextcloud share help

[Skirge01]

I installed DietPi to get a “preconfigured” Nextcloud install. I have a W10 NAS for all the shares, which are working fine for my Plex Media Server running on a headless Ubuntu server. However, Nextcloud is having issues with the mounted share (starting with just one share until I figure this out).

I set up a Samba share via drive_manager and it created the following fstab entry:

//192.168.1.180/george /mnt/george1 cifs username=nextcuser,password=[password],iocharset=utf8,uid=dietpi,gid=dietpi,file_mode=0770,dir_mode=0770,vers=3.1.1,_netdev,nofail,noauto,x-systemd.automount

Under /mnt, I now have the following entries:

root@DietPiNextCloud:/mnt# ls -rtl
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 2 root   root   4096 Jul 10 22:59 ftp_client
drwxrwx--- 2 dietpi dietpi    0 Jan  2 19:05 george1
drwxrwxr-x 8 dietpi dietpi 4096 Jan  7 21:20 dietpi_userdata

Browsing ‘george1’, I see all the files and folders on my NAS. So far, so good.

In Nextcloud, I installed the ‘External Storages’ app and tried to add the locally mounted drive ‘george1’ as a folder named ‘George2’. I used numbers to keep things straight as to what was being referenced no matter where I looked.

The green check means that Nextcloud can access the storage location.

Under External Storages, Nextcloud now shows the shared folder I created:

However, when I click on ‘George2’, it doesn’t bring up the actual contents of the share on my NAS. Instead, I get this:

… which appears to be the contents of:

root@DietPiNextCloud:/mnt/dietpi_userdata/nextcloud_data/George/files# ls
 Documents  'Nextcloud intro.mp4'  'Nextcloud Manual.pdf'   Nextcloud.png   Photos

These are the default files and folders for each user created in Nextcloud.

Any idea what’s going on?

[Joulinar]

Hi,
this comes down to file system permissions. Because your webserver /Nextcloud is running under user “www-data” while your mount was done by user “dietpi”. Therefore you are not able to access the share. You can reconfigure your “external storage” within NextCloud Config to “/mnt/”. There you will see that you are not even able to see the folder.

Solution could be to adjust your “fstab” to have the external storage mounted by user www-data

uid=www-data,gid=www-data

[Skirge01]

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!

I had been struggling with this for some time now and that fixed it! Funny enough, late last night, I was wondering if I needed to do something with www-data or dietpi in the permissions SOMEWHERE, but wasn’t sure what or where. I’m not sure I would’ve gotten there. LOL. Once again, thank you so much!

[Skirge01]

In case anyone else comes across this, I wanted to add that you can’t just add mounts via fstab. I’m not sure what else drive_manager does, but it doesn’t appear to work without entering them via drive_manager. So, add them through that tool and then just modify each uid=dietpi and gid=dietpi to uid=www-data and gid=www-data.

[Joulinar]

hi,
as far as I know you could try to mount SMB/CIFS shares directly using NextCloud External Storage tool. So you could avoid to have them mounted to dietpi. But honestly I have no idea if this is working because I had some issues to set it up on my Demo VM. What I was able to get working, was WebDAV.

[Skirge01]

Thanks, Joulinar. I started down that route, but could never figure out exactly what the different boxes required and in what format. I won’t swear to it, but I also thought I recently read that the latest versions of Nextcloud and External Storages weren’t working 100%. I did have it working several versions ago in an appliance installation. Somehow, getting fstab working turned out to be easier now.

Now, I need to figure out what’s messed up with external access to Nextcloud, but that’ll be another thread.

[mangladatech]

Samba configuration, I followed this tutorial: https://www.mangladatech.com/2019/11/cara-konfigurasi-samba-server-di-debian.html