I'm about to give up

[DrMartinus]

Hi, I just wanted to say that I cannot recommend Asustor NAS at all. I have been trying to get Nextcloud back to work for almost a year now, and there is absolutely no help available. Having two different setups of Nextcloud in the Appstore is a killer, I'd say (one with docker, one without, if I interpret it correctly). It probably has destroyed my installation, because I wasn't aware of the difference (it's hard to figure out when you browse through the Appstore). I tried to use portainer to get access to the Nextcloud installation which appears to be there, but that's just timing out in no time (the web page opens saying that it timed out for security reasons).
I have not the skills to dig into the system and figure out what and where to set certain values, as sometimes seems to be required. Hence: Asustor NAS is useless - at least for me. The main thing why I wanted to have it doesn't work.
I will probably move to Synology, I've had good experiences with their NASs, when I was still working for a company. Sad, though, because from the hardware side the Asustor NASs seem to be quite good value for the money.

[Nazar78]

Nextcloud is a typical app that's certain installation package distro gets maintained by others. The troubleshooting guides should be available from the developers end or answers to questions provided by many online forums such as this.

I'm very sure if you're able to install the app natively including all its prerequisite i.e. using package utilities and/or command lines or even manually using docker pull, you should be able to fix this simple issue as it will expose you to some skills in which if you can't fix it here on the Asustor platform, you could be facing the same issue too on other NAS or Linux distro.

Docker or non-docker version is stated in the app central description/change log. You can also easily tell by inspecting the package. In order to troubleshoot, you need to know where to start. Logs are useful. Simply asking around with details that you've tried including screenshots could be a good start. TBH I'm quite surprised it took that long looking for a fix. Just get in touch with someone in the forum and with that I'm also sure you could undo the things that's broken.

[DrMartinus]

Thanks for your reply.
Some aspects which I have encountered:
the troubleshooting guides by Nextcloud (NC) are very extensive, but don't really help me, because they assume a regular installation, and within Asustor nothing seems regular. It's already hard to find the PHP ini-file (which I did), but setting the memory limit to the (by NC) required value causes an error in the sense that no memory limit has been set (it should be 512 MB for NC, but Asustor allows max 124 MB, and setting it in php.ini seems to break it. Further, NC wants to have certain settings made in the Apache config file, which I haven't found until now. Another thing is, that all folders of NC are owned by admin, and I guess that at least part of them should be owned by Apache, because the web server needs to write into these folders. But there is no user with the name httpd or www-data or anything that might be related to apache. I tried some suggestions to find out the username for the webserver, with no luck. The Asustor NAS doesn't seem to have one.

Maybe I'm not thinking in the way it would be appropriate for those problems, but in some way I should have come to a solution for that problem by now (it's almost a year that I am trying). NC community says I should look for help with Asustor community, and Asustor community says I should look for help with NC community. That's good advice.
I can access NC, via web, but none of the documents I had uploaded to NC (many fotos, notes and other stuff) are accessable, and the NC client (official package) on my smartphone spits out constant error messages. The upload of images continuously fails, because there are no rights (according to the error message). The last working upload was in December 2021.

[Nazar78]

For your access issues, you can manually change the ownership/permission of its root upload path to match the requirements of the running httpd daemon. E.g. the httpd/php-fpm is running with www-data, chmod the upload path to 0766. You can also choose to have the daemon running with the same privilege but you need to understand the security complications.

Personally if it's me, I would prefer to have manually setup everything so I would have absolute control of its settings. E.g. setting the ownership/permissions and allowing the app to use all of my available memory. I would also avoid using any of the Asustor's installer if there's options to install it manually. All of my apps are running in either chroot or docker running off an external SSD, the ADM OS volume0 is also offloaded to run on the external SSD. So technically my volume1 RAID10 has nothing running in it. But I would understand the convenience of using the package installers.

[DrMartinus]

Thank you, but chown reports "unknown user www-data". That's what I mean - there seems to be no user for the web server.

[Nazar78]

Don't use chown, your daemon will eventually lose access. Which are you running? Dockerized or not?

[DrMartinus]

no docker

[Nazar78]

Then just chmod the upload path to 0766.