Arch Linux

saljut7

Member

Registered: 2014-10-05

Posts: 6

Some questions about the Seafile tutorial

Hello,

may I ask some questions about the Arch Seafile tutorial? Following the tutorial I wondered several times understanding the steps in the right way.

1) example.org

create the directory layout for the new seafile server instance and change directory to it:

$ mkdir -p $HOME/example.org/seafile-server
$ cd $HOME/example.org

Note: Replace every occurence of 'example.org' on this page with the actual domain of your new server instance 

1.1 Do I have to set up the file structure with example.org as folder under $HOME in exactly this way? Is it to provide the possibility for several parallel seafile installations so can I just use $HOME as my "main folder" if I only want to set up just one seafile server?

1.2 Is example.org a placeholder for my DynDNS/registered website name? For the case: If my DynDNS address would be 'my.ddns.net' do I have to name the folder just ddns.net?

2) Those initial setup steps can be done with the `seafile-admin` command

seafile-admin setup doesn't say something about consequences for choosing the server host address. The example says I can choose a DynDNS address or a local LAN IP. So I wondered: If I choose the LAN IP will Seafile be reachable via DynDNS anyway?

3) additional iptables/port forwarding information

It would be great to get some information which ports I have to allow in iptables and/or for port forwarding setup of a router. The overview for the seafile components in the official tutorial seems a little bit outdated. There are at least 3 ports (ccnet 10001, seafile port 12001, seafile fileserver port 8082) so do all of them have to be allowed in iptables and reachable from outside?

Thanks alot!
sj7

MadMe

Member

Registered: 2015-02-16

Posts: 7

Re: Some questions about the Seafile tutorial

Hello!
I'm on my mobile phone I will answer more detailed in the evening when I'm home.
But you should look for ssl
Except you are only accessing the cloud over vpn.
Here you only need one port to access the cloud.
You should also look for the official manual
Deploying seafile with nginx/apache
And
Enable https with nginx/apache

Till later

cris9288

Member

Registered: 2013-01-07

Posts: 348

Re: Some questions about the Seafile tutorial

Hello,

may I ask some questions about the Arch Seafile tutorial? Following the tutorial I wondered several times understanding the steps in the right way.

1) example.org

create the directory layout for the new seafile server instance and change directory to it:

$ mkdir -p $HOME/example.org/seafile-server
$ cd $HOME/example.org

Note: Replace every occurence of 'example.org' on this page with the actual domain of your new server instance 

1.1 Do I have to set up the file structure with example.org as folder under $HOME in exactly this way? Is it to provide the possibility for several parallel seafile installations so can I just use $HOME as my "main folder" if I only want to set up just one seafile server?

1.2 Is example.org a placeholder for my DynDNS/registered website name? For the case: If my DynDNS address would be 'my.ddns.net' do I have to name the folder just ddns.net?

2) Those initial setup steps can be done with the `seafile-admin` command

seafile-admin setup doesn't say something about consequences for choosing the server host address. The example says I can choose a DynDNS address or a local LAN IP. So I wondered: If I choose the LAN IP will Seafile be reachable via DynDNS anyway?

3) additional iptables/port forwarding information

It would be great to get some information which ports I have to allow in iptables and/or for port forwarding setup of a router. The overview for the seafile components in the official tutorial seems a little bit outdated. There are at least 3 ports (ccnet 10001, seafile port 12001, seafile fileserver port 8082) so do all of them have to be allowed in iptables and reachable from outside?

Thanks alot!
sj7

I run my own seafile server from home, so I should be able to help some.

1.1 It doesn't need to be under home, but that would probably be cleaner. Mine is under /srv/seafile/mydomain.com. (I used the seafile user throughout the installation). I don't remember why I did it this way, but it works fine.
1.2 I'm not sure it matters what you name that folder. Like I said, mine is named mydomain.com while the actual url for my seafile instance is files.mydomain.com. My domain as well as all of my subdomains are configured to point to my router using my domain name provider's host configuration settings. On my LAN, I run a local DNS server that points all of those names to my server.
2. Well, how do you have apache/nginx configured? Whatever you have set under ServerName or the Nginx equivalent is how you will be trying to reach seafile. This is what you will want to put under seafile_settings.py and the like. That's how I approached it at least.
3. I forget which ports I have forwarded, but I just followed the "Deploying Seafile behind NAT" page. I'm pretty sure you don't have to forward 8082 since Apache will be a proxy for the file server component. You probably also don't have to forward 8080.

The seafile manual is a bit outdated, but it is more up to date than the Arch Wiki page I believe and I have had good luck following that. It might be a good idea to just edit he Arch Wiki page to just point to the Seafile manual as it seems pointless to duplicate the information. Anyway, hope this helps.

EDIT: Let me clarify on 2 a bit. Say you have a domain name my.domain.com and you are resolving it to your router's public IP. You will want to set the server name to my.domain.com as this name will be passed in the http request by your router to the web server. Your web server will not see the IP address of your router, for example. You'll then want to add that url to ccnet.conf and seahub_settings.py (remember to add /seafhttp). The problem I ran into was, how to resolve on LAN? my.domain.com resolves to my public IP, even on my LAN because I'm using my router's DNS servers. On top of that, my router drops packets addressed to its public IP (this is expected I think, but I've heard of it working for some people).

So options: 1) Edit your client's host file to point to the LAN IP of your server. The problem with this is that it's not very practical on a mobile device and because I take my laptop with me I wouldn't be able to see my server from outside my LAN. 2) Set up a local DNS server that resolves your seafile url to your server IP. This is easier becuase bind is easy to configure and you can configure your router to use this DNS server rather than its own. You can even take a step further and set up a DHCP server that sets the correct search domain, but this probably isn't necessary. With this set up my.domain.com resolves to my server ip on my lan and my public IP while outside of that. Anyways, this is probably more than you wanted to know but I've been itching to talk about it apparently!

Last edited by cris9288 (2015-04-02 15:28:30)

MadMe

Member

Registered: 2015-02-16

Posts: 7

Re: Some questions about the Seafile tutorial

There was cris faster and very detailed. Here some additons correct me if i'm wrong
1
If you change the "Serverhome" you dont forget to modify the service file under /etc/systemd/system/
2
An easy way to acces your server in your lan is instead calling the IP or the dyndns domain you can also call the hostname of the Server.
for me it is: https://raspberrypi:MYPORT/
Works fine for me. (Client and Webinterface)
3
If you use ssl you only need to forward one... (i dont like to send data unprotected trough the net) Works also fine for me i used the Seafile manual here

saljut7

Member

Registered: 2014-10-05

Posts: 6

Re: Some questions about the Seafile tutorial

I'm on my mobile phone I will answer more detailed in the evening when I'm home.

Anyways, this is probably more than you wanted to know but I've been itching to talk about it apparently!

Hello MadMe and cris9288

thanks alot for your help and detailed explanation which was much more than I expected. Unfortunately I gave up two days before you replied and decided to try out Seafile on a Debian based system (because it seems more supported on Debian) until I'm more experienced with Linux in general.

From my limited point of view the arch tutorials seems to be more a reminder for people who already set it up successfully.

But I'm convinced that the Arch derivate (arkOS) I want to use for my Cubietruck would be a better OS than Cubian. So I will use your detailed information for a second try later.

Thank you alot!