The major shortcoming of NextCloud, in my opinion, is that that it's not able to do sync over LAN. Imagine wanting to synchronize 1TB+ of data and not being able to do so over a 1 Gbps+ local connection, when another local device has all the necessary data. There is some workaround involving "split DNS", but I haven't gotten around to it. Other than that, I thought NC was absolutely fantastic.
Check if your router has an option to add custom DNS entries. If you're using OpenWRT, for example, it's already running dnsmasq, which can do split DNS relatively easily: https://blog.entek.org.uk/notes/2021/01/05/split-dns-with-dn...
If not, and you don't want to set up dnsmasq just for Nextcloud over LAN, then DNS-based adblock software like AdGuard Home would be a good option (as in, it would give you more benefit for the amount of time/effort required). With AdGuard, you just add a line under Filters -> DNS rewrites. PiHole can do this as well (it's been awhile since I've used it, but I believe there's a Local DNS settings page).
Otherwise, if you only have a small handful of devices, you could add an entry to /etc/hosts (or equivalent) on each device. Not pretty, but it works.
That's a good tip. I had my local self-hosting phase during covid, but if I ever come back to it, I'll try this.
I had a similar issue with a public game server that required connecting through the WAN even if clients were local on the LAN. I considered split DNS (resolving the name differently depending on the source) but it was complicated for my setup. Instead I found a one-line solution on my OpenBSD router:
It basically says "pass packets from the LAN interface towards the WAN (egress) on the game port and redirect the traffic to the local game server". The local client doesn't know anything happened, it just worked.Or just use ipv6!
You could also upload directly to the filesystem and then run occ files:scan, or if the storage is mounted as external it just works.
Another method is to set your machines /etc/hosts (or equivalent) to the local IP of the instance (if the device is only on lan you can keep it, otherwise remove it after the large transfer).
Now your rounter should not send traffic to itself away, just loop it internally so it never has to go over your isps connection - so running over lan only helps if your switch is faster than your router..
Good to know!
> The major shortcoming of NextCloud, in my opinion, is that that it's not able to do sync over LAN.
That’s an interesting way to describe a lack of configuration on your part.
Imagine me saying: "The major shortcoming of Google drive, in my opinion, is that that it's not able to sync files from my phone. There is some workaround involving an app called 'Google drive' that I have to install on my phone, but I haven't gotten around to it. Other than that, Google drive is absolutely fantastic.
I don't know why the sarcasm is so necessary. I very much enjoyed Nextcloud and I proudly ran it for the better part of a year. I even ran various NC-ecosystem apps, such as the Office ones. However, my objective was to try it out from the standpoint of regular self-hosting. I wanted to contrast the 'out-of-the-box' experience to Dropbox, which I had been using for many years up to that point. Yes, one was centrally hosted, while the other was self-hosted, but still, that was the experiment I was running. So I'm sorry if I didn't live up to your standards of what a user should be doing to their software, but I sure had lots of fun self-hosting tons of software at that time.
Not sure why you took it so personally, I was simply pointing out that if you don't configure a feature then that feature would obviously not work, for example phone sync for google drive won't work if you don't download the google drive app, and lan access for nextcloud won't work if you don't set up lan access.
Except your phone comes with Google Drive and syncs things you don't want it to, so Google can scan your life better.
Last time I checked my iPhone didn't come with Google drive
> it's not able to do sync over LAN
I'm curious what you mean by this. I've never had trouble syncing files with the Nextcloud client, inside or outside of my LAN. I didn't do anything special to make it work internally. It's definitely not the fastest thing ever, but it works pretty seamlessly in my experience.
I use it on LAN without a problem (using mDNS). Sure it runs with self signed certificates, but that’s ok with me.