Briefly, I have tried a few different options for getting access to my data at home, I feel I get 95% of the way there but I keep encountering walls.
My solution has only been a win7 SMB share that I access on my local network and is in need of an upgrade.
My end goal is to access my files remotely through File explorer and ideally map a network drive
My first thought was get a VPN tunnel to access my network, Great, ready go!
Took a little bit, but I found the Softether project, got it setup and for once it just worked… But SMB does not work well over the internet, I read it has something to do with latency… Awesome, I can see my files, but accessing them isn’t practical if it’s even working at all.
Ok, off to find something else.
Seems like webDAV would be a good solution, and Windows can do that natively. After struggling with that for at least 8 hrs I gave up.
I followed several different tutorials and got stuck when trying to access the webDAV from other computers on the network. I was able to access it on the computer that was hosting it. and I’m not sure where the disconnect is. I tried this on my main win7 “server” and I even tried a Win 10 pro on a laptop and got stuck at the same spot. Not sure why other computers on the same network can’t see it.
Now that I have the VPN tunnel, an internal webDAV server would be fine, but it would be niceto have external access, I somewhat know how to deal with dynamicDNS so I might play with that if I get past the internal file hosting phase.
So Windows IIS webDAV isn’t working for me, so again I search.
I came across NextCloud and that seemed pretty promising, Has a bunch of features I don’t need, but would be nice. I just want the webDAV…
Found that a lot of people are using docker for this, and since I can do that all inside of Windows, sure lets try it.
Long story short, Installed fine, loaded and did initial setup fine, but this is where the information stops… I don’t know how to access the config file to allow the stupid computers ip address to be a trusted domain, SO I CAN ONLY ACCESS IT FROM THE LOCAL COMPUTER!
While trying to figure out this issue I noticed something about SQlite having an issue with larger databases. I only vaguely understand what that is and the prospect of troubleshooting it when I’m still down here struggling makes me want to cry… It’s times like this that I wonder how I ever got into computers.
At this point I don’t know if I’m supposed to have access to my files via http(s) and I’ll just have to live with the flashdrive.
The last thing I have is trying ubuntu on metal and get nextcloud running on there exclusively, should hopefully be able to access the config without my head exploding, I just have no idea how docker works, but I like the capabilities it offers. I, just… Don’t know how to use them…
I don’t know what I don’t know. Please help.