Time has come for a new release, and except that ownCloud made A LOT of fixes to the ownCloud core itself, we also added some extra features. In this post we will present the biggest changes.

Redis

In previous versions we used TCP (localhost) instead of the Redis socket. This works well, but socket is faster. As it requires some extra configuration to work as expected we left it out in previous versions, but now it’s added and you will notice a difference in loading speeds.

Mysql

During the pre-installation process the script provided a strong MySQL password and it still does, but for even extra security we now set a random password every time the startup-script is run. The password contains between 17-25 characters, so it’s very strong. The recommended “strong” password contains 8 characters. This means that all the users that download the VM will get a unique password.

TSO/GSO

Some weeks ago we got an email from a user that told us that in some cases the ownCloud download speed was very slow. This affected ESXi hosts. After some reading about the issue we found out that this isn’t a big issue on most UNIX hosts, but just to be sure and to give you the best possible experience, we turned both TSO and GSO off in the ../network/interfaces file. Maybe it’s just an illusion, but we think the VM feels more snappy after we applied that setting.

SSH

SSH could be a major security risk if not handled properly. To open port 22, is like asking for brute-force attempts. To give our users a even safer VM, the keys are now reseted and a new pair of keys are generated during the first run. This will produce a warning (man in the middle attack) if you try to login via SSH when the startup-script is run, but no worries – this is normal. To be able to login, just run this command:

ssh-keygen -f "/home/daniel/.ssh/known_hosts" -R 192.168.1.172
static IP

To avoid issues with static IP, and that the script fails half way through, we moved the setup of the static IP to the beginning of the startup-script. We also changed the old $ADDRESS variable to a better one that get’s the hostname instead of using ifconfig as we noticed that the ifconfig variable sometimes failed. Please report back to us if you get a blank IP with this new variable. Without you reporting back to us, we don’t know what to fix. ;)

Minor fixes

Other than that we made a lot of minor fixes. One of them was moving all the static scripts to a new folder so that we don’t have to update everything in two places every time there is a change. We really feel that the scripts that this VM are built upon are stable now, and right now it’s all about maintaining them and improve them gradually. We would love if you would help us test them, as we only have one environment and can’t find errors in every environment out there. So feel free to visit our Github repo and wget “owncloud_install_production.sh”, run it with “sudo bash” and report back to us if you find any errors.

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