It’s been a while since our last update on what’s happening right now, so we figured we’ll write a small post about the latest happenings.

Internal Server Error

First of all, we got a lot of reports from users that couldn’t login when updating PHP to 7.0.6. This was an issue in ownCloud 9.0.1 because of a bug in both ownCloud and PHP 7.0.6. This affects users that use the old VM that runs Ubuntu 14.04 with the Ondrej PPA for PHP 7 – and the reason for it is that the Ondrej PPA always uses the most recent PHP version. This is fixed in 9.0.2 anyway, and it won’t happen again in the Ubuntu 16.04 VM as it uses an older version of PHP (7.0.4) and issues with new PHP will get detected by the ownCloud devs before it becomes a bug as 7.0.4 is not “bleeding edge”. So all and all, the new VMs works without any issues with PHP.

There was also another issue with “Internal Server Error” that users experienced after upgrading to 9.0.2. This was because the ownCloud devs changed some code for the expected path (/owncloud), and from 9.0.2 you have to manually change the .htaccess + a parameter in config.php file to get it working. More information regarding that can be found here. This issue will be resolved in 9.0.3, so stay tuned or manually apply the fix mentioned in the issue report. We released a fix for this in our scripts after we noticed the issue, so it shouldn’t be an issue for our users anymore, even on 9.0.2.

Network Issue

Since the upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04 there have been some strange errors on the VM. One of those errors is that some users don’t get an IP address and the script fails because of that. We are still investigating the cause of this, and when we have a rock solid soulution for this, we will update the scripts to avoid this issue. As a workaround we added a check in the beginning of the startup-script so that the script won’t start if there are no internet connection.

It seems like the issue has something to do with the interface (eth0, ens33 or similar) since Ubuntu updated the way this works. In 14.04 the interface was almost always eth0, but in 16.04 it seems like the interface changes depending on where you are located in the world. I discussed this issue with Ezra Holm on IRC, and he will test a new fix that we have for this issue. If you experience this issue then you could try to this the following:

$~: ifconfig -a

Check which interface that is UP and change the interface in

$~: /etc/network/interfaces

We will try to prioritize this, but both me and Ezra have less time to work with this than before as we run this site on our spare time. Thank you for understanding.

Co-location

Great news! A few days ago Daniel set up a co-location server for both the main site of Tech and Me, and also the subdomains. This means that during the work on the server, the site will still be up. Though comments and other data will not be saved, so please email us instead of commenting until we announce that the new server is up. The co-location server also means that Tech and Me will never go down again, even on a hardware failure on the server. We are very happy about this, and really hope that our user base will appreciate this as much as we do.

Missed Discus comments

Another thing we want to inform you about is that we just discovered that we missed to answer all the comments from like the passed month or so, this is because we didn’t receive any emails from Discus when you were posting comments. The safest way to reach us is always to send an email. We usually answer within 1-12 hours.

Report issues on github

Today we get all the complaints and feedback through email or comments. That’s great – please keep doing that – but it would be even better if you could use GitHub to report issues with the VM. It’s not only good for us to keep track of everything, but also for other users that may be experiencing the same issues as you with a new VM release e.g. This way you could help each other and at the same time debug the issue so that we can solve it in the next release. Also, if you create a GitHub account you could help improve ownCloud itself as you’d then be able to report bugs, or suggestions of enhancements directly to the devs. So please use GitHub to report issues regarding the VM!

SMB issues

We had a few reports regarding the external storage in ownCloud. To use this you need to install a package called SMB in Ubuntu. This should be done in the scripts, but it seems like it doesn’t work properly. We will investigate this and commit a fix as soon as possible, problem is that we don’t use external storage ourselves, so therefore we haven’t looked into this before. But we promise, we will. It’s not on our todo-list and you can expect a fix in the one of the coming releases. Probably this summer. If anyone of you have a solution to this, please let us know so that we can fix it.

New job

Daniel will get a new job 1st June as an IT-consultant. This means that we will not spend as much time as before on Tech and Me. Simply because there won’t be as much spare time as before. We will keep updating the VMs and keep Tech and Me running, but it will take longer time to answer emails, and inquires. But no worries, we are here to stay. Just letting you know so that you won’t get mad when we don’t reply instantly. ;)

Smaller improvements

As always, we continuously improve the VMs. To keep updated about latest fixes please visit the GitHub repo and check it out. Mainly we added more checks to make a more robust VM. We will of course continue our work to always improve it, and keep you updated of the changes. That’s what we do. :)

That’s all for now. Please keep sending us feedback, that keeps us motivated. If you have any questions you know where to reach us. Stay tuned for more!