As commented yesterday, I have been undergoing another shift in my home server and the capabilities, to try to improve the overall performance and reliability. As part of this, I ended up trying to rebuild the Nextcloud personal cloud server, so that it would be more efficient. Previously, it was sharing a 300 GB VM with WordPress, for which I was only using the 15 GB of stored files (and barely anything for WordPress). So there was a lot of unused and wasted space. On the other end, my home theatre server (which holds the VM) has been squeezed for space recently, so those excess GB would be rather useful.
Thus my plan was to a) move WordPress to a hosting service and b) rebuild the VM as a Jail or a small VM to host Nextcloud. Unfortunately, there is an inconsistency currently with FreeNAS 11.1, in that the custom Jails are still running FreeBSD 11.0, but MySQL packages have been updated to only function with FreeBSD 11.1 (don’t hold me to that though, FreeBSD is rather complex so my understanding may be off). Thus I could not get a custom Jail to run Nextcloud cleanly (kept receiving a GD library error).
Plan B was a small new VM, which was easily allocated storage, but then encountered a performance problem with the FreeNAS server itself (likely due to all the other reconfigurations and changes). Cascading errors caused the VM build process to start failing, and the install to take a very long time (many hours). Eventually, I would cancel the install as failed, try again, and encounter the same error.
Then this afternoon, I finally had a chance to restart the FreeNAS server itself (after the rest of the applications started to stop responding as well). Once back online, everything of course reacts quickly and efficiently.
However, in that time, I came to the realization that I honestly don’t need a private cloud server. I have an account with OneDrive, Google Drive, and Dropbox, all of which cover all my particular needs. Although a private cloud is attractive from a tinkering standpoint, the storage doesn’t actually add anything, and it carries apparently a bit of baggage recently. So I have now abandoning Nextcloud entirely, and moved all relevant files to my ample OneDrive storage account.
Meanwhile, WordPress is happily running on my new HostGator site.
