Using CERNbox with the stock owncloud client

Hi,

just in case someone is running a Linux distribution that is not officially supported by CERNbox with its own client package. (I had this problem with Ubuntu 19.10, which got a CERNbox package only very recently)

It is possible to use the stock owncloud client, but only if you create a ‘custom’ config setup:
In my case, I downloaded the owncloud-client version 2.6.0 from www.owncloud.org.
Provide this URL for the server together with your CERN login: https://cernbox.cern.ch/cernbox/desktop
Then instead of choosing “sync all” in the setup wizard, I choose “individual sync connection” (or something sounding very similar ;). This allows you to only select the ‘/home’ root folder which is the one with your personal files.

When trying the slightly older owncloud-client V 2.5.1 (which is shipped by default with Ubuntu 19.10) it did not work. Its setup wizard tried to access the ‘/eos’ root folder as well which threw an error because of missing access permissions and would not let me finish the setup procedure.

I’ve been running the stock owncloud-client V 2.6.0 now since late November without any issues.
In the beginning, it showed a scary warning that the CERNbox owncloud sever would be too old in relation to my client version.
That, however, did not matter as I was reassured in a CERN IT ticket. The warning is now gone, I guess the CERNBox server version of owncloud might have been updated.
I’ve tried to find out which owncloud-client versions are meant to be compabitble with which owncloud-server versions by wading through their release notes but did not succeed…

Hope this is info usefull for someone,
Oliver

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Thanks for sharing. I have been using the Owncloud client for Ubuntu 20.04 as well. It works with the distribution package.

Nevertheless I had a problem when trying to add the sync of a folder shared by another user with me. In CERNBox client one enters the absolute EOS path of this extra folder and it works. Such setting is not possible with the default Ownclient.

Fortunately this time it wasn’t really hard to recompile the CERNBox client from the source available for 19.10 as reported here: https://linux-community.web.cern.ch/t/cernbox-for-ubuntu-20-04

Hi Fabrice,

we are discussing with ownCloud company to build a new CERNBox version with support for latest OS support (including Ubuntu 20.04).

The current ownCloud release 2.6.* branch has an issue when sharing from the desktop client, that is the reason why we have not delivered it to whole user community yet.

Besides that, the vanilla ownCloud clients are not officially supported, is up to the user to take that risk.