Sean Novak

Category: Open Source

I think Open Source Applications and Systems, like blockchain, will save the world from too much centralized power. I want to help dream up, contribute to, and maintain important applications that helps humanity be more human.

  • “Open” means “Open Source”!

    If you claim to be “Open” in your company name, your product should be “open source”. It’s in the name. Otherwise, it’s misleading, and this getting to the point of diabolical. It’s almost like these jokers are making a concerted effort to render the “open” in any open project meaningless.

    To establish that there IS actually a naming convention for open source projects. Here is a short list of projects that use the naming convention correctly, linked to their source code.

    Networking and Security

    Programming and Development Tools

    Graphics, Vision, and Multimedia

    Scientific Computing and Engineering

    Cloud and Infrastructure

    Gaming and Simulation

    Office and Productivity

    Mapping and Data

    Operating Systems and Distributions


    … are all open source LONG before OpenAI bastardized the naming convention.

    OpenAI started with intentions of being an open source company. Elon Musk has been very public about his early support and investments in the company being under the premise of their OPEN nature. But, they double backed, and went full evil and close sourced their models, but kept the OpenAI name.

    Well, apparently that is now standard for any AI company.


    OpenAI, is NOT open source!
    OpenRouter, is NOT open source!
    ...and this just in…
    OpenCreator is NOT open source.

    It just so happens that I was thinking about building a node based UI for AI image and video generation. And, this morning I stumbled across this post on X…

    Well what do you know a UI based AI Image/Video generator? Let’s keep these retards honest and create a clone of their product and MAKE IT OPEN SOURCE.

    Feel free to follow along: https://github.com/snovak/opencreator

  • Upgrading Nextcloud

    I use Nextcloud, running on a little box in my closet, as an alternative to iCloud or Google Cloud. It’s amazing, really. I’m very grateful that this open source software is available to people who have the will and wherewithal to buck the big personal data miner mafia corps. When it became obvious what these worms intend to do with our data, I started looking for a way to keep my personal data personal.

    I’ve been running Nextcloud version 22 for the last couple years. As you can see from https://nextcloud.com/changelog/ , there have been many updates and upgrades since my original installation and I’ve been quite negligent with my sys admin duties. Today, I’m trying to remedy that situation.

    I have Nextcloud running in docker. I use docker-compose to set up the environment, so I need to also upgrade through each version of Nextcloud using docker-compose, one major version at a time.

    I use this app DAILY so, I don’t want any surprises, which often happen during upgrades. So first, I’ll replicate all the data from my server to my PC. This way I have a sandbox where I can make all my changes while my production environment remains untouched. If something goes wrong.. No problemo.

    The PC is a Windows machine, so I’ll spin up an Ubuntu image to do all the transfers. 

    docker run -it -v "$(pwd):/volume" ubuntu /bin/bash

    Next I’ll get the image equipped with the tools that I need to rysnc my way to a mirrored environment. 

    cd /volume && \ 
apt update  && \
apt install ssh rsync && \
rsync -rav --stats --progress admin@sourceIP:/path/to/nextcloud /volume -e "ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no"

    Good, the transfer is ~80Gigs in my case, so that took a min.

    This is my existing docker-compose.yml You’ll also notice that I’ve specified mariadb:10.7 as that is what is currently running in the production env. I’ll upgrade that as needed. 

    version: '3'
services:
  nextcloud:
    container_name: nextcloud
    image: "nextcloud:22"
    ports:
      - 8000:80
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - ./html:/var/www/html
      - ./logs:/var/log/apache2
    env_file:
      - ./db.env
    networks:
      - proxy
      - internal_network

  mariadb:
    container_name: mariadb
    image: "mariadb:10.7"
    command: "--transaction-isolation=READ-COMMITTED --binlog-format=ROW --innodb-file-per-table=1 --skip-innodb-read-only-compressed"
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - ./db:/var/lib/mysql
    env_file:
      - ./db.env
    networks:
      - internal_network

  phpmyadmin:
    container_name: phpmyadmin
    image: phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin
    links:
    - mariadb:mysql
    ports:
      - 8001:80
    env_file:
      - ./db.env
    environment:
      PMA_HOST: mariadb
      UPLOAD_LIMIT: 300M
    networks:
      - proxy
      - internal_network

networks:
  internal_network:
    internal: true
  proxy:  
    external: true

    Now that I have a sandbox to start running these upgrades, let’s just run everything once through to make sure the app is running “as-is”. 

    docker-compose up -d

    The logs reported a minor upgrade, but other than that, we’re up and running.

    Let’s upgrade to the next major version now. To do that, I just increment the number in docker-compose.yml from image: "nextcloud:22" to image: "nextcloud:23" then run: 

    docker-compose down
docker-compose up --force-recreate --build -d

    Then I’ll watch my logs docker logs nextcloud to see when everything is done upgrading. You should see something like

    docker logs --tail 1000 -f daecd812fefe464712b9b6717cb6e2a3d842260e0c64c63ec88ea22e2edb9623 

Initializing nextcloud 25.0.3.2 ...
Upgrading nextcloud from 24.0.9.2 ...

    … but with the versions you’re currently updating. The update between 22 and 23 just worked.

    Be sure to update all the apps to the new version in between each upgrade with php ./occ app:update --all or through the web UI.

    It was between 23 and 24 where I needed to upgrade mariadb as well. In this case, I’m now using mariadb:latest. Then attach a shell into that container and run mysql_upgrade --user=root --password=rootpassword

    If you catch a snag at any point, your best bet is to attach a shell into the nextcloud container and run php ./occ upgrade. If you are dealing with file permission issues, try attaching to the shell as the owner with: docker exec -it -u 33 nextcloud bash where 33 is the user #.

  • ChatGPT – Scaffolding a Nextcloud Plugin

    ?

    I’m continually impressed by ChatGPT. This morning I thought it would be really nice to be able to track my health statistics on Nextcloud, my private cloud that I have running just behind me in my closet. What a cool little project to give to ChatGPT and see how quickly we can get something up and running. It’s 8am on a Tuesday morning, I’m back to work on my day job, but I have about an hour to fiddle around with it. Let’s see how quickly ChatGPT can get this started….

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