Author: Martin

In the previous post on the topic, I gave a general overview of how Nextcloud and OnlyOffice can play together. There are many ways to combine the two online services and hence, installation instructions that can be found on the net from Nextcloud, from OnlyOffice, from third parties and from each with many different installation options. This confused me to no end, I couldn’t see the wood for the trees anymore. But I finally figured it out and if you already have a private Nextcloud instance up and running, you can install OnlyOffice with just a few commands on the shell if you are willing to go for a no frills setup.

Continue reading Nextcloud – OnlyOffice Install – Quick and Simple

For working collaboratively on text documents with others, I’ve been using Nextcloud and Libreoffice / Collabora Online. Unfortunately, Collabora Online must have been designed to be used on-premise, as the document rendering is done on the server. Any network delay noticeably slows down the output and generates other undesired side effects. So I decided to look for something else.

Microsoft and Google online editors work a lot better, as they perform the document rendering in the browser rather than on the server. But these products are closed source solutions that suck my documents into their clouds and are hence not an option for me. So I gave Nextcloud with OnlyOffice a try. In the Nextcloud app store there’s an app to install OnlyOffice alongside Nextcloud on the same server. Unfortunately, the solution looks like it is abandoned and fails pretty quickly when one starts to work with it. That really puzzled me for a while…

Continue reading Online Word Processing – Part 4 – OnlyOffice and Nextcloud – For Real

A few days ago, a very strange GUI problem suddenly materialized that made me start sweating: After working on the notebook for a while, I suddenly could not switch between windows anymore and generally, the desktop started to behave very strangely. Suspend and resume helped, but after 15 to 20 minutes the desktop started to behave very strangely again. The same after a reboot. And, of course, this started happening just after making an update. So did the update actually cause it? I couldn’t see how, as nothing GUI related had changed. So I started to investigate and it took me several hours and several reboots to figure out what the problem was. And then I felt stupid.

Continue reading The Two Body Problem

Here’s an interesting question that recently popped up with an answer that surprised me. What is heavier, a locomotive or an A320 airliner? Before you read on, think about it for a second.

Continue reading A Locomotive or an Airliner – What’s Heavier?

I run quite a number of virtual machines on a bare metal server in a data center, and most of those are almost identical copies of virtual machines running at home. So my strategy so far for a failure of that server has been to restore service with another set of copies of the VMs running at home. But in recent months, I have started to run a number of VMs there for which I do not have a master on my home server. So I needed a different backup/restore approach here.

I use QEMU/KVM for virtualization on my network servers, and creating a copy of a VM is as easy as copying the disk image file of the VM and transferring it to another place. The challenge: VM images tend to bloat quite a bit over their lifetime, particularly when snapshots are used, and transferring a 50 GB VM image over the Internet and relatively slow VDSL downlink takes quite a bit of time. The solution: Compacting and compressing the image before transfer. Turns out that has an interesting effect on VM snapshots, which are also stored as part of the disk image, that one should be aware of.

Continue reading Shrinking a KVM Virtual Machine Image – What About Snapshots?

Collaborating on a text document or spreadsheet with other people and thus editing it in the browser instead of with a local application will definitely become more and more common. Collabora’s Online office solution doesn’t work so well for me, and I won’t use a closed source solution such as Microsoft 365 online for my projects, I was of course looking for yet another solution. In addition to Collabora, Nextcloud has integrated ONLYOFFICE for a number of years now, so this is where I went next.

Continue reading Online Word Processing – Part 3 – ONLYOFFICE

In the previous episode on this topic, I’ve been taking a look at Colabora Online and word processing in the browser in combination with Nextcloud. Unfortunately, in my humble opinion, Colabora Online suffers from a number of shortcomings, that have never been fixed over the years. My main issue with the solution is that the screen is rendered on the server side, which introduces a noticeable lag, which gets worse the further away the server is located. But it seems to be an architectural decision that can’t easily be changed. So how do other online office solutions fare in this regard?

Continue reading Online Word Processing – Part 2 – MS Office Online

I’m running a lot of the services I host on my own in Docker containers these days. This makes it pretty much worry free to run and update them. This blog is no exception, it’s been running in containers for two years now. But container images age as well, and from time to time one should have a look if one is still on a stream of a supported version. Case in point: The MySQL container that runs the database of this blog. So far, I’ve been using the MySQL 5.7 stream of Docker images. However, MySQL 5.7’s long term support will end in October 2023, so it was time to go to the next version. A nice quick project to do while at GPN21. It should have been be worry free, no? After all, it’s a container image. Well, not quite.

Continue reading The Blog Moves to MariaDB