- « Configuring S...
- Configuring S... »

# Installing and Configuring the External Storage: Windows Network Drives App

The “External Storage: Windows Network Drives” app creates a control panel in your Admin page for seamlessly integrating Windows and Samba/CIFS shared network drives as external storages.

Any Windows file share and Samba servers on Linux and other Unix-type operating systems use the SMB/CIFS file-sharing protocol. The files and directories on the SMB/CIFS server will be visible on your Files page just like your other ownCloud files and folders.

They are labeled with a little four-pane Windows-style icon, and the left pane of your Files page includes a Windows Network Drive filter. Figure 1 shows a new Windows Network Drive share marked with red warnings.

These indicate that ownCloud cannot connect to the share because it requires the user to login, it is not available, or there is an error in the configuration.

Figure 1: Windows Network Drive share on your Files page.

Files are synchronized bi-directionally, and you can create, upload, and delete files and folders. ownCloud server admins can create Windows Network Drive mounts and optionally allow users to set up their own personal Windows Network Drive mounts.

Depending on the authentication method, passwords for each mount are encrypted and stored in the ownCloud database, using a long random secret key stored in `config.php`, which allows ownCloud to access the shares when the users who own the mounts are not logged in. Or, passwords are not stored and available only for the current session, which adds security.

## Installation

Install the External Storage: Windows Network Drives app from the ownCloud Market App or ownCloud Marketplace. For it to work, there are a few dependencies to install.

- A Samba client. This is included in all Linux distributions. On Debian, Ubuntu, and other Debian derivatives it is called `smbclient`. On SUSE, Red Hat, CentOS, and other Red Hat derivatives it is `samba-client`.
- `php-smbclient` (version 0.8.0+). It should be included in most Linux distributions. You can use eduardok/libsmbclient-php, if your distribution does not provide it.
- `which` and `stdbuf`. These should be included in most Linux distributions.

### Example

Assuming that your ownCloud installation is on Ubuntu, then the following commands will install the required dependencies:

    # Install core packages
    sudo apt-get update -y
    sudo apt-get install -y smbclient coreutils

    # Install php-smbclient using PECL
    pecl install smbclient

    # Install it from source
    git clone git://github.com/eduardok/libsmbclient-php.git
    cd libsmbclient-php ; phpize
    ./configure
    make
    sudo make install

    # Enable the extension in your PHP installation
    extension="smbclient.so"

## Creating a New Share

When you create a new WND share you need: the login credentials for the share, the server address, the share name, and the folder you want to connect to.

1. Enter the ownCloud mount point for your new WND share. This must not be an existing folder.
2. Then select your authentication method; See Enterprise-Only Authentication Options for complete information on the five available authentication methods.

Figure 2: WND mountpoint and authorization credentials.

3. Enter the address of the server that contains the WND share.
4. The Windows share name.
5. The root folder of the share. This is the folder name, or the `$user` variable for user’s home directories. Note that the LDAP `Internal Username Attribute` must be set to the `samaccountname` for either the share or the root to work, and the user’s home directory needs to match the `samaccountname`. (See User Authentication with LDAP.)
6. Login credentials.
7. Select users or groups with access to the share. The default is all users.
8. Click the gear icon for additional mount options. Note that previews are enabled by default, while sharing is not (see figure 2). Sharing is not available for all authorization methods; see Enterprise-Only Authentication Options. For large storages with many files, you may want to disable previews, because this can significantly increase performance.

Figure 3: WND server, credentials, and additional mount options.

Your changes are saved automatically.

Note

When you create a new mountpoint using Login credentials, you must log out of ownCloud and then log back in so you can access the share. You only have to do this the first time.

## Personal WND Mounts

Users create their own WND mounts on their Personal pages. These are created the same way as Admin-created shares. Users have four options for login credentials:

- Username and password
- Log-in credentials, save in session
- Log-in credentials, save in database
- Global credentials

## libsmclient Issues

If your Linux distribution ships with `libsmbclient 3.x`, which is included in the Samba client, you may need to set up the HOME variable in Apache to prevent a segmentation fault. If you have `libsmbclient 4.1.6` and higher it doesn’t seem to be an issue, so you won’t have to change your HOME variable. To set up the HOME variable on Ubuntu, modify the `/etc/apache2/envvars` file:

    unset HOME
    export HOME=/var/www

In Red Hat/CentOS, modify the `/etc/sysconfig/httpd` file and add the following line to set the HOME variable in Apache:

    export HOME=/usr/share/httpd

By default, CentOS has activated SELinux, and the `httpd` process can not make outgoing network connections. This will cause problems with the `curl`, `ldap` and `samba` libraries. You’ll need to get around this to make this work. First, check the status:

    getsebool -a | grep httpd
    httpd_can_network_connect --> off

Then enable support for network connections:

    setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect 1

In openSUSE, modify the `/usr/sbin/start_apache2` file:

    export HOME=/var/lib/apache2

Restart Apache, open your ownCloud Admin page and start creating SMB/CIFS mounts.

# Windows Network Drive Listener

The SMB protocol supports registering for notifications of file changes on remote Windows SMB storage servers. Notifications are more efficient than polling for changes, as polling requires scanning the whole SMB storage. ownCloud supports SMB notifications with an `occ` command, `occ wnd:listen`.

Note

The notifier only works with remote storage on Windows servers. It does not work reliably with Linux servers due to technical limitations.

Your `smbclient` version needs to be 4.x, as older versions do not support notifications. The ownCloud server needs to know about changes to files on integrated storage so that the changed files will be synced to the ownCloud server, and to desktop sync clients.

Files changed through the ownCloud Web interface, or sync clients are automatically updated in the ownCloud file cache, but this is not possible when files are changed directly on remote SMB storage mounts.

To create a new SMB notification, start a listener on your ownCloud server with `occ wnd:listen`. The listener marks changed files, and a background job updates the file metadata.

Windows network drive connections and setup of `occ wnd:listen` often does not always work the first time. If you encounter issues using it, then try the following troubleshooting steps:

1. Check the connection with smbclient on the command line of the ownCloud server
2. If you are connecting to Distributed File Shares (DFS), be aware that the shares are case-sensitive

Take the example of attempting to connect to the share named MyData using `occ wnd:listen`. Running the following command would work:

    su www-data -s /bin/bash -c 'php /var/www/owncloud/occ wnd:listen dfsdata MyData svc_owncloud password'

However, running this command would not:

    su www-data -s /bin/bash -c 'php /var/www/owncloud/occ wnd:listen dfsdata mydata svc_owncloud password'

## Setup Notifications for an SMB Share

If you don’t already have an SMB share, you must create one. Then start the listener with this command, like this example for Ubuntu Linux:

    sudo -u www-data php occ wnd:listen <host> <share> <username> [password]

The `host` is your remote SMB server, which must be the same as the server name in your WND configuration on your ownCloud Admin page. `share` is the share name, and `username` and `password` are the login credentials for the share.

Note

There are many ways in which you can supply a password. Please refer to the Password Options section for full details.

By default there is no output. Enable verbosity to see the notifications:

    $ sudo -u www-data php occ wnd:listen -v server share useraccount
    Please enter the password to access the share:
    File removed : Capirotes/New Text Document.txt
    File modified : Capirotes
    File added : Capirotes/New Text Document.txt
    File modified : Capirotes
    File renamed : old name : Capirotes/New Text Document.txt
    File renamed : new name : Capirotes/New Document.txt

Enable increased verbosity to see debugging messages, including which storage is updated and timing:

    $ sudo -u www-data php occ wnd:listen -vvv server share useraccount
    Please enter the password to access the share:
    notification received in 1471450242
    File removed : Capirotes/New Document.txt
    found 1 related storages from mount id 1
    updated storage wnd::admin@server/share// from mount id 1 -> removed internal path : Capirotes/New Document.txt
    found 1 related storages from mount id 3
    updated storage wnd::administrador@server/share// from mount id 3 -> removed internal path : Capirotes/New Document.txt
    found 1 related storages from mount id 2

See Using the occ Command for detailed help with `occ`.

## One Listener for Many Shares

As the ownCloud server admin, you can setup an SMB share for all of your users with a `$user` template variable in the root path. By using a ServiceUser, you can listen to the common share path. The ServiceUser is any user with access to the share. You might create a special read-only user account to use in this case.

### Example

Share `/home` contains folders for every user, e.g., `/home/alice` and `/home/bob`. So the admin configures the Windows Network Drive external storage with these values:

Item | Description/Configuration
--- | ---
Folder name | home
Storage Type | Windows Network Drive
Authentication | Log-in credentials, save in database
Configuration | `host: "172.18.16.220", share: "home", remote subfolder: "$user", domain: ""`

Then starts the `wnd:listen` thread:

    sudo -u www-data occ wnd:listen 172.18.16.220 home ServiceUser Password

Changes made by Bob or Alice made directly on the storage are now detected by the ownCloud server.

## Running the WND Listener as a Service

There are several different approaches available to running the Windows Network Drive listener as a service.

### As a Cron Job

Firstly, create a new script called `wnd-listen.sh` and add the code below to it, adjusting the path to your ownCloud installation so that it’s specific to your installation.

    #!/bin/bash
    until php -f /var/www/owncloud/occ wnd:listen $@; do
       echo "occ wnd:listen crashed with exit code $?.  Respawning.." >&2
       sleep 1
    done

Then, make the script executable and ensure that it is owned by your HTTP user. To do that, run the following commands, changing `<HTTP_USER>` as required.

    chmod +x wnd-listen.sh
    chown <HTTP_USER> wnd-listen.sh

With the script completed, test it in debug mode by running it with the command `./wnd-listen.sh`. The script will ask you for the password on every restart. For testing production environments, add the password as a parameter. With the script tested, add a crontab entry to execute it on boot, e.g.:

    @reboot www-data /usr/local/bin/wnd-listen.sh 10.0.0.100 Users sysOwnCloud password

### Using Systemd

To setup a Windows Network Drive listener using Systemd, firstly setup a listener for each of your shares. In a high availability environment, however, setup only one listener per share; that way there is no redundancy for the listener(s).

Note

Your credentials will be in plain text — currently, this is unavoidable.

Then, create a systemd script for your Linux distribution. This process should work on any systemd distro, provided you change the paths/users accordingly. After that, create a `owncloud-listener.service` file in `/etc/systemd/system/` using your favorite text editor. Then, copy the contents below into the file.

    [Unit]
    Description=ownCloud WND Listener
    After=syslog.target network.target
    Requires=httpd.service
    [Service]
    User=apache
    Group=apache
    WorkingDirectory=/var/www/html/owncloud
    ExecStart=/usr/bin/php /var/www/html/owncloud/occ wnd:listen SERVER SHARE USER PASSWORD
    Type=simple
    StandardOutput=journal
    StandardError=journal
    SyslogIdentifier=%n
    KillMode=process
    RestartSec=1
    Restart=on-failure
    [Install]
    WantedBy=multi-user.target

With that done, make sure the file is owned by root and has the permissions `644`. You can do that using the following command:

    chown root /etc/systemd/system/owncloud-listener.service
    chmod 644 /etc/systemd/system/owncloud-listener.service

Now, you can control your new service like any other, such as using the following command:

    systemctl start owncloud-listener

If you’re happy with it, you can configure the script to auto-start on boot, by using the following command.

    systemctl enable owncloud-listener.service (or whatever you have named your file).

Note

If you need multiple listeners, just change the name of the file and configure the `ExecStart` parameters accordingly.

Note

This process is based on a WND Listener Configuration on ownCloudCentral.

## Password Options

There are three ways to supply a password:

1. Interactively in response to a password prompt.
2. Sent as a parameter to the command, e.g., `occ wnd:listen host share username password`.
3. Read from a file, using the `--password-file` switch to specify the file to read.
4. Using 3rd party software to store and fetch the password. When using this option, the 3rd party app needs to show the password as plaintext on standard output.

Note

If you use the `--password-file` switch, the entire contents of the file will be used for the password, so please be careful with newlines.

Warning

If using `--password-file` make sure that the file is only readable by the apache / www-data user and inaccessible from the web, to prevent tampering or leaking of the information. The password won’t be leaked to any other user using `ps`.

### 3rd Party Software Examples

    cat /tmp/plainpass | sudo -u www-data ./occ wnd:listen host share username --password-file=-

This provides a bit more security because the `/tmp/plainpass` password should be owned by root and only root should be able to read the file (0400 permissions); Apache, particularly, shouldn’t be able to read it. It’s expected that root will be the one to run this command.

    base64 -d /tmp/encodedpass | sudo -u www-data ./occ wnd:listen host share username --password-file=-

Similar to the previous example, but this time the contents are encoded in Base64 format (there’s not much security, but it has additional obfuscation).

Third party password managers can also be integrated. The only requirement is that they have to provide the password in plain text somehow. If not, additional operations might be required to get the password as plain text and inject it in the listener.

As an example:

For a more sophisticated test, which might be similar to a real scenario, you can use “pass” as a password manager. You can go through http://xmodulo.com/manage-passwords-command-line-linux.html to setup the keyring for whoever will fetch the password (probably root) and then use something like pass the-password-name | sudo -u www-data ./occ wnd:listen host share username –password-file=-.

### Password Option Precedence

If both the argument and the option are passed, e.g., `occ wnd:listen host share username password --password-file=/tmp/pass`, then the `--password-file` option will take precedence.

- « Configuring S...
- Configuring S... »