Hello All,
This is my first time posting here, and first time working in a linux environment as well. Please read along the whole post to better understand my situation and help me solving it.
I was able to get a used system (server) from a friend and he installed CENTOS on it. I want to able to do the following things from the server.
1) Create a personal cloud server that can accessed by anyone with right credentials.
2) Be able to save data from my windows laptop to this linux machine when in home network.
3) Make my external HDD's compatible to work in Windows and Linux. (I tried plugging in the HDD's but got an NTFS error)


To get the first part done, I tried to do the following things
1) Installed a FTP server - I was able to get this done with a fit bit of success. I can access the address (ftp://192.168.1.6:21) from my Windows laptop but when I had first setup the FTP thing the linux machine has ip ftp://192.168.1.8 which changed to ftp://192.168.1.6 for some reason.
2) Tried to create the SSH - No success.
3) Tried to install FileZilla - No success.
4) Tried to install owncloud - No success.
5) My friend asked to make some changes in my router (Netgear N900) regarding PAT which I tried to do but again no success.

One of the main reasons for this is because all the guides / YouTube videos I am looking at assume the user knows how to work in Linux and hence omit the basic steps and I get lost. Could someone please help me with a step by step guide on how to accomplish what I plan to do in a simple language.



Thanks in advance!
Aadesh Gandhi

Hi & Welcome to LQ.

You might Read This Guide to using it

It works this way
1. You tell us your problem and how far you have got.
2. we ask questions and suggest things
3. you try them, tell us the results & errors and answer all questions
4. Someone diagnoses the problem, and (usually) tells you how to solve it.

We're stuck on 1. This sort of thing
is no use. What the errors are - that's helpful.

Hello Business_Kid,
Thanks for welcome and reply. I know when I first posted my query I did not provide any logs or specifics. Apologies for that, the reason is I do not know where to look for them. This is the very first time I am working in a linux enviroment.

When I mention no success, I wanted to just imply if I was following few from a certain link I was not able to get to the end point.

After I posted here I followed the steps on this link to setup my owncloud.
http://www.unixmen.com/setup-your-pe...sing-owncloud/


I was able to do so but when I go to the owncloud link (http://192.168.1.6/owncloud/) and sign in the only thing that I see is a white screen. Can you tell me what should I provide you in terms of logs or reports to move forward.

One other request that I had is this, I have randomly installed many softwares on this system in an attempt to get my cloud server up. Is there a way to see a what programs I have installed and uninstall one's that are not needed or extra?


Thanks,
Aadesh.

I am currently running OwnCloud on our CentOS 6.x box now that we use for work. It is a bit buggy with media, but files and the calendar work great. By buggy I mean can be very slow if you do not have mega hardware to support the way OwnCloud makes copies of everything for all users.

example:

User A has 100 images in Photos and shares those 100 images with User B. OwnCloud instead of pointing some type of symlink to them or other form of permission sharing instead COPIES all 100 images to User B's directories. Now you have 200 images of the same thing. This is both very heavy on the CPU/RAM as well as I/O on the HDDs.

If you have a very fast RAID6 or RAID60 setup with a quad core CPU and no less then 32G RAM you should not see the massive performance hit we saw with out much less powerful system. We are only running a 4 disk RAID5 with a dual core CPU and only 8G RAM.

The Directions from OwnCloud.org on howto install on CentOS are 98% correct. The path is a bit off on some of the steps but not to hard to figure out what needs to be adjusted.

Hello lleb,
Thank you for information you shared but would you have some step by step guide on resolving my issue?


Thanks,
Aadesh Gandhi