build your own cloud

This, and this is all you need to replace Dropbox and Google Drive. You're gonna use this to make your own cloud. In this video, I just might convince you to stop using Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, whatever it is, even if you're a business, let's kick that sucker to the curb. I almost pull a muscle. Most of us paid Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive to host and keep our data in the cloud, giving them control of our data. That feels good, doesn't it? But hey, we do get a little bit of convenience in return, right? We can

easily share all these files and we have the peace of mind that it's always gonna be there and accessible until Google decides it shouldn't be. Or they change their prices or they go down or they get hacked. All of these things have happened. So the solution is to create your own, create your own clout, host your own stuff. Now, this is actually crazy simple. All you're gonna need seriously is a computer. It could be a spare laptop with a little external hard drive. It could be a virtual machine, a docker container. It can be in

the clout, which I know sounds weird, but you're hosting it yourself. It's different. I'll show you. And you're gonna find that Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, they haven't been giving us all the features we deserve. So right now, I'm gonna show you two self hosting features that are kind of gonna blow your mind. They have way more features than Dropbox and Google Drive Gross. Don't put that gr, that was so corny and dumb. Don't put the last part. So get your coffee ready. We're gonna give you a cloud experience on your own hardware, which that just

sounds cool, right? You're building your own cloud in a way, and you're gonna learn a ton along the way. So if you're learning it, man, this is for you. And if you're not, do it anyway. Cuz this is for you too. Coffee break. And by the way, this is my default route roast. It's my stinking favorite. It's a single origin coffee from Ethiopia, probably my favorite origin for coffee. It has notes of berry chocolate and caramel and yes, I can taste all of it. You can too. And shout out to File Cloud for sponsoring this

video. So now let's talk about what do you need? Well, first of all, you don't need these guys. You're done. Goodbye. Actually, Before we talk about what we need, there were two options. I mentioned now why two? Well, let's cover that. But first I just want you to know they're both free, completely free. But they do target different audiences. For example, our first one we're talking about is File Cloud. They are the sponsor of this video. They do have a free community edition, but their target audience is large companies, enterprises, which is something I love

by the way, because I get to use a tool, the same tool that large companies use. I'll tell you why I love that here in a second. But the second option is next cloud. Next cloud is pretty cool, but it's more home lap. You probably won't see an enterprise company using this and that's fine. Both of these have a ton of amazing features. I'm not gonna tell you what you wanna pick. You're gonna have to figure that out. I'm just gonna show you what they do. Now let's talk about what you need to deploy either

of these. You got a couple options. Just know it's gonna be pretty easy With an asterisk <laugh>, you'll see, but you're gonna learn a lot. Trust me, many of you'll want host this OnPrem or in your house, in your business, whatever it is. And that's kinda the main selling point, right? Like gimme my data. No one can have it. It's not leaving my house unless I can share it securely, but you can't. So for that, you can have a spare laptop collecting dust in your closet. You can install it on your Windows machine you're using

right now, or a Windows server if you're a nerd like me. Or it can go on any Linux. Server F Cloud loves Ubuntu 2004 server L T s. I said all that backwards. That was weird. It can also be a Docker container. So you have a lot of options. Oh, they even have a image for virtual box and ES xxi, whichever option you choose. It's really, really simple to get installed. We'll walk through it. Then the other option I think is more fun and you're gonna learn a ton. And that's in the cloud. So I

know it sounds weird like we're leaving the cloud, but you're gonna put me back in the cloud. What are you doing? You kind of have more control though. You do have more control. We're gonna put the sucker in aws, Amazon's cloud, which means we're gonna get to learn a few things about how to do things in the cloud like e C two and s3. I'm gonna walk you through the entire thing, but you're gonna end up hosting your own drive in the cloud. Your own cloud, in the cloud. So my advice, if you wanna play

around and have fun and learn a ton, do pick both options. Play with it. Now keep in mind that on-prem is gonna be completely free as long as you have stuff aws, they do charge for hosting because you're not just using your hardware anymore, you're using someone else's hardware and you gotta rent. Okay? That's what you need. Oh, <laugh>, I forgot. The most important thing you need coffee you do. That's required in it. Everything in it requires copy. We're gonna start with File Cloud. Now, as I mentioned before, one of the main reasons I love

File Cloud is because they're enterprise, they target large companies. But why do I like that? Well, for me, and I think probably for you too, the reason I build my home lab is so I can kind of pretend to be a company cost playing as a company, right? Because I wanna get hands on the skills and experience with stuff companies might use and then pay me for those skills, right? That's the goal. My home lab is to learn. So any chance I can get to host something in my lab that's enterprise, That companies really actually

might use, I'm gonna take it. And I love that you can install on Windows. I think it's probably one of the only host your own cloud solutions out there that install on Windows, which is why, why companies love it, right? But yeah, windows 10 and up Windows Server 2000 something I, I forget what it is. Then you put a thing there for what version? It was the file Clouds was known as an EFS or an enterprise file sharing solution. E F S. Their goal is to help you make your own private cloud as a person,

as a business. They got you back an emphasis on the enterprise because it's really, really powerful and really, really secure. That's why they're big in government finance and education nowadays. Data is the name of the game. Keeping your data safe and secure, making sure you're not sharing it with someone you shouldn't. I mean, goodness. Can you think about a large company that uses Dropbox and trying to control who they share your data with? That's a nightmare. I'm just worried about my two kids in there who are using Dropbox and Google Drive, not to mention my

employees. Goodness. Now for the community edition, before we install it, lemme tell you a few things I love it for and why you might wanna install it right now. Of course you get remote access to your files from anywhere and it's free. You also have full control of your stuff, of your data and it's private. And then this is just incredible <laugh>, I've been wanting this from Google Drive and Dropbox forever and they just don't do it. They have hyper secure file sharing and what that means cuz that that's just a word, right? What that

means is when you share a file password protected limit, the time it's allows it to be downloaded, limit the amount of downloads that can occur. Create a file. Say you can only download it until next week and you can only download it one time. That's killer, right? Most solutions you can download a an application that'll sync your files back and forth, but you can also, and I don't think else does this, you can mount the share or you can mount your drive as a network share and it Acts just like, it's so cool. If you're

like, what are you talking about Chuck? I'll show you in a second. It's amazing. Now beyond the community edition, there are some things that they do enterprise that will just, you didn't even know what's possible. It's crazy. And we'll talk about that just for a moment so you can see what's out there. So you can learn what companies do to protect their data. I think it's important to know that because a big thing that File Cloud cares about is data governance. Putting retention policies on your data, having smart D L P or data leak prevention.

They even have zero trust file sharing and antivirus scanning, all kinds of stuff I'll show you. So now the setup, I'm gonna start with AWS because honestly it's the most fun. Like really it's so fun. If you don't care about aws, if you wanna host this on your own, I will have timestamps just jump forward to that point in time stamp. That's one step I'm not gonna repeat. So you wanna watch this right now and that's setting up a file cloud account and getting your community edition license, which by the way used to be a

paid license for community, used to be $10 a year. Now it's free. So you got nothing to complain about. I mean I'm sure you could find something and I'll see it in the comments, won't I? I'm talking to you buddy. Before you finish hitting enter, take a sip of coffee, take a breath, I'll take my own advice much better. So file cloud account, Let's set that sucker up right now. We're gonna navigate out to ce dot file cloud.com CE for community edition here. We have a lot of the stuff I already showed you. Feel free

to peruse that. But we're gonna scroll down and click on download now, which is gonna take us to the whole, hey, you need an account thing. So let's get an account. Bernard Hack. Wow, personal use. I have read everything man. Anyone else feel out they're lying when they click that I didn't read anything but I do agree blindly verification code And we're in from here. It's pretty simple. We're gonna click on download now. Download now and then click on download. That's gonna give you a few options of how you can do this. Right now we're

gonna laser focus in on AWS because it's awesome. Clicking that will take you to the guide, which we're gonna depend on right now. And I'll walk you through and this will be actually pretty easy now if you've never used AWS before, I am so excited for you. It's so fun. In fact, right now you can sign up for a free tier account, which means you'll get a ton of stuff for free in aws. You may even be able to set this up for free. So you wanna head out to aws.amazon.com and get started for free.

I'm not gonna walk you through it, I've got other videos on that. But go ahead and set up an account or get logged in if you already have one and meet me back here. Now here we are in the AWS console. It's kind of fun, don't get overwhelmed, there's a lot going on. But let's navigate through this. First we're gonna go up here to the services tab or button. Click that from here we're gonna click on the compute little menu icon right there. And finally we'll click on E C two, which is their service to

create virtual machines and the cloud. Click on that. Now, mental note real quick. Up here at the top right, you'll see what region you're currently in. I'm in North Virginia, which is US East one. If you're somewhere different, just remember that, write it down, whatever. It'll come in handy here in a bit. Now from here we're gonna click on launch instance. We're gonna create an e C two virtual machine launch instance. Let's name it. And then just below the name, we have the option to search for an Amazon machine image, an aami. We're gonna search

for file cloud right there. Hit enter. Now it's not gonna show you anything until you click on the AWS marketplace. Amis right here. Once you click on that, boom, file cloud's right there. First one is what we want. Click on select Now file cloud is free. Amazon isn't all the time and it's gonna tell you the server they recommend, the size and how much it will cost you per hour, which is a T2 medium. That's how they uh, refer to the sizing of their virtual machines. The amount of virtual CPUs that give you ram hard

drive space. We'll walk through that. But anyways, let's click on continue. Now with that selected, let's walk through this together. Scroll down just a bit. Here we have our instant type, which they already default selected for us to be T2 medium. Now I'm gonna go with that, but you don't have to. In fact, I've installed this on a smaller version, especially if you're on the free tier. You can do the T2 Micro, which is free tier eligible. You can do that just to try it out. Just have fun so you're not charged anything at all.

And if you're wondering Chuck, what's the advantage of going t2? Medium. Uh, it's faster. It can handle more. You're gonna have a better experience going with a larger computer. That's true in everything from gaming to cloud. Next we have our key pair login. AWS is big on using a key pair to login. So as opposed to a password, they're gonna want you to have a key that you'll use to unlock to get into their server. And we're gonna create that right now. We're gonna create the lock and key. That's what a key pair is. So

we'll create a new key pair. If you already have one, you don't have to create a new one. I'll name this hack. Well everything else is fine. I'll say create keep here. And what that will do, you'll notice it downloaded the key, which I'll want to keep and refer to in a minute. Just keep it there. Keep it safe. The lock will be on the server. Now that's pretty much it. If we scroll down just a little bit just to make sure everything's good, it looks all good to me. You can add more stuff if

you want to. You don't need to. I'm done. From here we're gonna click on launch instance and we are off to the races almost. Yep, it's launching it. It's probably booting it right now. If you wanna see what's going on and start to access it and see all the details, go ahead and click on this link right here, which is your instance id. Now you don't have to know everything about what I'm talking about to feel comfortable here. It's fine if this is new for you, let it be new, like walking into a new house.

Just explore, have fun, just don't get crazy <laugh>. I'm gonna click on the link now and we can see right there in the instant state. Mine is still pending. So I'm gonna wait just a second. Take a little coffee break for that to go to like booted ready to go. So with your virtual machine, booted, we're gonna scroll on over until we see the public I PV four DNS name, that's your server's address. That's how you can access it. We're gonna copy that right now. Open up a new tab and paste it. Now don't you

hit enter yet. Calm down. <laugh>. Before we hit enter we're gonna do a forward slash and type in admin and hit enter. Oh yeah, looking good actually you know what? Before we do that, take all out extra stuff out just after com. Do forward slash install. I like this feature. This will tell you if everything's golden and good installation checks. Do you got level those check marks, things look good. Extended checks, things look good. So anyways, let's get back to the admin. So take all that out just after com, type in admin and let's get

logged in. The default login will be admin and the password will be your instance ID for this machine. So let's go back to AWS and we scroll over just a little bit. Our instance ID is right here. I'm gonna copy everything the I dash, copy that paste into the password field and get logged in. We are in but hold up, we're hit immediately with a hey invalid license file. Do we have one yet? No we don't have one. Let's go grab it. Let's get back to our file cloud portal that we were in earlier. And

notice on step two we had the option to get our license. We definitely want that. Let's grab it right now. Click get license and it downloaded for you. That's all you had to do. So now getting back to aws, we're gonna click choose file, choose that license file, open it, apply it and that's it. You've got a fully licensed file cloud instance, pretty sick. Now you're immediately hit with a barrage of notifications on the right and I Don't like that. Uh, we'll solve those here in a sec, especially the invalid url. We'll cover that. But

let's go ahead and click those away. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. No, I'm not gonna show you everything cuz there's too much. But I will give you enough to get started to like not be totally lost. I'll give you some breadcrumbs. Now the first thing we want to cover is storage. And that's the whole point of this entire video, right? Is we wanna store our stuff somewhere else besides Google Drive one Drive in Dropbox. I'm getting tired of saying those company's names. Let's just call them the uh, the triad. We're calling 'em the triad from

now on. Okay? Currently with this install I only have about 40 gigabytes or so of data to Store, which is not a lot. And the reason for that is because that's how big my hard drive is on the AWS e C two machine I deployed. If I go over to storage in my AWS console, I can see my volume right there. Now you might be like, okay well that's easy, just increase the size of that volume and we could do that. But that wouldn't be the smartest thing, at least not the most economical thing. Increasing

your volume size here cost more money than it would be to do something else. And that something else is called s3. S3 is Amazon's storage service and it's relatively cheap. It's gonna cost you 0.02 cents or dollars. I'm not sure how to refer to that per gigabyte, which is about the industry standard. And they're only gonna charge you for what you use. If you only got two gigabytes of storage up there, it's gonna cost you double of that. Now comparing that to Google or OneDrive or whatever it is, you'll probably get a better deal with

Google and all these other companies. But if your goal is to have more control over your data and just have fun with Amazon, this is a pretty good option. Also, if you're a company with large amounts of data, like large amounts of data, this will end up saving you more money than Google will. And you also have the option looking at Amazon's price sheet of going like crazy cuz they had different storage tiers. If you didn't know about Amazon s3, I was pricing you the standard tier, which is 0.023 gigabytes per month. You can go

for their like infrequent access tier, just stuff you wanna store that's much cheaper. Their glacier tier, like glacier tier, which is like crazy deep archive. Let's do the math on that. If I wanted to store 10 terabytes, see how many <laugh>, how many zeros is that? That seems right, doesn't it? No, it doesn't seem right. 10 terabytes will cost you 10 bucks a month just to archive your stuff. That's pretty cool. And you have the option of doing that. You don't have that option with these other consumer level things. So I say all that to

say this. We're gonna set up right now an S3 storage bucket and we're gonna connect that to File cloud, which is fully supported. So here in aws, Let's set up our S3 bucket. It's actually not too crazy, but it will involve two things. First we're gonna set up an S3 as you probably guessed, and then we'll set up an IAM user for file cloud to access that bucket. An IAM is Amazon's identity Access management sounds scary, it's not. Let's do it real quick. First, our bucket for s3. We're gonna go up to services, the top

left here and then we'll scroll down just a bit on the side until we see storage right here. Go ahead and click on that. And for us right now we care about s3. Click on s3. And this is actually pretty simple. First we'll just create a bucket, click on create a bucket. The more I say that, the more I like that they called it a bucket. We'll name it something for region, let's keep it in the same region. We created our E C two, which for me was US East one. And then from there, that's

pretty much all we need to worry about. We're not gonna open this up to the public. Keep it all default, all protected and safe. And finally down here at the bottom, we'll click on create. Ah, my pen create bucket. We got our bucket time for the IAM user. From here we'll click on the search bar. We're gonna search for it real quick. Just search for IAM. And there it is right there. By the way, you can use the search bar as much as you want for all the things we've been doing so far. So click

on iam. Ah, it took me outta dark mode. Okay, thanks a lot aws. And here we're gonna focus on one thing, Creating a new user account. So on the left here we have account management or access management and we have users click on users. And then over here on the bottom right, we'll click on add users. I'll name this hack, well file cloud, click on next, click on next once more and we'll click on create user at the bottom. We're done. Not yet though. <laugh>. We have one more thing. We have to give that user

account permissions to be able to interact and use the S3 bucket. So find your user account in our list right here. There's mine right there. I'm gonna click on that. And here in the middle we have our permission policies. On the right we have add permissions. Go ahead and click on that and click on create inline policy. Now this will be really simple cause all we're gonna do is copy and paste. First we're gonna go back to our file cloud portal. And remember previously when we clicked on download here and we chose AWS and opened

up a new document here for us to look at here, they're gonna have some fun stuff for us. If you scroll down just a bit, you'll see the table of contents and we'll want to click on the last option, which is post install, expand that. And then there'll be a link right in the middle setting up file cloud, manage S3 storage, click on that. Whew, A lot of clicking and we're almost there <laugh>. Um, we're actually gonna do all three of these options, But we're gonna do number two first, which sounds very counterintuitive, I know,

just stick with me here. Click on change credentials or configure cred credentials. And then right here where it says under S three key, we have the following permissions. Click on that. Here we have some delicious J S O N starting with that opening bracket. We want to copy all of it until the closing bracket or curly brace rather copy that. Go back to your AWS console where we were configuring our policy and we're gonna click on J S O N. So right now we have the visual edit editor selected. We're gonna click on js o

n instead. We're gonna control A and then control V pasting all our delicious J S O N. Everything looks good there. Click on review policy at the bottom right, we'll name it real quick. And then click on create policy. And now our user account, which mine was hack, well file cloud. He has permissions to mess with our S3 buckets. So back in our file cloud dashboard, we have one goal here. It has to change from using the storage in Amazon, which is just our hard disc, our drive for the virtual machine change from using that

to using Amazon's S3 file storage. Now for this we do have to get a little under the hood and mess with command line, which is kind of fun. So let's just do it real quick. It's not gonna be crazy. But first I'll show you what we're changing here on the left. We scroll down just a little bit, we'll have settings and then we'll click on settings. Go ahead and close that tutorial. And what we wanna click on right now is the storage section in our settings right here. Notice here in our storage settings we can

change the location of where we store our file cloud settings. But I don't see anything about S3 and that's cuz we have to enable. And for that we gotta go to the command line. So let's get back to aws. This won't be scary, I trust me, it won't be scary if we get back to our e C two instance, Which if you get back to your e c two service, you'll be able to get there pretty quick. Let's just go and open the settings here on the right you'll see the option for actions and then

connect cuz we wanna connect to us. So click on connect. And I love this cause right here at the very bottom they have an example of the command you can use to automatically connect to your box with the key you downloaded if you just created that. So I'm gonna copy this command, I'm gonna launch my terminal here and I'm gonna change my directory real quick to the downloads folder. That's where I have my, my key stored. I just downloaded it and that's probably where you have yours too. So I'll do CD downloads and then I'll

simply paste that command. And all this is doing is connecting to our server via SSH using our key. And it's not gonna ask us for a password. It's gonna be pretty sick. Ready? Go accept all fingerprints. Yes sir. And we're in and here we're gonna edit one file. So with me right now, type in pseudo then we're gonna use Nano cause Nano is the best text editor in Linux period. Just as. And then we're gonna edit this file that be forward slash var slash www slash html slash config slash cloud config dot php head enter.

And we're gonna change one thing here. I'm gonna scroll down pretty much towards the bottom of this file until I see this. Define Tony, do cloud storage implementation. Right now it says local. We don't want that. We want it to say Amazon s3. And that's what we're gonna do. Gonna move my cursor on over, Delete local and say Amazon S3. And that's it. We'll hit control X, Y enter to save and that should be all we have to do. And then one more thing, we're just gonna copy a file. That's all we have to do.

We're gonna type in pseudo once more. We're gonna use the CP command for copy and we'll copy this file var ww html config, Amazon S3 storage config dash sample php. And we're gonna copy that file to same location. It's just gonna paste that in. But we're gonna remove the sample and the dash. So where it looks just like this Amazon S3 storage config do php. We're not gonna change that file, we just need to create a copy of it. Hit enter when we got it. Now looking back at our storage settings, It looks a little

bit different. We have S3 options now let's configure it. So our first two options, S3 Key and S3 C. Let's get that. We're gonna go back to our IAM management console. Jump into our user account we created, which for me was Hack. Well file cloud. And we'll see over here in the menu options right here in the middle kind of is security credentials. Go ahead and click on that. If you scroll down just a bit, you'll see a section called Access keys. We wanna create one of those. So let's so click on create access key.

From here we're gonna click on the little radio button for third party service. Click on I understand and click on Next describe it five o'clock. And then we'll click on create access key. Done. So now this information right here is what we need first. Look at the access key. I'll copy that. Go over to File Cloud and paste that right here where it says S three key paste. Then we'll grab the secret access key. It's a secret. Click on copy, it's copied, we'll paste it here. And the secret for bucket name, whatever your bucket name

was. Mine was Hack, well bucket. Everything else is optional. We'll click on save S3 settings, click on. Okay, settings verified, we're good to go. We are now using Amazon S3 as our storage for File cloud, which is pretty sick. So if you did this, that's amazing <laugh>, because that was, yeah, you gotta be honest, it's kind of complex. Right now we're using Amazon as a cloud storage provider on the back end. Bio cloud is kind of our front end and it's amazing. So let's test it real quick. Um, let's create a new user. Kinda our

first thing to do on file cloud. Let's go to users on the left here, under users and groups. Click on add a user, it's all pretty basic stuff for authentication notice we have default authentication selected by default, but you could change it to active directory or ldap. You can integrate with anything pretty much. Let's put a little user in. I'll say Chuck, Chuck a little bit of password here, email address and click on Create. Now let's just grab our URL for file cloud. I'll open up an incognito window, I'll get logged in with my new

user and here we go. My home personal cloud, just like that. First of all, it's already here. It's already happening. Let me add a file. I'm gonna go to my files. I'll just drag and drop something. I'll drag and drop a Dropbox. Uh, picture <laugh>. Perfect, it's there. Now what I wanted to show you is let's go to Amazon S3 real quick and let's see if we have any new objects in our bucket. Look at that. We have an object one I just uploaded. Now one more thing you may wanna do for Amazon S3 settings.

So here in file cloud and our storage, if we scroll down just a bit, we'll see a button that says where is it? Where to go. Oh, right here we have S3 Encryption and Manage. We can enable Amazon S3 encryption, which will encrypt our data at rest and in transit between Amazon S3 and File Cloud. Our file cloud server. I'll leave the default option here and I'll click on enable encryption. Keeping in mind that it will encrypt everything currently in there. So it's best to do this. Like to begin with <laugh>, click on. Okay and

we're good. All existing files and new files will be encrypted using a E S 2 56. Okay, sorry I squeaked a bit there at the end. I feel pretty accomplished right now. That was pretty cool. Now at this point you do have file clouds set up in AWS using S3 storage, but there's probably a few more things you'll want to do. Like using your own domain name, setting up a legit SSL certificate. We're gonna cover that here in a moment. In fact, I'll put a timestamp jump to that real quick if you wanna just do

that right Now. But now I wanna get into hosting this yourself on prem. Now once you have your file cloud CE account setup, which I covered just earlier, installing on-prem is pretty easy. And I'll show you a few different options. So here we have the option to download our server. I'll click on download clicking on any of these options. We'll show you how to do it. I'll you real quick. How to do the docker installation, the Linux install. And for a really quick way to do this, just download the O V F and actually I

think docker's faster. But you can download a virtual machine image. They can just load up in virtual box already ready to go. And then Windows. I'm not really gonna show you that cause that's kind of self-explanatory. All you gotta do is download an MSI installer and just go from there. It'll do it for you. So let's knock out the easy one first. Docker, click on docker. Really just a few commands you can copy and paste yourself. So here are my Linux server or it could be your Linux computer cloud two, wherever. Let's first make sure

we have Docker and Docker compose installed. So we'll do a little pseudo a P T update, make sure our repositories are up to date. And then we'll do a pseudo A P T I install docker io, docker dash compose dash y, just like this. Hit enter little coffee break. It'll do its thing. If you have no idea what docker is, check it out. I got a video somewhere explaining what it is. It's amazing. You're gonna have a great time, but you don't have to know what Docker is to run this. It's already installed. Cool. Now

we're gonna do a couple things. First we're gonna use this w get command here they have fors pulled down their Docker composed file. We'll just paste it in there. It pulled on the file if I'll do an ls, there's our Docker composed file. And then it wants us to pull all four file cloud images, which takes a long time, especially for the community version, the file cloud solar image. So we're not gonna pull that. And we also don't need file cloud preview. So all we'll do is copy the command up until file cloud preview. We'll

just do, We'll stop at MongoDB, which is their database. We'll copy that. Go back to our command prompt, clean up a little bit, type in pseudo paste that command and let the party start. This could take a minute, so just take a little coffee break. Also, keep in mind that Docker, they recommend only for training and testing and it's not optimized for production servers. Now does that mean you can't use it in your home lab? Not at all. You probably just use that all the time. It's fine. But if you're run into issues, that's probably

why. Okay, it actually wasn't that long. If you do a pseudo doctor PS it's running, it's going. So let's see if it works. Grab your IP address, navigate on out to the IP address slash admin. Actually no, Let's do a forward slash install to make sure it's all healthy. This will do some checks to make sure it installed correctly. Everything's running. It totally is. That's awesome. Now let's go to forward slash admin. We'll log in with admin and super secure. Password. Password, all lowercase. And we are in. So now the last thing we have to

worry about is the license file, which looking at our file cloud portal, just under what we downloaded, we can say get our license, click get license and it will download for us. Just like that. Notice that to download there. Getting back to our server, we'll just say choose file, pick that license file, apply it and we're good to go. Now there are a lot of things we gotta do to set this up. We'll continue that here in a moment. If you wanna jump straight there, go ahead now I'm gonna cover the Linux install real quick.

So to install directly onto Linux, we'll click on our Linux X 86 64 Ubuntu Deb package. It'll take us to a place where we can install it directly from our repository, which is fantastic. Now I do highly recommend you go with their recommended server os and that's UB 2 20 0 4 lts. Just do that. It'll save you a headache, trust me. So go ahead and click on that. And it's simply a matter of adding some repositories, updating your repositories and installing it like that. It's that simple. So let's do it real quick. We're gonna

copy all these commands right here in step one, adding all the repos and we'll paste that here. It's gonna update our repos done and then we're going to install the Apache and Mongo DB servers. And actually I'm just gonna do the first two commands. We'll paste those here and then I'm gonna grab the command down here that'll automatically accept the ULA. And install hands free, paste that command, give it just a little bit of time. Quick coffee break. Now throughout the install you may hit things like this and I always say install the package maintainer

version. It's kind of annoying, just go through it. There's not too many but just enough to be annoying. Then right here, I'm just gonna say why enter one more time. I think it was last time. No look more stop it. Okay, Think it's done now that should be it. Let's just make sure it's working. We'll do an SS dash tool pin and I do see ports open. That's a good sign. I'm gonna grab that IP address and navigate out there to see if it's working. Type in the IP address. We'll go to forward slash install.

Make sure everything's good. Dude, things are looking great. If you get the screen, you did a good job and if you see how blue check marks, you also did a great job. So now we can go to forward slash admin after the IP address instead get logged in with the super secret password and use the name of admin then password, all lowercase. That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life we're in. But we need a license file. Getting back to our file cloud portal, Just click on get your license and it will download

the license for you. Just downloaded mine, I'll choose it, apply it. We're good to go kind of. We'll ignore all those messages on the side. And then finally, if you wanna set up your file cloud just with the virtual machine image, it's super simple. You download it, yeah, spin it up in virtual box or E S X I or whatever. It's just pre-baked and you follow the steps I mentioned previously. Go to the install full uh url, make sure everything's good. Then go to admin, load your file. If you're like I didn't, I skipped those

parts, we'll just go back and watch that last part. You'll get it. Now I didn't mention that all you need to replace the triad is a computer and an external hard drive and you'll want do that because right now my server here Doesn't have much storage's got like 50 gigs or something like that. What I want to use is an external hard drive. But how do we do that? Let's set that up real quick. It's not too bad. And this will be specific to Linux. Now I do recommend you start out with a blank hard

drive completely clean cuz we are gonna format it. So I'm gonna grab this guy, plug him into my computer, my Linux server. So first I'll type in the command LS USB for list USB and I can tell right there there's my Western Digital right there. I know he's plugged in. Now I'm gonna type in ls, B L K. I can see right here. SDB one is how he's identified on my Linux machine and I can tell like he's got 1.8 terabytes right there. Perfect. Now I'm gonna double check and make sure he is not mounted.

I'm gonna type in mount and I'll just do a, actually let's do a mount pipe grip for SDB one. Nothing. So he is not mounted. We're good to go there. Now we have to format our hard drive. Keeping in mind this will erase everything. Hope you know that one command super easy. Pseudo M K F S will do a dash t. And then EXT four. This is the EXT four file system. It's I think the best You can try other options. But for simplicity, let's try this and it'll specify our drive, which will be in

the dev location on your Linux file system. And then SDB one for me. Whatever you had when you did L S B L K, put it there. Go ahead and do it. Ready, set, go. It'll take a minute. So just a little little coffee break. Formatting is complete. Now we can mount our drive. So real quick, I'm gonna make a new directory. I'm gonna say NK dir slash mnt slash file cloud. That's my new directory. I'm gonna check the permissions on that directory real quick by typing in ll and in the directory. And I can

see right here that we'll need to allow some permissions for our users according to this stuff right here. But we're gonna do this real quick, okay, will be pseudo c h mod. We'll do you for users plus RW for read and write. And then that new directory we just created Mount or N N T file Cloud done. Looks good so far. So now we can mount our drive, our external drive and it's really simple to do that. It'll be pseudo mount will specify our drive, which was Dev sdd one for me. And it'll specify where

you want to mount it in the file system, which for us we created a folder for that already slash nt slash file cloud, it's mounted. If we type in mount, we can check that out real quick. There it is. This video has so much stuff. I hope you're having fun. Let's check our file permissions real quick for that folder. Once more we'll do ll slash NT slash file cloud, make sure everything's good. Looks like we need some work actually because the Apache service will need to be Able to read and write to this directory. So

let's change the permissions real quick. Once more, we'll do pseudo CH mod for simplicity. Let's do a for everybody plus read write and then we'll specify our directory MT file cloud. Actually let's set back real quick. Let's go back to the beginning of CH mod and we'll do a dash r dash capital R for recursive. Let's add that real quick. Check our permissions once more things look a lot better. So now here in file cloud, let for our storage path, let's change it real quick. We'll do forward slash mentee slash file cloud where I have

my external drive mounted. I'll check the path. Looks good. Awesome. Click on save. And now we've successfully mounted and are using an external hard drive with file cloud. Felt like a lot. Kind of was a lot but that's awesome. Now there's two more things I wanna show you with File Cloud. Two more things we wanna set up to make it a bit better. First I wanna get a domain name and SSL set up. And second I wanna show you real quick how we can add a user set up our phone and everything with File Cloud

and the coolest feature by far mounting a network share like you're there, like you're anywhere, like you can go anywhere and have this network share mounted. It's so cool. Now this first tutorial is specific to AWS or if you're just hosting File Cloud externally in some other cloud that's publicly accessible, it has a public IP address. We want to get that sucker a domain name and enable ssl. Now for that I'm going to assume that you already have a domain name and if you don't already have one, I've got other videos that'll show you how

to get a domain name pretty cheaply and pretty awesomely. And you're gonna wanna set that up with CloudFlare. These are two prerequisites I'm not gonna walk you through. So buy a domain name and set that domain name up with CloudFlare using it as your name server. Again, I've got videos somewhere around here floating around that'll show you exactly how to do that. Now we'll start with our config and CloudFlare here in CloudFlare. We're gonna go to the DNS settings of our domain. Go to records and we're going to add a new record. This will be

a sub domain, meaning it's gonna be network chuck.com, but it'll have something before. So file do network chuck.com. I'm gonna call it Hack well files. And then we'll point that domain to our IP address in Amazon or Leno or wherever you're hosting your uh file cloud server. So I'll go back to aws, grab that public IPV four address right here, copy and paste that right here. I'll keep the proxy status enabled and I'll click save. So now hack well files.network chuck.com will forward to my file cloud server. But that's just half the story. We now

need to set up our file cloud server to believe that's its new name. That's where you can find it. Now I do have a link to File Clouds guy below, but I wanna walk you through it real quick. First, We'll create a CSR request for File Cloud. Now if you've never done something like this, get a certificate signed for ssl. It's pretty cool to walk through this and learn it right now. I struggled with this so much in the beginning of my career, I'm like CSR, ssl, what is that? To know this now is so

powerful. So anyways, here what we're gonna do, we're gonna use this command right here, which is open SSL to generate a csr. You do wanna be logged into your Amazon e C two instance, the terminal to run these commands. I'm gonna paste that right now. Open ssl, let's go. It's gonna ask you to do some things like where do you live us, the country Code State, Texas City Dallas Company Hack. Well now for common name, this is where you wanna put your url. So it'll be hack, well what did I call it again? I don't

even remember. Oh Hack Well files. Hack well files do network chuck.com. That'll be your common name. Your CN email address. Am I gonna do a password? Keep going and it's done. Now here if you type in ls, you should see a server CSR and a server key created that csr. We want that sucker. We're gonna cap that server file real quick. Type in cat server dot csr, there's our certificate request right there. Leave that there, we'll come back in a minute. Let's go to CloudFlare here. I'm gonna navigate over to the SSL TLS section on

the left and go to Origin server here. I'm gonna get my certificate signed by CloudFlare and then I'm gonna download that. So I'll say create certificate. I'm gonna say use my private key in csr. Right here is where we'll paste our certificate. If we get back to our terminal here, we're gonna grab this, copy it, paste it right here. Now here for host names. I'm just gonna be very specific and say File hack, well file z network chuck.com and then click create. Now leave that page there. We're gonna step forward into the next steps in

our terminal. I know this is kind of involved and other solutions are kind of automatic, but it's fun to learn this manually. It is. So first thing we'll do is we'll use the A two e n mod command to enable SSL and Apache. So we'll copy that command, go to our Ubuntu, paste it there, Done next step. Now getting back to CloudFlare, we're gonna grab this certificate file or this text. We're just gonna copy it, get back to our terminal and we're gonna make a new file real quick. We're gonna say nano server ct, we'll

paste that certificate in there, control X, Y enter to save, good to go. And then we're gonna copy and paste these commands to make a new directory in Apache. We'll paste that first one. We'll copy our certificate to that folder and then we'll copy our server key, our private key to that folder. And then one last thing, we gotta modify our web server config and Apache to use this new certificate. So the file location is here. Just gonna grab that. I'm gonna type in nano edit that file. I'm gonna do a pseudo before that just

in case. We're gonna change our virtual host right here from 80 to 4 43. And then just under document route we're gonna add server name and then put in the server name that you set up. Mine was hack well files.network chuck.com. And then just under that we're gonna copy the SSL engine on paragraph right here, paste that right there, make sure everything's lined up nice and neat. Then we'll hit control X Y enter to save and that should be it. All we'll have to do now is restart Apache, which I'll just copy and paste that

command and we should be good. So now in theory I should be able to go out to hack well files.network chuck.com and that should take me right to my file cloud server SSL and everything. And it totally did. That's awesome. I'm gonna get log into the admins one once more. And there's one thing I wanna change. It says invalid server url. You wanna change that cuz as important as you share your files and everything, they'll have a an URL that people can access it with. And if it's like 1, 2, 7 0 0 1, that's

not gonna be great. So let's change that real quick. We're gonna go to settings here and here under server url. We're just gonna change it to https Hack well files.network chuck.com. It's gonna check it, make sure it's all good. Server's valid, save. Now before I show you the awesome network share feature, I'm sure you're wondering, Hey Chuck, I did an on-prem install. How do I handle SSL and CloudFlare and all that? I would recommend using CloudFlare tunnels. It's called Cloud Flared. And I have a video right here of how to set that up for any

service within your home. It basically allows you to open up a very secure tunnel into your house through your firewall and access all your stuff anywhere. Easily do that here with File Cloud. I'm not gonna walk through it right now cause this video's getting so long, but it's not very, very crazy different from what we've been doing here. Now let me show you real quick this cool server share thing. So first I'm gonna step a new user. Um, this can apply to anybody anywhere, whatever installation method you used, I wanna set up a new user.

I already had one for Chuck. I'm gonna add a new one. Add. I'll say Bernard. Bernard and I'll create that user. Awesome. Now I'll open up a new incognito tab, log in hack well files.network chuck.com. It's so cool, this works flawlessly. Get logged in as Bernard bam, I'm a new user. I got my own cloud ready to go. Now I can use File Cloud for my web browser anywhere all the time. And it's amazing. But the apps are what make it shine. So here on my dashboard I have the option to install mobile and desktop

apps right here. I'm gonna click on that. Now here we have a few options. This first one, file cloud sync is what you would see for most Cloud Drive things. It'll store your files both on your computer and remotely and they'll sync back and forth. Pretty cool. But the drive is what's really neat. <laugh>, let's try that out now. So I'm gonna click drive and I'll download this for Windows. I'll launch it, install it. You know how installations work. Pretty basic. I'll restart later, no big deal. And I'll launch my file Cloud drive. It's kind

of hard to say File Cloud to get started. I'll put in my information. So I'll server's already been set up. I'll log in. You can set a download limit, which is cool. And then you choose your mount. So I'll mount it as, let's just say L and bam, I'm done. Start using drive. So it gave me a little recent activity of how it mounted and it's, it's mounted. So check this out, take a file here, put it in my files, it's there. And here are my drive, map drive. There it is. Now what's cool about

this is I can actually share it from here. I'll right click that. Click on more options. File cloud, share link. I can just change my share options right here within <laugh>, my stinking file explorer. That's pretty cool. I can say expires tomorrow. I can restrict it to one download. That's, let's do two downloads and then I'll do a password and then I'll copy that link. I'll get email notifications and people use it. Let's test that out real quick. There's the password. Download the file. So that feature I don't see anyone else doing. It's pretty cool.

So File Cloud, Community edition, you're gonna have a great time. It's really fun. Set this up and let me know how it went for you. Comment below. And also if you're a business or maybe you're thinking about pitching a new file solution to your company, the enterprise features are what kind of set File Cloud apart from everybody else. Like I said, educational institutions, financial government, all that kind of stuff. They use this to manage their data. It's like here in governance, which is a very scary word. You can pretty much do anything you want with

your data monitor every bit <laugh>, like you can do legal holds, data leak protection. You can classify your content, you can put in retention policies, smart D L P, an entire compliance center for gdpr, hipaa, I T A R, <laugh>. It's all kinds of stuff. You can do workflows if this, then that on files. I mean look at the triggers I have for these workflows. The file is downloaded, the comment is added. All these things, I mean every little thing you can control. And that's killer for a business and an enterprise, not to mention you

can integrate it with everything. Active directory, single sign-on. You can implement antivirus scanning on all your data. I mean looking at the third party integrations you can do, of course antivirus, Salesforce Seam, reCAPTCHA, McAfee, Microsoft Teams. You can even enable it. Edit your files in Microsoft Office, like if you're in the portal, just auto open. Now that was File Cloud. And I'm now realizing that this video is so super long <laugh> because there was A lot we had to cover. And I think File Cloud is amazing because they focus on one thing and they do

it great. And that's just file sharing and data security. And they do that for enterprises and they can do it for you in your house. That's pretty cool. So that's the enterprise solution. Now let's move on to more of the home lab open source solution and that's next cloud. Now next cloud is pretty popular already. You've probably already heard of Next Cloud and setting it up is not too bad. Now my favorite way to install Next cloud is through Docker. They make it really easy and you can find Next Cloud in a lot of places.

By the way, you can run on your Sonology and nas. You can integrate it with True nas. So it really is a great home lab solution. So let's try the Docker install real quick. Now, next cloud can only be installed on Linux-based systems. Again, file Cloud is the only one I know of that can go on Windows. So real quick, in Linux we need Docker. Let's install it, make sure we have it. We'll do a pseudo a P T update, not update, update. There we go. And then we'll do a pseudo APT install docker.io y.

Now we go grab there Docker command, which you copy and paste this code. It's a simple docker run command, paste it and run. It's gonna pull all the necessary images doing its thing. And that's it. Go to https, your IP address or your domain name, whatever it is, port 80 80 From here you got a weird password thing. You wanna copy this little phrase here. Kebab maturity, Paste that password in there for the next cloud A I login. And by the way, the reason you can't do anything else here is because they didn't do a

dash D for running it as a Damon for Docker. By default, it's kinda annoying. Now depending on your setup, you may wanna do a reverse proxy and refer to the reverse proxy documentation. I'm not gonna refer to that here again because <laugh>, my video is already so stinking long. But right now I'm running this on LE Node and LE node's already public. And I'm just gonna use the reverse DNS address I have for Lin node. I'll submit that as the url. Now next cloud is pretty cool because they have a ton of features, like almost

too many. So they uh, integrate with next cloud office. They call collab. You can do next cloud talk. I don't wanna do that. I'm not gonna do the office thing either. Turn that off, save changes and then I'll download and start the containers. It's kind of weird how they do it where it's like you install the installer as a Docker container and then <laugh> and then it, the Docker container installs the other Docker containers. It's really strange, right? So that's what it's doing right now. We'll wait. Okay, it's almost there. The yellow means they're starting.

So we're gonna wait for that to finish. Now also, while we're waiting, the other cool part about Next cloud is you can install it on pretty much anything including a raspberry pie. They have Next Cloud Pie, which will work pretty well. Now it won't be blazing fast, But it does its thing. And also one thing you'll want to note with Next Cloud as I'm watching the startup is that it's very like online service, meaning it needs to have an internet connection pretty much all the time to work. If you wanna like keep it closed off

on your network without any connection, I don't think it works well with that. I could be wrong, but I was reading some documentation and that's what I found. But anyways, it looks like mine is done. Um, there's my admin user name and then password. I'm gonna copy this password real quick. I'll click on open my next cloud. Let's get logged in, get a nice little graphic meeting. This is pretty neat. And notice they try to be, they try to be everything right? Um, You can like have a contacts and and calendar and and do notes.

And you've got tasks like I like what they're trying to do, but also I hate it because it's like I just wanna manage my files and you're making this really complex. But files they can manage and much like File Cloud, they have apps for everything and they do have a drive thing, but they don't do that Mapped drive thing, which I love. Now one of the big differences between next Cloud and File Cloud will be the limitations. Next cloud being an open source solution and much more, you know, targeted toward home users. They pretty much

give you everything, all the features. So unlimited users, you can add a bunch of apps, like lemme see all the apps, you can add all the integrations. It's pretty cool. And if you're a tinkerer and you love to just add a bunch of things to your Stuff and troubleshoot things for a while, uh, this will be fun. And with File Cloud, you're not gonna see all that file Cloud. You actually have a limitation of five users. So if you're gonna be doing more than five, next cloud might be the solution for you. Unless you're a

business, then you may want to really, really consider File Cloud. Now Next Cloud does have similar sharing features. When I wanna share a link I can control, like can they edit it, I can hide the download, but I can't limit the download. But I can do things like password protect and set expiration dates, even though I'll note Hi buddy. So pretty much the same as File File, but you can't limit the downloads, which I don't think anybody else does. So I know this video has probably been so long. I'm exhausted. I've been recording for hours.

But I hope I encourage you to possibly kick the triad to the curb. Now I still use Google Drive and I use Dropbox. I use 'em as backup. For me, I'm comfortable with that decision cause I like my data being everywhere. I don't care if they have my videos, I make those public anyway. I just want them backed up in as many places as possible. So I use a little bit of everything. But now for personal things, no I don't put everything up there. I like control of that. So for you, you may want to

be very much in control of your personal data if you're a company, even more so cuz you may have a ton of regulations where you can't put your Stuff up there. So you have to have that control. So solutions like File Cloud specifically can help you with the business side of things. And if you're a person who has that business level of security and fantastic file sharing file cloud will be for you. And if you're more of a fan of open source, you like a product that does a lot, next cloud is really fun too.

So I'll leave it up to you, whichever one you think, but I just want to make sure you guys know there's an option besides going with the triad. It does require a bit of IT knowledge but of tinkering. But we covered that here in this video. And please let me know in the comments what you think, What do you use for file sharing, how do you keep your stuff safe? That's all I got. I'll get you guys next time.