Remote access for evaluation Pydio Cells Home server

[mtnman55]

Newbie here. I’m in the process of running an evaluation on Pydio (Home 3.0.3) to determine if it will fit the needs of a non-profit organization I volunteer for - a group that has lots of historical and vintage documents and images. We want to create a digital archive to pull all of these docs and images into one spot rather than being scattered over many different computers.

I have built a server and installed Pydio here at my house and have it working locally. I have a lot more to learn but I can do the basic things and so far, I’m impressed. Now, I would like to setup remote access so that other volunteers can try playing with Pydio so that we get a consensus if it’s what we want to go with. If we move forward, we will install Pydio on our real website.

At this point, I need a bit of help. I’m familiar with Linux but I’m not an IT or website developer. I’ve never added a security certificate and really don’t want to go to that effort when we’ll take down this server and move to our real and secure website, hopefully very soon. So, I was hoping to implement a simple http server, not https.

Using this page:
https://pydio.com/fr/docs/developer-guide/cells-configure-sites
I attempted to implement Item 5 - HTTP only. Apparently, I’m not understanding this, because it’s not working for me.

First, I set the binding port to something other than 8080, as I know 8080 is a very common port. I had assumed it could be anything, so for the purposes of this discussion, let’s say it is 8089. I selected localhost as shown by the above page, then selected No TLS. I wasn’t sure if I needed the reverse proxy but it appears that’s how I get the external URL, which I set to http://localhost:8089 as per the document. Then, I saved the configuration. Not sure if I needed to or not, but I then restarted the service cells.

Once I did that, I then went back into my webbrowser and accessed the site using the IP address and port 8089, but it wouldn’t access it. I can still access it via port 8080. And, having one of my other volunteers try remotely, he could not access it remotely (I opened ports 8080 and 8089). (Actually, not entirely true - another volunteer was able to access it via https with 8080 but got the warning about it being nonsecure, advanced, not recommended, proceed anyway.)

I’m hoping someone can tell me what I’m doing wrong, what I missed, or if I’m made a wrong assumption. Thanks for your help.

[charles]

Hello @mtnman55
You’re on the right track
Two things here :

• you should not set the external URL to http://localhost:8089 : if you wish to provide access to your teammates, I guess you will send them the public IP of your local machine. So keep 0.0.0.0 as the binding host (will bind to all interfaces of this machine), and leave external URL empty. Unless you are using a DNS (or DynDNS) to give access to your machine, in that case set the external URL to the proper value.
• When you change the sites, you have to restart Cells for the changes to apply.

-c

[mtnman55]

Thanks so much for the response, Charles. I followed these steps and it does work, albeit not exactly how I expected it to, with one exception. I set the binding port to 8089 rather than 8080 but when I access the site, it still works with 8080, not 8089. It’s not a big deal - I just hate opening up port 8080 for remote access. So, it seems to ignore the binding port, at least the manner in which I’ve entered my parameters or the way my configuration is set. Now, when I get to review the parameters, it shows:

Bind(S) TLS External URL

0 http://0.0.0.0:8089 No Tls

However, here’s what I get when I try accessing it from a remote browser:

http://:8089 inaccessible - The site can’t be reached - took too long and timed out
https://:8089 inaccessible - The site can’t be reached - took too long and timed out
http://:8080 Client sent an http request to an https server
https://:8080 This works but I get the Unsafe message - Go back to Safety or Advanced - Go to Advanced and proceed to :8080 - Not Recommended - but click on it anyway and I then get my login screen

I don’t want to spend any more time on it - would rather spend my time on the evaluation - but it still seems like I’m not doing something right, since I can’t use port 8089. Thanks again for your help.

[mtnman55]

Sorry, now that I see it in print, the parameter headings didn’t get formatted correctly. These are the parameters I see when I run

sudo ./cells configure sites

0

BIND(S) http://0.0.0.0:8089
TLS No Tls
External URL (blank)

Thanks.

[mtnman55]

Aaargh - I’m not very good with the formatting on these replies. On the first reply, for the four cases, it removed the public ip address included in brackets - I did include the public ip address in the browser request.