Run your own personal cloud server (owncloud)

So what do you do when you have gigabit internet symmetric and loads of hard drive space?  You start finding ways to start using some of that capacity.  So I've been looking to setup my own cloud server to just more easily access my files in general and maybe share files with some close friends and family.  I didn't want to go through some third party and I didn't want to have to worry about any file size or space limitations.  I searched around and owncloud seems to be the most popular.  It's also free and open source.  It's also linux based.  They have a live demo on their site if you want to play around with it first.

While you can install it in windows using xampp there seems to be some limitations that way.  So I took this as an opportunity to play around with linux a bit more.  In the downloads section under the appliances tab you'll find vm images ready to run (based on ubuntu 14.04).  I used the OVA image and imported it into virtualbox.  I kept it at 2gb ram but upped the cpu to 2 cores and changed networking to bridged.

I recommend using ssh (putty) instead the virtualbox console to work in since you get copy and paste that way and don't have to install the guest additions.

Setup wasn't too bad but my linux is pretty rusty and I haven't messed with apache much.  First thing was to give it a fixed internal ip address from my router then add that ip and my domain to the trusted_domains section in:
/var/www/owncloud/config/config.php
You will have to become root (sudo -i) to get to that directory.
I like using pico/nano for my editor.

To get windows shares going you just need to install smbclient first using apt-get
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install smbclient
After that just go enable the external storage app.

To get rid of the php5-apcu warning:
https://github.com/owncloud/core/issues/14386
Just uncomment the trusty-backports lines in the sources.list file and then you just use apt-get to install php5-apcu/trust-backports

Changing the default ports was slightly trickier but I got it all working and installed my own ssl certificates too to get rid of the self signed warnings.  I had to change ports because my windows iis web servier vm is already using 80 and 443.  Setup your port forward in your router and you should be good to go.

change ports in:
/etc/apache/ports.conf
/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/

installing your free startssl cert:
You'll need to make sure these lines are in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/self-signed-ssl
SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/2_yourdomain.cert
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/yourdomain.key
SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/ssl/1_root_bundle.crt

Overall, I had fun getting this setup and so far it's been running pretty great.