Office Options for TrueNAS Core (CPU doesn't support VM)

[luckyal]

I have a working TrueNAS-12.0-U8.1(CORE) running several Jails, one of which is running NextCloud. Since migrating all of my data from Dropbox to Nextcloud, I'm happy with the functionality overall except lack of Office Integration. Last time I tried implementing Collabora, I discovered that because I'm running a FreeBSD version of TrueNAS, I can't just install the plugin via NextCloud interface and call it a day. After digging a bit deeper I discovered that I had to set up a VM and run Ubuntu to get it to work. Because I'm on the X3470, which doesn't support VM's, I abandoned the whole thing to avoid adding complexity to an already shaky NextCloud implementation. All of my services are behind HAProxy running on pFsense.

In doing a search online it appears that most folks who do implement OnlyOffice, do so on a separate Jail with a separate dataset, etc. I'm not sure I understand the logic behind this. Is there a reason why OnlyOffice can't be implemented directly within Nextcloud? Am I just not understanding how it works? My deployment is relatively small. I will have about 4-5 users that will be using NextCloud/OnlyOffice.

 

[ragametal]

My installation is similar to yours.
I use PfSense as my HAProxy, I successfully installed nextcloud in a jail and OnlyOffice Document server on another. I then used an app inside nextcloud to integrate them. It works like a clock.

The reason why most people using TrueNAS core choose OnlyOffice is because (as far as i know) is the only office type product that has been ported to freeBSD and this happened fairly recently. This means it can run natively in freeBSD. Any other solution would have to run in a linux VM.

The idea about having OnlyOffice on a separate jail is so you can update/upgrade it without affecting other products.

For example, OnlyOffice use mySQL and so does Nextcloud. An update of OnlyOffice may require you to also update mySQL but that newer version of mySQL may not be compatible with the current (not yet updated) version of nextcloud. This means that this upgrade to OnlyOffice would break the Nextcloud instance.

A more realistic example of this is PHP7.4 which is EOL. Therefore, most software that depends on PHP will be updated in the near future. The problem is that they will not be updated at the same time. So, you will end up with software needing PHP7.4 and PHP8.0 but you can only have 1 version of PHP installed.

This problem is resolved by having each software (and their required version of PHP) in their own jails.

 

[luckyal]

My installation is similar to yours.
I use PfSense as my HAProxy, I successfully installed nextcloud in a jail and OnlyOffice Document server on another. I then used an app inside nextcloud to integrate them. It works like a clock.

The reason why most people using TrueNAS core choose OnlyOffice is because (as far as i know) is the only office type product that has been ported to freeBSD and this happened fairly recently. This means it can run natively in freeBSD. Any other solution would have to run in a linux VM.

The idea about having OnlyOffice on a separate jail is so you can update/upgrade it without affecting other products.

For example, OnlyOffice use mySQL and so does Nextcloud. An update of OnlyOffice may require you to also update mySQL but that newer version of mySQL may not be compatible with the current (not yet updated) version of nextcloud. This means that this upgrade to OnlyOffice would break the Nextcloud instance.

A more realistic example of this is PHP7.4 which is EOL. Therefore, most software that depends on PHP will be updated in the near future. The problem is that they will not be updated at the same time. So, you will end up with software needing PHP7.4 and PHP8.0 but you can only have 1 version of PHP installed.

This problem is resolved by having each software (and their required version of PHP) in their own jails.

Thanks for your reply. Are there good instructions that I can follow in deploying OnlyOffice?

 

[ragametal]

Yes and No.
To my knowledge, nobody has written specific instructions on how to deploy OnlyOffice in TrueNAS (and i just don't have the time to do it myself at the moment).

However, if you know how to create a jail and how to install a freeBSD package then you can follow the instructions posted on https://www.freshports.org/www/onlyoffice-documentserver/