I was looking for a way to host my calendar and contacts. I looked into Owncloud and tested it but found to be way too much for what I needed. It has it's own ecosystem with an online store. I just need to backup my data.
I found sabre to be perfect. Its barebones as you need it to be. I use DAVx5 on android and add it as an account then changed my calendar/contact's default to that. So now my PC can push notifications to my phone and vise versa using thunderbird.
I enjoyed it so much that I use it to sync data to/from my phone 247. I have my music folder symlinked to sabre and using FolderSync it tries to copy the music anytime I'm connected to wifi. So, if I download a song I know that all my music will be auto copied to my phone.
Same goes for my camera. All my photos are auto copied over to my server. This is huge because my server is setup to run auto backups. It's basically icloud but entirely in my control.
Maybe there's a modern version of my setup, but this has been so great and ultra lightweight and works anywhere.
Really nice to hear that people still have love for this project! Heart warming after all these years. I no longer maintain the project but the people that have taken over have done a great job keeping everything modern (even though the website has become a bit stale).
Really nice to have a tiny bit of legacy, the new open source projects I've been working on have never really quite picked up in the same way.
I have photos backup with FolderSync but just using Samba (since the NAS will be accessed by Windows clients anyway), is WebDAV necessary?
Oh, you said wifi and I read "home wifi", So I guess the WebDAV is exposed to the Internet and the phone can upload from any (wifi) connection in the world? That's more clever than my setup!
I have it setup to sync anywhere with wifi. I bought a domain and set it up to my IP using dyndns (I just have it running on my regular consumer internet, not a dedicated business line with a static IP). By wifi I mean any wifi with internet access. I could use it over LTE but I don't need to burn up all my data pushing backups.
I have it behind an apache service which is password protected and only accepts https. As well, it uses fail2ban. If you ever ran a web server, you'll know your server will get bot scans 247. These only occur on the root domain and direct IP, so I disabled all root/direct IP access and moved it to a subdomain. I've never had issues.
I use samba as well, but that's only because this server works as my NAS as well. I setup a dedicated DAV folder on the NAS directory and give it extreme user restrictions, just incase. It's just a nice central server to keep all my devices in sync.
I assume you don't expose the Samba to the internet? I'm still wondering if there's a reasonable way to do this (side-channel authentication/"port knocking"?).
Wireguard / tailscale or similar vpn should be fine?
I've toyed with tailscale and ZeroTierOne - both should work fine with Bonjour/zeroconf if you need it - and handle routing (using lan when devices are on same net, routing over the internet when not).
There's also Nebula from slack (but I've not tried it).
Would love to see tailscale work with kernel wireguard clients (for better performance) - AFAIK today you'll have to pick one: easy setup with smart routing (ZeroTierOne / nebula / tailscale) - or - best in class performance with kernel space wireguard.
I don't expose samba no, but at one point I did run openvpn access. I set the client config for the VPN to only forward 192.168.x.x through the vpn, but not all other traffic. So if I go to a coffee shop, my windows laptop would act entirely like it was still on my lan and my mounted network drive would fully connect as normal.
I removed that service since it was kind of clunky and always had connection issues. Perhaps I should try it again.
I found sabre to be perfect. Its barebones as you need it to be. I use DAVx5 on android and add it as an account then changed my calendar/contact's default to that. So now my PC can push notifications to my phone and vise versa using thunderbird.
I enjoyed it so much that I use it to sync data to/from my phone 247. I have my music folder symlinked to sabre and using FolderSync it tries to copy the music anytime I'm connected to wifi. So, if I download a song I know that all my music will be auto copied to my phone.
Same goes for my camera. All my photos are auto copied over to my server. This is huge because my server is setup to run auto backups. It's basically icloud but entirely in my control.
Maybe there's a modern version of my setup, but this has been so great and ultra lightweight and works anywhere.