ecoDMS undocumented

Rock-ons
1

I am new to rocstor, I have setup the latest version on my old server, I bought 16Gb Ram and 3 off 2Tb HD with a 250GB SSD for the operating system. I have installed plex and got it working fine, this covers my music and pictures.
For Home documents, I like the look of ecoDMS and installed it through the rockons section, however, there are several variables which it tells you to set up , mainly working directories, storage and backup locations, the thing is I have searched for days and days for documentation to see what to set each location to. without this I am just guessing, I have blindly went with 20gb for config directory, likewise for backup, I set the min directory to my documents share . no errors as I can see, but when I run the gui from the rockon page I get the error failed to connect to port 8080, it is open and redirected to my new rocstor server so am unsure if this is because I have not setup the initial sizes correctly or I need to tweak a setting somewhere.
the ecoDMS website is mainly in German and the documentation which I have read from head to toe doesn’t cover installing on rocstor so is there any help on this site that walks through a beginner to help setup ecoDMS to get it to the GUI?

oh and a search feature on the forums would also help as I have had to look through pages and pages searching for ecoDMS without success. there probably is and I can’t find it and it points to the help I need. that’s life…
Cheers for your help in advance

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Hi @murraymx and welcome!

Glad you could cover your needs with Plex.

Thanks for pointing the issue with ecoDMS, I’ve never used it myself so I just went ahead and tried to install it and can confirm it does not work for me at first either. I can see they have a much newer version available (the current version seems to not have been updated in a couple of years). I’ll give a try with the newer version and see if that fixes the issue.

I’ll try to answer your other questions below, in hope it helps.

In general, it is preferred to create a new share for each one required per rock-on. For instance, ecoDMS requires 4 shares to be bound to it, and it would thus be preferable to create 4 shares dedicated to this use. This would thus result in something like below:

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Using separate and dedicated shares like these prevents any eventual conflict that would inevitably arise if the same share is used. Note that you can still add one or more shares to a rock-on after its installation to make some data available across multiple rock-ons. That can be particularly useful if you need to make some files available between different rock-ons (Plex, etc…). See the related section of Rockstor’s documentation for more details:
http://rockstor.com/docs/docker-based-rock-ons/overview.html#add-storage

You may think that creating too many shares will result in a waste of your pool(s)’ space, but do not worry as share usage restrictions are not enforced. As mentioned in Rockstor’s documentation, this is related to a current state of the feature in Btrfs:

Currently, as of 3.8-7 version, Share size enforcement has been disabled. So the Size input during Share creation has no real effect. Any Share can grow up to the Pool’s capacity. Consequently, resizing a Share also has no effect. We will re enable the enforcement when support in BTRFS improves.

To get back to your questions, this means that the share size you set do not actually matter much and setting them to your best guess of their planned use is perfectly fine.

There is one, but it’s actually not visible due to some reason (not sure why). Hover your mouse cursor to the left of your avatar icon in the top right header and you will see a “magnifying glass” icon. The search feature is actually quite powerful.

I hope this helps. As mentioned above, I’ll try to see if the newer version of ecoDMS fixes the issue, or try to dig deeper into what the issue actually is.

1 Like
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Hi @murraymx,

I’ve tried both versions of ecoDMS but both fail to run with default settings; I actually noticed several errors in the logs related to file permissions and observed a very odd change in ownership of the rockstor shares I set up for it (they somehow get set to one of the published ports). As you mentioned, the fact that their website is in german does not help, and I couldn’t find their Dockerfile after a quick search (may be related that it is not OSS). I may try again soon to dig a little deeper, but we can maybe find an alternative in the meantime.

I myself do not use an eDMS, but after a very quick google search, two projects seem to come up as the most popular: Mayan EDMS and Paperless. You can also find a more exhaustive list below:

While Mayan EDMS seems to be feature-rich but with the downside of being somehow resource-intensive, Paperless seems to be lot more lightweight but a lot more simple. Maybe one of these two can fit your needs?

They both seem to be quite popular so a docker installation should be possible, which means we can make a rock-on for it. @phillxnet, having a rock-on offering for an eDMS seems like a good fit so we may want to pursue this, what do you think?

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@Flox Re:

Definitely. And if you think we should dump / delete the 2 that are not working then great also. Especially given their ‘strange’ behaviour. Also much prefer OSS of course. I’m all for clearing out (read deleting) the broken stuff and I have rather neglected pruning in the Rock-ons. Very bad user experience if a Rock-on fails. We should take to deleting any that do not function and we can now push to production pretty fast if required. And those that have an existing install will not be affected and if the Rock-on no longer works their is no loss on a re-install anyway.

Apologies but I can’t step up to the new rock-on creation task currently but I’m standing by for delete / addition pull requests. It’s especially easy if it’s just a delete as their is no further testing required in that. Also I’m in favour of removing an entire json as well as the root.json entry as their is always an older copy left in git anyway. This way we keep our root.json to current file count consistent.

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Very helpful feedback and its great to hear it’s not me and my limited knowledge that is the root of the issue (it usually is!) . I am really just looking to sort out the decades of electronic files that have been clogging up my Mac . I believe Synology NAS comes with ecoDMS which was my main reason for testing it out however I do like the look of Mayan, I am used to creating DMS workflows at work so this has a very familiar feel to it. I am new to this Docker install method as it’s been a few years since I dipped my toe in the Linux pond, would it be an easy task to follow the docker instructions on the Mayan website for installation or would a proper rock-on be required?

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Hello,
i have setup ecoDMS on my rockstor server for testing purpose and out of curiosity and it function very well. I didn’t use the rockon as it is pretty outdated. But it gave me the idea to try out a DMS system, so i’m thankful it is in the repo.
I use the docker engine directly on cl.
In short:

  • create Rockstor SHARE : ecodms-backup
    path: /mnt2/ecodms-backup

  • create Rockstor SHARE : ecodms-data
    path: /mnt2/ecodms-data

  • create Rockstor SHARE : ecodms-restore
    path: /mnt2/ecodms-restore

  • create Rockstor SHARE : ecodms-scaninput
    path: /mnt2/ecodms-scaninput

then on cl:

~> docker run -it -d -p 17001:17001 -p 17004:8080 -p 17005:8180 --name ecodms --restart unless-stopped -v /mnt2/ecodms-data:/srv/data -v /mnt2/ecodms-scaninput:/srv/scaninput -v /mnt2/ecodms-backup:/srv/backup -v /mnt2/ecodms-restore:/srv/restore ecodms/allinone-18.09:latest

The english manuals are over here:
https://www.ecodms.de/index.php/en/download/handbuecher/ecodms-archiv/ecodms-version-18-09-apu

2 Likes
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Thanks a lot, @Bert!

The curious thing is that I’ve tried to exact same thing on my test machine… I’ll give it another try to see what little detail I must have missed.

Thanks a lot for confirming it does work, however! As soon as I’ve figured out the problem, I’ll give a go at updating the rock-on as needed.

@Bert, any special user / access control setting on your shares used for ecoDMS?

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Hello @Flox,

Just did a quick reinstall. It did work out of the box. No need to set any special user / access control.

hth Bert

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Interesting…
Are you using the webUI (http://<rockstor_IP>:17004) or are you connecting through one of their desktop clients?

Based on their documentation, I would believe the webclient is enabled by default on their docker image but I’m not sure.

Sorry the repeated questions, I’m really curious. Thanks again immensely for your help!

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I’m using the ‘connection manager’ and ‘ecodmsclient’ from a windows 10 computer.

It seems the webclient is NOT enabled by default on a fresh docker container:

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Glad to help wherever i can. Really appreciating your work @Flox. Thank you!

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11

In this case everything makes sense! Thanks a lot for all your help, @Bert!

@murraymx, it does seem our current rock-on is working, in this case, but it still is using an older version than what’s available. I’ll try to update the rock-on as soon as possible to get it to use the latest version of ecoDMS. Note, however, that the fact that their webUI is not enabled by default means that you will need to use one of their desktop clients and activate it from there if you’d like to.

Based on your comment above, it seems Mayan may be worth creating a rock-on for, so I’ll try to give that a try as well. I just had a quick look at their instructions, however, and noticed that it actually will be a little more involved than updating the current ecoDMS rock-on.

Based on the paragraph above, creating a rock-on for it may take a little more time and might actually require a few changes to Rockstor code itself. These should be “easily” possible in the future as we already have the groundwork laid out (see here and here, for instance), but it will take some time before it is released as most effort is currently on the upcoming openSUSE release for Rockstor (see this post from @phillxnet and others in that thread and others). This is due to the fact that Mayan EDMS docker image uses a separate image for its database, whereas ecoDMS is an all-in-one image ready to use.

It will all come in due time, however, but we can still try to help set Mayan EDMS “manually” if you prefer to use it in the meantime.

Hope this helps, and I hope I didn’t confuse you more than I answered your questions.
Let us know :wink:

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@murraymx, @Bert, thanks again for your help.

Based on ecoDMS’ manual, there is no possibility for a drop-in update from 16.09 to 18.09, so I’ll create a new rock-on for 18.09. Linking to the Github issue below for reference:

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For information, a pull-request for the newest version v18.09 was created. Those interested in reviewing it (instructions here) or just testing it can do so at the link below:
https://github.com/rockstor/rockon-registry/pull/198#issue-328942818

Hope this helps,

1 Like
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@murraymx, @Bert,

Thanks to @phillxnet taking care of this right away, the updated Rock-on for ecoDMS v18.09 (apu) is now live and should be available in your list of available rock-ons if you are interested.

Thanks again for bringing this to light and for your help on the updated rock-on!

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Guys, the weekend has come around again so I now have had time to install the new version, works brilliantly, very easy to install and get up and running. I will now spend time on the program over the weekend but what a brilliant response from everyone, Thank you guys .

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