Mohammed Shareek

About This Project

Replaced commercial cloud storage with a fully self-hosted Nextcloud instance running on my own hardware — files, calendar, contacts and photo sync, under my own control.

What Was Built

• Nextcloud in a Linux container on the Proxmox cluster, backed by NFS storage on the NAS
• Apache, MariaDB, PHP and Redis installed and tuned directly, without Docker, for full control of the stack
• HTTPS with a certificate from my own internal CA, HSTS enabled
• Performance tuning: local object cache, Redis file locking, correct background job scheduling, and PHP memory and opcache tuning — every administrative warning resolved, not ignored

Security Decisions

• Two-factor authentication (TOTP) enforced for all users
• Password policy with minimum length and breach-database checking
• No public exposure. The instance is reachable only through my WireGuard VPN — no port forwarding and no public reverse proxy. Convenience was traded for a much smaller attack surface
• Email notifications configured over authenticated SMTP with an application-specific password

Data Migration

Migrated roughly 358 GB across nearly 58,000 files from a university OneDrive account using rclone over WebDAV. Because the source used redirected desktop folders, I used a copy-and-verify procedure rather than a move, then confirmed the result with a full checksum comparison — 57,914 files matched, with only excluded system junk files reported.

Operations

The instance is included in the nightly backup job, so it inherits the same 3-2-1 protection as the rest of the lab.

Skills Demonstrated

• Linux service deployment
• Web and database stack administration
• Application hardening
• MFA and access policy
• Large-scale data migration and verification