The delusion of trying OnlyOffice

[fpiraneo]

Dear OnlyOffice developers,

I spent nearly ten days trying to make your product works in sight of a professional use and these are the points I realized:

1. OnlyOffice is an heavy and complicated product, badly documented with outdated online documentation; none of your procedures are applicable to the actual version;

2. I tried to install OnlyOffice behind an IPv4 proxy to reuse an IPv4 (static addresses are expensive when available!) - You don’t provide any indication of how to perform such configuration and OnlyOffice appears to be unusable even with all the 80 & 443 ports forwarded; what other ports should be forwarded? Documentation doesn’t report anything; the only clue I had a “protocol error” the broswer report when opening a document for editing;

3. I installed OnlyOffice on an IPv6 capable exposed host, with the same result: OnlyOffice simply hung, with showing blank pages, no error at all, nor on the log nor on the user’s page; ok, not all the software are ready to perform under IPv6;

4. Finally reinstalled under Debian and on an exposed IPv4 host - No way!! The installer script is unable to download repositories signatures from ubuntu repos; you know the problem and you’re working on it, but I’d like to test OnlyOffice NOW, so I decided to…

5. Install on a CentOS host; the first run of the installer stopped with a repository error (again??) but the second run succeeded; wow! I have OnlyOffice running, cool! I receive the invitation to strenghten my installation (exactly what I want to do) going from http to https; perfect! I have my own certificates that I renew once for all my infrastructure! I follow the related document and…

6. All my installation gets corrupted because the nginx config template seems a mixup of docker + bare metal installation; I don’t need to add another virtualization layer (docker) on my virtualization layer (qemu) so I really need a bare metal install; hopefully because I’m 52 and I know the value of a backup I restore the previous setup from my backup;

7. Ok I really need to go https! It’s imperative! So I go to the https pane of the control panel to see… “oh sorry! If you need to go https you have to run these script to generate [another] let’s encrypt certificate” - Ok let’s go! Script runs with no error - but please specify that I have to indicate the fqdn of the instance of OnlyOffice! Nevermind, now the certs are there so…

8. Let’s edit my first document: Impossible! The nasty message “The document cannot be saved” pops up every time I begin editing a document! No more please! No more!

9. I don’t want to waste more time! I remember other products like ProxMox, OwnCloud, DokuWiki and GitLab that went online flawlessy and still run! Why not OnlyOffice?

Some design concerns:

1. You have to choice for a DB? You choiced Postgree? Cool! Please, is there any reason to install mySQL and redis? There is no reason to install THREE DIFFERENT data base engines on a single host!! Why this incredible waste of resources?

2. I tried to run a yum update and a series of update error appeared about broken packages: Do you mean that I cannot update my linux box with OnlyOffice installed?

Again, no more please! No more!

Also buying a commercial subscription I’m sure will not change the soul of the product. As a software and validation engineer I strongly believe that OnlyOffice needs a strong re-engineering to enlighten the design (three databases!!!) and to drastically improve the documentation!

Once the customer sees that OnlyOffice works with no bullshits can think about buying support license when the game become hard and the business must run, not earlier.

As always I’m available for any face-to-face discussion with your team or any other help I can give to a promising project to improve or test documentation, but at this stage I cannot trust OnlyOffice anymore!

With deep regret.

[Alexandre]

Hello @fpiraneo
It’s really sad that you faced some issues during your tests.
Let’s figure out what exactly goes wrong.
First of all, please let us know your OS and point me to the guide which you used for installation process. Also please clarify if you use clean separate server for Workspace (I mean there are no other installed apps).
You mentioned proxy in front of Workspace (in this topic and others). Does the issue reproduce without proxy server in front of Workspace?
As for three databases in Workspace installation. We are working on it already. There’s internal suggestion number 51841 (add Postgre support to Community server, so Document server will use the same database as Community server, as for Redis, it performs separate tasks).

As for the situation in general, please reproduce it and provide us with detailed description of each issue (issue scenario step by step with screenshots and necessary logs from Document server and Community server). I believe that we can resolve all of them together.

[fpiraneo]

Good afternoon,

1. I tried OnlyOffice on both CentOS Stream 9 and Debian 11;
2. The guide I followed can be found here workspace-install-linux
3. The installation has been performed on a qemu virtual host, a new clean linux instance, up to date, all dedicated to OnlyOffice;
4. I tried both with a proxied installation and with an exposed host with a public IPv4 address: Quite same result; focusing on the exposed (not proxied host) the instance was a CentOS 9 Stream and worked fine until I installed the https certificates; so with http OnlyOffice seems to works correctly but I really need an https!

At this stage and with the fire of angry I destroyed my OnlyOffice installation; I’m going to replicate it (CentOS 9 Stream, clean installation, exposed host, http); waiting for your consideration on what written above; then what I need is a clear procedure to go https with my own certificates (domain wide certificate released by Let’s Encrypt).

Thanks.

[fpiraneo]

PS about the installation guide I followed - bullet 2 - a popup appeared when posting the reply: “You cannot post a link on this site”.

[fpiraneo]

Update: Rolled back the CentOS 9 Stream installation from a backup and here is the behaviour when I open a document with https: the document opens but an error popup appears.

[fpiraneo]

After dismissing the popup the document is closed.

[fpiraneo]

To enable https I followed the instructions here:

(cannot post a link on your forum)

Any suggestion is welcome.

(Cannot put three screenshots in one post… )

[fpiraneo]

Any indication on that? Any checklist? Any idea?

[Alexandre]

@fpiraneo

The guide I followed can be found here workspace-install-linux

I can’t open this link, please point me to the guide.

At this stage and with the fire of angry I destroyed my OnlyOffice installation; I’m going to replicate it (CentOS 9 Stream, clean installation, exposed host, http); waiting for your consideration on what written above; then what I need is a clear procedure to go https with my own certificates (domain wide certificate released by Let’s Encrypt).

Let’s try from scratch. Please follow this guide and install Workspace with installation script: Installing server version using the provided script - ONLYOFFICE
You can choose docker or package installation during the installation step.

Docker installation contains the opportunity to get Let’s Encrypt certificate from Control Panel:

For package installation, you have to follow this guide to switch portal to https: How to switch your office to HTTPS when installing from RPM/DEB packages? - ONLYOFFICE

Update: Rolled back the CentOS 9 Stream installation from a backup and here is the behaviour when I open a document with https: the document opens but an error popup appears.

We have to take a look at Document server logs folder. Please reproduce the issue and provide us with whole logs folder. It’s located here: /var/log/onlyoffice/documentserver/

[fpiraneo]

Hi Alexandre, thanks to ChatGPT that pointed me on the right direction, yesterday evening I solved the issue; Under Setup >> Integration >> Document Service the parameter “Community Server address for requests from the Document Service” must be changed manually to the https FQDN. After that it worked as expected.

I hope that no more changes has to be performed to have OnlyOffice fully functional; however I expect that the installation script does this automatically or an indication appears that I have to do this by myself.

However, the task to update the linux box once OnlyOffice is still open: this is the result when I perform a yum update:

An hint to solve this is welcome.

[Alexandre]

Hello @fpiraneo
Please keep in mind that there’s hard dependency on component versions of Workspace. We do not recommend its manual update.
For Workspace update we recommend to use installation script with -u true flag: Installing server version from RPM/DEB packages using the provided script - ONLYOFFICE
If you’re going to update other packages\OS itself, please do not touch Workspace related packages.

[fpiraneo]

Alexandre, the problem is that I cannot update anything on my linux box if OnlyOffice is installed because yum refuse to update everything! Yum seems broken!

[Alexandre]

because yum refuse to update everything! Yum seems broken!

Please run a test. Run yum update command one more time, but specify package which you want to update. Please do not try to update all packages because you can interrupt Workspace.
You might as well prepare whole server backup before any server side actions just in case.