There is a huge bug in the yunohost user administration: Every yunohost user automatically is added to the nextcloud contacts. Needless to say that this not only is unnecessary but potentially dangerous, since nextcloud contacts of course are accessed by and visible to countless users, none of which are yunohost server admins who don’t need to know yunohost users and thus shouldn’t.
On top of this clusterfuck it’s not even possible to manually delete those fake contacts from nextcloud.
It is obvious that this is a security relevant bug and therefore very urgent. Please prioritize fixing this bug.
Thanks for pointing this out, although the way you phrase it is quite accusatory (“clusterfuck” triggered me, kind of). I need to stress that this is a volunteer-run project, so “kindness” is expected as a minimum payment for the free work put in. (I’m not a native english speaker either).
Without denying your feelings, I want to point out that Yunohost was first set up as a tool for small, related groups (family, friends, etc…) as indicated here : What is YunoHost? | Yunohost Documentation
You can host your friends, your family and your company safely and with ease, but you must trust your users, and they must trust you above all. If you want to provide YunoHost services for unknown persons anyway, a full VPS per user will be just fine, and we believe a better way to go.
So This feature (and probably some others) have been seen rather as a bonus that a malus.
Of course, opinions may vary, and the fact that you are upset by this means that (at least) we should point it out more clearly in the docuentation. Been a long time since I set up a new server so I don’t really know where we stand here.
I’m sure others will come to add more info, but I felt obligated to post in support of the group, as your post was feeling quite angry in my morning readings…
I admit that I am angry, since deliberately revealing server admin data to potentially thousands of people in the internet without any reason to do so seems a quite strange way to maintain it security. I can’t see a bonus there.
Your tone is not welcome here, and your categorization of the issue is wrong. I have fixed that.
This is somewhat a privacy issue, not security. Though I do not understand how this data can be revealed to the public outside users logged in your server.
Collaboration among a self-hosted community might be one.
Hum. Maybe I did not see that one How would that data be exposed ? Are you referring to thousands of “users” on your server ? Or is the nextcloud adress book publicly exposed in some way ?
I tried this but it reports wrong password for the nextcloud user. This user is also not visible in the yunohost web interface. Any ideas what I’m doing wrong?
Nextcloud allows to create accounts directly (not with the ldap), so i guess you can have “thousand” of nextcloud local accounts + yunohost ldap accounts.
However, keep in mind Nextcloud needs specific configurations (with several servers) for 1000+ accounts setup… But it’s dependent of the frequency of used per user.
Note that on its side yunohost ldap/sso/webadmin doesn’t really support more than 500+ accounts. Some commands becomes (if i remember) very slow (in more, people can’t change their password in yunohost 11)
For reminders: YunoHost setup the apps in the way we suppose to be the most general case (for self-hosters). We slowly extend possibility to support medium communities with several pilot projects more or less identified. If you are planning to create a big instance with yunohost, you really should consider to follow what’s going on this topic and ideally contribute.
Finally, keep in mind it’s important to go in configuration menu and docs of your apps to adapt it to your use case (especially, if you run it for medium or big communities).
We might add config panel or install questions to support this kind of issues, but note that YunoHost has a 500+ apps catalog, so it’s quite difficult to configure all those things by thinking on each use case and for each apps.
The purpose of nextcloud contacts is to be used as an alternative to google contacts on your (hopefully) degoogled smartphone. If only one single user of these contacts uses whatsapp, then ALL contacts on that phone are on facebook’s, google’s and several other data brokers’ servers.
So, the self-chosen claim of yunohost is to make self hosting easier, but you say everyone has to expect that data will be spread all over the place for no reason and find a solution for that in CLI? Which one is it? Please make up your mind. And how is CLI-fixing a wanton bug easier than normal self-hosting? And your solution isn’t even in the right place: It’s not nextcloud which is broken. plus vandalizing the forum by moving the topic to the wrong app is not helpful either.
You were unsolicitedly mansplaining and insulting me on Mastodon, which is why I blocked your impudent ass there, just as I will block you here now.
It was already pointed out that having users in Nextcloud contact make a lot of things easier, such as sharing documents etc. Please stop ignoring this fact and repeating that this is “for no reason”
I don’t see how the data is “spread all over the place”. You mention people using smartphone with Whatapp of whatever, but to me it’s not even obvious that Nextcloud contact will be automatically shared with any other app on a smartphone, at this stage this sounds more like speculation, and even then, the issue ain’t really about YunoHost/Nextcloud itself and more about smartphones being a complete privacy mess
It was also pointed out that the threat model of YunoHost implies that users sort of trust each other, at least partially. Hence for us i’s not like the biggest news ever. If you want, I actually have a few ideas on how a user can “mess around” with the server or other users.
With that said, you were provided with a workaround to disable the address book thing, which yes is in CLI, but is in fact also available in Nextcloud’s webui.
Maybe you don’t need to transform this into a false dilemma “you claim that YunoHost is supposed to be easy but you tell me to use command line!” which sounds like boring bad faith, on top of an already agressive tone in all your messages claiming that this is an epic security issue when it’s in fact not a huge deal. Moreover it’s not like you can expect a volunteer-run project to cover every use case and have non-CLI options ready for every case that shows up in every specific app. We don’t design how Nextcloud address book works. In any case, for this specific problem, there is both a CLI and web interface way to tweak it.
I don’t know which section this topic was in initially, but we are the moderators of this forum and do move topics based on which category it feels most appropriated when needed. The agressive tone doesn’t help either, you admitted yourself that you were/are angry.
Welcome to the friendly community here at Yunohost!
All the others already pointed out the primary goal of Yunohost: hosting your own place on the net, securely, for trusted users such as friends and family.
If you hang around the forum for a bit, you’ll notice that it is not just primary school kids and people with little IT-experience that like Yunohost, but also quite a few knowledgeable folks, organizations, and businesses.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but seeing your Google business, I think you at least fall in the “knowledgeable folks”-group.
Most of us are not only security minded, but privacy minded as well.
I hope your experience with Google can help, in stead of destruct, the conversation on the forum. In light of the aforementioned, maybe you would consider rephrasing the message of your opening post?
I will ignore your venting on my supposed bullying… frankly I has completely forgotten about you and our first bad interaction on Mastodon. As a reminder, you were basically writing that YunoHost was shit because you had a bug, without mentioning what it was. So yeah, I told you off. Was it smart? No. Is your behavior now consistent with your behavior then? Yes.
Have you been triggered about my “RTFM”? Sorry, it was a bit of tongue-in-cheek answer in reaction to your tone.
Have I defaced your thread here? No. I have rephrased its fear-mongering title, and recategorized it in the right place. I have also added a general warning about how to handle security issues.
Let’s focus on the issue.
You have mentioned on Mastodon that my solution has nothing to do with your problem. I think this is the problem: when opening the contacts app on Nextcloud, there already are contacts in the “Accounts” address book. This is the standard behavior of Nextcloud, YunoHost has nothing to do with this.
About Mastodon: It was nothing like you describe it here. I was ranting, yes, and vindicatedly so. I was not asking for help. You very condescendingly unsolicitedly mansplained me, that I had to come here for help (which I neither needed nor asked for at the time). You didn’t read what I wrote then and you didn’t now, which brings me to
the issue: No, grabbing random contact entries from other software is not the standard behavior of Nextcloud. Not even close. Hence this is not my issue.
Whenever I create a new user in yunohost (as I am forced to do for some apps), this new user will appear in nextcloud contacts. This could not happen if yunohost wouldn’t make it happen. It is very obvious that this cannot be a nextcloud issue.
OK, understood, though I am not sure I was “mansplaining” (I cannot see our messages obviously, and I used a translator, though “scheiße” is well understood; and heck, you are a man). As a YunoHost contributor and helper, it is hurtful and annoying when I only see people complaining about it on Mastodon. Your messages become even more public when you use the yunohost hashtag, and could pass for a cry for help. And your choice of terms about YunoHost was very hurtful. So yes, I told you off.
Imagine having a business seeing only negative things about it while you have the capability to help your customers. The comparison stops here, this is a free and volunteer-based project.
It is the normal behavior though!
Nextcloud creates this “system address book” by default, holding all users from the instance.
YunoHost advertises that its Nextcloud app integrates with its LDAP user base. That’s why you see YunoHost users automatically added to Nextcloud, and subsequently to the “system address book”.
This is good for the self-(as in solo)-hosting, or small-ish communities. But I completely understand it can be annoying if you have a large user base and you open registrations to all.
If you want plain nextcloud with default nextcloud behaviour, you could install it on your server by your own.
The nextcloud package for yunohost is providing by default an integration with the ldap because it’s a wanted feature for small self-hosters that use yunohost for family purpose or small organisations.
This default behaviour can be changed with cli command indicated earlier by @tituspijean
For other granularity as you seem to wish, it is not implemented yet, afaik.
As an external reader of this thread, i’m not aware of your previous interaction in Mastodon, but I find the tone of this thread not very helping in our goal to have a happy and welcoming community.
Is it okay for you to make an effort to cool down your written expression a bit and try to make the efforts made by our team of volunteers to try to solve this issue more smooth ?
To test it, only if you are on Nextcloud v28.0.4~ynh1: yunohost app upgrade nextcloud -u https://github.com/YunoHost-Apps/nextcloud_ynh/tree/config-addressbook -F
This will create a new option in the app’s config panel in YunoHost’s webadmin.
I don’t know if it helps, but to prevent that, I use the Groups sheet in define LDAP integration in Nextcloud and I put the groups I want to use Nextcloud inside the Only for these groups field. Like this, only people in the groups entered appear inside Nextcloud.
That’s indeed a possibility, though do not wander in other fields in there, as it is very easy to crash Nextcloud’s login if a misconfiguration happens. (Source: me, a few days ago )
How would that data be exposed ? Are you referring to thousands of “users” on your server ? Or is the nextcloud adress book publicly exposed in some way ?
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