Nextcloud Calendar Invitation Failure

Tools
#1

Tl;dr:

I’ve been experiencing some issues with nextcloud calendar invitations. Invitations from the nextcloud server get through to other calendars, but both incoming invitations and updates to the invitations sent from nextcloud (ie, accepted, declined) do not update. Unfortunately, this is behavior that I have experience with from a Mail-in-a-box deployment (and is the reason I threw up my hands with miab and came to mxroute!) Would be grateful to hear from those using nextcloud calendar successfully and are not seeing this behavior

Longer version
Testing done primarily from the nextcloud web calendar client and calendar.app . Emailing currently works fine. Current setup up-to-date, though I’m currently having some issues getting DKIM on AWS lightsail to propagate (sadly, I’m not alone: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=960166&#960166). This shouldn’t matter for the present issue and, otherwise, everything is set up appropriately.

Invitations created on the web client and calendar.app both properly show up on one another. Invitations out to others, at other domains, do eventually arrive. Acceptance or rejection, though, of these invitations does not propagate back to the sender from nextcloud. Further, invitations to the address at nextcloud do not show up. This, in particular, feels like a big deal.

I should note that I had the exact same issue with Maib which, like mxroute, relies on nextcloud to handle caldav and carddav. I was running a linode with 2gb, v0.50 of maib, which was running a recent (but not current) version of nextcloud. DNS through aws lightsail. Nginx logs didn’t demonstrate any obvious errors.

I have also posted, of course, both to the nextcloud forum to solve this but got no traction–they’ve got a lot of open tickets over there. I also tried /r nextcloud and miab forum just in case; no luck. I couldn’t get it to work so I figured I’d just try the professionals over here at mxroute.

I thought it was something I was probably doing wrong with my miab install or setups, because this is a pretty major issue that I presume others would be elevating if it wasn’t just me. But now that I’m having the same experience with mxroute, I’m pretty confused. I don’t think it’s user error with the web interface or the calendar.app setup; I don’t see how it could be the DNS. I guess I could be wrong…

So I’m stumped. Any input would be much appreciated. Thanks very much mxroute folks!

Mark

edits: typos

#2

I am looking into this and will let you know my findings.

#3

Initial investigation into this isn’t getting far, but I’m not ready to call it quits yet. I’ve reached out to the Nextcloud devs and requested a quote for support / development to make this function more as desired.

I’m starting with one simple thing: I can’t email an invite to an external email address and have that user accept it, they receive “There was an error updating your attendance status” immediately. So long as that’s true, I think that’s the first bridge I need to cross to begin diving further into your use case.

#5

Checking in–I’m wondering if you’ve had any initial luck @Jarland. Let me know if I can help in any way.

#7

Mark. Were your SRV records set up in your Extenal DNS?

I honestly do not use cal/card features of MiaB or here at MXRoute, so I do not know how much this matters. If they were not set up in DNS, and you want to experiment, I can set up a test account on my test MiaB install which the SRV records are propagated if it helps you test this …

#10

I believe that we’re looking at going an entirely new direction in addressing this. Crossbox, one of our most important vendors (crossbox.io) is working on integrating Nextcloud into their software. In fact you can try out a demo of it from their front page. This is expected to come very soon and likely result in the announcement of sunsetting our initial Nextcloud offering for this better solution.

#14

I am also experiencing multiple issues with Nextcloud CalDAV, seems that it works only in one direction. Actually I can receive invitations but when I accept or decline nothing is sent to the originator. @Jarland do you have any news on the possibility to use the Crossbox solution? Thanks in advance

#15

I do not have an update, I just know that it’s coming very soon.

#16

New Crossbox with integrated NextCloud is live! A famous US politician once said “We have to pass it to see what’s in it.” So join me in testing it out?

#17

I’ve played around with the file uploading aspect a little bit and it seems to be working.

What are the storage limits? There doesn’t seem to be any quota from what I can see on my end but I imagine it counts against our email storage in some way?

#19

Just contributing to the tests, while trying to open the calendar or the tasks in crossbox, it starts initializing the app up to the 95%, and then always ends up with an “Error while setting up the app: App not ready!”. Any idea?

#20

I noticed that I can no longer log into the original NextCloud instance (cloud.mxroute.com). Does it mean that it’s no longer available? And the new CrossBox NextCloud is now declared stable?

#21

Login has never been stable with that instance and the IMAP proxy that it uses to authenticate. Long passwords consistently fail, not sure what the cut off is.

#12

6 days ago I was given an estimate of 15-30 days

#8

Thanks very much @Alento for the suggestion. I already spun down my maib, so unfortunately I can’t test that now. I did try moving my DNS over to route 53 from lightsail to see if that would do anything (it didn’t). Adding SRV records didn’t appear to either, though I’ve not used them before so I might have configured it incorrectly. Do your calendar invitations go out without issue?

#6

I’m getting back to them with an expanded scope of requirements in hopes that they might give me a sane path.

1 Like
#4

Great–that makes a lot of sense. And please let me know if I can be helpful in any way; I’m invested in making it work!

#18

It will use the same quota that your email would.

1 Like
#9

Like I mentioned, I do not use card/cal personally. If you’d like to test, using a MiaB install with the complete DNS handled by MiaB itself, I’d be willing to let you experiment. Personally, I don’t have the interest. But as I said, if you want to take the time to test on an install with all dns handled by the box, let me know in PM and I’ll set it up for you.

That way it can be conclusively proven or disproven that the SRV records do or do not matter. :slight_smile:

#11

Okay that sounds good @Jarland–any sense when I should jump back in and try and check the calendar services? I can’t start moving folks over until we have working calendars. Thanks!