I have had been hosting my server at home using a self-signed certificate. I use my own CA and thus the client computer considers the owncloud certificate to be valid. I have multiple computers on my network, Windows and Linux that are using ownCloud client successfully. The exception is my macOS machine that I updated to Sequoia and noticed synch was not working. So I am blaming the macOS update.
In order to figure things out; I deleted the connection and tried to create it again but I get “Could not detect compatible server at” error now. I tried the sugesstion of adding owncloud to the URL that’s been suggested in previous threads. That did not work for me.
Another confusing thing is the client on my mac can successfully connect to two other owncloud servers fine and continue sync.
Expected behaviour
Create new server connection
Actual behaviour
Fails with an error message
Steps to reproduce
N/A
Server configuration
Operating system: Ubuntu 18.4
Web server: Apache
Database: MySQL
PHP version:
ownCloud version: 10.3.2
Storage backend (external storage):
Client configuration
Client version: 5.3.1.14018
Operating system: macos 15.2
OS language:
Qt version used by client package (Linux only, see also Settings dialog):
Client package (From ownCloud or distro) (Linux only):
Client logfile: Output of owncloud --logwindow or owncloud --logfile log.txt
(On Windows using cmd.exe, you might need to first cd into the ownCloud directory)
(See also ownCloud Documentation Overview )
Web server error log: No activity in the log when error occurs
Server logfile: ownCloud log (data/owncloud.log): No activity in the log when error occurs
i’m not sure but i think it could be possible that the “Could not detect compatible server” message is causing by the use of a 5 year old version of ownCloud (Changelog for ownCloud Core 10.3.2 (2019-12-04)) together with the most recent desktop version 5.3.1.
I’m not sure if this is supported by the ownCloud people or have been ever tested by them so i think it could be possible that you need to update the outdated versions including the end of life Ubuntu version 18.04 to more recent versions first.
That’s a fair argument. But the odd thing is the client was still able to connect to two other servers running 10.2.1 and 10.4.1 compared to problems with 10.3.2.
So I just tried installing the latest version, 10.15.0, and still have the same problem.
I use an nginx proxy and thought maybe that could be the issue but even when I use http port without the proxy I get the same error. So very strange!
I was repeatedly getting the same error. But strangly when I started the owncloud client using ./owncloud --logfile ~/owncloud.txt command in the /Applications/owncloud.app/Contents/MacOS folder, I did not get the “Could not detect compatible server” error!
I post this here in case someone else runs into the same issue. Because the only other suggested solution was to add /owncloud to the end of the server url but that did not work for me.
By the way I updated my MacOS and owncloud client since I posted the trouble report. Versions are MacOS 15.3, and owncloud 5.3.2 as I got it to work!
UPDATE:
The solution has nothing to to do with the --logfile option but it does with starting the client from the command line. If I start the client with a double-click from Applications folder, my server connections to two servers (one pretty old version, one current) appear disconnected and can not connect; but if I start the client from the command line; it works fine.
This frustrated me for weeks now. Hopefully this helps someone else.