Rockstor on vanilla CentOS 7?

General
15

Whichever distribution is most BTRFS friendly is hard to objectively state. I am just reading the policy of the distro, and opensuse has a “default BTRFS” policy for their filesystem. Thus my opinion of opensuse beeing a more BTRFS friendly distro. In addition I was as g2_ufo writes, mostly thinking of tumbleweed, as it is a rolling release, as this will give a most up-to-date BTRFS status. But this is not for me to decide. I see that it is possible to install Rockstor to Vanilla Centos, and thus it must be possible to install on opensuse, if one disregard the support.

16

I have tried to install rockstor on Fedora server 22 without result. Rockstor installation have been locked by elrepo kernel request.

17

Just want to chime in here with my 2cents. Me is not an OpenSuse friend but OpenSuse has build in the Snapper Tool (see Snapper.io), which seems to be fully supported by their package management. Furthermore, they are using Btrfs already as their root file-system to support their Package management as well as to redo changes made via those tools.

Most probably snapper could also be used with CentOs, but I am highly unsure.

18

I will add my 2 cents too: rockstor is a distribution, so it might be installable on centos or fedora or opensuse or slackware, but we really need to support it as a distribution so that it can grow fast and get new features quickly. Making it work on other platforms could be great but that’s for tomorrow.

1 Like
19

Absolutely right, just wanted to add my 2cents about the Opensuse discussion and where to look for “nice” features :wink:

20

My initial thought behind talking about opensuse, is that maybe Opensuse is a better platform to build Rockstor, since opensuse early started to use BTRFS as default filesystem, is close in windows integration and have a rolling release if that road is wanted.

but I have installed Rockstor as a default installation, and are now looking for my homeserver/mediaserver needs.

my $0.02

21

Hi,@suman ,How can I install Rockstor on CentOS 7 with the source code from github?

22

@Jeff_wu Welcome to the Rockstor community. I’m chipping in just in case it helps. Hopefully the information you need should be in the Developers section of the Contributing to Rockstor - Overview part of the docs. This takes one through forking on Github and then transferring the source to the target machine and finally how to initiate the build process, along with the various procedures necessary depending on what you change if anything.

Hope that helps.

1 Like
23

Hi,

I opt-in for centos, the reason why I gave rockstor a shot anyway. CentOS is used by a lot of companies instead of the redahat pendant for a good reason. It is conservative, yes, but this makes it so rock solid, stable and kind of unbreakable.
This is what a storage system should be, stable because we rely on the data on it.
Using BTFRs on rockstor is already pretty rebellious, it is not 100% stable and in active development which is good and bad in both ways.

So I trust centos more than opensuses and a rolling release, for the moment. They have to earn some kudos again after a lot of years being very very conservative in any way, and they made some bad decisions if the media can be trusted.

24

Thank you for your reply .I have clone the project from github,but I can’t run the python code,can you tell me what’s the problem?

From:

[root@localhost rockstor]# python manage.py runserver
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “manage.py”, line 10, in
execute_from_command_line(sys.argv)
File “/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Django-1.6.2-py2.7.egg/django/core/management/init.py”, line 399, in execute_from_command_line
utility.execute()
File “/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Django-1.6.2-py2.7.egg/django/core/management/init.py”, line 392, in execute
self.fetch_command(subcommand).run_from_argv(self.argv)
File “/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Django-1.6.2-py2.7.egg/django/core/management/init.py”, line 261, in fetch_command
commands = get_commands()
File “/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Django-1.6.2-py2.7.egg/django/core/management/init.py”, line 107, in get_commands
apps = settings.INSTALLED_APPS
File “/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Django-1.6.2-py2.7.egg/django/conf/init.py”, line 54, in getattr
self._setup(name)
File “/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Django-1.6.2-py2.7.egg/django/conf/init.py”, line 49, in _setup
self._wrapped = Settings(settings_module)
File “/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Django-1.6.2-py2.7.egg/django/conf/init.py”, line 132, in init
% (self.SETTINGS_MODULE, e)
ImportError: Could not import settings ‘settings’ (Is it on sys.path? Is there an import error in the settings file?): No module named settings

25

@Jeff_wu Rockstor is not just a python program but a whole collection of systems tied together, including systemd initialized components that do some required setup tasks. Is is required that you go through the steps in the previously referenced doc so that all the components can be established / configured on the test system. Specifically the bootstrap related commands which should among other thing modify your systems systemd boot scripts to customize the install to that of a Rockstor one. Note however that a standard CentOS system will have way too old a kernel and btrfs tools to be usable as a Rockstor system. The systemd component then orchestrate the serialization of the Rockstor startup process.

26

I am curious why you need to build Rockstor on vanilla centos and not just use Rockstor?

27

I have already update the kernel to 4.2.2，then what‘s the step if I want to run rockstor on my on vanilla centos？How many systemd components shoud I setup？

28

Yes,excatly,I want to use the default CentOS kernel ,so I have to build Rockstor.Can you give me some suggestions？

29

@Jeff_wu at this point, the only broad suggestion I can really give you is to follow the contribution guidelines here to build Rockstor manually: http://rockstor.com/docs/contribute.html#developers You may run into an issue or two along the way which you should be able to troubleshoot yourself with a bit of programming and Linux knowledge. Good luck!

30

Hi,suman:
According to your approach to install Rockstor on centos 7,there is some question.When I execute “ yum install -y rockstor ”,an error has occurred, as follows:
`[root@localhost sage]# rm -f /var/run/yum.pid
[root@localhost sage]# yum install -y rockstor
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, langpacks
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile

31

@suman,why i can’t install rockstor on centos 7.1 ,

`[root@localhost sage]# rm -f /var/run/yum.pid
[root@localhost sage]# yum install -y rockstor
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, langpacks
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile

32

run yum repolist

words to get past spam filter

33

Hello Suman,
I’m very interested in Rockstor specifically because it uses CentOS and I’m trying to test a virtualized solution.
I’d like to verify that the repo information you supplied originally is still relevant. Can you reply?
EDIT:nvm I just grabbed the info from an exiting install.

Also, just a suggestion to assist folks like me who are attempting a virtual solution or for people who would like to test on VMWare, can you include the open-vm-tools package in future builds?

34

RedHat dropped support for btrfs back in August 2017 (almost exactly a year ago, today). CentOS 7.5 will not let /boot reside in a btrfs file system in the GUI installer. It complains that /boot cannot be on partition type lvmlv, and the installer will not let you progress.