3.9.2-# Stable Channel Changelog

Announcements
21

3.9.2-54

Merged 24th Feb 2020
Released 25th Feb 2020

I am delighted to announce our 54th ish 3.9.2 release. This one is mainly concerned with our openSUSE offering in our ongoing effort to reach feature parity. The email fix however does related to our CentOS rpms as it corrects some wacky but though to be mostly harmless postfix (email server) config file permissions. And the Samba fix also contains a cross distro fix/improvement building on the last releases’ improvement in this area by @def_monk and @Flox. All details are available in the linked issues.

I would like specifically to thank our intrepid @Flox for both their continued forum moderation and a continued supply of fixes and improvements in the code. I would also like to thank @tyukh for researching the fixes necessary to achieve feature parity in our email notifications system in openSUSE. This saved me time and effort and was much appreciated.

  • -Source package default smb.service in “Built on openSUSE” variants. Fixes #2127 @FroggyFlox
  • -[openSUSE] fix postfix config re ipv4, tlsmgr, & CA file settings. Fixes #2132 @phillxnet

Special thanks also to @gaspode for researching and confirming @Flox’s findings re our requirements on openSUSE for improved Samba support going forward.

So all in although we only apparently have 2 ‘fixes’, between them they actually close 4 outstanding issues. I’ve only listed the primary GitHub fixes in the change log as we have a bug where > 1 issue links per line breaks, and thus we loose the all important attribution :slight_smile: .

As always a general thanks to all our Stable channel subscriber and contributors for helping to make this whole endeavour sustainable. We are hoping, in the near future, to be able to release a new Rockstor 4 version available in our yet to be populated openSUSE Stable channel. This move will ensure upstream updates for components related to our underlying file system that are beyond the expertise of our small but dedicated team. A major motivating factor in our ongoing “Built on openSUSE” endeavour.

N.B.

If you have a Stable channel updates subscription and do not see this update available please check your subscription status and relevant Appliance ID via our recently available ‘self service’ *Appman facility: https://appman.rockstor.com/

If all looks well and you are still not offered this update then please PM me on the forum with your current Appliance ID and original order number and I will look to what the problem may be. There is a known issue for a small subset of our subscribers which I can only sort if contacted.

4 Likes
22

3.9.2-55

Merged 10-11th March 2020
Released 13th March 2020 (UK Friday !!)

Tempting fete with a Friday the 13th release we finally have a slightly delayed 3.9.2-55.

This release is particularly important for Apple users as our intrepid forum moderator and prolific code/doc/rock-on/forum contributor @Flox has now established our first implementation of Time Machine capable Samba share export capability. All hidden behind a little tick:

Time-Machine-Tick
Time-Machine-Tick790×415 20.9 KB

This brings us right up to date with being able to service the last few years of macOS versions.

As a result we are now going to remove our previously flaky and near enough abandoned by upstream AFP capability. It has been linked within Rockstor to a long list of “Too many open files” errors and given Netatalk’s long waning support within a number of distros it’s now time for us to follow some of our fellow DIY NAS colleagues and remove it entirely from our newer offerings. Apologies to all those with insufficiently new enough macOS systems but this decision has pretty much been made for us by the lack of attention having been paid to this now long deprecated protocol. Apple has, for a while now, favoured the SMB protocol and we are a little late to the game with adding this Time Machine Samba export capability.

If you are currently using AFP with Rockstor and cannot change then note that Rockstor will soon not be able to server your needs unless you can transition to the newer and upstream supported SMB protocol. All outstanding issues and documentation relating to AFP will also soon be closed/marked deprecated. Sorry again to those affected but this change has been a long over due one and we just wanted to first have the Time machine over SMB capability at least in place before we announced and then removal the entirely of AFP support.

Particularly important in the light of the above is that we need this initial new implementation tested. The core development team within Rockstor has very limited access to sufficiently new enough macOS versions/hardware to properly test this feature. So if you are interested in ensuring this can serve your purpose then please test this ‘tick’ with you Time Machine setups and report your findings. Without these reports our TM over SMB capability is likely to go the way of our AFP implementation and languish in various states of neglect. Our focus is in part determined by the quality of interaction we receive about stuff that doesn’t work as expected.

Note that his update does include a database migration so is a little more fragile than those that do not: the majority of them. But the change is relatively minor however a little more significant than our last db update in 3.9.2-53.

We also have, from myself, a further nudge towards our goal of feature parity for our “Built on openSUSE” offering. This one is a fix for the shellinabox Web-UI embedded terminal capability. Bit by bit.

As always I would like to thank all those who make this endeavour of ours a possibility, specifically and contextually for this thread, our Stable Channel subscribers. Sustainable consistent opens source development is not a solved problem but I hold out hope that we can edge towards this as we develop.

N.B.

If you have a Stable channel updates subscription and do not see this update available please check your subscription status and relevant Appliance ID via our recently available ‘self service’ *Appman facility: https://appman.rockstor.com/

If all looks well and you are still not offered this update then please PM me on the forum with your current Appliance ID and original order number and I will look to what the problem may be. There is a known issue for a small subset of our subscribers which I can only sort if contacted.

3 Likes
23

3.9.2-56

Merged 17th March - 1st April 2020
Released 3rd April 2020

This is another important release for Apple users holey reliant on AFP, as in this release we have deleted Rockstor’s Web-UI interface with this Netatalk backed protocol. Again, following on from 3.9.2-55’s announcement, apologies to all those who’s systems are unable to transition to the newer, Samba support for Time Machine. SMB (Samba) is now Apples preferred, and only supported in newer macOS versions, option for running Time Machine over to a network storage system such as is presented by Rockstor. Given we are fast approaching our transition to our ‘Built on openSUSE’ base we needed to make this transition prior to releasing a new ISO which are normally based on the most recent stable release. That way folks start with what it likely to be available in the near and medium future. And as this is a sizeable code reduction it should also help with reducing our increasing urgent pending technical debt tasks, i.e. upgrading across the board to Python 3 and a more appropriate Django, along with all our associated libraries and the like.

So to the bullet points:

-Deprecate Netatalk/AFP. Fixes #2146 @FroggyFlox
-update known non unique product uuids. Fixes #2143 @phillxnet

Thanks to our intrepid forum moderator and long time all repo contributor @Flox for their follow-up AFP removal to accompany the already released Time Machine support within Samba of our last release. And in a further move to prepare for our next installer I have added all the outstanding known non unique Appliance ID’s so that our new installer will catch them before they catch us out. Included in this addition, and as it goes many of the last couple of years, is a continuing effort to nudge our code base that little bit closer to Python 3 compatibility. Still a way to go but bit by bit.

And a final note on the AFP removal: This does not affect an existing configuration or AFP server state, but all future configuration changes will have to be made via the command line in accordance with netatalk documentation. We are simply removing it’s Web-UI configuration / reporting. However we have also removed it as a dependency and so our new installer will not have netatalk installed by default. Also note that although we tried to ensure a yum downgrade would restore AFP functionality, due to db issues of reversing such a change and our requirement to focus on more pressing tasks, such as the “Built on openSUSE” endeavour, test have not been positive with regard to restoring AFP post rpm upgrading to this release. So if you do have an ongoing need for Netatalk then I would suggest a command line approach from here on in. Again apologies but the health of the Netatalk project and Apples deprecation of the protocol it servers, along with our small but dedicated developer team, pretty much rights AFP off as a sustainable endeavour for us.

N.B.

If you have a Stable channel updates subscription and do not see this update available please check your subscription status and relevant Appliance ID via our recently available ‘self service’ Appman facility: https://appman.rockstor.com/

If all looks well and you are still not offered this update then please PM me on the forum with your current Appliance ID and original order number and I will look to what the problem may be. There is a known issue for a small subset of our subscribers which I can only sort if contacted.

2 Likes
25

3.9.2-57

Merged 19th April 2020
Released 25th April 2020

We are now starting to move back to our older, hopefully more robust model of releasing first into our testing channel updates and then into stable if no ‘worries’ were reported. But during our transition as part of the ‘Built on openSUSE’ endeavour we only have an openSUSE based testing channel. But as we move closer to achieving feature parity with our current stable updates channel, which is based on CentOS, we can hopefully soon designate a release to go into the ‘Built on openSUSE’ stable channel updates. There after we can embark on tackling our mounting technical debt in the testing channel.

That aside this release is relatively minor on the production code side and involves no db migrations and has been running without report for a few days now in the testing channel as referenced above. And is the first release for over a year to involve a sole committer, me in this case.

The first change was fairly substantial but is intended to improve our tooling with regard to establishing our long sought feature parity across our CentOS and openSUSE bases. The second is, as stated, an overall improvement with regard to how we treat passwords during a configuration restore. These then both contribute to our current main mission of being able to offer a more modern, upstream supported btrfs platform. I look forward to finally being able to release a Stable counterpart in our future home via our ‘Built on openSUSE’ effort.

Further I would like to point out that although we have only a single committer on this release, there has been much work behind and on the scenes by many forum members and the venerable @Flox (forum moderation/support and alpha testing our pending new installer). Thanks also to @Hooverdan for their sterling effort with support on the forum. And to all those intrepid folks contributing to the testing effort within our openSUSE only testing channel updates: special mention in this case to @shocker who is currently engaged in a monster effort re a very large raid5/6 Leap 15.1/15.2beta / Tumbleweed adventure.

Finally a special thanks to all Stable channel subscribers without which this whole endeavour would be unsustainable. We aim to have, soon, a shiny new installer which represents the last part of at least the software side of this rather large puzzle. More on this soon.

N.B.
If you have a Stable channel updates subscription and do not see this update available please check your subscription status and relevant Appliance ID via our recently available ‘self service’ Appman facility: https://appman.rockstor.com/

If all looks well and you are still not offered this update then please PM me on the forum with your current Appliance ID and original order number and I will look to what the problem may be. There is a known issue for a small subset of our subscribers which I can only sort if contacted.

3 Likes