I got a older supermicro from a friend today, and when I try to install rockstor to an internal USB, I’ve got a few problems.
First, it never gives me a chance to pick the boot drive. It jumps straight to offering to format my USB. Useful, but I’d rather get the choice.
Then it goes through loading rockstor-nas.raw, before it immediately starts booting into an unfinished install. Like, dracut-init right over the blue installation screen. This terminates with an error because the root filesystem was never created.
I was able to use the same installation ISO to install a working rockstor VM inside KVM, and then tried to use KVM to install to the USB again. SAME ISSUE
Any ideas how to get past this? I like the idea of Rockstor as easier “side-grade” from my current DIY NAS (Arch + BTRFS + Cockpit + docker-compose), but I could have installed and configured Arch again by now
This may well be due to our excluding drives over a certain size. This was intended to try and minimise the risk of accidentally selecting a data drive (assumed to be larger) rather than an intended system drive. See the following line in the kiwi-ng config:
If you simply remove the “rd.kiwi.oem.maxdisk=5000G”
Then you will be presented with drives of all sizes, rather than just those < 5 TB.
But note that when you mix the system and data drives there are more limitations with regard to migrating your data from one install to another. We originally had this limit much lower actually, at 500 GB. See issue:
and associated pull request:
where long time occasional commiter @magicalyak moved to increase this safety cut-off limit. It definitely eases install for those having generally a smaller system disk with likely much larger data disks. But as per the discussion in the above pr the consensus was to push this up to 5 TB, which personally I still think is a little high but we have had no further comments on this other than your own here.
So in short, if you wish to install on a > 5TB drive then just remove that boot command line option and you will be presented with all reported/observed drives.
To know more about what’s happened here the actual error would be useful. In some cases a report file is created and reported as such. Otherwise a screen grab / picture of the resulting failure should help folks here on the forum see what may have happened. Difficult to guess otherwise I’m afraid.
The 5TB limit there makes sense, it just surprised me that it skipped drive selection altogether and went straight to “format /dev/sdk?” with no indication of size or anything. I think using the /dev/disk/by-id/ identifier there would be more clear, but that sounds like a kiwi issue, not a Rockstor one
It’s close enough, Sandisk Ultra Fit, but I would be upgrading to a dedicated SLC USB in the future. This is more an evaluation run.
I recorded a failure using KVM with the USB passed through, heres a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFMajCVs98M
I gave up copying the rdosreport out, and just slowly paged it, but I can recreate it if you need the log file. It might just be a dead USB stick looking more closesly at the log in the video though, at 5:56 theres a buffer I/O error.
I’ll try a different os drive next and report back
@kageurufu Glad you got this one sorted, I think from memory the Sandisk Ultra Fit was going to be too slow anyway.
Re:
Agreed. In fact in the very early days (read when it didn’t work) of the installer we had by-id names showing up and that’s definitely nicer as they can often given a fairly good indication/confirmation of the device, i.e. via manufacturer within the name. But then we started seeing the sda type names and just had bigger issue at hand than chasing down what might have caused this. Plus the installer started to work at around that point which was nice.
It may be there is some kiwi-ng setting or the like where we can re-gain this but I’ve not gotten around to chasing this one up.
Thanks for your report, and sharing your findings:
Which may well have shown up the failure of the prior problematic USB key. But again I’m pretty sure this is not a performant key so would likely not have given adequate results anyway. Out of interest what is the USB number for this key?
I have a SanDisk Ultrafit: idVendor=0781, idProduct=5583
here myself, 64 GB, as we had a report of a variant having a really long serial number but alas the one I received did not:
usb-SanDisk_Ultra_Fit_4C530001111124116103-0:0
I only have a single record of an install timing using this device as the system disk on an old Dell OptiPlex 755
model name : Intel(R) Core™2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz
Installing:
From: SanDisk Extreme USB 3.0 installer (in USB 2.0 port)
To: SanDisk Ultra Fit 64 GB(in USB 2.0 port) shows up as 55 GB in Rockstor Web-UI.
7 mins to login prompt.
8.5 mins to Rockstor Web-UI availability
And for comparison on the same old machine a more performance orientated USB system disk:
From: SanDisk Extreme USB 3.0 installer (in USB 2.0 port)
To: SanDisk Extreme USB 3.0 installer (in USB 2.0 port)
4 minst to login prompt.
5 mins 12 s to Rockstor Web-UI Setup page available.
It would likely have done better in a USB 3.0 port though. Take a look at the following forum posts in this area:
and
And as it goes this has reminded me of the following outstanding doc issue influenced by the above @b8two exposition re USB 2.0:
I may have thrown that USB away already, if I find it i’ll report back with the vendor/product ids.
Its a SC847E26-R1400LPB, with X9DRi-LN4F+, Xeon E5-2560 v2, 64GB RECC @ 1600MT/s, X520-DA2 2xSFP+ card with E10GSFPSR modules, connected to a matching card on my desktop during testing, but i’ll be connected to my other home server later. I currently have 13 WD Red 8TB drives as my test pool.
I have another 3 8TB, and 7 14TB drives in another BTRFS array I want to move over to this server once I have time to do that migration.
