Blank WebUI after install

[phillxnet (Philip Guyton)]

@s8wc3 OK so that is the latest download.
The following comment helps:

@s8wc3

Seem to be having an issue creating the user initially, that page appears to load OK but pressing submit just brings up a spinner and then doesn’t continue. It does actually create the user, though, because if I press it again it says there’s already a user with that name, it’s just not moving on past that point on the front end (this happened last time too, just forgot).

I was initially under the impression that you were not even getting the initial setup screen. From your explicit description I think this is a disk serial issue. If you manually edit the url after the initial setup screen to read only the ip address (i.e. remove the remaining url that is auto added) I think you will see the Web-UI just fine. But the problem here is likely that you have disks without serial. This may be a limitation of your hypervisor and if this is not possible then you will not be able to run Rockstor in this Hypervisor until it can given drives a unique serial. See:

https://rockstor.com/docs/installation/quickstart.html#minimum-system-requirements

All drives must have unique serial numbers (real drives do); not all VM systems default to, or are capable of this. See: VMware advisory.

Pretty sure ESXi is alone in not being able to emulate ‘real’ drives. No ‘real’ drive/disk is without a unique serial, we absolutely depend on this as per:

Device management in Rockstor

This is a wikified post documenting how Rockstor manages devices and is intended to serve as a live document on the same; user documentation is available at Disks. Please update this developer document when you make any changes to the disk management subsystem within Rockstor’s code. Also any suggestions on how this might be done better are very welcome; but please make sure that these suggestions are clearly indicated as such; this helps to maintain the relationship between this document and th…

subtitle: Subtitle: Rockstor’s Serial Obsession

As you see in the quote there is a ‘thing’ one can do for VMware to make this so. If you can find the same for your chosen Hypervisor then you should be good. Otherwise it’s incompatible with Rockstor.

Once you manually edit the url and navigate to the disks page you will see the indicator of this if my guess is correct. We have a bug where we fail this initial Web-UI ‘show’ in incompatible VM hosts/config. KVM defaults to no serial for virtio disks but has the options to assign a serial to each device. Also note the following from that same doc section:

Rockstor is a complete Linux distribution “Built on openSUSE” intended for direct hardware installation. Virtual Machine installs can work but are not recommended without full drive or preferably whole drive controller pass-through. Hardware raid underneath btrfs, Rockstor’s chosen filesystem, will weaken data integrity assurances. Raid controllers, if used, should thus be configured to HBA / JBOD operation.

Hope that helps and let us know if my guess is correct: i.e. manually editing the url post setup screen to be top-level, that is ip only, get you the Web-UI. Although still disfunctional for the given disk properties not meeting the minimum system requirements. Rockstor tracks disks, and uses their serial fro this. Without serial udev, and consequently Rockstor, cannot track them.