3.8-14 release was fun and educational, as always. It was a collaborative effort that brought the entire community together. Now it’s time to kick off a new release cycle!
We are starting off with big contributions. 3.8-14.01 is out! First, I’ve just merged @ganti_priya’s pull request in which she used DataTables to provide really snappy search, sort and pagination features to the UI. After @Flyer’s recent logs manager, this is my new favourite UI feature to play with!
@phillxnet has a really big one in queue which I plan to merge next. He has taken the disk drive management code to the next level. I am looking forward to it. Similarly, @Flyer has a pull request ready for a new password recovery system. I’ll brag about all of these more in the coming days
I get a few e-mails asking about what to expect in an upcoming release. So, I want to make our effort more transparent in this cycle by linking this release to our Looney Bean milestone. It’s a tall order where I plan to work on isci, django upgrade, letsencrypt just to name a few. I am sure there will be new issues not part of the milestone that we may work on and conversely, we may not be able to close every issue in this release. Every contributor, including me, are not obligated to work on Looney Bean. I just hope this gives us all some guidance and perspective. I’ve prepared this milestone after taking a few factors into consideration including tech debt, community and subscriber wishes and our own broad vision.
To my lovely code contributors, please feel free to comment on any issue in Looney Bean if you like to work on them. And to the community at large, please comment and upvote issues to voice your support, even on the ones that may not be in Looney Bean.
I am happy to announce that 3.8-14.02 is now available!
Just like .01, this is a big one. @phillxnet has re-factored the low level disk management logic to rely on persistent by-id names of disks. Previous implementation was short sighted, where we mistakenly treated temp names like sda, sdb etc… as persistent names. This triggered buggy behaviour when these names changed. This implementation is a much needed re-factor. Phil has documented it thoroughly, which you can read on the pull request’s page.
Secondly, I’ve added support to run Rockstor UI on a custom port. Thanks to @ghensley’s test feedback, it was quicker to get this done!
I really like the work you are putting into Rockstor. Its steadily improving. For me it has been rock solid stable for the last many releases. I only see small usability bugs, but the basic job of a NAS is being done very reliably.
The new disk naming setup seems to work well, and if it prevents problems, its even better.
Only complaint is that the disk names get very long, like “ata-SAMSUNG_HD154UI_S1XWJ9BZA03197”, which as a result makes the disk activity dashboard look a little crowded:
You cant possibly read which disk is doing what
Mostly a cosmetic thing, but should be fixed.
I see philxnet noted it too in the pull request
Rockstor 3.8-14.03 is now available! Like the previous two updates in this new cycle, this is also a big one. @Flyer has contributed a pincard based password recovery system for users including root(with a bit of extra security). The system is pretty interesting to me and something security conscious users may like a lot! The UI side of it has the signature @Flyer snappy-ness which is pretty cool.
I made the samba service independent of rockstor-bootstrap which was giving grief to some users and proved hard to debug. I’ve also enhanced a few other samba related stuff. Enjoy the update and please post your feedback!
edit: I forgot to mention the third issue that was also merged in this update. We’ve updated warning messages for RAID5/6 in light of recent updates to BTRFS wiki. Thank you @phillxnet!
it seems I had a particularly sloppy day and did not test enough on the last update. My samba improvements did more harm than good. Mea culpa.
On the bright side, it’s great that you quickly caught the regression and @phillxnet even prepared a partial fix. I’ve tested them, added one more commit and we are good… for now… I think…
So, 3.8-14.04 is now available with samba fix. Plus it also comes with @Flyer’s contribution which displays your Rockstor sytem’s time on the UI. Thanks @phillxnet and @Flyer!
Thanks a lot. Samba seems to work again on my system.
I dont thin k its a question of being sloppy. We are on the testing channel, and things like this will happen.
I see you have added system time to the web ui. Sadly on my system it shows “System Time: 15:45 (-0500 CDT)”, where it is really 22:45 (CET) where I live.
Where do I set it up to show the correct time? Sorry if I missed some instructions, but cant seem to find where to set it up.
3.8-14.05 is out now! and we are breaking the trend of pushing major updates temporarily. @Flyer has fixed a couple of issues quicker than anyone else could get to. Enjoy!
There’s no stopping @Flyer! I just merged his shellinabox feature that gives terminal access to your Rockstor system, securely from the UI. This is very useful for a client-platform independent CLI, especially for those that are not Linux heads like the rest of us here. Also, this makes it easy to help users troubleshoot in many cases. Grazie!
I’ve also fixed a Rock-on related issue(hi there @henfri) . Now there’s a script /opt/rockstor/bin/delete-rockon to delete a Rock-on, its metadata, containers and images. This is useful for more advanced users who may like to start fresh on a Rock-on they are tinkering with. Now you can use @Flyer’s shellinabox feature to run this script and others from the UI.
Yeah, so 3.8-14.06 is now available! There’s a deployment related bug due to which you may see an error while accessing shellinabox. Just restart the rockstor-pre service with systemctl restart rockstor-pre or reboot the machine to get around it. We’ll fix it up in the next update. Other than that, this is a great update. Enjoy!
3.8-14.07 is now available! We closed two issues in this update, one from @phillxnet and the other from @Flyer, both are nice enhancements to existing functionality. Thank you guys!
