I couldn’t think of a title for this, other than does it work?
I am currently a Synology user, that has maxed out on the resources of my NAS. It has enough space, but it can’t handle the plugins I want to run.
As such I got a hardware list together bought the parts and am now thinking of options.
XPEnology will work for me, but I am not a fan of the fact that it is a bit of a “hack”. I would rather use something that is native.
So I look at Rockstor and need to know if this really will work for me.
What I need is the NAS to support the following:
Plex (Rock-on exists)
sickrage
torrent downloader (rock-on exists)
working raid5
backup to S3/Glacier
backup to USB
I get that raid 10 is stable, but I can’t afford the disk penalty here. If rockstor / brtfs still has issues recovering from a drive failure then this would be a deal breaker.
You “can’t afford” the penalty right now, or are you thinking more long-term? Because one cool feature of BTRFS is that it’s easy to switch RAID configs on the fly. So in my case, I’ve started off with RAID10, just to be safe, and will probably convert it to RAID5 later, as I need the space, and as it’s more stable.
On S3/Glacier, I’ve been running rclone on my rockstor box, with a little script. Works great.
Have a feeling you may want to wait a bit.Read this recent post for more.
Hi @Hobo_Joe, welcome to Rockstor community! As you’ve gathered, Rock-on for sickrage does not exist, but you may be able to add one by following this README. I see that some are already succeeding at this, which is great to see.
As to the stability of raid5/6, as the consensus goes, it’s not rock solid yet. The link @bdarcus posted describes the progress and current status pretty well, but in summary, things have improved quite a bit as of 4.3 kernel. Personally though, I do use raid5 and raid6 without any basic issues. The big open question for me is whether it’s stable enough to recover from drive failure reliably. While this is mostly in the hands of btrfs developers, a bigger and open problem within our(Rockstor project) reach is to provide a nice alert system that notifies the user about errors, next steps to take etc… We have basic S.M.A.R.T support and savvy users can set this up with some manual work, but we do plan to make this better soon.
Regarding USB backup, I need it myself and there’s enough demand from the community as a whole. Here’s the issue for it. Please stay tuned.
From your messages it leaves me with a single, major, issue in my opinion. The lack of backup support is worrying for me.
Currently my Synology backs up (Photo’s only) to USB, a friends Synology and to Glacier. With Rockstor, running RAID5 I would be running in a config that is not recommended with no backup solution.
Synology DSM 6 (currently in beta) is based around BRTFS so hopefully this investment in the file system will do wonders for Rockstor.
Am I right in thinking that with Rockstor a user can access CentOS and install native apps? And that these apps can access shares locally?
As this may be a work around for me. Otherwise I am going to have to hold off on Rockstor and go with XPEnology.
Rockstor is not completely independent package sitting on CentOS, it would have been a lot easier if that is the case Instead, you can think of it as being weakly dependent. For example, it needs a few special packages including the kernel from elrepo, and our own baked btrfs-progs package among others. So if you run a different kernel, you get a warning on the UI. The other kind of weak dependence is configuration files such as samba, sshd etc… that Rockstor manages. In these cases, Rockstor tries to confine it’s config into clearly marked sections whenever possible. But it could interfere in some cases depending on what you are trying to do around Rockstor. But the key take away is that it is 100% open source and Rockstor does not put any arbitrary restrictions on what you can or cannot do with your system.
Same here. But I decided to get my own hardware and then had to choose whether to use XPEnology or rockstor.
I got to admit that DSM 6 will be tough to beat. Btrfs, cloud backup, out of the box Let’s encrypt support, …
Nonetheless I’ll give rockstor a try now and I’m going to test bdarcus’ rclone backup.
Hopefully more and more DSM 6 features will make their way to rockstor as time progresses.
Simple answer: I don’t.
I tried to find alternatives here and there like rclone / Duplicati for the cloud backup functionality.
And @henfri worked on a possibility to integrate Let’s encrypt support
( https://github.com/rockstor/rockstor-core/issues/987)
Last but not least there is the OwnCloud Rock-on. It gives you some extra apps and options like music and video streaming. (Emby should do as well)
Instead, you can think of it as being weakly dependent. For example, it needs a few special packages including the kernel from elrepo, and our own baked btrfs-progs package among others. So if you run a different kernel, you get a warning on the UI. The other kind of weak dependence is configuration files such as samba, sshd etc… that Rockstor manages. In these cases, Rockstor tries to confine it’s config into clearly marked sections whenever possible. But it could interfere in some cases depending on what you are trying to do around Rockstor. But the key take away is that it is 100% open source and Rockstor does not put any arbitrary restrictions on what you can or cannot do with your system.