Excited about Rockstor -- build plans

[phillxnet (Philip Guyton)]

@ceh-u Hello again.

@ceh-u

For that I actually used the Rockstor 3.9.1 ISO, which surprisingly the Rockstor page on SourceForge page still says is the current version.

It is our last available CentOS based installer and only publicly available installer; for now at least. And will, with a lot of patience for the hundreds of MB of upstream updates, update itself and it’s Rockstor related packages to 3.9.2-57 from 25th April this year if subscribed to the Stable channel. Though a ‘yum update’ at the command line is advise for this given it’s now such a large update.

3.9.2-# Stable Channel Changelog

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 desi…

So it’s still viable, but given your linux interests and newer hardware plans, and the beta state of our now long planned openSUSE transition, the testing channel does look like the way to go. Just be cautious with the updates especially as we near our next stable release and we will then start using the testing channel to address our other technical debts accumulated over the years, ie Python 2 to 3 and old Django etc, which will inevitably cause issues. Auto updates doesn’t yet work in the openSUSE version anyway (at least through our Web-UI) so you should be OK there.

I’ll try and indicate in the changelog the point where we stop heading towards the current stable and branch out towards the next stable release which will be post Rockstor 4 Stable release but build on Python 3 newer Django etc.

I can chip in with an idea re:

@ceh-u

I have a good UPS for my current systems

If this UPS has the capacity to also back the proposed Rockstor machine and your network switch and infrastructure then you could consider having Rockstor manage it and use NUT’s (https://networkupstools.org/) network capability to serve the power info out to your respective clients. This is a built-in config within Rockstor for it’s UPS config. See our following doc entry on this:

http://rockstor.com/docs/ups-setup/ups_setup.html

Specifically the Netserver Mode mode. But this all depends on your particular setup of course. And if your UPS is sufficiently supported by NUT. The following page should give an indication of this:

Network UPS Tools - Hardware compatibility list

Just a thought on the overall power wiring really. As that way Rockstor can send shutdown notifications to all the network clients (assuming NUT client compatibility) and await their acknowledgement and, after a time out for this, cleanly shut itself down there after.

You might like that. Also do post pictures of your build. And be careful with those hackintosh updates, I’ve tried those on and off a little while ago and the updates would often cause major headaches. I may just have been using more borderline hardware though.

Hope that helps and thanks for sharing your plans. Very encouraging.