Hello Rockstor community. New Kiwi user here investigating using Rockstor as a home storage server.
For reasons of cost, part availability, power & thermal management I purchased a new AMD Athlon 200GE CPU + compatible ASUS A320M-E motherboard + ram & shovelled it into a cheap Silverstone 4 bay minitower together with existing 1 X 120gb Western Digital SSD, 2 X Seagate 4tb SATA drives.
My intention is to replace the functionality of a Synology, which although good is very low performance for the money (very expensive to get decent performance).
First candidate : Open Media Vault.
Result : Complete fail. The kernel & hardware stack is too far behind for modern hardware. Installer gives corrupted video. Do not pass go.
Second candidate : Rockstor. Very, very slick. Didnât even have to choose install target! The installer put the new system on the SSD & a few minutes later I had a Rockstor available at the target IP. NICE!
First look at the GUI, again very slick. First job was RAID 0 the 4 tb Seagate drives, boom, done! So slick.
Essential to my use is scheduled off site backup to Alibaba Object Storage Service. This is an S3 compatible service like Backblaze, Wasabi & of course Amazon.
Synology handles this with ease. How to do it on Rockstor please?
Glad Rockstor is working our for you so far. As per your:
I would say seeking out a Rock-on that can do this is the easiest route. Iâm not familiar with this service myself but if itâs S3 call/API compatible then maybe the Duplicati Rock-on will work for you as that has Amazon S3 target as a capability:
I think on that Rock-on you would, after install, add the shares you want Duplicati to have access to via the Rock-on Add Storage facility. Unfortunately we are still awaiting those instructions to be published but @Flox kindly submitted them in the following pull request:
and they have been merged but I am rather way laid currently on improving the backend systems that help to support Rockstor and once they are in place we should have a faster âturn aroundâ on all repo additions and their consequent intergration into our Web sites/rock-on repositories and rpm roll outs.
We donât seem to currently offer may options in this area so anyone with an interest in expanding this is welcome to suggest possible docker images that serve various back-up needs as they are obvious candidates / partners to a NAS. Better still if you find a nice docker image for âcloudâ backup solutions then the README.md at our rockon-registry has a nice rundown on how to host / test home grown Rock-ons via the /opt/rockstor/rockons-metastore directory. Itâs essentially just a single json file per Rock-on and itâs contents can mostly be gleaned from existing Rock-ons as a guild.
Maybe this thread can serve to rally ideas / contributions on building out our backup Rock-on options.
Thanks for your hello post, Iâm in UK currently and that looks like a nice tidy NAS arrangement. I like the Asus motherboards myself and have one in my Desktop. That case looks good, although I wouldnât call it cheap; but then removable drive bay cases are rather over priced across the board, and presumably it comes with a PSU. What the build quality / PSU fan noise like on that one?
Many thanks for your friendly informative reply.
Ok upon further investigation, so the easiest way to periodically sync my data to Alibaba OSS is use Minio command line client + cron jobs. There is a Minio Client Docker image on Docker Hub.
Should I be aware of any general problem deploying a Docker image on Rockstor outside of the official Rock-on repo? (Anyone can chime in here).
This little minitower mATX case has room for 4x3.5" drives & 1 x 2.5". There is one case fan pre-installed at the front of the case behind a dust screen. Perfect for a smallish home sever. The quality is quite ok considering itâs low cost. This will live on a shelf in an existing small clothing closet now repurposed to house a fibre ONT + UPS + Server + Switch and spare PC bits/pieces etc.
The reason I went mATX with the build was budget. Anything ITX still has a cost premium unfortunately. I would love to have gone the ITX route but shaving cost while maintaining quality was more important.
No PSU included at that price. I went with a Cooler Master Thermal Master 420W OEM PSU.
This is far from my preferred EVGA but it will have to do for now⊠The PSU fan is quiet. The Athlon 200GE barely get above 37C, its fan is barely spinning. The case fan is the loudest (not loud per se) & could probably be disconnected as thermal load is very low with this CPU.
It has that horrible Windozy integrated fake RAID but skip it & just connect your drives to the SATA ports & use soft RAID. n.b. this board has only 4 x 6Gb SATA ports but 2 x m2 connectors, so booting from m2 & using all 4 SATA for HDDâs should be a thing (?).
Iâll chime in here
No, you shouldnât have any general problem in deploying a Docker image directly from the cli.
There actually also was a pull request on our rock-ons registry repository for a Minio.io rock-on but it was limited at the time by the need for command arguments at the docker run time. See below:
As you can see in the issue linked above, we do support docker run command arguments now (see this PR) and its implementation is documented on our README file in the rockons-registry repository:
As a result, it should now be possible to create a rock-on using the official minio docker image: Docker
If youâre interested in giving it a go yourself, you should find all the needed information in the README file from our rockons-registry repository (linked above). It also seems one can use the now closed PR for a custom minio rock-on as base, changing the image to the minio/minio official one.
The PSU fan is quiet. The Athlon 200GE barely get above 37C, its fan is barely spinning. The case fan is the loudest (not loud per se) & could probably be disconnected as thermal load is very low with this CPU.