Hey there big openSUSE fan. I run Tumbleweed usually and have always used Synology NAS’s because I don’t (didn’t) trust myself. They served me well but I’m now building a new server and plan to use my Synology as a backup server. I’m still contemplating what OS to run but Rockstor is right up my alley as I am comfortable with Tumbleweed (it’s on my daily driver).
What I want to know is how close to Leap does Rockstor stay? My testing is on a VM but it seems it’s a CLI only interface so does it support GPUs? I was planning to use a Nvidia card for Plex transcoding. Can I use the typical Leap tools to manage the GPU? It does look like it uses the normal Leap repos so I’m thinking yes? Mostly I want to install Portainer, I think that’s probably something I’ll be able to use?
Rockstor stays “true” to Leap, i.e. no customization of the OS is performed. All changes come from the official upstream repositories. The Rockstor appliance is built starting with a JeOS version of OpenSUSE, so it’s always updated with the latest updates that OpenSUSE releases. As you can see from the download page, there’s also a TW flavor, though that tends to sometimes run into a few quirks, as it’s more advanced in some areas than Leap (though I have not had many issues with running Rockstor on that so far).
Obviously, because that’s the mission of Rockstor, it only support the btrfs filesystem, and even that is all driven by the upstream releases, Rockstor just exposes certain functionalities via a WebUI.
Because, as an appliance it focuses on the NAS aspects, no additional desktop like KDE or GNOME is part of the installation, but the majority of activities should be manageable through the WebUI. Any remaining advanced things (special driver installations, other tools outside of the direct NAS operations) would then be done via the CLI. If you need to have a desktop, then you can also take a look at the installation of Rockstor on vanilla Leap: https://rockstor.com/docs/howtos/rpm_install.html
When you look through the forums, users have installed and used GPUs (obviously depending on the hardware configuration). Since not every single kernel module is part of the base installation, nor drivers like you might find in a full-fledged OpenSUSE install, you will have to do some CLI work to get those things added, but, it follows the same process as you would on a vanilla LEAP install (or TW for that matter).
Rockstore has its own take on using docker containers via the Rockons, you can read more on this here:
using that approach allows Rockstor to help with e.g. avoiding port conflicts. Check it out and see whether some or all Rockons might fit your needs that you would otherwise use Portainer for.
However, you can of course install Portainer, either directly, or via a Portainer Rockon definition, you do need to activate the Rockon service inside Rockstor in either case, though. But the Rockstor project has not made any allowances for any conflicts between the two, as the intent is/was to offer Rockons as a fairly simple option to run add-on programs/applications with a few mouse-clicks and no knowledge requirements around compose files, etc.
There are couple of discussion threads on the forum around the Portainer topic if you want to peruse those. What docker containers are you thinking of using?
Dan - Thank you for the wonderful writeup. I’m glad to hear it stays true to Leap, one less thing to worry about. I didn’t notice a TW flavor, so I may give that a whirl as I’m just used to TW from using it on my daily (I would zypper dup instead of zypper up at least once a week I’m guessing! Tho I guess on Leap I don’t need to check that often). I’m not sure if I would need a desktop or not, currently one of my two docker hosts is TW and although it has a monitor attached the only time I needed it was when I made a boo-boo in cockpit trying to bridge my network and it became unreachable. I probably could have fixed it from the CLI but since I had just messed it up in cockpit by going to the now inaccessible machine and visiting localhost:9090 I knew exactly where to go to undo my mistake.
I did see the Rockons, and although I’m not opposed to them I have two docker hosts right now that I manage with Portainer and I have grown proficient in it’s use. I really like using Stacks (eg. compose files) because I can spin the same stack up here or there easily. Yes I have to manage my own ports and volumes, but it’s manageable. I like the ability to grab a backup and get the containers up somewhere else “just in case” as my wife has grown accustomed to a few of the things I’ve started hosting. One thing I’m trying to do is the new hardware is a Threadripper Pro, so the machine is planned to have horsepower and some RAM and I’d like to take all 60-ish of my containers currently running on my Synology NAS and Ryzen 5800 “server” and move them to one machine. Note that’s not 60 applications, but many things have a database, redis, nginx and some things like the *arr stack has 12+ containers for one functional stack. I haven’t bought the NVMe yet but I did pick up a PCIe x16 to 4xNVMe adapter I’d like to create a fast NVMe volume for “running” everything and keep the media and word doc’s on my spinning rust. I’m wondering if a U2 solution might be better but I’m trying to keep cost minimal tho the budget has already been blown.
Anyway, I am comfortable with the Synology UI and it has worked well. I use Tumbleweed daily and in fact my other “server” is a Tumbleweed machine so I’m comfortable with that. I haven’t used any other Linux outside a VM so I appreciate that this is using something I’m already familiar with. I may actually try to install Rockstor on Tumbleweed in a VM (for testing, on bare metal once settled) as I think I may like that the best, but I do like the idea that if I go with the integrated Leap install it’ll probably be less headache in the long run.
I have a similar relation to openSUSE as you have. I was very happy running TW on my Desktop, though I am currently running Leap due to some graphic driver issues. Nevertheless, I am acustom to using the openSUSE OS and enjoy having Leap as the underlying OS of my Rockstor Server.
Speaking of Rockstor, I also do use docker on it’s own on Rockstor with docker compose and also use Portainer for diagnostic & debugging. I think it’s great that Rockstor has developed the Rock-ons as it’s easier to learn, but as you are used to manage docker containers “manually”, I would actually advice you to continue doing this.
Because you mentioned cockpit - I have actually installed it on my Rockstor server as well. Though my use case is mainly for managing VMs, I have written my experience down here:
Regarding the TW vs Leap discussion, I know the arguments for both versions, though I defenitely prefer the stability Leap provides for a server. Also the new features and the newer kernel are not as important on a server. Feel free to tinker around with TW, but don’t be afraid of the differences regarding Leap, you won’t notice them for the most part. Updates (command line equivalent zypper up) can be made from the Rockstor Web-UI and that’s also the way I do it most often.
@simon-77 thanks for chiming in here. I am embarrassed to say I completely forgot about your write-up, thanks for posting it here to add to the context.
Your comment on the TW vs. Leap:
I like the fact that btrfs improvements are available earlier than on the standard leap (as far as I can tell); of course more bleeding edge can be a double-edge sword . But, I think I also addressed that by using the backport kernel branch for Leap, tough with Leap 15.6 the differences are not quite a big as they were on 15.4. Though, as @phillxnet has pointed out in the past, OpenSUSE does a lot of under the hood around the kernel stuff, even in Leap to ensure that critical upstream stuff lands more quickly.
@simon-77 Thanks for the tips, that is kind of what i’m trying to do. I want a server, but admittedly I have no experience managing a linux RAID volume, or BTRFS volume for that (I have used snapper but I the nuts and bolts I’ve not had to deal with). I’m looking for a way to not have to use one of the “internet recommended” packages that do seem nice (TrueNAS and Unraid) but those are not openSUSE, and that is another distro to have to learn and as a weekend warrior type of self hoster, not a professional IT guy, the amount of time I have is limited and with openSUSE I already have a comfort level.
So using Cockpit I just spun up a Tumbleweed system I’m gonna try putting Rockstor on it and seeing how that goes. The new install uses SELinux tho, I’m hoping the switch is painless, I never really messed with Apparmor anyway so I’m hoping SELinux is just as hands off for me. Anyway, I have to finish building this new rig so I can go bare metal but man am I happy I found Rockstor. Some people are Ford people, some are Chevy. Some are BMW, some are Benz. Well, I’m an openSUSE guy and I am just fine with that. I’m also glad to see these forums aren’t dead as I can imagine I’ll have some questions as I go live with actual hardware in the coming week or two as I build this thing.
I just wanted to briefly mention that we provide a Rockstar installer for Tumbleweed on our downloads page: https://rockstor.com/dls.html
It was built a little bit ago so there will be quite a few updates to install when you run zypper dup, but it should all be set up for Rockstor.
I’m mentioning this because of your mention of Selinux, for instance. We are not yet compatible with it so it may block key components of Rockstor. We did have plans on enabling MAC via Apparmor but now given the shift to SELinux (likely to reach Leap as well), well most likely shift to that as well. We do have other big upgrades planned that have priority over that, though, but it is something we would like to see supported in Rockstor. I would thus recommend using the TW installer for the moment as you won’t have to manually customize TW to ensure it has the components needed by Rockstor.
This will be a fun exercise. Install a year-old Tumbleweed .iso and see if it survives the zypper dup
EDIT: 917 packages updated, then I logged into UI and set update channel to testing, did another dup and had 4 more packages. Seems to be running fine.
Nice!
I’m always impressed by how TW can handle that kind of dup. I’ve been guilty of few times of not updating mine for a few months on my personal laptop, and it went through close to 3k updates without a problem.
We’re keeping a very close eye on TW and will likely try to spend more time and efforts in ensuring we are 100% functional on it. A few things may differ at the moment, such as the parsing of Btrfs scrub output or the like as the underlying Btrfs progs version does differ a lot from the one in Leap, but we’re very interested in it.
We’re also curious about Slowroll and how it behaves so please do share your experience with it when compared to TW if you have played with it . A lot of innovation on the OpenSUSE side lately so we’re trying to see how to best leverage this (what to consider and what not to consider).
The version number in our installer file names indicate the ‘rockstor’ rpm version pre-installed; currently 5.0.15-0 released on 19th November 2024.
Our installer build process pre-installs all updates available at build time. So the included Tumbleweed for that installer would be up-to-date as of 26th November 2024. Still old for TW mind . Once we get our next testing rpm out we hope to do a rebuild of all our downloadable installers.
Glad the updates went OK. We do use ‘zypper dup’ when on Tumbleweed within the Web-UI update mechanism, so you can do updates from there if that is preferred. It may well be as you can then avoid updating the ‘rockstor’ package as that is locked during updates via the flashing wifi icon method!
Thanks for the info. I got the year timeframe from an up above comment, but really I didn’t know. I did think < 1,000 updates was light but just figured the install was very lean. I had this week off (transitioning jobs) and just hung around the house. So I tried all kinds of flavors of Rockstor. I think I like the Leap 15.6 install I did, then added Rockstor because then I do have the GUI though admittedly I use it less and less these days. My new hardware is mostly in hand, but I’m kinda regretting the Corsair Wraith Ripper cooler because it’s taking so long to get here. Probably should have gotten the Noctua but it just looked too cool to pass up.
. But, I think I also addressed that by using the 
. A lot of innovation on the OpenSUSE side lately so we’re trying to see how to best leverage this (what to consider and what not to consider).