IP not showing even after long waiting

[Hunyady]

Hi,

I installed Rockstor a few days ago on an old laptop. It has just one hard drive (320 gb). Then I found out that the entire drive has to be system drive. So I installed Rockstor on a flash drive. It was installing like 35 hours and then, every time I boot it from the boot menu (flash drive cannot be selected as default boot option) it acts like I opened it for the first time (there is that loading bar down that normally shows only on first boot). And when it launches, it just says:

Rockstar 3 (Core)
Kernel 4.10.6-1.el7.elrepo.x86_64 on an x86_64

[Server name] login:

It doesn’t show any IP adress even though it is connected with an ethernet cable. Any ideas?

[phillxnet (Philip Guyton)]

@Hunyady I think this is a clue to the root cause of the issue here:

@Hunyady

It was installing like 35 hours

That’s a crazy long to install and very much point to the usb key not being even nearly fast enough. From our Quick Start doc section we have the
Minimum system requirements: http://rockstor.com/docs/quickstart.html#minimum-system-requirements

subsection that state

• 8GB drive for Rockstor; if USB key use only fast variants (16GB+ SSD recommended).

And these values are due to be double soon.

It should install easily within 30 minutes or so depending on the speed of the other components. But 35 hours very much suggests this hardware is not fit for purpose. And even if you did have a fast USB key to use as the system drive you have to have at least a USB 2.0 port and ideally a USB 3.0 to make use of that fast USB key.

From there on there will be an avalanch of issues as everything will take so long to run most things will fail, or simply time out.

So all in this is never going to work satisfactory unless your system drive is considerably faster. Rockstor is very much not light weigh as is near enough an enterprise linux used as a DIY NAS. That has strength but also weaknesses. We just don’t do well on low end hardware. If that laptop has at least USB 2.0 or better 3.0 then a fast USB key as the system drive may work out but this one does not look to be promising.

Although another element that can slow down the install is the speed of the key that holds the installer of course. But USB keys are often significantly faster to read than they are to write and the installer is used in read only mode.

The following post has some USB key speed tests:

Rockstor taking a REALLY long time to install

@cmdywrtr27 Welcome to the Rockstor community. I think the key element here is that it is best if the system drive is dedicated. You can usually create shares on the ‘dedicated’ system drive but they are more restricted in their flexibility and of course would vanish on a re-install. So Rockstor is best if the system drive is an independant / dedicated block device. As for choice of USB drive if that is the way you are to go. Your choice in this case is clearly wrong as even if it complete th…

Take a look at the range of those tests. Some USB keys are super slow and others are faster than most Hard Disk Drives, depending on the port they are used in also of course.

Hope that helps, at least for a bit on context.

[Hunyady]

Thanks for the reply. It makes sense, when I tried to install FreeNas on that drive, it didn’t even install. That USB drive is 16 gb usb 2.0. And it’s old. I’ll try installing it on another one.