Hi all 
It seems that the last news on the blog is date back to Novemeber '17… is the project stalled?
I remember the blog advertising every new release with the changes, so I presume nothing happening.
Thanks for any explanation
@horizonbrave Welcome to the Rockstor community.
I wouldn’t say so: but yes the Blog posts have been neglected, as has our prior forum posts for each update. But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been any.
Please see the GitHub rockstor-core repo releases page for the when and what of each release (last 4 days ago):
We are on our 40th update of the 3.9.2 stable release channel. Where 3.9.1-16 testing (the last so far) = 3.9.2.0 stable channel. Each release has details of exactly what was changed. We have moved to serving the stable channel with more frequent updates, as opposed to the other way around which ended up splitting our limited time just a little too far.
I have been intending to take on the role of release press poster here on the forum but all things take time and I’ve been heads down on the coding side recently. Did you like the last blog post. I’ve had almost zero feedback on it and it took an age to create?
Hope that answers your question.
I have to make some comments here.
I have been wondering the same things as the original poster.
Allthough I dont consider the project dead, its concerning that no major updates seem to have been made for over a year.
I find it especially concerning that the kernel hasn’t been updated for many many months. The current kernel dates back to July 2017 … There have been several security issues in the meantime, that have been taken care of, and the base FS for Rockstor, have undergone major changes.
It seems as if Suman has almost disapeared. There can be many reasons for his absence, but it is concerning. Has he lost interest in the project? Does he simply not have time for it?
Mark my use of the word concerning. Rockstor is such a promising project, that it would be sad to see it go the way of the Dodo.
And even though a Rockstor install in the current release channel is very reliable (it has been for me), its just not very good that its not kept uptodate with the latest improvements to the FS and security.
I have chosen to have a payed subscription (3 years I believe), but I’m considering not renewing it when it runs out.
I know there is work being done, and Philip has been very active in the community with generally very good support.
But I am worried about the future of Rockstor, and I think rightly so.
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I’ll write up a detailed review of my experiences, but I migrated away after concluding the same. The project appears quite polished from the front, but when you get into it, many areas are stagnant.
There is a lot of promise here. I would encourage the developers to determine how much money they need to get two people full time on this project developing and another resource managing the community and fund raising - and consider reaching out to the community to fund it properly.
it seems like the project is avoiding public exposure… not advertising it self at all. If it’s your choice I’ll respect it (I’m not a paying user thought). I’d just wish the best to the project or to an eventual rebirth. I’m willing to pay for a good NAS software the ticks all the boxes, which for me are: bitrot detecting and self healing filesystem, linux based, security patches added promptly, good/healthy community kept in consideration by the project leaders
I would like to add I have the same concern. Rockstor is a very promising NAS operating system but there seem to be many significant rough edges underneath the shiny UI. Many critical aspects are still considered “in beta” and some key functionality is missing. There’s also the issue of kernel updates, supporting new hardware, security fixes, etc.
I’ve been looking hard at the main options and believe Rockstor fills a significant niche in terms of NAS operating systems. I’ve looked at:
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FreeNAS: It’s is the 800 pound gorilla of DIY NAS OS’s, and is funded by Ixsystems, but ZFS has has expensive hardware requirements and is relatively complex for a novice to set up. It’s also transitioning to a new GUI which has caused a new set of problems.
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OpenMediaVault: OMV is fairly solid, reasonably easy to set up, fairly well documented, well maintained and runs on even a Raspberry Pi. It’s probably the closest competitor to RockStor but it notably lacks an advanced file system like BTRFS or ZFS.
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UnRaid: This is a very interesting NAS OS and the key point is plenty are willing to pay for it. Perhaps Rockstor should adopt the UnRaid business model? It has lots of features and a unique data protection parity scheme that makes maximum use of available drive space. It has a ton of great features. Unfortunately it suffers in performance unless you use a cache SSD which creates other problems. It also prefers higher-end hardware and can get fairly complex in some areas.
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XigmasNAS (formerly NAS4Free): This is a stepchild of FreeNAS and lacks the support and documentation of FreeNAS. It’s also not very suitable for low-end or low power hardware. It does at least avoid the new GUI mess than FreeNAS is suffering.
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Commercial NAS OS’s: The two biggest are probably QTS by Qnap and DSM by Synology. Unfortunately, in my opinion, both companies have lost sight of what’s important. They’re so focused on adding every imaginable feature their marketing people can dream up their operating systems have become bloated, unstable, and full of security holes. Qnap has had 3 full releases in the last 3 weeks and the latest one has serious issues right out of the box such as constant high CPU usage. So bigger isn’t always better.
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Rockstor: It’s nicely designed to be relatively simple to install and set up, it uses BTRFS, has minimal hardware requirements, and it supports at least some of the most popular functionality. But, as with many open source projects, it looks like development efforts are fading and perhaps the current business model, and developer interest, is not sustainable?
Just for the record, you can use OpenMediaVault with BTRFS (see e.g. Using BTRFS withOMV), and in future that will become the default FS OMV uses. See here Proposal: Use BTRFS as default and only filesystem for data pools for the development team’s proposals.
I agree it is disappointing that Rockstor maintenance, especially keeping the Kernel up-to-date, has not been forthcoming. Sadly I’ve not got the skills to contribute much.
While I agree that the UI is still quite young, I’m not sure the list of what’s considered ‘beta’ has been updated in a while.
Realistically, the only things I’ve found a little short are multi-tiered sharing (or subvol tiering) and recovery options.
As recovery options for BTRFS are complex and entirely situation based, I can’t put the blame on that with the RS team.
Yah, but Rockstor isn’t really an OS so much as a few packages on top of one, this stems from the root operating system (CentOS).
As @phillxnet has alluded to a few times in the past, there is investigation into rebasing onto OpenSUSE which would alleviate this issue to a degree.
I suppose they could probably re-release new ISOs every now and again to support newer hardware tho.
A couple of things worth noting:
No, you can use OMV on top of BTRFS.
The difference here is that OMV doesn’t inherently understand BTRFS. It cannot manage BTRFS snapshots, consistency checking, balances or report reasonably accurate usage information (due to using du instead of btrfs fi usage.
It also cannot manage BTRFS volumes, it cannot create volumes/subvolumes, resize, change RAID levels, add or remove physical disks to a volume.
It may become the default FS that OMV uses.
The idea is currently a proposal with a lot of community push back.
No work has been done on BTRFS integration at this point that I can see in their source tree.
If they do start implementing it, it’ll still be quite a few revisions before it gets even close to Rockstor’s BTRFS capabilities (which compared to the capabilities are available still lag behind a bit!)
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not the biggest fan of how Rockstor has slowed their development cycle, and I’m especially disappointed in the fact that the ‘testing’ branch has become quite the opposite (in that people in the ‘stable’ branch now ostensibly run largely untested code), but I don’t think it’s fair to represent the competition as something that it simply isn’t.
All of this said, if you’re unsatisfied with the development cycle, you can always contribute, or even fork it (Hell, fork the daylights out of it!) and release you’re own, as it is GPL’d.
OMV works great on the pi, but on x86 I only had problems with it and hardware compatibility.
I agree that rockstor could use more publicity. I only found it by “accident” when I was looking for alternatives for OMV.
There is a lot of potential for rockstor… imo.
@Haioken I’m trying to get a feel for things around here being new. Do you still feel the same way as your comment from 6 months ago?
@ArmyHill01 Largely, yes - though I’d need to know what part you’re referring to, and to what capacity.
FYI - It looks on the surface as though Rockstor’s development has stalled (no updates available in UI for a while), however much of the work at the moment appears to be in preparing for the ability to use OpenSUSE as a base for the system. There are still recent commits to the github repository showing that the team is still around.
I continue to use Rockstor, and have had no particular issues (aside from those I caused myself) for quite a while.
Thanks man, appreciate the feedback.