Leaving rockstor

[phillxnet (Philip Guyton)]

@dont Welcome to the Rockstor community.

@dont

ressurect my old FreeNAS server. Couldn’t update to the most recent version due to the fact that my mobo only has 2gb onboard.

Yes 2 GB is really a very bare minimum these days and is our minimum Ram specification as it goes. But as long as you don’t run a large pool and don’t run many Rock-ons you should be OK. Also don’t use the btrfs parity raid levels of 5/6 as they are less well able to cope with lower memory conditions and are younger implementations as well.

@dont

Plus the fact that it uses CentOS.

As posted previously in this thread our new Testing Channel is actually openSUSE Leap 15.1+ only and upon reaching Stable status we will be moving over, in time, to only releasing openSUSE rpms but for both Channels.

@dont

At first there were some hassles but it didn’t stop me yet.

Yes our ISO is now 2.5 years old. But our new one will be openSUSE based and we have to get our openSUSE based offering into shape before we release that one. But it’s in private alpha test currently.

@dont

However OpenVPN, Crashplan didn’t succeeded. And although I cleaned all unused containers/settings I still can’t get these rock-ons working.

There may be hints in my last post on this as our ISO release (essentially 3.9.1 and our testing channel, 3.9.1-16 (a few months newer) both still use older docker and we have moved to docker-ce in our testing channel for openSUSE. Or you could try a stable subscription to get the latest, I see you have contributed a rock-on json in another post so lets circle back around to a stable subscription in that thread .

@dont

Oh yes system shell doesn’t work!! But ssh is fine with me.

Try changing it’s mode, we had an early bug on this, see the spanner icon next to it’s name in the System - Services. That should fix that one hopefully. But works more reliable in our newer offerings. Again lets circle back around to that one in your other thread:

Node-Red rock-on

Hi, I managed to install the Node-Red container thru the Rock-on UI. I just wanted to test the system and it’s working great. This is the JSON code: { “Node-Red”: { “containers”: { “nodered”: { “image”: “nodered/node-red”, “launch_order”: 1, “ports”: { “1880”: { “description”: “Node-Red WebUI port. Suggested default: 1880”, “host_default”: 1880, “label”: “WebUI port”, “ui”: true } }, “volumes”: { “/shared”: { “description”: “Choose a Share for Node-Red. Eg: create a Share cal…

@dont

Oh yes system shell doesn’t work!! But ssh is fine with me.

@dont

Is there any development with Rockstor? This forum seems to be a bit outdated.

Our last stable release was 3rd April (11 days ago) and they are Announced / documented in the following thread currently for the 3.9.2-* releases:

3.9.2-# Stable Channel Changelog

3.9.2-55 Merged 10-11th March 2020 Released 13th March 2020 (UK Friday !!) Tempting fete with a Friday the 13th release we finally have a slightly delayed 3.9.2-55. This release is particularly important for Apple users as our intrepid forum moderator and prolific code/doc/rock-on/forum contributor @Flox has now established our first implementation of Time Machine capable Samba share export capability. All hidden behind a little tick: [Time-Machine-Tick] This brings us right up to date wi…

Also see our rejuvenated “Built on openSUSE” Testing Channel effort:

Built on openSUSE testing channel live (early-adopters/developers only)

As per more recent changes to our Update Channels docs and following our ongoing developer doc: We now have very early testing channel rpms available for openSUSE Leap15.1 / Leap15.2, and Tumbleweed (but only if you have the required python2 libs grandfathered in). All variants are now close to feature parity with our CentOS offering and getting closer all the time. I would like to inviting linux proficient / ideally developer capable forum members to try these rpms out. Another prerequisite …

But as yet no installer for that one.

We also have a Rock-ons Announcements (form tag) thread here:

Rock-ons changelog

Introduction As the rock-on system has gained a lot of popularity within Rockstor, it has now become important to provide a dedicated place to better keep track of its evolution and --most importantly-- to announce significant updates to our community. The purpose of this thread will thus be to announce changes to the list of available rock-ons; be it the addition of a new rock-on, its replacement, or a notable update. N.B.: Inherent to this purpose, this thread will remained locked but we ar…

last updated 18 days ago as of writing.

I’ll continue this discussion on your newly submitted Rock-on post referenced earlier.

Thanks for the feed back, much appreciated.

[b8two]

It is not encouraging at all, I must say.

Hi there,

I’ve had an experiment going with Rockstor for a couple of months now.
For a BTRFS based NAS project, there are slim pickings.

I’ve made an installation that was indicated as will work however is not recommended. (USB system pen Drive)

From what I can tell is that BTRFS was started with support by RedHat, CentOS and SUSE linux but CentOS have fallen behind in supporting the latest and greatest of BTRFS and that is where Rockstor need to be, hence there has been major effort porting across. This is the backgrond to the no Public releases.

As for the target market of the project, I’m not clear who that is.
It somewhat suits be Me clearly, however there are things that I’d prefer was done differently. e.g. Appliance type deployment.
There are Rockons that the target market is home users but also some that could be more, however I have been unable to get them working. (Web based office suite).

Once I have time to change my “USB system pen Drive” configuration, perhaps I’ll have a less tainted example of how it is performing.

[thedrjones (Simon Lee)]

I’ve been using RockStor for almost 3 years now. I use an SSD as my main system drive and a quartet of hard disks in a RAID-1 pool. Using BTRFS means I can easily upgrade disk sizes as needed, which is not as simple a task on a ZFS filesystem.

The CentOS 7 version of RockStor is now very old, the distribution’s stock kernel does not work with a lot of new hardware, most obviously some of the AMD Ryzen motherboards. There has been a long journey to port functionality over to the OpenSUSE, thanks to a handful of handful of supporting developers. When the OpenSUSE build is ready (in the coming weeks by the sound of it), it will be a much more up to date and well supported target compared with CentOS going forward.

OpenSUSE places BTRFS front and centre - it’s stock installer defaults to using BTRFS for the root file system, whereas on CentOS’s stock installer it was an optional, rather than recommended, approach. RedHat (the upstream origin of CentOS) have made it clear they do not recommend use of BTRFS.

I think RockStor is a similar target market to other bring your own hardware and tinker storage solutions (e.g. FreeNAS and the like). I find the NAS in a box solutions like Synology compromised (i.e. low powered processors, or limits on what the OS can do), so while I may recommend them for friends and family, I want more. I enjoy building new or re-purposing old hardware to fit my data hoarding needs. I don’t want our private household data obtainable from the latest cloud service breach, nor do I want a delay when want to open one of my 25MB raw photographs for editing.

RockOns are quite useful to me, I’ve run a few of them untouched and also a handful of custom ones which expand on the ones in the repository (e.g. an Emby one where I can plug in my individual shares at creation rather than adding the extra shares several times). Building or expanding them is quite easy, but it does require use of a text editor and a name that does not conflict with the repository.

The handy thing with having a solid Linux distribution is that we have access to all it can do, so I also use KVM on my server to run an always on desktop which I occasionally connect to when in a hotel over a VPN connection to access documents on my Rockstor box.

I have some much newer hardware I plan to deploy when the OpenSUSE image is available for use. I am looking forward to moving across my existing arrays for a quick replacement of my now 6-8 year old hardware depending on which bit you look at. The biggest bonus to me being a more up to date KVM build, where USB forwarding might actually work and working on Ryzen processors without fiddling with custom kernels.

[dont]

My 2 cents …euro for me

I stumbled accross Rockstor in an older review (top 10 best NAS software).
The description, the looks …it felt good. At first I had troubles installing Rockstor on my older, self-build system. But after a few tries I got the system working.

The rock-on system had my special interest, not the btfrs part. I managed very quickly to install pi-hole and some other rock-ons. Since I’m a huge fan of domotica I wanted to run Node-Red on my Rockstor system. I managed easily to get Node-Red running. Then @phillxnet asked me to make a pull-request.

My first encounter with GitHub. Oh boy I had some troubles to understand the system but along the way I really got the learn GitHub and the way Rockstor is working. So at the end I was really happy with Rockstor.

My pros:

• running on older hardware (> 8 years)
• runs smoothly with just 2gb RAM. I have 4 rock-ons (pi-hole, node-red, sabnzb, watchtower).
• runs CentOS (we’re running Rhel at work)
• Stable subscription (easy updates)
• Rock-ons
• Can use some other third-party software (purevpn, portainer). Yes it survives reboots

My Cons:

• The move to OpenSuse …some sort! Have to learn OpenSuse

Next step will be configuring a new system and install the new Rockstor/OpenSuse build.

Cheers,

J.