This may be a silly question, but do you absolutely have to purchase multiple support subscriptions if you plan on building more than one appliance for home use in order to keep them all up to date?
@hammerite Welcome to the Rockstor community.
Hopefully the following Update Channels doc entry will answer your question in part; but it’s a little outdated currently.
For the last few months only the stable release channel has been supported for Rockstor updates via rpm. All the rockstor-core repo code is GPL and can be built from scratch (see: Developers doc entry) but the convenience of the rpm update is via a hopefully mutually beneficial subscription system. This update channel subscription is not a support subscription, paid support is however available at understandably considerably greater cost via the shop under Incident-Based support.
Sustaining open source software is a tricky thing, especially financially, and the subscription model for convenient updates, along with the independent previously referenced incident based support, is part of Rockstor’s current sustainability model.
So having gotten that out of the way, currently the only frequently updated rpm release of Rockstor is via the stable channel, per install, subscription which is built directly from the fully open source master branch of Rockstor. That is each versioned release is taken directly from the head of the master branch at that time.
For the Rockstor code itself no, you can build directly from the source code on as many machines and you have, but note that the db contents will be deleted each time so a reconfiguration will be required there after. That code is identical to that used in the stable subscription rpm installs. In the case of rpm convenience updates, currently yes: if you mean update channel subscription, rather than Incident-Based support. But there is quite an active community here on the forum where many issues have been raised and resolved over the years.
Also note that although many features and bug fixes have been added in stable, many users / forum members get by just fine with the latest currently available testing channel update. But note that for the replication feature between the machines you will need the fixes in stable (or current master branch code) to be on both machines.
Another angel to this is the rather nice but possible less obvious Web-UI option to update everything but the Rockstor package via the flashing indicator to the left of the kernel version indicator to the right side of the header bar:
This will apply all upstream (CentOS) updates but leave the Rockstor package at it’s current version.
See how you get on with subscribing to one of the channels and then updating to what ever is available, but the most recent code is either on GitHub ready to build or available via the hopefully mutually beneficial stable channel subscription.
I would rather not Rockstor go the way of Openfiler, another accomplished NAS that is sadly no longer maintained, and so essentially dead. Constant development is key to any software project, especially the larger ones. And without any sustainability model, or financial backing, that is a very difficult thing to achieve.
Apologies if I’ve gone on here, it’s potentially a prickly / tricky subject; though getting less so as more GPL projects adopt similar models in order to survive. And if you go from latest testing to stable note that you will need a ‘yum update rockstor’ as we have a catch 22 bug left over in the last released version of testing channel:
https://github.com/rockstor/rockstor-core/issues/1870
Hope that helps to answers your question.
Thanks, I went ahead and purchased a 3 years code, however I haven’t actually received the activation code yet.
I emailed suman@rockstor.com but the email was deferred.
@hammerite Thanks for helping to support Rockstor’s development.
The code usually comes through after a few minutes, I suspect this has something to do with the email failure:
I’ll pick this issue up on your other thread.