New Here... and new at Linux

General
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Figured I’d introduce myself, since being fairly inexperienced with Linux I’ll probably be spending a bit of time engaging the brain trust here for help and guidance.

I’ve settled in after a couple of weeks of research and testing several NAS solutions and I think I’ve settled on Rockstor for a number of reasons. One of the big reasons is that it’s based on CentOS which I have some (though rather limited) experience with from where I work. Some of the core issues I will have (and I like to tinker so I WILL end up breaking something), so I know I can get help from them as well. Also, having a working CentOS distro to work with will help me learn more for work… so win win.

Thus far, I’ve successfully installed and configured RS on an old repurposed AMD Dual Core box and is running nice. Spent quite a bit of time on the forums, lots of information here helped get me running. I’ve even been able to successfully install the LSI server so I can remotely view and configure my Raid controller. Yes, I’m running a hardware based Raid vice the recommended software Raid… more for similarities with work infrastructure… learn as I go (and I got the card very cheaply).

I’m still having issues with configuring my UPS (APC XS-1300), but I think there’s an issue with NUT as I couldn’t configure on other NAS distro’s either. This is something I’ll be looking at sometime in the future. I am also thinking of trying to get apcupsd working instead, since there’s a network GUI and I should be able to access remotely (or at least that’s what I think I’m reading). I haven’t spent much time on it yet, was able to get APC to work at the command line but not over the network. Be a couple of weeks before I can experiment again.

I have one more immediate question or concern, though. Since I work in a production environment, I’m a firm believer in backups and trying configurations in a test environment. Thus far, I’ve been unsuccessful in cloning the USB stick hosting the OS on another USB stick. I’ve tried using a couple of tools, more on the Windows side, but ended up “killing” the second USB stick. The thought is that when I try and install or experiment, I don’t want to break my stable copy. If I kill the test environment OS, I can simply start over. I can do some in a virtual environment on Windows, but it’s not quite the same as running on the actual box.

Anyway, a couple more weeks of testing configurations and recovery and I think I’ll be set. Once I do, I will be looking into the subscriptions to keep up. But please bear with me if I do come up with newbe questions, particularly when trying CLI and more advanced stuff with the program.

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@superfrog73 Welcome to the Rockstor community.

From a quick look at the NUT harware compatibility list nearest I could find, model wise, was “BACK-UPS XS LCD USB” which uses the usbhid-ups driver. Did you try that one? Also have you seen the UPS / NUT Setup section of the official Rockstor docs? NUT also has network capability so that might well serve in that capacity.

If that NUT drive doesn’t work then there is also the apcupsd-ups driver which I think is some kind of bridge between apcupsd (which stands outside of NUT) and NUT itself. But I’m not sure and have never used this arrangement myself.

As for cloning the USB key you could try imaging it on a Linux system and writing the image to the other usb key. But you must be sure to never plug the 2 keys into any one linux system at the same time as this will corrupt the root partition on one or both keys.

Hope that helps.

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Thanks for the reply phillxnet… actually figured out the UPS. For NUT, yes I used that driver and a number of other recommended settings in NUT without any success. Again, reading on the net for solutions, looks like this is rather hit and miss for this UPS (it’s getting quite aged…) I had been experimenting with apcupsd-ups with only command line success. Just getting into Linux, I couldn’t find where cgi-bin was, this is where the apcupsd-cgi is supposed to be to host the remote view. Did some more research and digging in the command line, realized I needed to yum install httpd first. Then I installed apcupsd-cgi again. The cgi folder for the ups then simply needed to be copied into the /var/www/cgi-bin folder (was in /var/www/). Now I have my remote view. Can’t change settings, but that I can do at CLI if I need to.

Learning was acomplished!