New Rockstor appliance

[phillxnet (Philip Guyton)]

@jcdick1 Hello again.

@jcdick1

… Leap 15 for use temporarily that I might be able to later just lay Rockstor over top?

and

@jcdick1

f I install Leap and create a couple of virtual disks, one with spinning disk and one SSD, lay BTRFS on them, and export NFS from them, how might that be handled later by a Rockstor install potentially?

That’s a complex question as it would involve sketching out the current capabilities/limitations of Rockstors btrfs capabilities. And given you are obviously game to take a round about route, how about you try a source install of Rockstor on a generic (with some detailed config / package options) install of Leap 15.1. It’s now one of our intended targets in the openSUSE offerings (the other is Tumbleweed due to the cutting edge kernel / btrfs-progs).

There are 2 available references for this. It’s not for the linux beginner, but then you are obviously not a beginner, but on the other hand it’s also not that tricky either.

Big caveat is that it’s definitely at alpha stage, but if it works for you in the setting you have then great. And of course your input on what you find broken would also further the effort to move to openSUSE in the first place. Anyway I think it’s well worth a try as long as you are game to potentially jury rig a thing or two or three in the process. I’m currently working on backend infrastructure which in turn will enable the release of openSUSE rpms anyway and the current master branch can transition itself from source install to rpm install so when those testing rpms do become available that system should be able to convert in place to an rpm based Rockstor install. Although all settings (the db) will be wiped but that can be aliviated in part anyway via a config backup prior. Also not you will have to install via source NOT in /opt/rockstor. I suggest /opt/rockstor-dev.

To the two key doc resources on this:

The Developers subsection of our
Contributing to Rockstor - Overview doc section.

Slightly more on topic is our developer centric wiki entry:

Built on openSUSE dev notes and status

This document represents the current and pending state of our move to openSUSE as our linux distro base for Rockstor and is not an endorsement of it’s use or support status but is simply intended to share the progress and development made to date. It is intended as a developers document so any changes made should be in accordance with keeping this text up to date with the current code state, including in this case pending pr’s. If you wish to comment on our openSUSE move in general, as opposed …

which give openSUSE specific instructions on how to do a source (developer) install of Rockstor.

You might also want to take note of all issues in the GitHub rockstor-core repo that begin with [openSUSE].

At least this way you should, once we have the openSUSE rpms rolling, transition over and also ensure that your btrfs configuration is consistent with what Rockstor can manage. Take note however that current master is what stable channel subscribers are currently using and this is not guaranteed to be the case with our initial openSUSE offering (though it is very likely).

Hope that helps and do bear in mine that that the openSUSE function is very much a work in progress. Also note that we are testing against Tumbleweed also so that might also be of interest if you also have install difficulties with Leap 15.1 (currently in beta and one of our targets).

Progress reports and pics most welcome, along with focused GitHub issues, and remember to specify [openSUSE] in their title if they pertain only to the openSUSE base.

I should be able to move back to this openSUSE move, code wise, once I have the back-end infrastructure project mostly underway.