Rock-on requests

[Flox]

Hi @ArmyHill01, and welcome to the community!

Thanks a lot for sharing your experience and feedback, I personally particularly appreciate and welcome it .

I agree with you that Portainer is a very useful tool for those with an existing setup and needing complete customization. I myself am using it for this reason .

@ArmyHill01

I’d really like to be able to just turn off Rockstor’s docker integration and be allowed to completely decouple Rockstor from Docker. That way I can get the latest and greatest and do my own thing

My first reaction was: “yes, you can indeed just turn on the Rock-on service (which starts the docker daemon), and then simply set up your own containers whichever way you want (via portainer, for instance)”. I then wondered whether you would also mean controlling which docker version you install and with which settings, etc… This case would, too, be doable, but I can’t guarantee what would happen if you attempt to turn on the Rock-on service later on. Indeed, turning on the Rock-on service for the first time set the docker.service configuration with some slight customization to better fit with rockstor’s system (and btrfs, mostly). This is the step that might introduce some incompatibility if you were to first install and run your docker version on your own and at a later time decide to turn on the Rock-on service, as your previous configuration may get overridden and the different docker version (if any) may be incompatible with that configuration. Note, however, that this is based on my memory and I’ve never tested that so I actually may be wrong and everything be smooth.

Most importantly, note that Rockstor is in currently transitioning to a rebase onto openSUSE (see updates and rationale in a separate post by @phillxnet and his other posts therein). Under this process, there is a current pull request proposing to simply source the docker.service configuration straight from the docker package itself (and then apply rockstor’s settings–including the user defined ones–on top of that).

Source docker.service configuration from package in openSUSE

I’m unsure of exactly which docker version will be shipped, but I believe it will simply provided by upstream directly, so either openSUSE Leap 15.1, or Tumbleweed… the latter should be the latest and greatest, I believe. @phillxnet, am I correct with that one?

@ArmyHill01

I totally get having a click and run solution for those users not interesting in having a complex container configuration

Yes, that’s personally what helped me at first to get acquainted to docker and its ecosystem. I progressively became more familiar with it and started feeling some limitations that the rock-on system had at the time to get a few more “customized” configurations. I personally do see a very interesting opportunity to provide an easy way for unfamiliar users to set up more complex containers configurations provided some improvements to the current rock-ons framework. On this topic, there has been quite a bit of work done lately and I personally have an upcoming series of rework to implement docker networking into Rockstor. You can read more on this in the issue below and the links therein if interested:

[Rock-ons] UI for adding a new docker network

For this reason, I am particularly looking forward to hearing more about the following:

@ArmyHill01

Rockstor’s “Rock-ons” honestly put a bad taste in my mouth right off the bat

Was there something in particular that you would like to see or not to see? As you can probably guess from above, I’m interested in getting as much feedback as I can and getting as many suggestions for improvement as possible, so your experience seems to be very helpful for me–pending you’d be willing to share the gist of it.

Welcome again to the community!