Rockstor Fit for prime time?

Hi All,

I’ve allocated a couple of evenings now to Rockstor and i’m both quite impressed and a little worried at the same time.

I’ve seen some great stuff, but also seen more bugs than I can shake a stick at in terms of UI failures, things that just don’t work.

Some examples of issues I’ve seen:

  1. OpenVPN rockon doesn’t play well - won’t start ( and yes, i’ve done the additional setup steps and tried several installs )
  2. Another Rockon ( can’t remember which was in the same boat ).
  3. Replication - once the latest build at the time fixed whatever it broke (very quick fix - thanks), remote appliances are now available again, but I’m replicating 2 shares to the same remote pool and none of the UI really knows whats going on. Pool utilisation 300GB, share 16K for one and 2.3GB for the other. The big one just doesn’t appear. Things don’t seem to share out until the second replication etc. and the UI just doesn’t make it clean at all. Looking at the history of the ‘Personal share’ replication and it provides pages of details about the other replication rask - nothing I could find about the major volume. So looks like its not replicated, but its there on the pool filesystem.
  4. I managed to get into a position where I couldn’t delete a pool/disk as shares existed, but none shown in UI - went in manually and killed bits (thus having to work out the brtfs commands - not a great start ).

So thats just a couple of major issues I’ve seen over the last couple of evenings using the latest build.

So really not sure what do to - i’ve ported all my data over from Freenas in the hope for a slicker Linux based system, but really not sure i’ve made a mistake.

Can anyone else comment if these are recent issues, new functionality and/or i’ts just the current state of Rockstor thats not yet mature enough for real use ?

The support I got when I provided bug details of the broken appliance was excellent, but also, the number of bugs and the speed of release makes me think we’ve got a long way to go in terms of maturity of test cycles / processes etc.

This isn’t supposed to be a slating of Rockstor or a winge in general, I’m genuinely seeking advice from those using it for real and if these are really minor issues that ( probably won’t ) impact me in the core use of the product.

Thanks in advance

Simon

I am in the same boat. I went over from freenas for a solution that is similar to freenas but linux. The freenas system i migrated from didnt have much data, so wasnt hard to migrate. But I am having my issues with rock-ons myself. Crashplan will not start now. Emby doesnt show that i added storage now. They just disappeared. Be nice to easily see logs to my dockers to see exactly what is happening. I didnt have much to migrate on this one, but i have a media server i use at home, and it has lots of data on it. It is currently running unraid and i thought about rockstor cuz i like the benefits of btrfs. But as of right now, i dont think i will be switching that server for a while. Not until some of these issues get fixed.

Thanks for your constructive post @enly1. responses to specific points of yours below, but I’ll say this overall. The little regressions we are seeing lately are really annoying and being the main guy behind the project, a bit shameful too :frowning: . We are upping our testing game, but do keep in mind that Testing-updates have some chance of unreliability by definition. But they do get rectified pretty fast. For anything close to “prime time”, you should be on the Stable updates channel.

There’s still rawness to Rock-on support. While many of us use them in a prime time fashion, the whole feature set has not reached the stage of “set and forget”. There are open issues being addressed in the current milestone. Again, we are making improvements to our testing methods which will also help.

This is more of an issue of documentation and design. You’ll see the destination Share soon as 5 replication tasks finish. Until then, the data stays hidden in the UI. Again, there are a couple of open issues to make the design better and transparent. These issues are also at the top of the queue.

This is pretty bad. The state of Storage(Disks, Pools, Shares and Snapshots) is refreshed periodically and shouldn’t go out of sync by more than a couple of minutes. It would love to get more details and see what may have happened.

I’ll let others comment on this as I cannot be unbiased. But hopefully you can come to a conclusion based on above data points. I do appreciate constructive criticism like this because (1) it shines light on issues important to users and helps us prioritize better and (2) gives everyone the opportunity to track progress out in the open. Things do improve fast around here :slight_smile:

I’m not sure if it’s just because I’ve never used a full fledged NAS OS before, but I also feel it’s not quite ready. Unfortunately I decided this after I fully integrated it into my network. My main concerns center around the AD integration, I have to SSH into the box to rejoin the domain anytime the box is power cycled. Some other minor issues with the UI as well which aren’t that big on their own but do add up.

I just went back to freenas for now. I will keep an eye on it but it just didnt seem mature enough for me at this time. I was looking for something pretty stable and expandable. Right now I am running crashplan, and emby on free nas with no problems. I like the rockstor felt better but i cant make a choice on looks alone though. I hope it does improve though, because i really liked what I saw.

1 Like

The short answer is no, not yet.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean you should stop using it. It’s a fairly young project whereas freenas has been around for…what?..about 10 years? It’s still maturing so I, at least, expected some bugs and instability issues. It does pretty well at it’s primary function: storing and serving data. That, plus the active development team who are not only continually pushing out updates but are also fairly responsive to supporting users makes it worthwhile to continue to use.

Prime time is just a couple of seasons away.

2 Likes