@samjam I can chip in on this one.
“Why do we even have that lever?” Exactly.
Answer: we don’t any more: Please see our new Rockstor 4 installer in our docs here:
https://rockstor.com/docs/installer-howto/installer-howto.html
Your experience exclamation was mirrored by mine when I first encountered Rockstor (3 something way back). And I only later discovered that it inherits and re-badges the generic CentOS installer but fails to fully constrain stuff that is later garbage to the rest of Rockstor code Web-UI. Now we have a far more ‘sane’ installer as per our very tightly configured kiwi-ng configuration here:
And that same repo contains the current instructions on building your own installer on what is our current effort: Rockstor 4 “Built on openSUSE”. No download as of yet but soon. However it will be build with those exact instructions and a plus is that all pending updates are pre-installed at the time of the installer being build.
We are keen for this DIY installer method to be widely understood as then folks will not have to wait for our next ISO download to get all the latest upstream updates. We did used to have instructions on building our installer but they received almost no community input. This last attempt has been far more successfull in that regard and we now have several contributors and have even had a profile added by a Hardware innovator i.e. the Leap15.2.ARM64EFI profile for Arm servers or the Ten64 platform. Plus we have a Pi4 profile in case that is of interest.
Hopefully this helps to answer at least part of your question. And yes, I at least plan to add this to our main web page shortly, hence the following issues in our newly oped GitHub repo for our main website:
and:
I’m afraid you have joined us at a transition period where our CentOS install is now way old (read dinosaur) and our “Build on openSUSE” installer is in pre-release. And the newest Rockstor version/package is in Release Candidate 8 (4.0.7-0):
This is significantly newer than our last release on the CentOS variant which was:
Released 14 months ago.
And if one build your own Rockstor 4 installer it will be up-to-date from upstream at least up to and including the day you built it. Where as our dinosaur legacy installer on the now legacy CentOS base was released nearly 4 years ago:
If you do give the new DIY installer a go, which is fitting for a DIY NAS software solution, do report back on your findings as many forum members have now built their won and so far all feedback has been fed back into assisting with the documentation/process. It’s non trivial but not far from it for those who also have the skills to DIY NAS. But yes a download would be easier but also static and less empowering overall. In time we will have frequent automated builds of our installer but that time is now now. But soon hopefully.
Cheers. And I share/shared your frustration on this one. All in good time is the hope.