[Solved] How hosed am I? (cleared out the database) [turns out: not *that* hosed]

[phillxnet (Philip Guyton)]

@doenietzomoeilijk Thanks for you feedback here. As per:

@doenietzomoeilijk

If anything, the only thing that could be changed is feedback; I had uploaded an un-gziped version of the JSON at first, which resulted in nothing at all happening after I tried to restore that - that could’ve either notified me of the error I was making, or it could’ve gone and actually accept the un-gziped JSON.

Definitely. This is bad / buggy behaviour: Fancy opening a GitHub issue for that one.

@doenietzomoeilijk

Also, the feedback from the import itself was mostly me peering in the logs, so yeah, that could change. Then again, afaik there’s no message queue like system in RS at the moment, and since the handling of the import is async, messaging would have to be as well.

Yes, a definite weakness currently. There has been some discussion on this in the following GitHub issue where @maxhq and @henfri give examples of using logcheck to ‘filter’ logs and generate email reports:

Alerts and notifications

We could take the same approach with extract and forward the config-restor log entries. But of course there may be a chicken and egg situation going on there with regard to email. But it may play a part in the initial filtering element.

And there is also @Flyer’s issue which sits at a different level (more Web-UI feedback related):

[New feature] Add Notifications API

@doenietzomoeilijk

One final thing, apart from imports, might be the UI to import an existing system user into RS, to bring them under RS control. No idea how feasible that actually is, but I had one or two users that I added from the command line, and I’d love to see those in the proper list as well. But that’s a separate issue, really.

Yes that’s a tricky one as if a user was added from command line it really isn’t a Rockstor user. But maybe it would be ‘sane’ to add an existing user as Rockstor managed during a config restore. To me that make sense. If you agree please feel free to make an additional GitHub issue with that as a request. I think the ability to change an existing user, via the Web-UI into a managed users is a little more complicated and definitely a different case. But restoring a user does rather pre-define that they were once added so is a much clearer case. Nice find.

@doenietzomoeilijk

As for the Rockons - the reason I was considering going with a third party solution in the first place, was to be independent of containers being available as Rockons, basically. I’m comfortable enough with Docker to get it to do what I want, anyway, so in many cases it’s easier to just fire up a docker-compose file than to add it through the UI.

Yes, that makes sense. And is of course one of the big wins of building on top of a general purpose Linux OS. More power to you, which of course there will be as any UI, especially one that caters to democratising such things will necessarily limit the available options: if for no other reason than there would be pages of them otherwise given modern software’s capabilities. But I stand by the simplifications that Rockstor instantiates as it’s good for all of us at one time or another.

@doenietzomoeilijk

My problem is solved, as it turns out I’m not all that hosed, really.

Cool: and thanks for sharing your experience on this one. And do please consider creating the one or two GitHub issues, as you see fit, as I think they are worthy candidates for future improvements.

And as per the Rock-on docker doubling up, remember there is always the following:

Force RockOn cleanup in postgres

@magicalyak Hello again, good ideas. Have you had a look at the currently undocumented: It was added to ‘force’ remove ‘problematic’ named rock-ons. One at a time, and might be a good place to start with extending such ‘emergency’ maintenance tools re rock-ons.

which might get you out of a dead end where that to happen, but that is of course once they are in the db. But good to know going forward.

Thanks for the update and feedback and glad you managed to claw you way out