I’ll start my journey in this forum with small information why I ended up trying Rockstor in a first place. I have been using Linux based disk sharing since late 90s and OpenMediaVault for few years now. However, out of curiosity (and due to some stability issues in OMV) I decided to check if there are any alternatives.
I kind of liked how the Rockstor is built and I decided that I’ll give it a try. But before investing in new hardware I will do some tests on VMs just to see if everything works as I like. The idea of simple replication of one share to another in completely different location is a big thing for me. Especially I like that I don’t have to manually set up rsync or similar to achieve this.
So far I have played with two VMs doing the replication between them. I run raid10 setup with multiple small disk images images just to see if everything works as I would expect. With 5.0.5 the replication seems to be broken, but sticking to 4.X seems to be OK (although there were some failures in some replication tasks).
I might be asking some specific questions at some point, but first I need to figure out that the issues are not caused by errors in my configurations.
Welcome to the Rockstor community. Let’s hope, this will work to your satisfaction, and that the next stable release in the near future will further the stability of Rockstor. 5.0.5 is just one stop towards that, with some loose ends still need to be tied up.
For the replication, while I don’t have very much experience, there has been (among others) a recent thread, where @phillxnet pointed out that replication takes some time to settle once started up.
In that same convo there is also some further discussion around “resume” of replications, or the lack thereof. I don’t think anything has changed in that respect, at least I couldn’t find any more recent updates when browsing the btrfs wiki information.
In my case the issue was that the replication service did not even start. For a while it was “on”, but before any replication attempts it went back to “off”. Maybe I’ll upgrade my test VMs on weekend and try it again. In case of issues I might start a separate thread with some logs in the Troubleshooting category.
Yesterday evening I installed a VM for “semi-production use” with direct access to few old SATA drives I had lying around. The intention is to test the the setup with larger amount of data.
Yesterday I tried the upgrade few times (with VM snapshots) and I always ended in situation where the replication does not work. I created a topic to Support category about the issue. I like the facth that the error dialog provided a direct link to create the topic.
Today I spent some time on security. I could not figure out if it was possible to encrypt the root disk with Rockstor installer, so I decided to install vanilla openSUSE and then add Rockstor on top of that. After few trials I got it working nicely, so now I have a test system with /boot uncloked (with dracut-ssh-unloc) and /root encrypted. The data disks are also encypted with LUKS.
Hi, I’m too in need of dracut-ssh-unlock (not necessarily for / but for data pool). Currently rockstor’s secure implementation needs it in boot and my secondary NAS is in another country and does not have KVM built-in. Do you have any tutorial to have that in OpenSUSE?
I just did it with trial and error. Basically the steps were (out of my head, might be that I miss some steps):
Install vanilla openSUSE, but create separate partition for /boot as brtfs. Rest of the filesystems can be done with default (automatic) settings. This is to avoid encryption of the /boot.
The full-disk-encryption repository must be added to system. Rest of the dcaut-ssh-unlock is descibed there in Overview .
Just as an FYI. I experimented a bit with the full disk encryption for Rockstor during the installation. It obviously requires a slightly different installer than the one we have in the downloads section.
I built a new one using our kiwi-ng installer repo, but had to jump through a couple of hoops (at this time) to get it to work. In principle the kiwi installer supports the full disk LUKS encryption during installation.
I did not go further with the dracut-ssh-unlock piece mentioned above since that was not my focus.
I have documented my research so far in a new issue here:
While there might never be an officially downloadable installer for a full LUKS encryption, we will try to make it straightforward to roll your own using the installer repo.
