[SOLVED] WHAT? NO FILE MANAGER or

Features
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Two things really, and these are very important to me!

  1. Can’t log in a basic terminal shell as ROOT or ADMIN. They put me in the BuggyAllScaryHickups (BASH) shell which may be nice for scripting Gurus and totally useless for Average Joe.

This is MY PERSONAL SYSTEM, every dime spent (and it’s a lot!) is mine and I want 100% control to kernal level. EASY control. I want the power to totally upgrade or totally and repeatedly TRASH my setup. I want a terminal window that let’s me format the boot drive if I want!

  1. WHY IN HEAVENS NAME do we not have a GUI File Manager like Nemo or Nautilus somewhere? Good Grief 1000 times that seems like a basic MUST HAVE from the get go!!

Please fix these somehow in the next 60 minutes… (lmao!!!) JK!!! LOL!!!

Thanks!

LOL!

:sunglasses:

PS: Nemo or Nautilus could operate ONLY on the share level out if you want… or make it configurable so I can delete the /bin and /etc directories if I want…

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@Tex1954
for your first item on the login … not entirely clear what you are asking for there? Is the issue with the web-based Terminal, or the connection using a client like PuTTY?

on the GUI File Manager, you could either create (and submit) a rockon based on any of these docker containers:
https://hub.docker.com/r/djaydev/krusader
https://hub.docker.com/r/silverwind/droppy
https://hub.docker.com/r/filebrowser/filebrowser
https://hub.docker.com/r/mtabishk/nautilus-ubuntu

or, of course, just install them directly from the docker command line.

2 Likes
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  1. Can’t log in a basic terminal shell as ROOT or ADMIN. They put me in the BuggyAllScaryHickups (BASH) shell which may be nice for scripting Gurus and totally useless for Average Joe.

That is a basic terminal shell on a UNIX-like system, and usually the default in almost any UNIX-like OS. You could edit /etc/passwd and change the shell for those users to sh if you want even more basic. If you’re talking about the web shell in the GUI, not sure if that’s able to be changed, but you can always type “sh” once you’re in it to change to a shell that has less capabilities than Bash. Shells aren’t intended for the Average Joe.

This is MY PERSONAL SYSTEM, every dime spent (and it’s a lot!) is mine and I want 100% control to kernal level. EASY control. I want the power to totally upgrade or totally and repeatedly TRASH my setup. I want a terminal window that let’s me format the boot drive if I want!

Rockstor is really just a polished interface on top of a UNIX-like OS, and the developers aren’t going to include things in the interface to allow someone to easily do something incredibly stupid. But, if you want to nuke the contents of a partition, “fdisk” from the shell will let you do that.

  1. WHY IN HEAVENS NAME do we not have a GUI File Manager like Nemo or Nautilus somewhere? Good Grief 1000 times that seems like a basic MUST HAVE from the get go!!

Likely because Rockstor is a storage solution and not a file manager. It’s intended to store files, not manage files. But, great news is Rockstor allows for you to add what you need pretty much through Rock-Ons. There’s plenty of docker containers for file managers, and I’m sure someone here if they have the time could create and submit a rock-on or help you create one on your local system.

or make it configurable so I can delete the /bin and /etc directories if I want…

Open a shell, and as root do:

rm -rf /bin
rm -rf /etc

Don’t cry when your system no longer works.

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LOL! I never cry when I crash a system! I ALWAYS have an SSD backup to swap in!

Thanks for BOTH replies. I can’t get into ROOT directory or even HOME directories at present the way I would from a simple linux terminal on the RockNAS keyboard or thru SSH… I’m still working on that and other things that I will (brag?) talk about later.

Adding a file manager as a Rockon might be the way to go and I will tell you exactly the reason why now!

In my setup, I have several TBs of data, (mostly audio/video/Dashcam files) that I need to work on and want the data/changes backed up as work is done. For that, the front end of my setup has a RAID-0 component to serve my workstation (Ryzen 9 5950X being built at same time) over a 10Gb fiber network.

I have so many files that a 4TB mirror is 95% filed and another 1.8TB is used on a second 4TB mirror.

So, setup at present is two 4TB RAID-1 setups that will feed into and out of a working RAID-10 setup that can keep up with the LAN speed…

I need a file manager to move working files into and out of the RAID-10 setup into either of the two 4TB Raid-1 setups because it will be a slow process. I need this so the moving process is on the local machine and not across the network because I will be moving terabytes at times…

I have two 1TB m.2 drives on the workstation motherboard for fast working storage and SSD for boot and Local 4TB drive for a bit more storage.

To tell you the truth, I am about to setup a test system and install openSUSE Leap 15.3 and see if it works easier by itself just because there is no local file manager on RockStor. I am totally sold on Btrfs though… everything about it seems better than any other storage file system I have messed with including ZFS.

And the bottom line on the other comments is:

If you make me have to research and learn BASH commands or other container widget things, then it isn’t push-button friendly and not suited for Joe Amature use… BUT YOU ARE SO CLOSE!!!

RockStor is so super close to being a push-button solution for the masses that it isn’t funny!

Someone added rockons for Plex and other media server types etc., why not a local share level file manager??? If it had a share level file manager, I would be happy and done! All I want to do is copy/paste from some shared directory to another like Windows Explorer could do, but in the local machine.

So close to a perfect NAS is RockStor… wouldn’t other folks like to copy another employee’s share directory files into their share directory the fastest way? Call admin, admin invokes GUI and selects File Manager and it’s done!!!

:sunglasses:

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That’s why the creation of a Rockon that encapsulates all the container widget things would make it more push-button friendly, and it only needs to be done once, so the community can benefit from it :slight_smile:.
If you figure how to do this once, then you can do it for any other additional functionality that you need but is not part of the base system, and we will all benefit from it. Using @Flox’s instruction from here: https://github.com/rockstor/rockon-registry
to create a json file for any of the above options of file manager should make it fairly easy to do for this use case.

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Maybe I will give it a try…we will see…

:sunglasses:

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When I need to do data moves between shares on the same box I either use rsync (CLI required) or midnight commander (more of a graphical interface) via SSH. The latter is a great Linux ‘File Manager’.

Midnight commander is not installed by default, so zypper in mc will install it.

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Forgot to say, I’m totally with you there.

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Before I even look into it, some obvious differences in the way the disks are handled present obvious problems with a local file manager…

  1. Current file managers work at the disk level and share (in general) directories off the disk. It can always see everything not hidden. Rockstor operates at the POOL level where it gets all that power to add and subtract hardware.

  2. A SAFE file manager would have to work at the SHARE level in Rockstor, the same way a common file manager would/could map into a Samba share.

  3. The only way I see to do any development or testing is to get Leap 15.3 running on a separate system because no matter what I do, the ONLY shell I can get into with Rockstor is that BASH shell. I haven’t been able to change directories or any other simple things in BASH and I dare say I will not be forced to learn another scripting widget to do so.

If I do anything at all, it will be on a separate setup where I can play to my hearts content unobstructed… In fact, it might be fun… we will see.

For now, my setup will stay the same and I will live with the long transfer times over the slow 10G network…

:sunglasses:

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PS: zypper is the Apt-Get, YUM, equivalent I think, but what is mc? And RSync isn’t what I really need…

:sunglasses:

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zypper is the package management tool
zypper in is the install command option
mc is the midnight commander package
So the following command in SSH will install midnight commander:
zypper in mc

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Also your Rockstar pools/shares are mounted at /mnt2
So, if you have a pool called Live, and a share in there called Data, it will be available at

/mnt2/Live/Data

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I know… it’s so easy for guru’s… just not me…

:sunglasses:

rn

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@Tex1954 I can chip in on the shell difficulties here.

You appear to be logged in as Admin. And my be using he Web-UI which uses a chroot environment. What you may be more familiar with is working as the root ( read all powerfull/dangerouns) user. When you did the Rockstor 4 install it requested the root user password be set at that point. See the following doc section:

https://rockstor.com/docs/installer-howto/installer-howto.html#enter-desired-root-user-password

So if you do something equivalent to say:

ssh root@machine-name-here

you will get a full and non chroot bash shell. Plus Bash (Bourne again sh) is the norm on linux so you should be at home from there on.

As out embeded terminal faces a few more security concerns we run it as a chroot by default I think.

The “admin” bit in your above

admin@rocknas

indicates the user you are logged in as. If you wish to substitute this user for say root you can do

su

Which might be read as super-user, but I believe it stands for substitute user and if non is specified then it defaults to the root user.

One has to be a root user to run zypper. We are a pretty standard openSUSE Leap under-the-hood so anything you read for that will be the case for if you are ssh ing in from say another linux box.

Hope that helps.

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Well, learn something new every day! Thanks!

MY Rocknas is still 3.9.57 centOS version… but, when y’all say go, I will upgrade it. Meanwhile, as time and interest permit, I’ll work on a Leap 15.3 setup…

Also, as it turns out, I may go back to work for a while sometime next month… we will see. I need some more pocket change for toys…

:sunglasses:

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cd..

isn’t a valid comand.

cd ..

is. You need a space between the “cd” and the directory. This isn’t a bash thing, it’s a UNIX-like OS thing.

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@Tex1954 the upgrade would be a good idea, if you’re going to play with Leap 15.3 at some point anyway. For the time being though, you can also install the mc on the “old” version.
Once you have been able to log in as root (like mentioned above by @phillxnet), then you should be able to install midnight commander via:
yum install mc

For usage, here is a tutorial (probably quite a few more and better ones, but this should help to get started:
http://www.trembath.co.za/mctutorial.html

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Wow! So much help… and yes I know about spacing the command and such like CD …, it was a typo that I knew would not work anyway just to show y’all.

I might give that a try tonight if I finish other stuff I’m working on…

THANKS to all! A+++ help!

:sunglasses:

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@vesper1978 Hope you don’t mind. I just did a quick forum edit of you post to stop some auto formatting turning the 2 dots into 3.

Nothing else changed, just didn’t want your contribution to go to waste with the overly zealous form text fromatting. I surrounded your commands, each, in the ``` i.e. line before and line after. It’s a kind of code comment thing that leaves things mostly alone.

Hope that helps.

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Don’t mind at all ever! Thanks! Off to home depot for more house fixings today…

Then, I have to choose which setup I want to load Leap 15 on…

:sunglasses: