I’m a new user and checking if (the future of) Rockstor meets my requirements, so I decided to try the new Rockstor 4 version Built on openSUSE. I wanted to share my experience because I had a rough time building the installer.
It took me a while before I realized there’s no installer (yet). I wasn’t expecting this (even for a beta). So I searched on sourceforge (arrived there via the Download page on the website) for a v4.x ISO but couldn’t find any. Maybe there could be a note (in bold/capitals) inside the readme on /rockstor/files/4.x that says “THERE’S NO INSTALLER YET, BUILD IT YOURSELF HERE: link”.
On the Rockstor website I found the howto “Rockstor’s “Built on openSUSE” installer - Beta release” at rockstor.com/docs/installer-howto/installer-howto.html. But this only walks you through the trivial part of the installation (after the ISO has already been built). There’s no link to GitHub - rockstor/rockstor-installer: The kiwi-ng configuration used to create Rockstor 4 'Built on openSUSE' installers.. Which is where you need to be to build the installer.
I know it’s a beta a.t.m. and the “Rockstor 4 Installer Recipe - call for beta testers” forum post explains it all. But the other places (download page, docs) are easier to find. I think a few extra notes would help here.
But the actual trouble started when I tried to build the installer on Windows.
I already had Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) setup, so I just downloaded openSUSE Leap 15.2 from the Microsoft Store. But building the installer kept failing due to missing packages. When it failed because of a missing package, I installed the missing package and then re-tried building. Eventually I gave up as I had no idea how many times I’d have to repeat this process. In hindsight I was probably almost there. In this post I found the additional packages the process depends on: https://forum.rockstor.com/t/problem-building-rockstor-4-with-vagrant/7639/19: qemu-tools, gptfdisk, e2fsprogs, squashfs, xorriso.
Then I tried to use a OpenSUSE live CD in VirtualBox. But this didn’t work because of current WSL2 and VirtualBox incompatibility. Then I tried the Vagrant build method (which is a bit hidden on the Github page). Because this also depends on VirtualBox I had to disable all WSL related options in Windows Features and reboot. Then Vagrant gave me the “Wrong user error”. Fixed that. Then the shared folders weren’t mounted. I had to set them up manually in VirtualBox (and not run vagrant up afterwards anymore). Then I could connect with vagrant ssh while the VM was started manually from VirtualBox. Next I had to run sed -i -e ‘s/\r$//’ on ./run_kiwi.sh to fix a “/bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory” error. But these errors kept coming back on other files: KiwiScriptFailed: config.sh failed: chroot: failed to run command ‘image/config.sh’: No such file or directory. So then I decided just to follow the steps on the Github page.
I ran these commands as root user in some folder within the VM:
git clone https://github.com/rockstor/rockstor-installer.git
cd rockstor-installer/
kiwi-ng --profile=Leap15.2.x86_64 --type oem system build --description ./ --target-dir /home/kiwi-images/
This finally worked and I could manually move the iso to the shared folder and then I could access it on Windows.
What a ride
I was able to successfully install Rockstor in a VM and I’m now evaluating if it will work in my scenario. So far I think it’s really nice!