I had some spare time this weekend and wanted to give Houston UI a go. I’ve worked with CentOS in the past, and figure I might as well try Rocky as I read the HL15 ships with Rocky and Houston by default.
Both times, I setup a VM on an ESXi 8 host. The goal here is not to permanently run as a VM, but to check out Rocky and Houston UI. I plan passing through a couple SATA SSD’sby passing the host chassis HBA directly to the VM.
Ubuntu, all seemed to go well. I followed the single line of using curl to grab the script and pipe it out to bash. No cockpit packages seemed to install. I am going to try that one again later.
Rocky however is the one that troubles me more. When running the curl command I receive an error stating: Failed to detect the repo that would best suit your system. Please contact repo@45drives.com to get this issue rectified A few lines above that however, it does say Detected RHEL-based distribution. (I did use the Minimal Rocky ISO, as it was the one used in the Rocky documentation at 45Drives).
Now, I’m not an enterprise customer and certainly don’t want to chew up support channels either. Just wanted to raise attention in case anything changed upstream in Rocky, or if there’s anything of use here to the support/devs before I blow the VM away in the name of science!
HI @orix, Our tools and script do not support Rocky 9 or Ubuntu 22 yet. if you still wish to play with Houstin you will need to have Rocky 8 or Ubuntu 20 as your OS.
We are working on adding support for these newer OS but have not had the chance to yet.
That’s what I get for trying too late at night after all the brain juice was switched over to decaf. I swear Hutch, I did read the KB. I also, for whatever reason, read the screenshot as 9 and carried on with my misadventure! I had a sneaking suspicion this was the case, as I saw a few failed dependencies for Navigator. However, I had chalked that up to building on unsupported HW, thinking the Navigator was part of the 45Drives HW only modules. Shamelessly, I carried on with dnf install --skip-broken xyzrestoftext only to further dig myself into the hole.
The prerequisites in the Houston UI Installation for Rocky do point to their repo for the ISO. But, with Rocky 9 as the first and foremost option. I may have overlooked it, but I wasn’t able to locate a list of supported releases for each OS. I did notice the Ubuntu guides state 20.04 in the title, but assumed that was due to the KB’s age.
With the amount of these rolling out, alongside the forum topics created yesterday for various Apps like Nextcloud, a few pinned KB’s in the forums with some of that information for Houston would probably help cut down on a few questions.
I’ll roll another VM with Rocky 8 (as Ubuntu 20.04LTS is Maintenance EOL as of Apr 2023) this afternoon and try my hand again.
P.S. - Very happy to see some realmd love! I keep my homelab similar to my prod environment which is (unfortunately) very Microsoft centric. So realmd has become a favorite of mine!
I’ve been there myself too many times but I’ll never admit it lol.
I went ahead and updated some of the KB guides so that Rocky 8 is in the name of the article. I hope this will clear up some of the confusion between Rocky 8 and Rocky 9 support
I have also run into issues with Ubuntu 22.04. I know it’s not supported however the LTS has been out for quite some time. Are there plans to support it? Will the HL15 be supported with Houston?
I had not tried, but I believe Cockpit itself has support for 22.04LTS. I hadn’t heard about Cockpit until Houston UI, and now I’ll be slapping it on a few VM’s I have as an easy way to check logs and services.
The install doc seems easy enough, maybe I could try pulling in the 45Drives specific modules on 22.04. The biggest one being the ZFS module.
the HL15 specific packages to make the 45drives disks tab, motherboard, and system info are only on the testing repo for 45Drives
We do have enterprise customers that have Houston UI on Rocky 9 and Ubuntu 22 although it is not a supported OS from us yet I believe it works out of the box for Cokcpit and then you would need the testing version of our repo for Ubuntu 22.
As for Rocky 9, we do not have el9 packages so you would need to manually compile the Rocky 8 (el8) packages for Rocky 9 to get the specific 45Dreives tabs
Hi @myusuf3, We do not have packages created for Rocky9 and Ubuntu 22 yet so there is no repo I can give you. You would already have our repo installed you would just need to enable the testing version. Below is an example of Rocky 8 where the testing repo is enabled.
The issue with Rocky 9 is we do not have EL9 packages so I’m unsure if/how you can use EL8 packages on Rocky 9. I believe the customer we have recompiled there own packages from the EL8 versions
Hey Hutch,
I know it feels like beating a dead horse, but 24.04 is due out next month. Is there any movement/ETA on a release for 22.04/24.04 or Rocky 9/10?
I went back to the ways of TrueNAS and frankly… I want off that crazy ride! ZFS handholding is the last thing I’m really reliant on in a NAS, as it still intimidates me quite a bit. But, leaving both of my storage boxes on the SAME OS and one that’s entirely managed by a company (TN in this case) scares me as much if not more.
If not for me, do it for Red Shirt Jeff (@geerlingguy). HAHAHA.
(Hope the order churning process is starting to get easier on you guys, I know you all were straight out for a bit.)
We are hard at work on many projects currently. RND is busy working on the new 4 and 8-bay systems for both the Homelab and the enterprise market.
They are also working on updating our Ansible playbooks to start deploying Quincy Ceph clusters. Once these things mentioned are out of the way I’m sure they will be pivoting to the newer OS but for now, Ubuntu 20 is still supported until April 2030.
And yes we finally caught up on all the orders, I believe any new orders placed are expected to be delivered within 2 weeks.
I’m not a linux user but after 2 days I finally got the newest version of Rocky Linux 9.4 installed on my new server. Now I find out that I have to start over and install Rocky 8. So I can install Houston. I guess I will but its been 9 months since this problem was first reported and still it is not fixed.
I just looked it up and Rocky Linux 9.0 came out 2 years ago and you still don’t support it. But in your videos you tout how you are big supporters and contributors to the project.
It’s not available for Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04 either. There’s been some attempts by community members to get the packages working, but I myself ran into quite a few issues with dnf showing missing or broken packages on Rocky 8.
I moved over to TrueNAS Scale. I know 45Drives and 45Homelab are primarily a hardware company. It’s what they do best. I love my HL15. But, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t the least bit bummed that Houston always felt a bit like an unloved child.
Might be wishful thinking but I’ve been hoping that official packages for Ubuntu and Rocky would be coming out with the upcoming with new and redesigned Houston Modules. I suspect that work is taking precedence over supporting Rocky 9 or Ubuntu 22.04.
I wanted to convert my home server from TrueNAS Scale to Ubuntu running Houston, but I can’t.
While using an older version like 20.04 sucks for other reasons, I am unable to actually import my the ZFS pool created in TrueNAS because of a version mismatch of zfsutils-linux. From what I found, the pool was created using a feature that was introduced in OpenZFS v2.2.0 and because the version of ZFS on Ubuntu 20.04 is only v0.8.3, I can’t import the pool.
While I would like to see if anything will go wrong if I manually install the sufficient version of zfsutils-linux, I’m not going to risk that because I don’t know if there were any breaking changes between those versions.
I’d love to get to use Houston because using native Linux would be great and I wouldn’t be kneecapped by some of the things TrueNAS forces, like I’m currently running Docker in a jail which aren’t officially supported on Scale, but again I am literally unable to make the switch.
I’ll keep researching to see if there’s any solutions I can find, but if anyone has anything to add, please do.
