Houston UI on Debian 12

Software & Applications
1

While I know that there are not any packages for Ubuntu 22.04 (install failed using the 45Drive script when it got to the network-manager section of the script) and Ubuntu 20.04 is the currently one of two supported distro for Houston UI. I am wondering if it is possible and how one might install Houston UI on Debian 12 instead of Ubuntu. I did try installing it using the following command:

apt install -y cockpit cockpit-zfs-manager cockpit-benchmark \
cockpit-navigator cockpit-file-sharing cockpit-45drives-hardware \
cockpit-identities cockpit-machines cockpit-sosreport realmd tuned \
udisks2-lvm2 zfs-dkms samba winbind nfs-kernel-server nfs-client \
45drives-tools;

But got an error on cockpit-zfs-manager saying zfs-dkms is required and zfs-dkms gave a package not found error. I haven’t done much more digging into this yet and will report back as right now I am trying Ubuntu 20.04 to get the Huston UI setup so I can poke around and see if I want to use it in my environment.

2

HI @astraea, would need to have ZFS installed on the system first inorder to install the zfs module.

It looks like you are missing the repo that provides ZFS.

We ourselves do not provide this so you will need to add a repo that has ZFS for Debian 12. once you have that repo you should be able to install the Houston UI with ZFS.

If you wish to only install the Houston UI you do not need these extra packages for the Houston UI to work

cockpit-benchmark,cockpit-machines,cockpit-sosreport,realmd,tuned,udisks2-lvm2,zfs-dkms,samba,winbind,nfs-kernel-server,nfs-client

If you do not need ZFS you can still install Houston without this by leaving out these packages

cockpit-zfs-manager,zfs-dkms

3

I did do some more experimenting and was able to get cockpit and zfs installed on a debian system and was able to make use of the varous 45 drives modules (identities, navigator, file sharing) though i could not get an NFS share working as i kept getting a permission error. Samba worked fine in my basic setup tests.

I am still tinkering to find the best setup for moving my storage from mutiple independent boxes into a ceph cluster and will need support for SMB and NFS for other systems that will access the shares.

Though the full migration to Ceph is a ways off as i need to make some large hareware chnages to make it work properly.

4

Hey @astraea! FYI - I was able to modify the official script to work on Ubuntu 22.04 using the 20.04. The failure with network manager was mostly due to a change in the service name. Putting this out here in case you’re interested.