I received my HL8 fully built and burned in unit about a week ago. I was extremely impressed with the build, packaging and over all design. My excitement quickly turned into frustration once I plugged it in.
I loaded my 8 drives and turned it on. I had no issues with boot up or logging in. I downloaded the setup wizard on my laptop and it found the server with no issues. Went through the steps but only got as far as setting up a zfs pool. Each attempt showed no hard drives were found. I kept getting errors in regards to python 3 failing to load modules. I logged into the web UI and ran some updates and it still had no success. I gave up and just went in to create a storage pool in Houston.
Once in Houston I was immediately advised that I had service failure for /etc/systemd/system/houston-dbus.service. I quickly learned from the forum that this seems to be a common problem. I did the suggestions on the forum with trying to resolve this issue but I had no luck.
I then went to try to setup a zfs pool but was unable to even after clearing the drives. Rocky Linux was showing all the drives were connected and accessible. I tried updating zfs but I could not update past version 1.10. I tried to remove zfs and follow the steps to install zfs manager but it kept saying package not found. I tried updating the repositories to testing but had no luck.
After two days wasted trying to get Houston to work I gave up and installed TrueNas. TrueNas installed with no issues and I was able to setup a storage pool and data sets without any issues. Granted this all could have been user error on my part as I am completely new to Rocky Linux and zfs. This is also my first time using TrueNas and I am learning as I go.
As a self proclaimed first timer, I think you’re on a better path with TrueNAS on your HL8. I would put Houston (which is add-on to Linux Cockpit) in the power user category for those who want the flexibility (and server admin responsibilities) of a full fledged Linux OS.
@CrazyManInCincy
Hey there, my name’s Jordan and I’m one of the R&D Developers at 45Drives. I’m sorry you’ve had a bad experience so far with your new HL8. I assume you are on Rocky 8 if you’re having this issue with the python3 modules. We identified an issue with our Rocky8 images where they were mistakenly being shipped with Python3.9 set as the active version and not Python3.6 (the Rocky 8 system default). Due to this the el-8 python3-libzfs module (which ZFS module and Setup Wizard both use) was breaking since it was compiled with 3.6 in mind. We have fixed that issue on our master images, but it appears a few boot drives made it out through production with the out-dated image.
If you indeed are on Rocky 8 and I am correct in my assumptions, getting this to work will be a simple one-line fix. (If you are on Rocky 9 then this would be a different issue as the compiled el9 python library already supports 3.9).
To see if your python version is set to 3.9 instead of 3.6, run
alternatives --display python3
and you should see something that looks like this, with 3.9 and 3.6 both showing with ‘link currently points to’ showing the active version.
[root@homelab bin]# alternatives --display python3
python3 - status is manual.
link currently points to /usr/bin/python3.9
/usr/bin/python3.6 - priority 1000000
slave easy_install-3: /usr/bin/easy_install-3.6
slave pip-3: /usr/bin/pip-3.6
slave pip3: /usr/bin/pip3.6
slave pydoc-3: /usr/bin/pydoc3.6
slave pydoc3: /usr/bin/pydoc3.6
slave pyvenv-3: /usr/bin/pyvenv-3.6
slave python3-man: /usr/share/man/man1/python3.6.1.gz
/usr/bin/python3.9 - priority 3900
slave easy_install-3: /usr/bin/easy_install-3.9
slave pip-3: /usr/bin/pip-3.9
slave pip3: /usr/bin/pip3.9
slave pydoc-3: /usr/bin/pydoc3.9
slave pydoc3: /usr/bin/pydoc3.9
slave pyvenv-3: (null)
slave python3-man: /usr/share/man/man1/python3.9.1.gz
Current `best' version is /usr/bin/python3.6.
If so, then run:
alternatives --auto python3
and that should switch you to 3.6 as intended.
Run alternatives --display python3 again to see if 3.6 is active now.
If it is, then when you refresh your Houston UI ZFS Module or connect to Setup Wizard again the disk detection should work.
The houston-dbus.service is another bug we have had reports of. That service is related to the email notification feature in the cockpit-zfs module so its unrelated to this case, but we have been having a hard time recreating it in order to nail down and fix the exact cause. Hope to have an update for that soon. If you have any trouble reach out and we will dig in deeper!
Yes I was on Rocky 8 but since I was unable to get it functioning I installed TrueNas. If I wanted to reinstall Rocky 8 and the Houston interface for the HL8 how would I got about getting the image ?
This should put you back in the spot that we were before the issues we had!
If you run into any issues with any of the script or installers please let us know! If you want to dive deeper, you can look at the scripts and read through exactly what they do!