Special Installation Scenarios

Since Rockstor can accommodate a wide range of hardware configurations, as well as virtual machine set ups, there have been instances reported over the years that required some specific actions to enable setting up Rockstor on a new system. While the friendly Rockstor forum contains many more scenarios and resolutions that can be searched for, some recurring themes are documented below:

Assign static IP address after installation but before WebUI setup

Note

The below is meant for setting up a specific connection before the installation/configuration is completed using Rockstor’s WebUI. Under most circumstances this should not be necessary, as most routers today offer IP address reservation that will effectively result in a static IP address assigned to the Rockstor appliance (which by default uses DHCP to automatically obtain an IP address from the gateway).

If during setup the network architecture requires a static IP address on the Rockstor appliance’s network interface Network Manager can be used to force a static IP address on the network interface.

Check Network connection using the command line:

Rockstorsys:~$ nmcli connection show
NAME     UUID                                  TYPE      DEVICE
enp0s3   aa44c29f-33e8-358f-879b-e0b8efae27f3  ethernet  enp0s3

In order to make this a static connection, here is an example on how this can be set up using nmcli:

nmcli connection modify 'enp0s3' \
   connection.autoconnect  yes \
   ipv4.method manual \
   ipv4.address 192.168.22.199/24 \
   ipv4.gateway 192.168.22.1 \
   ipv4.dns 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4.

Upon successful completion of the command the connection will receive a static IP address:

  • automatically (i.e. whenever the network management is started)

  • static address with

  • IP address of 192.168.22.199 and

  • Gateway of 192.168.22.1 and

  • DNS1 and DNS2 server 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 respectively.

To move the connection back to DHCP mode, the above settings need to be reverted:

nmcli con mod "enp0s3" \
  ipv4.method "auto"
  ipv4.addresses "" \
  ipv4.gateway "" \
  ipv4.dns ""

For either of these changes to take effect run

nmcli connection up "enp0s3"

or reboot the system.

Proxy for private network

In some network architectures, a proxy is required to be able to manage updates from external sources like OpenSUSE upstream packages, or to check for and update to a new version of the rockstor package.

This KB 7006845 provides some insights into how to set up a Proxy using the command line.

VMWare guest tools installation

When running Rockstor as a VMWare guest (unsupported), consider using open-vm-tools to help with various aspects of the host/guest integration. Similar guest extensions exist for VirtualBox.

This or any package can be included into a custom installer, making them available during the initial installation. For building a custom installer see our rockstor-installer repo. The open-vm-tools package is already contained in the rockstor.kiwi file, albeit commented out.

Note

This is intended for more advanced users that are comfortable creating their own installers with custom content.

To install the package after Rockstor has already been installed on a VMWare Guest instance, go to the command line and run:

zypper install open-vm-tools

Subsequent updates to the package will be automatically considered during Rockstor’s upstream package checks.