Heeeey….
It’s been almost two years since I wrote the last time. I guess I had nothing to say until now;)
No, that’s not true, just didn’t have the time or the energy.
But the last couple of days pushed me towards posting some more about Openfiler.

This project is quite controversial. On one hand, it’s good. It combines most of the features, stability and quality you want for the storage without paying a cent.
On the other hand, the dev team is odd. To say the least. Their thing is that they don’t talk to the users. They used to, but they don’t anymore.
They had promissed to release the version 3.0 about 3 years ago, since then they keep it silent.
Now, I totally understand the “it’ll be released when it’s ready” attitude, a lot of open source (and only) projects do that. But at least talk to your community, tell them approximately what’s going on, something.
A lot of people just said goodbye to the project because of this. But it doesn’t seem to effect the principle - to disregard the community.

Anyway, personally, when choosing the storage for the mid-size company I’m still choosing the OF, because I know it pretty well, it proved to be stable enough and it has all the features a company may need.

So I decided to set up another storage for backup in the company I work for. It’s a pretty standard procedure. Takes about 15 min to install, another 20 to update, and about 30 min to join Active Directory and configure all the rest.About an hour that is.
So I downloaded the usual OF 2.3 x64 since this is the version I trust - I had some problems in the past with 2.99 (which is a beta for 3.0), installed it and started the updates.
And here came the surprise! The updates wouldn’t go through, instead I started getting dependencies errors and what not.
So I turned to google and immediately found out that 2.3 is EOL and there will be no more updates, plus they took out most of the existing ones.
WHY?! So I googled some more to find out that rpath (the company behind the builder) was acquired by some other company, which in turn donated the builder to the Foresight Linux. I guess this somehow contributed to the decision not to renew the kernelbits.rpath.org (or to deny the access to it) and throw out some of the updates.

This was frustraiting. Then I thought maybe I can update manually somehow - by doing conary update “packagename” and do some other tricks.
If you’re asking yourself: why do I need to update anyways? How critical is this? Well, you can just read some of my previous postings about OF and understand. Especially the XFS part. I needed this.

So what I did was download the update pack from the sourceforge page, but it was dated 2009, so it obviously couldn’t contain everything. But it was something. I installed it via “conary update packagename.ccs” and ran conary updateall. To my surprise half of the updates went through. Then I hit a wall with dependencies and continued updating one by one. All in all, about 8-10 packages couldn’t update. Some because they were simply missing from the repository (nagios-plugins, nrpe), and some because there was no access to kernelbits.rpath.org (openfiler, openfiler-group, group-core) and some were less important (I think), like “man”.

While nagios and man were not dealbreakers, openfiler and group-core were. I didn’t know what I can expect stability and bugs wise and decided not to go through with it. And just like that the OF thing for me was over.

So… I decided to give 2.99 another try. I downloaded 2.99.2 and installed it.
Waht can I say? For my use there were 2 bugs. The first one is something you can bypass via the command line - not a big deal.
The second one is a huge dealbreaker. But I did find a loophole and stayed with this version.

I’ll tell you all about it in the next post, since this one is too weepy. The next one is going to be much more practical.

C ya!