Download Rockstor 3.8-11

Rockstor is a CentOS-based Linux distribution, which can be used as a NAS or private cloud storage solution, among other things. It uses popular open source technologies such as the Btrfs file system and Docker to deploy applications in so-called software containers. Rockstor is free to use and updates can be received over a test or stable channel. Updates through the test channel are very frequent, often several times a week, but can sometimes contain bugs. Updates via the stable channel, which only subscribers have access to, are released every three to four weeks and have been extensively tested. Version 3.8-11 was released on Friday and the release notes are as follows:

3.8-11: Rock-On and UI improvements

I am happy to announce the release of rockstor 3.8-11. This is our third release in the stable updates channel and I’d like to thank subscribers for their support. As usual, subscribers can just update to this release from the Web-UI.

For new users, we’ve created a brand new 3.8-11 ISO downloadable from here. After installation, please purchase Stable update subscription and take advantage of many benefits that come with it.

This release cycle was pretty exciting with increased community activity. Many users offered feedback, test results, bug reports and shared useful information with everyone else in the community. The usual code contributors submitted many pull requests to add new functionality, improve existing functionality and fix bugs. We also welcomed a new contributor in this cycle, which is always special!

All together, we closed 24 issues, 11 more compared to last cycle. There are two significant changes I’d like to highlight. We made several improvements to the Rock-Ons system, including making it easy for users and add their own custom Rock-Ons and 3rd party contributors to submit theirs for wider community. We added new Rock-Ons including Discourse and Jenkins. We also made the system significantly more robust and simpler. Expect more changes in the next cycle, but a lot of heavy lifting was done in this one.

Second significant change is to the inner workings of the Web UI. We’ve revamped templating and overhauled existing templates using Handlebars. As a result, the UI is leaner, faster and code is a lot more readable and simpler. Most of the credit goes to @priyaganti for this massive patch set.

There are many other improvements and bug fixes to SMART, NUT and SSL cert management to name a few. many thanks to @philxnet for nicely crafted pull requests and to community members for testing and engaging in issue reporting.

Here is the list of all issues resolved in this release:

• Significantly improved Rock-Ons functionality. #858
• Overhauled and optimized frontend with better temlating using Handlebars. #1019
• Improved disk scan to handle duplicate names and offline disks better. #937
• Updated django-auth-toolkit and improved the Access Key functionality. #1017
• Fixed a bug in SMART monitoring functionality. #1060
• Simplified Rock-on app profile management. #842
• Enhanced custom config implementation in Rock-on install wizard. #918
• Added support for bigger SSL certs of size up to 12K. #1067
• Enhanced state refresh for Shares and Pools when underlying disks drop. #930
• Added better support for drive name changes. #897
• Fixed admin host related bug in NFS management. #959
• Added better handling for md block drives. #1063
• Made Rock-our framework more robust and simpler. #858
• Added SMART support for MSA70 enclosures. #997
• Fixed minor regression in fake serial ui logic. #1086
• Added support for retaining only last 5 kernels. #1068
• Made Access Key API a bit more robust. #1080
• Fixed a regression with raw SMART error log display. #1084
• Fixed a UI bug in schedule task display. #1058
• Improved config ownership management or NUT. #1073
• Fixed a regression in NUT service configuration in the UI. #1094
• Fixed a Share ACL display bug in the UI. #1100
• Improved README. #1104
• Improved messaging for SMART self tests on the UI. #1097

In addition to above issues, we’ve also updated the default kernel to 4.3.3 along with btrfs-progs.