I don’t approve or disprove Limeware’s business and community practices. I don’t care at this point (btw one of the reasons I left their product for years when such things mattered to me, but that is beside the point) - I just want to do the stuff I want to do.
And unRAID (plus the add ons, containers and the VMs I have it) does it.
Even if the the future of NS8 is not written in stone, I want to get familiar with the concepts 
For starters it seems to me getting to know podman and running/building containers with buildah is a kind of important.
Where can a container-noob like me start here?
Installed podman on Debian bullseye (=next stable) am{d|r}64 and can run/start/login to a (alpine-linux) container , yeah… 
where to go from here, ie further reading ?
IIUC traefik is going to be the router / network-glue of the containers/pods. again : are there links to further reading ?
Redis database seems have a prominent role, can not figure out where/how Redis is utilized…
In the end, after kind of getting the concepts above can one (noob like me) install a small NS8 service to play with and get more understanding where we are heading?
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Hi @mark_nl
You can install Portainer CE.
With it, you can see a lot of things inside all your containers.
I am sure that there is a lot of how-to about Portainer for Debian.
Michel-André
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Hi all, since the last community meeting in February I worked on the ns8 prototype with Nethesis teammates.
You’re right, after one year many ideas around NS8 were put in reality. There’s still way to go and as Giacomo said above, some important decisions to take, for instance what Linux distro(s) Nethesis will support.
Before we take those decisions, we want to come back here with an alpha, so we can evaluate together.
I’m really happy you are eager to learn and already got some information from the ns8-scratchpad repository.
We strive to realize a platform that is developer friendly, sysadmin friendly and end-user friendly. We are working everyday with new things, like Podman and Buildah. For some core components I learnt a bit of Golang - thanks to my teammates help 
However the docs are outdated and they need to be aligned with recent prototype evolutions. You have to wait a bit more. Hopefully we’ll get there in 4-5 weeks.
I’ll be glad to share as much information as possible in a video-conference too!
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I bet/wonder the idea behind, systemd to start and stop the containers like I did for example with nethserver-piler. However you need an orchestrator to start several containers to talk together at the good time, I used docker-compose but podman can create the pod itself(inside a pod the containers can use the localhost to share data or connectivity and not a tcp port like you know with a container alone)
The major important things to understand is that the limits that an operating system impose are no longer existing. You have to get another version of a software, you could build a new container with the needed version.
The data will stay ever in the operating system data, containers are binaries and completely ephemeral. The data are saved on your hard drive, you can destroy the container they will stay there
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Hi all,
Rocky Linux 8.4 Available Now.
Sufficient testing has been performed such that we have confidence in its stability for production systems. Free community support is available through the Rocky Linux Mattermost 3, IRC 1, and forums 3. Paid commercial support is currently available through CIQ.
Corporations come and go, their interests as transient as they are self-serving. But a community persists, and that’s who we dedicate Rocky Linux to: you.
Rocky is more than the next free and open, community enterprise operating system. It’s a community. A commitment to an ideal bigger than the sum of its parts, and a promise that our principles –embedded even within our repositories and ISOs–are immutable.
Michel-André
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Hi Michael,
I’m happy for the Rocky Linux community achievements. However RHEL 8 derived distros are not relevant to the current NS7 and NS8 developments.
Please use another thread and the Chat category if you really like to keep us informed about Rocky Linux and similar distros. And consider that anyone can subscribe their great Discourse-based forum if interested: https://forums.rockylinux.org
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I beg to differ. If NS8 should be able to run on a .rpm based distro, IMO the RHEL8 derived distro’s ARE relevant. Any RHEL7 derived distro’s will be EOL in 3 years (EOL June 30th, 2024) and therefore not feasible to consider.
If a .deb based distro is going to be used, then you are right, but I can’t imagine that development is not going to take place on a .rpm based distro since the vast experience of the dev team is lying there.
Sure a containerized environment can theoretically run on any distro, but then again, the dev experience of .rpm is not going away, is it?
In the end, any production environment will opt for a rock stable base distro. And IMO there are only 2 candidates for that: a RHEL downstream distro (Alma Linux or Rocky Linux) or Debian.
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I fully agree with Rob.
Michel-André
I’m inclined to agree with Davide. Otherwise, we’d just as well say that every release announcement, however trivial, for OEL, AlmaLinux, Debian, and possibly others, belong here. Yes, Rocky is a possible host OS for NS8. We know. We don’t need to be notified of every incremental piece of progress they make, on a topic that really isn’t about them.
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What is this censorship?
Isn’t this post “NethServer 8: planning an evolution” and the tag “Community”
As @robb wrote:
I preach for my parish - IMHO Rocky Linux is the road to follow and the only other worthy alternative is Debian.
@davidep: Please, expain …
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I do not post all the “incremental piece of progress” but the milestones of my candidate.
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What is that We… Who do you represent ?
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But, as always, you have to put your “grain of salt” even if it has nothing to do with the topic.
Beware NethServer, sterile discussions got the better of SME …
Michel-André
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But posting every single release of a distro Neth isn’t using does have something to do with the topic? As does the personal attack?
What a silly question–I represent nobody but myself. But I still feel quite comfortable saying that every participant in, or reader of, this thread knows that Rocky exists (as does, frankly, pretty much anyone else who’s at all interested in the CentOS8 situation), and if they’re at all interested in it, they know where to go for more information.
But much more importantly, the Neth devs know that Rocky exists. Maybe they’ll use it and maybe they won’t, but do you really think they’ll be swayed by your posting here about every release? I rather suspect it’s having the opposite effect. I know it’s getting annoying to me. Davide’s just said he doesn’t think it’s on-topic here. Michael said the same thing a few weeks ago.
If you want to advocate for “your candidate” (as you describe it–though I didn’t realize we were having an election), and you have arguments to make that haven’t been made repeatedly already, go for it–but I don’t see that it serves any purpose to post the release announcements.
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Sorry… IMO is not censorship when people are spamming things that are OT…
Is someone looking for a “replacement” for CentOS. Ok… but this topic is not about CentOS replacement, but about Neth 8.
Will it look nice and pretty to you? I don’t know.
Will it be nice and pretty with CentOS Stream or Debian? Still I don’t know. I expressed my concerns and doubts about CentOS Stream path, and RedH… IBM way to manage projects. I was not that soft in explaining my reasons but anyway… it’s overdue and “done” as target.
You think that Rocky Linux (or whathever other CentOS clones were advertised here) is wonderful? I’m happy for you. Maybe this topic is not the right place for talking about that?
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Meanwhile, is investing a bit of time on personal research on podman and traefic well spend taking NS8 development into account?
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- NS8 prototype requires cgroup2 (aka systemd “unified” default-hierarchy). RHEL 8 provides the cgroup v1 “legacy” default-hierarchy. It is possible to enable it from the kernel cmdline, but I don’t like to change the distro defaults. Systemd version 239 in RHEL 8 is a bit old.
- NS8 prototype requires Podman 3+ and Python 3.9 that come from Appstream in RHEL 8: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Application Streams Life Cycle - Red Hat Customer Portal
That sounds to me like software collections (SCL) for el7. It is not that kind of “stability” and “rock-solid” we were used to deal with in the old times.
Probably RHEL 9 and derivatives are a better choice, so Fedora 34 is our current RPM-based workbench.
On the Debian (and derivatives) side, we’re playing with Debian 11 “bullseye” (testing) that provides what we need out of the box.
Yes really nice idea! Also from the ARM-compatibility point of view there is much work to do. I confess I do not check the ARM support of upstream images, though the choice is usually towards “standard” ones: widespread, supported, security-aware … (and multi-arch friendly).
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@davidep
I agree with @Andy_Wismer, it’s really a good explanation.
@michelandre, I like your updates, but after the explanation of Davide, I think a new topic is more practical for it.
Of course you can put the link to the topic here, so we all have the chance to follow, if we want.
PS: @danb35 and @michelandre, we don’t want to argue here, so please mind your words.
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OT
to annoy people, and clear the waters a bit
My Debian bullseye just got an update of the package distro-info-data which seems to indicate bullseye is going to be released on 2021-07-31.
$ cat /usr/share/distro-info/debian.csv | grep bullseye
11,Bullseye,bullseye,2019-07-06,2021-07-31,2024-07-31
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