NethServer on Rock64 ARM board

Development
1

Greetings,

I found this thread relevant to the help I am seeking.
I recently bought a ROCK64 SBC (1GB RAM) on eBay.

I have successfully booted it with a CentOS image:
https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/ROCK64_Software_Release#Cent_OS
and Ubuntu Bionic.

I was wondering if I can get NethServer running on this board by installing the Nethserver RPMs on top of this image.

If yes, please let me know:

  1. The NethServer repo to add,
  2. The Nethserver RPMs to install (+ dependencies) and
  3. Any gotchas to watch out for.

I’ll document the steps to get Nethserver up and running on a Rock64 SBC board.

Thanks for your help.

2

Hi Arun and welcome to NethServer community!

I’m not expert of ARM installations. I hope @mark_nl @dz00te can lend you an hand.

In the meanwhile, is aarch64 the right architecture for your board?

Try to install http://packages.nethserver.org/nethserver/7.8.2003/base/aarch64/Packages/nethserver-release-7-17.ns7.noarch.rpm, then run nethserver-install as explained in the manual.

Paste here any error message.

In a Raspberry with armhfp architecture we have different repositories instead:

[root@davidep2 ~]# yum repolist -v | grep -E 'Repo-(id|mirrors|baseurl)'
Repo-id      : ce-base/7/armhfp
Repo-mirrors : http://mirrorlist.nethserver.org/?release=7&repo=ce-base&arch=armhfp&nsrelease=7.7.1908
Repo-baseurl : http://vault.centos.org/altarch/7.7.1908/os/armhfp/
Repo-id      : ce-extras/7/armhfp
Repo-mirrors : http://mirrorlist.nethserver.org/?release=7&repo=ce-extras&arch=armhfp&nsrelease=7.7.1908
Repo-baseurl : http://vault.centos.org/altarch/7.7.1908/extras/armhfp/
Repo-id      : ce-sclo-rh/7/armhfp
Repo-mirrors : http://mirrorlist.nethserver.org/?release=7&repo=ce-sclo-rh&arch=armhfp&nsrelease=7.7.1908
Repo-baseurl : http://mirror.nethserver.org/nethserver/7.7.1908/empty/armhfp/
Repo-id      : ce-sclo-sclo/7/armhfp
Repo-mirrors : http://mirrorlist.nethserver.org/?release=7&repo=ce-sclo-sclo&arch=armhfp&nsrelease=7.7.1908
Repo-baseurl : http://mirror.nethserver.org/nethserver/7.7.1908/empty/armhfp/
Repo-id      : ce-updates/7/armhfp
Repo-mirrors : http://mirrorlist.nethserver.org/?release=7&repo=ce-updates&arch=armhfp&nsrelease=7.7.1908
Repo-baseurl : http://vault.centos.org/altarch/7.7.1908/updates/armhfp/
Repo-id      : epel
Repo-baseurl : https://armv7.dev.centos.org/repodir/epel-pass-1/
Repo-id      : nethserver-base/7/armhfp
Repo-mirrors : http://mirrorlist.nethserver.org/?release=7&repo=base&arch=armhfp&nsrelease=7.7.1908
Repo-baseurl : http://mirror.nethserver.org/nethserver/7.7.1908/base/armhfp/
Repo-id      : nethserver-updates/7/armhfp
Repo-mirrors : http://mirrorlist.nethserver.org/?release=7&repo=updates&arch=armhfp&nsrelease=7.7.1908
Repo-baseurl : http://mirror.nethserver.org/nethserver/7.7.1908/updates/armhfp/
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3

Hi Aron,
i have no experience on rock64 but i used project31 images on pine64 and if i remember correctly it should be aarch64, so once installed centos and updated, you can proceed as suggested by @davidep

yum localinstall http://packages.nethserver.org/nethserver/7.8.2003/base/aarch64/Packages/nethserver-release-7-17.ns7.noarch.rpm

and then:
nethserver-install

in the meantime I try to look for the sd for my pine64 and see if everything still works correctly
let us know how it goes

4 Likes
4

Hello David and dz00te,

Thanks for your quick helpful replies!
The Rock64 SBC is part of the Pine64 boards and aarch64 is indeed the correct target.

As I already had a base CentOS 7 running on this board with SSH access, I did the nethserver-install “over” an SSH login session (as root).

However, I ran into some gotchas like:

  1. The SSH session became unresponsive after the script completed the package installation. I realized a firewall rule was blocking my established SSH session. To fix the issue I logged into the console and nuked all the fw rules (iptables -F) and this restored my SSH session. All this time, the eth0 interface was still running on IP obtained as a DHCP client.
    A nmap scan reveals open TCP ports 22,53,80,443,9090 and UDP ports 53,69,123

  2. I logged into NethServer WebUI on port 9090 and configured a static IP address for eth0. However, I lost the Web UI connection (port 9090) after I applied a static IP configuration to eth0. To reconnect, I had to use the script network-recovery on the console.

  3. On reboot the eth0 interface does not have an IP assigned. I checked /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 contents (shown below):
    To restore network connectivity I have to resort to the network-recovery script on the console. This is a show stopper.

    DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=none
GATEWAY=10.1.1.1
IPADDR=10.1.1.8
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
NM_CONTROLLED=no
NSLABEL=
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet
USERCTL=no

  4. I don’t get a login prompt in the cockpit Web UI when I select terminal. This issue is not a show-stopper if the user can get a CLI SSH session (see above).

  5. Also, IMHO the NethServer UI on ports 80,443 do not serve any useful purpose. The Server Manager button there takes the user to the cockpit UI on port 9090 Is there a way to disable this?

I would appreciate if you could suggest a solution on how to fix the eth0 issue upon reboot.

Thanks for your help!

5

Followup on my earlier post.
Solved – issue #3

The network.service was in a disabled state!
systemctl enable network has resolved the issue of the setup of IP addresses and routing on all the interfaces at boot time.

1 Like