On Sat, Feb 27, 2021, at 23:23, Olav Reinert wrote:
Hi Ignaz, and Richard,
On Fri, 2020-08-21 at 09:48 +0200, Ignaz Forster wrote:
Hi Olav,
Am 15.08.20 um 08:43 Uhr schrieb seroton10@gmail.com:
Hi,
When installing openSUSE (any flavour), the installer offers a choice between the "server" and "transactional server" roles, among others.
If I choose to install using the "server" role, is there a (supported) procedure by which I can later convert it into a "transactional server"? (Assume using btrfs for /, and having snapshots.)
No, this is unsupported - see Richards mail for the differences between the roles.
[cut] Any clarification on this would be much appreciated.
I was also quite surprised to see this approach working - I would have expected that at least the /etc overlays would be falling apart.
So I just checked the read-only-root-fs spec file. The necessary directories will be created there even on an existing system, so you may indeed have created a working setup ;-)
HOWEVER: The warning is imho completely legitimate. Installing this package will not magically convert an existing read-write system into a read-only system, but will require manual interaction. In fact you missed one important step: The root subvolume should also be set read-only (i.e. not only setting the read-only flag in fstab but by calling `btrfs property set / ro true`). You may have to mount the root file system rw again for this operation to succeed, or call it directly on the snapshot directory in /.snapshots/xxx/snapshot).
I never got back to thank you guys for your responses, but I'd like to add that to the record now.
For your information: After applying the btrfs read-only property manually, as suggested, I just left the machine (a Raspberry Pi 3) running. It is still running just fine, after having been powered on non-stop for 6 months. By "just fine" I mean I can do SSH login to it, and nothing seems to be exploding - not disk usage, not the overlay hierarchy, etc.
One of the nice things of MicroOS and transactional-update is the automatic upgrades. Where the server reboots by itself and performs the upgrade. Which should be a few days a week. Having an uptime of 6 months makes me think something is not working right. A mutable OS like TW or Leap can be upgraded usually without a reboot. An immutable OS like MicroOS can only upgrade with a reboot, as the /root is read only. /Syds
I would also like to add that I think it would be a very cool feature to be able to enable transactional updates on an openSUSE system that was not installed with the transactional server role. Providing that a certain set of minimum requirements are met, of course. Even if such a retrofitted system is not identical to a real transactional server, and maybe doesn't support all its features, from my experience it still seems like a very useful thing to be able to do. IMHO.
Again, thank you for your feedback.
Regards, Olav