README and Docs need to state that RancherOS is dead

[evilhamsterman]

There has only been 5 commits since the last release and even that release was running a fair amount of older software.

• Kernel: 4.14 (2017 LTS but sad that it is still being used [WIP] Bump up kernel to 4.19.37 #2750 feature: Ask upgrade the kernel to 4.19 or provide a option to use it #2728 Update linux kernel to fix cpu quota #2972 )
• SSH: 7.9 (2018)
• Docker: 19.03.5 (this is reasonable updated but there are several point releases since then that aren't available despite every previous version being available)

There are several major issues that don't appear to being addressed.

• UEFI boot UEFI Support in ROS #2251
• IPv6 ipv6 under rancherOS #2593
• RaspberryPi 4 support Cannot boot RancherOS on Raspberry Pi 4 #2875

There have been lots of commits to k3os so it appears that is where Rancher is putting its efforts now. If that is the case it would be nice to know and know if there is a migration plan?

[rouing]

I am going with a fat NO right now. While there is plenty of options out there, I personally love RancherOS' way of handling things. The next best option has been SmartOS. I have forked RancherOS and started my own personal build. Seems like this is the only option.

[nathanweeks]

https://support.rancher.com/hc/en-us/articles/360041771072#development-status-0-0

[evilhamsterman]

Thank you @nathanweeks. Unfortunately that is a blurb behind a login so it isn't indexed on search engines and groups using the Open Source version without support may not find it. It would be nice if that information was posted on the RancherOS docs and on this Repo.

For those of you who can't don't want to login this is what the above article states

RancherOS 1.x is currently in a maintain-only-as-essential mode. That is to say, it is no longer being actively maintained at a code level other than addressing critical or security fixes. There are two significant reasons behind this product decision:

1. Docker. The current industry requirements for a container runtime is very much evolving. Container runtimes like containerd and CRIO are now being actively considered as the default choice. RancherOS 1.x, which was specifically designed around using Docker engine only, unfortunately does not lend itself, in its current design, to this new evolving requirement. To address this situation, at Rancher Labs, we are currently working on new technologies such as K3OS that leverages k3s constructs built on containerd. When done, it is a desired outcome for us to be able to offer K3OS as a RancherOS 2.0 alternate.
2. ISV Support. RancherOS was specifically designed as a minimalistic OS to support purpose-built containerized applications. It was not designed to be used as a general purpose OS (such as CentOS or Ubuntu). As such, most ISVs have not certified their software to run on RancherOS, nor does RancherOS even contain the necessary components for many of these applications to run. For the K3OS project, our outlook is to investigate the viability of technologies like AWS Bottlerocket that can be used as the default general purpose OS and leverage its ecosystem of compatible ISVs.

I'm fine with the reasoning but it needs to be made clear so people don't start using RancherOS

[nilathedragon]

+1 for this issue. Just as I was finished setting up rancher os for a cluster, I got to see this.

[mfld]

agreed. +1

[mathieubodin]

+1

Just like @Infinytum ... It's sad it's been abandoned because I liked how RancherOS worked. I will now move to Debian as it lives like forever ! See U

[askawu]

+1
Thanks @evilhamsterman for the information.

[olljanat]

Based on https://rancher.com/support-maintenance-terms/ Rancher OS will hit end of maintenance on 29th of December and end of life 29th of June 2021.

I assume that here is also others who are not planning to use Kubernetes which why k3os is not option for them but are you:
a) planning to migrate some other OS?
b) interested to contribute if we create community maintained fork of Rancher OS and its main repositories?

IMO, minimum level to keep project going is to have enough people who will participate to create/review pull requests of updated kernel + docker versions. Based their needs we probably can simplify that work by minimizing number of supported configurations and increasing level of automation.

because Github is not optimal solution for this kind of voting I created simple poll of it: http://www.rkursem.com/poll/view.php?id=00ada0fcb862bb1ad

[olljanat]

Looks that there might be enough couple who are willing to participate so I created https://github.com/rancher-os-community project, forked all needed repositories to there and started to setup build automation.

Please look readme and issues on https://github.com/rancher-os-community/os and let's continue discussion on there.

[jokay]

I would migrate to Fedora CoreOS 😉

Or for some small installations this may be a solution, but not sure how stable this may run.

[olljanat]

@x-jokay yea that looks to be valid option. I have ignored FCOS earlier as its documentation is quite terrible from getting stated point of view but this one looks to be better for that purpose https://computingforgeeks.com/install-fedora-coreos-fcos-on-kvm-openstack/

Some comments/tips for others who are considering to which to FCOS:

• If you want use swarm you need override /etc/sysconfig/docker file with version which does not include --live-restore switch.
• FCOS looks to be prefer Podman instead of Docker but both of those are installed. Here is also guide how to disable Docker but not how to disable Podman.
• Afaik it is not possible to force specific Docker version on FCOS like it is on Rancher OS.

So here is my version getting started fcos.fcc file for Rancher OS users:

variant: fcos
version: 1.0.0
passwd:
  users:

  # To simplify migration from Rancher OS
  # we are still using "rancher" as username
  - name: rancher
    groups:
    - sudo
    - docker
    ssh_authorized_keys:
    - ssh-rsa <ssh-pub-key>

storage:
  files:
  # Override default Docker config because:
  # --live-restore is not supported with Swarm mode
  - path: /etc/sysconfig/docker
    overwrite: true
    contents:
      inline: |
        OPTIONS="--selinux-enabled \
        --log-driver=journald \
        --storage-driver=overlay2 \
        --default-ulimit nofile=1024:1024 \
        --init-path /usr/libexec/docker/docker-init \
        --userland-proxy-path /usr/libexec/docker/docker-proxy \
        "

Just update public key to it and convert to Ignition format using command:

docker run -i --rm quay.io/coreos/fcct --strict < fcos.fcc > fcos.ign

And then you are able to deploy FCOS where you can still login with rancher user and use docker commands and Docker Swarm features with it 😄

PS. I did not yet decided switch to FCOS and I will most probably play with that Rancher OS community fork still at least because of Raspberry Pi when if we decide migrate production workloads to FCOS.

[jokay]

And the size: FCOS (727 MB) vs RancherOS (140 MB), they state "minimal operating system" for FCOS ^^

Thx for the sample fcos.fcc. I have not yet migrated the RancherOS instances and I'm not sure if FCOS is the right choice as well.

Beside the old kernel and the missing UEFI-support I like how RancherOS is setup (just enough OS and the idea of system-docker is great).

[gittygoo]

Just ran accross this same problem, built a cluster only to find out this wont be maintained anymore... docus must clearly state this imho

[evilhamsterman]

Rancher Team there is a building list of people who are running into this. You've published the EOL announcement for people who are subscribed to your support, but as stated above most people don't bother with that if they are using the OS release. It can't be that hard to add the same information to the public facing documentation.

[olljanat]

FYI. We found some show stopper bugs from FCOS (example iSCSI does not work correctly) and other options which we have tested so far does not looks very good either so I'm still seriously considering to keep Rancher OS alive at least for a while on community repo (contributions are very welcome).

I did build now later Docker versions than currently are available on official version. You can use those like this.

First set new repository location:

sudo ros config set rancher.repositories.docker.url https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rancher-os-community/os-services/community-dev

Then you can switch to latest Docker using commands 19.03.13:

sudo system-docker pull rancheroscommunity/os-docker:19.03.13
sudo system-docker tag rancheroscommunity/os-docker:19.03.13 rancher/os-docker:19.03.13
sudo ros engine switch docker-19.03.13

or if you want to test Docker 20.10.0-beta1 version you can do it with commands:

sudo system-docker pull rancheroscommunity/os-docker:20.10.0
sudo system-docker tag rancheroscommunity/os-docker:20.10.0 rancher/os-docker:20.10.0-beta1
sudo ros engine switch docker-20.10.0-beta1

[jokay]

@olljanat looks promising 👍🏼 do you think a kernel bump to e.g. 5.8.12 may be possible as well? 🧐

[olljanat]

@x-jokay I think that it is doable but will need some work. I created burmilla#5 about it. Please comment to there what are features which you are looking for on newer kernels.

[Just-Insane]

This is unfortunate. Is there a reasonable alternative OS for use with Rancher? Ideally something lightweight.

[olljanat]

FYI. We have now BurmillaOS release candidate which is compatible with RancherOS and to where users can directly upgrade. Anyone who is interested please checkout release notes, test your configuration and report bugs if found any so we can fix those to release version: https://github.com/burmilla/os/releases/tag/v1.9.0-rc1

[bf8392]

Really nice! I loved rancher os and it's extremly cool that it will be continued in some way =). Thanks for all the effort!

[evilhamsterman]

It looks like the documentation on the website has finally been updated. It would be good to also include the same information in the README

[JOduMonT]

Sorry @RancherOS Team's, but at https://rancher.com/docs/os/v1.x/en/ the statement is not clear; for me, it sounds I could hope for a RancherOS 2.x. and then if you click on the link for more information it leads to a 404 page.

I'm saying that because VMWare with PhotonOS have the same kind of statement when they end the support of an older version.

If your focus is k3os, at least mention it somewhere, and then the user may follow you into your adventure.

[olljanat]

FYI for those who have followed. For me it looks that Rancher active development has already moved beyond of K3s / k3OS to RKE2 and Harvester.

Recently Harvester codebase was migrated to "RancherOSv2" harvester/harvester#581 (comment)

Also if you look about Rancher press releases those will tell that they are focusing to Enterprise scale Kubernetes solutions now and side effect of it is that these older solution will die.

For those who are ready to contribute there is small light end of the tunnel that with https://github.com/rancher-sandbox/cOS-toolkit it should be (in theory) quite easy to create something similar than RancherOS v1.x have been.

[JOduMonT]

FYI for those who have followed. For me it looks that Rancher active development has already moved beyond of K3s / k3OS to RKE2 and Harvester.

Recently Harvester codebase was migrated to "RancherOSv2" harvester/harvester#581 (comment)

Also if you look about Rancher press releases those will tell that they are focusing to Enterprise scale Kubernetes solutions now and side effect of it is that these older solution will die.

For those who are ready to contribute there is small light end of the tunnel that with https://github.com/rancher-sandbox/cOS-toolkit it should be (in theory) quite easy to create something similar than RancherOS v1.x have been.

Yes, all these are nice project, but not everyone need a cargo to go on the sea; but I understand Rancher need to focus on more on business and less on hobbyist. At the end, me I was just using RancherOS as a jet ski to surf around the Cargo.

[evilhamsterman]

Looks like this was finally addressed in #3066. It only took a year and a half

[psy0rz]

I know its not the same as racheros, but if you're looking for a minimalistic linux distro to install in a VM or on bare metal, take a look at Alpine linux.

It has perfect Docker and ZFS-rootfs support, rolling releases, and has and will be around for years. (since its the defacto distro to run inside containers as well)

All the others are either bloated, too new, not supported anymore or require major hassles to upgrade to next major releases. (redhad and debian derivatives.)

And almost none have good recent ZFS rootfs support.

https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Root_on_ZFS_with_native_encryption

[jokay]

I switched to a Debian LXC (instead of VM) as Debian is officially support by Docker.

• Setup Debian LXC (priviledged if NFS is required)

• Enable features Nesting and NFS

• Execute the following

  apt update && \
  apt upgrade -y && \
  apt install ca-certificates curl gnupg lsb-release -y && \
  mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings && \
  curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/debian/gpg | gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg && \
  echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/debian \
    $(lsb_release -cs) stable" | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null && \
  apt update && \
  apt install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-compose-plugin -y

Enjoy the latest Docker engine and native Docker compose support.

You may even experiment with Docker rootless one day 😉

[psy0rz]

Thats the problem i have: you have to add a repository for debian to get a recent docker version.

With alpine its just

apk add docker docker-composer

And its finished before apt even is done with its "reading package dabase..." stage.

[root@alpine ~]# docker --version
Docker version 20.10.20, build 9fdeb9c3de2f2d9f5799be373f27b2f9df44609d
[root@alpine ~]# docker-compose --version
docker-compose version 1.29.2, build unknown

Or you can install docker-cli-compose if you want the plugin version of docker compose.

edit: forgot my forgot to update my server :)