We have had posted on that site for almost a year that ncp would be transitioning into a new illumos core product called illumian. We sent email to everyone who had registered a download that the site would be coming down.. In it's final week the primary and secondary were badly compromised so they were shut down.

You can hit the apt repo from a mirror site. apt.zpool.org is still live.

We recommend moving to illumian as this will be our core distro for now on..

Okay, I suppose it's obvious how often I visit the website.

That's tragic that the apt repo is toast. There is this great storage product you should look at the next time you need reliable stable storage, it's called Nexenta :) The mirror you mentioned has a fraction of what apt.nexenta.org had. I suppose that's life, I'll live with it.

On the plus side I downloaded and installed illumian. It looks great and will fit my needs perfectly. Thanks for continuing the project.

From my reading I understand illumian is the base for nexentastor 4? Can you confirm this? The reason is I trust the stability patches the nexenta team puts in place and would like to use them. If they use illumian for nexentastor then it's stable enough for me.

Well, i still have access to the boxes and could put them back up if there was alot of demand... But they have been down for almost a month and this is just the second question i have had.. :(

Yes one of the many reasons to go to illumian is for a new base for our commercial products, also the name confused people, building from a different core.

Illumian has an illumos core just like smartos or openindiana. We prefer and have all our tools built around the debian packaging so we needed a distro that had this main feature and we had alot of legacy users.

If you have any other questions please feel free to join the list for illumian, look at the wiki for the project on illumos.org, ask in freenode irc #illumian-dev or please feel free to contact me directly linda.kateley@nexenta.com

Linda Kateley wrote:

Well, i still have access to the boxes and could put them back up if there was alot of demand... But they have been down for almost a month and this is just the second question i have had.. :(

It's okay. I can compile fping on my own. I was pleased to see illumian has fping just like Nexenta CP had. It's one thing that has frustrated me over the years, the inattention to maintaining apt repos. I've learned to live with it and I understand as a startup/small company no one wants to support a free product for years when you've got new exciting products to show off.

I found out most of the packages I really need are located at apt.nexentastor.org. That lets me install samba and a few other tools I use.

I will move on to illumian for my next round of deployment.

We are sharing an upstream with openindiana now, so the cooperation should allow for better code and more choices.

We also have alot of resources to try and grow this community to make it more robust repo.

Welcome to illumian.

Hi,

I'm also an NCP user, and running it on 4 boxes. Just like Daniel I like the command line and I am really happy with my Nexenta boxes. I knew Illumian would replace NCP some day. But I thought that Illumian was not yet that mature to run production systems on it. Perhaps I'm wrong about that? Can (and should) Illumian be used in an production environment?

Since there's not an easy upgrade path available from NCP to Illumian (or more like not at all), my guess is that it takes quite a while before everyone has replaced their NCP installations with Illumian. If I recall from memory correctly, the last update to NCP was not more than 6 months ago, so it seemed to me it was still in (some) active development and supported. So, the email that the nexenta.org site had been replaced came a bit as a surprise. Also I noticed that the apt repository had been down for some time which gave me a bad feeling about the support and the continuation of the product.

A few days ago I tried to locate the forum for an issue I encountered, but was unable to find it. I even registered on this forum to post this message. I think that it was not quite a wise decision to cut off all strings related to NCP as I think there are still a lot of active users. Or are there not as many as I think? Offcourse I have no info about the stats of the downloads or the apt repository hits (that should give some information about it). I vote for bringing back up the repository as all installations are broken right now, as Daniel allready mentioned. Or has apt.nexentastor.org the same content? If it's really an issue to bring it up permenantly perhaps I will even consider to supply an public mirror (if within possibillities).

So is all support for NCP cut off? Even the community forums? They had a lot of information. If that's the case, and Illumian is the recommended distro/OS as replacement, I seriously have to consider to speed up the upgrade to Illumian.

There are still some people on the irc channels. We had hoped to save the nexenta.org site in an archive here on this site, but in it's last week online it was badly compromised. I have the content and plan to move over some of it to this site.

There is some info still out there in places like zpool.org.

There is a list you can subscribe to at the illumian project off of illumos.org. Most of the ncp developers are on those lists.

Hi Linda,

Thank you for your quick reply. Is my conclusion correct that Nexenta is not willing to support the NCP users anymore and that even the apt repository will not come back online, since you ignored most questions about that? I'm really sorry, but the fact that the site has been "compromised" is no excuse at all. That's where backups are for. Furthermore it does not sound like the content will be available any time soon.

I understand that Nexenta offers the NCP software with minimal support and all, but I think that for most users (including me) it seemed like a solid OS being backed-up by a commercial product. Well, this seems no garantee at all, and again, I think that's the wrong decision.

And then again the question: Is Illumian production ready and should it be considered as an stable OS? There is very little information on the website available, so does not seem as a very mature project yet. But offcourse I can be wrong about that. I will do some testing with it and figure out how to upgrade my NCP boxes to Illumian and convert the configurations on the boxes.

I'm sorry if the above sounds a bit unfriendly. But I'm just a bit frustrated (and irritated) about the fact that Nexenta just seem to drop all support and information about NCP and not seem to put much any effort in bringing it back online. Also it suggests their users to just "upgrade" to illumian. Well, this is not an easy operation and requires a complete re-install of the software and requires more than just "zpool export and zpool import". Therefore it will be a huge downtime of our (and others) systems running the Nexenta software and all systems attached to it.

How can know if Illumian will not end up being the same story?

The apt repository for ncp is at the mirror site apt.zpool.org.

We posted the end of nexenta.org for about 6 months. We sent an email to everyone who had registered of the move.

Both projects are community releases. We look for community support, help and use. But AKAIK support was always best effort community support. We are working to reproduce most of the docs at the illumian project site.

I don't know if we made a claim for ncp as being "production ready". It is very stable, so is illumian, actually illumian has an additional year+ of development and bug fixes by a much larger community. I think the word production means different things to different people. For production quality we would need to provide minimal downtime for upgrade.

I don't think we ever sold support for NCP, do you have a support contract? If so, please contact me right away, we need to know that. linda.kateley@nexenta.com. we will need to honor that.

I don't see us providing production quality support for illumian. But i can't say never.. There maybe a company somewhere who might want to do that, like a canonical.. We do provide production support for nexentastor.

I too was taken by surprise when I attempted to install a package and was told that the repository was unavailable! My fault for not following the Nexenta news more closely I guess :) apt.zpool.org does not appear to contain all of the packages that we install on fileservers by default. Does anybody have a full mirror of apt.nexenta.org? I'm quite happy to take a copy and host a mirror myself (as I use NCP in production on several boxes). I just need to get my hands on the files!

I have sent all this info to the project lead and hopefully we will be able to arrange a mirror.

thanks

There are a lot of us still running Nexenta CP and the apt site being down is a hassle. For example today I needed to install rsync on a server and instead just get error can't connect.

Yes, the "community" needs to step up - Nexenta has provided FAR more support for NCP than is commercially reasonable to expect, but just leaving this piece up would be appreciated by many - even if it's just a dns entry really pointing to someone (like myself) in the community providing the mirror.

I'll be happy to provide a mirror if needed, just let me know what you want for a setup (Linux or NCP or other).

Steve Radich

BTW to agree with the others about apt.zpool.org being uncomplete - the rsync doesn't exist.

We are working on a plan and will enlist all the volunteers we can get.

Ok, so we now have the full ncp3 repo up at

deb http://apt.nexentastor.org/ncp3 hardy-unstable main contrib non-free

If you want to pull a mirror please feel and also please post the url.

We talked to the Phil at zpool and he will try to get this sync'ed later today..

This won't be permanent so if you want a mirror try to get it in the next 30 days.

Phillip at zpool has finshed the mirror... it should be the same as the ncp

deb http://apt.zpool.org/ncp3 hardy-unstable main contrib non-free

Also let me know if there are any problems!

Please post to let us this working correctly

linda.kateley@nexenta.com

Thank you very much, very appreciated.

Hi all,

I also have put up an mirror. At first glance the mirror apt.zpool.org does not seem to provide sources. I've used wget to sync with apt.nexetastor.org/ncp3 and seems like an full mirror (34GB). My repository is available at: apt.linuxbak.nl/ncp3. Repository is located in Europe/The Netherlands and is 1gbit connected. Feel free to use. If anything is wrong/not working please let me know at hugo (a) linuxbak.nl.

Hugo