Forum Discussion

Zach_Sterling's avatar
2 years ago

Is Fedora OK for a Collector?

Hello there,

I was curious about installing a collector on Fedora Workstation/Server. I have my own test lab environment in a sandbox and am considering moving my test box over from Ubuntu to Fedora to play around with Cockpit. Does anyone have any experience? I wasn’t sure how strict LM is with distros and how far you could stray from the major supported ones listed. Considering Fedora is upstream for RHEL, I think it could be a good option if you don’t want to give Red Hat their blood money.

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    2 years ago

    I was able to get it up and running without any issues on a vanilla fedora 37 vm.

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous

    Just ran it up in a container using the fedora:latest image. Yum update and yum install which and the installation proceeded for me. However, it failed when trying to call back to LM (i think). 

    We cannot make a connection to  (error: 0). Do you want to setup a proxy now? [default: y]:n
    You can continue installation. But the installed agent may not work correctly until you manually set the proxy correctly
    Insufficient physical memory. please choose a proper collector size installer
    Installation aborted

    Verified internet connectivity from the internet by pinging 8.8.8.8, but could not ping my portal, but ping may be blocked.

    I would say just try it. The collector that runs all collection for k8s used to be based on the python:3.9-slim image, which is debian bullseye. LM has since hidden the collector DockerFile, or at least moved it off github to somewhere i can’t find. 

    I know it works on rocky, the free version of centos (which used to be the free version of RHEL).

  • Thanks @Stuart Weenig, nice to hear this worked! It’s always fun to test things out (Raspberry Pi’s got a lot of cycles internally at LM!), but I would like to highlight that for monitoring production environments you will want to stick with the supported distros as outlined in our Installing Collectors document. 

    If problems arise with the collector we may be unable to assist in troubleshooting efforts until a supported OS version is being utilized. 

    If Cockpit was the driving factor to test with Fedora, it does seem that it is available for other distros we support, so maybe that might be an alternative test case you want to pursue that way you can continue using it on a supported distro if you end up liking it. Thanks!

    https://cockpit-project.org/running
     

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous

    I was able to get it up and running without any issues on a vanilla fedora 37 vm.

  • No @Stuart Weenig. I should clarify “wasted cycles” haha. It was a lot of fun trying to make it work though!