Debian Stable and Ceph Are Great

Debian stable is great distribution that we have been using as a foundation for our Ceph storage management solution since its inception. Unfortunately, stability and reliability come along with one limitation that every Debian user is familiar with: sometimes the software is old.

Old software can be a problem if you want to run the latest and best version of Ceph.

To solve this problem for all Ceph users on Debian, we already announced an unofficial mirror on the mailing list in June 2018. For all those who are not active on the mailing list or didn't see this thread, we would like to draw your attention again to the fact that our Debian/Ceph Mirror is still available and will be maintained in the future. All packages go through our internal tests and quality controls and are built based on our Nautilus branch. We will sometimes backport fixes for bugs we have encountered in our deployments for these builds. Sometimes we also fix bugs ourselves in that branch, all fixes are of course also upstreamed to Ceph, but it might take a few versions until they are backported.

You can check out the our GitHub repository to see what we are building. All Nautilus builds are based on a 14.2.x tag in our repository. For example, the current 14.2.1 tag corresponds to the 14.2.1-1 debian package.

Where Is That Mirror Now?

As stated in our June 2018 release, the mirror was available at static.croit.io for testing. The new permanent URL is https://mirror.croit.io/debian-nautilus/, the repo is signed with this GPG key. If you have used the static host so far, you should switch to mirror.croit.io.

How to Install?

curl https://mirror.croit.io/keys/release.gpg > /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/croit-mirror.gpg
echo 'deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/croit-mirror.gpg] https://mirror.croit.io/debian-nautilus/ buster main' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/croit-ceph.list
printf 'Package: *\nPin: origin mirror.croit.io\nPin-Priority: 990\n' > /etc/apt/preferences.d/pin-mirror-croit-io
apt update

Check if everything worked by running apt-cache policy ceph before running apt install ceph

root@croit ~ $ apt-cache policy ceph
ceph:
Installed: (none)
Candidate: 14.2.3-1
Version table:
14.2.3-1 990
990 https://mirror.croit.io/debian-nautilus buster/main amd64 Packages
12.2.11+dfsg1-2.1 500
500 http://deb.debian.org/debian buster/main amd64 Packages
root@croit ~ $ apt install ceph

Please note: We have validated the compatibility with our image only, use at your own risk.