In the continuing adventures of my laptop hard drive failing, I decided that I might as well upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04 on this laptop, seeing as I had to reinstall it all from scratch anyway (the laptop is only for development / testing / experimenting, so I can afford to be more adventurous with it, at it's not actually serving anyone but me on "localhost". Definitely not a production server). There were a few changes from the Ubuntu 16.04 "perfect server" tutorial that I was following, but I was able to work out - from the error messages and looking up what a few packages had been renamed to - how to make it work and get ISPConfig up and running. My issue is, admittedly, cosmetic. But it does mean that the "monitor" page of ISPConfig is rendered useless, as the server is permanently red for "error" when there isn't strictly a problem. To explain, Ubuntu 18.04 comes with some snaps pre-installed (mostly gnome utilities). Snaps use Apparmor. The very first instructions in "perfect server" is to turn off Apparmor. Snapd is therefore uninstalled as it depends on that. The snaps are useless. This is not the end of the world, though, as you can still install the old "apt" versions of these things. On the ISPConfig side of things, snaps create these "loopback" file systems - "/dev/loop0", "/dev/loop1" - mounted onto the "/snap" directory and these are all "squashfs" and have zero bytes available. They're all "100%" usage by design. The problem here is that ISPConfig sees the zero available bytes on these and then flags up the error that the disk is full. But my actual "/" happily has 1.7TB available (2% usage, so still a very long way from "disk full"). So this is not an actual true error. It's just ISPConfig not knowing to just ignore these special snap filesystems, as they're always "100% usage" and that's fine. That's just how they work. Well, if you dev guys have been working on "perfect server" for Ubuntu 18.04 then you might well have spotted this problem. Snaps and how the guide / ISPConfig currently work are, unfortunately, a bit intrinsically incompatible. Snaps use Apparmor. You can't turn off Apparmor without disabling snaps completely (I can live with this for the time being as I never used snaps before, so I can happily continue never using them, but it will cause various issues going forward. Also, the snaps in question are all desktop apps, which a real headless production server wouldn't care about anyway as it wouldn't have a desktop). The problem here, of course, is that because the server is permanently rendered red for "error", then this could well mask a genuine error. Certainly, I can't use "monitor" to spot when packages need updating, as red overrides blue which overrides green. It's cosmetic, granted. It'll function regardless. But it'll be interesting to see the "perfect server" for 18.04 and how it gets around these things.
I've written the perfect server tutorial already, it will get published when ISPConfig 3.1.12 is ready. There are no tools that use snap installed, so there are no issues in perfect server 18.04. My guess is: you installed an Ubuntu Desktop and not an Ubuntu server. Here df output from perfect server ubuntu 18.04: Code: root@server1:~# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on udev 965M 0 965M 0% /dev tmpfs 199M 5.1M 194M 3% /run /dev/mapper/server1--vg-root 29G 3.2G 24G 12% / tmpfs 995M 0 995M 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 5.0M 4.0K 5.0M 1% /run/lock tmpfs 995M 0 995M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup tmpfs 199M 0 199M 0% /run/user/0 But we should add some code in ISPConfig to ignode these loopback filesystems.
Oh, yeah, totally. This is on my laptop, so it's Ubuntu Desktop and not Ubuntu Server. As I mentioned, I can just not bother with the snaps and use the old "apt" way of doing things, as all the utilities that are pre-installed as snap are also still available that way too. Basically, this is not a show stopper. I can get by. Implement some "work arounds" here and there. It's really just the fact that those "loopback" file systems screws up the "monitor" functionality. Which is an annoyance, but not a show stopper - I could, of course, just manually check if packages need updating or if services are online. Not as convenient, though. But, yeah, if you're aware of the problems that snaps can potentially cause with how ISPConfig currently works, then my job here is done. This was more of a "heads up" to you guys about this problem. Though Ubuntu Server doesn't need or use snaps for now, it is Canonical's little pet project. They might change that in future, to push their format over the "flatpak" competition. We'll see.
