On Installing Ceph-common Package

So far, we have focused on Ceph cluster (server) side. In this article, we will see how to install ceph-common package for client sides.

Let’s start with the packages in the Ubuntu repo. The following screenshot shows the ceph-common packages in the Ubuntu repos: focal (Ubuntu 20.04) and jammy (Ubuntu 22.04).

ceph-common packages in Ubuntu repos

On the Ceph documentation, there are the three ways to install a spcific version from the Ceph repos. Here, we will use cephadm to do that.

First, we will download cephadm. First, we need to find appropriate URLs. These are two commands that work.

curl --silent --remote-name --location https://github.com/ceph/ceph/raw/pacific/src/cephadm/cephadm
curl --silent --remote-name --location https://download.ceph.com/rpm-reef/el9/noarch/cephadm

Here, we will use Ubuntu 22.04 and pacific version of cephadm.

Adding a Ceph repo for Ceph reef and listing available ceph-common versions

The add-repo command performs two tasks: adding repo keys and adding a ceph source list. The added ceph.list (/etc/apt/sources.list.d/ceph.list) is shown below.

deb https://download.ceph.com/debian-reef/ jammy main

Please note that pacific cephadm can add the reef repo. These two steps can be done without cephadm.

wget -q -O- 'https://download.ceph.com/keys/release.asc' | sudo tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/ceph.asc
echo "deb https://download.ceph.com/debian-reef/ jammy main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ceph.list
sudo apt update
apt-cache madison ceph-common   # Check

In the previous process, we added a reef version of ceph-common on Ubuntu 22.04. Can we add the pacific version to Ubuntu 22.04? There are many Internet posts reporting issues with this attempt. We will have this error.

Error from adding debian-pacific repo in Ubuntu 22.04

This is because the ceph repo does not have jammy. The Release files are in each distro like focal.

Ceph debian-pacific repo distros

We can replace jammy with focal. Then, we can add the repo, but we will have unmet dependancy problem while trying to install the package. It does not seem to have a straightforward solution to fix this issue.

Instead of specifying a release name, you can add a specific version repo using version option from Octopus (15.2.0) and later releases.

sudo ./cephadm add-repo --version 15.2.1

You can directly get available repos with the Ceph repo website like this.

curl https://download.ceph.com/debian-16.2.15/dists/

Ceph common 16.2.15 (debian) can be installed using apt install on

• Debian 10 (buster)
• Debian 11 (bullseye)
• Ubuntu 18.04 (bionic)
• Ubuntu 20.04 (focal)

Finding steps for installing pacific on Ubuntu 22.04 is beyond the scope of this article.