A year ago I built a NAS to reduce my reliance on cloud services, and set up an arr stack. I went with TrueNAS Scale, which was on Bluefin at the time. In the past 12 months, TrueNAS Scale has been through FOUR major OS versions, with a fifth already announced. At least one of those involved a release train switch so, despite diligently checking for updates in the dashboard, I was left in the dust with an obsolete OS, and didn’t find out until it was already a huge hassle to upgrade.
I’ve been really happy with the utility and benefit of having this tool, but holy smokes how is anybody supposed to keep up with all of this? This is far from my only hobby, and I simply do not have the time, patience, or interest for a constant race to keep up with vetting new release versions and fixing what breaks every 3 weeks. I have enough tinkering hobbies as it is.
On top of that, there’s the whole blow up with TrueCharts, which has also left me with an entire suite of obsolete albatrosses around my NAS that I need to deal with. Am I still waiting for them to figure out an upgrade path? I don’t even know anymore.
Sorry for the rant, but I guess what I’m looking for is: how do you keep up with the constant maintenance and updates, and where do I go from here, in February 2025, with a system running Bluefin 22.12, a 32TB ZFS pool (RAIDZ1) that has to remain intact, and a handful of TrueCharts apps that I don’t want to lose the data from (e.g. Jellyfin configs/watch history)?
ngl the newest truenas version is incomprehensible to me. Makes most of the videos on it obsolete, and the docs aren’t much better, all while trying to abstract docker compose in a way that makes it shit itself when you try to use anything not specifically developed to work with TNS’s storage layout.
It’ll probably improve with time but I clearly picked the worst time to pick it up.
I’ve decided either to return to https://dietpi.com/ or try prox mox and pray it’s more stable.
I use debian, so what’s to keep up with? Apt upgrade is literally everything I need. My home server doesn’t take a lot of my time except when I want to tweak something or introduce something new. I dont really follow all the trendy stuff at all and just have it do what I need.
I use Debian stable for my main OS for the stability, security and infrequent updates, and run all of my services in Docker containers to keep everything up to date.
I switched away from truecharts once scale switched to native docker and my experience has been much smoother since. TC had some kind of breaking change every other month, now I only have to worry about breaking changes when the actual apps have a major update.
The transition was way easier than i expected. First I set up nginx pointing to the TC load balancer for every url, so I could swap apps one at a time. Then I used heavyscript to mount the volumes for an app and rsynced them to a normal dir. With that I could spin up the community apps version or a custom docker config and swap over nginx once I confirmed it was working.
I run proxmox on the host with docker in a VM for 90% of my stuff, OS updates I do like every 6 months maybe, I’ve done 1 major version upgrade on proxmox with no issues at all.
The docker containers auto-update via Komodo, and nothing really ever breaks anymore other than the occasional container error that needs a simple fix.
Everything important is backed up nightly using both proxmox backup server, and to backblaze B2 with restic.
I’ve never heard of komodo, I’ve heard a lot about Watchtower but I found it more annoying to set up due to its labeling systems. Is there any added benefit for Komodo over using a standard watch tower setup?
I haven’t set up either of them, but my main concern is having a breaking change be automatically updated
Komodo is a full management setup, similar to Portainer, Dockge, etc… It works reasonably well.
Watchtower doesn’t require any labeling unless you want to exclude a container.
but my main concern is having a breaking change be automatically updated
Pinning to a major version usually solves this, ie; instead of using
postgres:latestusepostgres:14which will give you updates only from version 14.But also have backups in place, worst case you just roll back to before it updated.
Oh ok, thank you, I already use Portainer for my existing setup so it wouldn’t make much sense to fully rework it. I haden’t thought of version pinning though so I may implement that instead, it makes sense “breaking changes” wouldn’t happen within the same major version.
Yeah pinning is great, you’ll still need watchtower for auto updates too
Yea for sure, I plan to implement that as well when I have some free time.
Thanks for a lot of useful replies, everyone. Sorry I ghosted my own post for a couple days. I’m seeing surprisingly few people who actually use or used TrueNAS, so maybe that’s something to consider moving away from. I’ll have to weigh my options.
This is why I’m still using a Synology ¯\(ツ)/¯
I can install all the fun stuff I want in Docker, but for the core OS services, it’s outsourced to Synology to maintain for me
I’ve never used true nass, but I’ve never had any issue with keeping up with releases. I use a proxmox host with Debian containers mostly, and then I use ansible to do any major changes to the hosts such as replacing certificates or upgrading the packages
Being said my backup structure isn’t the most professional, I have a 8 TB external drive that I keep plugged in via USB and I have proxmox backup server on the same host and it creates backups nightly
OS updates I only bother with every 6-12mo, though I also use debian which doesn’t push major updates all that regularly.
As far as software goes; pretty much everything is in a docker container with watchtower automatically pulling new updates to those nightly at 4am. It sends me email notifications, so It’ll tell me if an update fails; combined with uptime-kuma notifying me if any of my services is unavailable for whatever reason.
The rest I’ll usually do with the OS updates. Just because an update was released, doesn’t mean you’ve gotta drop everything and install it right this moment.
You might want to think about running a “stable” or “LTS” OS and spin up things in Docker instead. That way you only have to do OS level updates very rarely.
Thanks for this. I’ve recently been recreating my home server on good hardware and have been thinking it’s time to jump into selfhosting more stuff. I’ve used Docker a bit, so I guess I’ll have to do it the right way. It’s always good to know what choices now will avoid future issues.
I learned this the hard way as well… I did a big OS update on mine once and it broke almost every application running on it. Docker worked perfectly still. I transferred everything I could to Docker after that.
In life? Amphetamines.
For one I don’t use software that updates constantly. If I had to log in to a container more than once a year to fix something, I’d figure out something else. My NAS is just harddrives on a Debian machine.
Everything I use runs either Debian or is some form of BSD
Same, but openSUSE. Tumbleweed on my desktop and laptop, Leap on my servers.
And yeah, if I need to babysit something, I’ll use an alternative. I’ll upgrade when I’m ready to, which is usually over holidays when I’m bored and looking for a project.
First off, backups of the configs any user data that you can’t torrent should the inevitable happen.
Then set time aside to do updates, I spend Wednesday evenings updating and improving my setup.
Then find a way to track update announcements, I use both an RSS reader and newrealeases.io to know when something I run gets an update
I dont :) Mostly.
Honestly I have an auto backup system. And then set it up to auto update periodically. Then use Debian Server as it almost never breaks as a server distro.
If it works, I don’t update unless I’m bored or something. I also spread things out on multiple machines, so there’s less chance of stuff happening like you describe with the charts feature going away. My NAS is pretty much just a NAS now.
You can probably backup your configs/data, upgrade, then deploy jellyfin again, restore, and reconfigure. You should probably backup your data on your ZFS pool. But, I recently updated to the latest TrueNas Scale from ~5 year old FreeBSD version of TrueNas and the pools still worked fine (none of the “apps” or jails worked, obviously). The upgrade process even ported my service configurations over. I didn’t care about much of the data in the pools, so only backed up the most important stuff.
I don’t update unless I’m bored
Hahahaha, one of my kind!
My upgrades usually occur because I’m setting up a new system anyway, that way my effort is building for tomorrow in addition to the upgrades, and I get testing time to ensure changeover is pretty smooth.
