I plan to change my motherboard, RAM, and CPU in my attempt to support ECC on my home TrueNAS server. I wanted to ask what would be the safest or straight-forward approach.
Should I backup my config and reinstall TrueNAS on my “newer” hardware, or just swap the new parts and attempt to boot the system like nothing happened? Boot disk, and the rest of the data drives will not be changed.
I know that TrueNAS was designed as an appliance software, but I am also aware that the hardware I aim to use isn’t exactly enterprise grade, although I don’t see any particular issues with the support.
Backup the configuration, export the pool, build the new system, import the backup, import the pool. This should likely work. I do not think the configuration has any hardcode information about the drives locations. The export / import should make things pretty much just work. To be clear, I have not done this myself, but in years of using the product these steps match most everything I have read in docs or post.
Thanks for the reply! Apologies but I’m not sure I get the export/import pool part. Are you referring to the boot pool? How and why would I import it again once my backup config is imported? Is that step coming after I reinstall TrueNAS or reinstall just won’t be necessary?
I really don’t get why export is necessary. I won’t have a 2nd system. I’m just pulling out the motherboard from my current build and setting a new one, with CPU and RAM already installed.
The closest thing to this I’ve done was when my boot-ssd suddenly died, so I installed a new one, installed TrueNAS, imported the config, and I was back in the game.
Isn’t the export function needed when I want to keep the current system running without the exported pool?
When I recently changed my CPU, motherboard, and RAM to a 9th gen Intel, first made sure of the data backup I had stored offline then backed up the system config from the GUI using the secret seed option. Next, I changed out the hardware. Booted up Truenas with a monitor connected to the motherboard so I could check for any problems but after some configuration scrolled across the screen, the system came online. The motherboard NIC changed the name of the Truenas interface so I had the work of editing some apps and a VM interface. Otherwise, it was easier than expected.
reinstall. maybe half a year ago i swapped my b550 motherboard to an x570 for extra pcie lanes, everything else was unchanged (cpu, ram, hba, boot ssds, etc), the only addition was a 2nd nvme and an intel i350-t4. it was even the exact same brand and model of mobo, msi tomahawk. after doing the swap my system was so incredibly unstable i thought i had gotten a defective motherboard. i exported my config, did a reinstall, restored the config, and i havent had a single (system related) problem since.
Just swap the drives into the new hardware and take a trip to the console to change network settings if needed.
Have a backup of the configuration “just in case”.
Powering down exports pools anyway, so there’s nothing to do.
This, but I took the measure to export the pool manually which had my backup data from the rest of the pools.
TrueNAS booted like nothing happened, however I’ve made the mistake of removing my PCIE NIC and moving to the onboard one. Things went south since the new NIC had the same IP as the old one but I couldn’t access the web ui. Then I assigned a new one via dhcp, and I had SSH access but still not UI. Then I had to learn the hard way that ‘alias’ is actually static IP. Long story short assigning the same old static IP solved my issue, however there seems to be a game-breaking bug within the middleware that results in network access to the appliance (via SSH) but not web ui access. I’ve tried several different devices for clients, browsers, etc. I’m pretty sure that it’s not a simple networking problem in my homelab.
With that, I think it’s okay to close this as resolved. Thank you.
