Dragonfish planning

Apps and Virtualization
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1

Hi folks - I’m trying to plan out my migration to Dragonscale. I’m a current Cobia user, running 7 Apps, all of which are Truecharts:

  • CloudFlared
  • Traefik
  • Jellyfin
  • Qbittorrent and Sabnzbd (download clients)
  • Sonarr and Radarr (media downloading, indexing support, etc).

I have a registered domain with an SSL cert so that my parents can access Jellyfin from their home (they’re elderly and get a big kick out of the wizardry involved in having their shows be able to be “uploaded to their television” for them).

I’m trying to figure out what I should do in terms of the next steps with Dragonfish, given the work we need to do in Truecharts. I’d actually like to put together a bit of a video or summary article on this, as I think this is going to come up a lot in the next bit, as we move from tech-savvy people who are early adopters of Dragonfish to the significant portion of the TrueNAS userbase which are maybe less-tech-centric people who followed cookbooks and got their stuff working, and just want to leave it alone.

I’m a mid-level IT professional who moved into management about a decade ago. Most of my experience is on the Windows side, but I cut my teeth many years ago on Unix variants (primarily AIX and IRIX), and have a few hundred hours on Linux systems, though mostly as a passive hobby and without much thought to security or anything like that (ie. for fun, not for my job).

Most importantly: I’m not trying to take on a second job maintaining TrueNAS. I want to do light admin / upgrades every so often, but not have to invest consecutive weekends and deal with “it’s not working” calls from my folks.

So: I see a couple of options in front of me:

  1. Do manual uninstall/reinstall/reconfigure of my apps in Dragonfish, using the walkthrough provided on Truecharts’ page. This is tedious, but (theoretically) has the experience which most closely resembles what TrueNAS intends. Obviously, I have no idea when this will break again, and given that it has broken twice in the time I’ve used TrueNAS, I should reasonably expect that this will happen again.

  2. Go with Jailmaker. I have no idea what this looks like in practice, but my assumption is that a lot of the access / configuration / etc of the applications will no longer be done through TrueNAS as they are today. This is a bit of a bummer; I’m on TrueNAS because of the single pane of glass and integrated experience. I’ve zero experience with jails, but am confident that I can learn.

  3. Scrap both of the above, stand up a Linux VM, and just install my stuff on that. Again, a departure from the TrueNAS experience, but I’m now back to a simplistic experience running a single server with what I want on it. TrueNAS just sits in the background doing NAS things, and I am responsible for maintaining a Linux VM.

Is that essentially what it looks like right now?

Again - I’m ultimately looking to “give back” by producing a bit of a guide on what this experience looks like so that other people can see it. I know the Jellyfin/video server build is a very common one for TrueNAS and my setup is typical of that build, so being able to provide a step-by-step for folks (maybe even in a Youtube video) should ultimately help with the traffic clog on the forum; at least a little.

Given the above scenario that I’m running today, which would you choose in my situation?

2

I think you’re missing:

  1. Use the migration script that TrueCharts recommends to handle the migration.
3

I’d recommend option 1B, which is just a one-time migration to the TrueNAS official apps for some of those you have, such as Cloudflared (I use that as well), Jellyfin and some of the others. Then deploy via the UI any remaining apps via Custom Docker image since those should all persist nicely and migrate to future versions of TrueNAS with little fuss.

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4

Yep, this exactly. I’ve moved on from Truecharts over a year ago. I now use a combination of the TrueNAS catalog and custom apps.

No fuss, things just work. Upgrades are simple as well.

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5

…still don’t support important features that have been in every TrueCharts app since the beginning, like Ingress and cert management. It’d really be nice if you guys could work together rather than against each other.

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6

I just migrated 30 Truecharts apps using the heavy script, took me about 90 minutes. No Data loss and no problems. My guess is those 7 apps will take you around 30 minutes to migrate using the script.

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7

I’d actually meant that as option 1. A quick (admittedly) read-through of that page looks like a fairly manual process, which is why I spelled it out that way.

I’m reasonably confident that I can muddle through making any of the options work; I’m trying to figure out what makes the most sense for a bit of a “cookbook” approach for people who might be a little less technically-inclined. What is on the Truecharts page is not - in my opinion - something you can just throw at people with unknown technical abilities and expect them not to be flooding back here with issues, but if that’s the consensus “best” approach from people here, I can do that.

8

Thanks, Lars. By “Heavy Script”, do you mean following the process recommended by Truecharts (on this page? Just clarifying.

9

Yes that’s the Guide i used.

10

It really doesn’t look like it to me, though I haven’t run through it yet (might try it this weekend, though .0 releases of TrueNAS aren’t always that dependable). Run three commands at the shell, install one app, run one more command at the shell. From there, it appears to be automatic.

I’d think this would have to be the method from their docs–certainly neither of the other two options you mention would be anything close to this. Jailmaker is going to be purely CLI work. A VM is going to be, well, a VM. Either of these is going to require far more manual work and technical expertise than it appears would be needed for the documented method.

The one thing I’d add is to take a checkpoint of the Apps pool before upgrading to Dragonfish. That way, if you run into problems with apps under Dragonfish, you can revert any changes it may have made–and since I’ve had significant problems with apps with the last two upgrades, I plan to do this.