I have not touched FreeNAS-11.3-u5 since setting it up over 5 years ago.
I’d like to bring it up-to-date which seems to involve migration to TrueNAS Core.
Where do I start? There seems to be plenty of help here if you have some idea where to begin - which I don’t have.
I hope I’m not committing any breaches of etiquette here!
Martin
What services are you using? Only file sharing?
If yes, the easiest method is probably:
If it’s only file sharing, trying to perform an update in place which involves multiple steps and versions is probably not worth it.
If you are using more than file sharing, what exactly?
That is quite an old version, but it’s a testament to how stable it is!
I’m not sure if a migration is even possible now because the current version of TrueNAS is a vastly different beast from that version 5 years ago.
I’ll let other people attempt to explain this one because I have no idea what the best route is… My instincts tell me you’d probably want to slowly upgrade to latest version of 12, then latest version of 13, then finally the sidegrade to TrueNAS CE.
Thanks to all.
To answer (partially) pmh, all I have on it are 5 drives in a pool shared with Windows 10 plus Plex server.
I would not know how to follow pmh’s route.
whattteva’s route looks more possible but how do you start to ‘slowly upgrade to latest version of 12’?
Is this done from FreeNAS itself? ‘Check for updates’ says ‘Unable to connect to url https://update-master.ixsystems.com/FreeNAS/trains.txt: Automatic update check failed. Please check system network settings.’
What next?
Thanks again - Martin
THis is a good place to start.
My main issue for my migration was I had built the RAID with GELI encryption, which is FreeBSD only. TrueNAS has been using ZFS’s native encryption for a while, which is supported in FreeBSD and Linux, and had to transition to that by using zfs send and receive to get it to backup drive, reformat the raid, push it back. Only did it once. If you made your RAID with version 12 or 13, I think (not sure) it would be native ZFS already, and is mountable on a new system.
Which part exactly? I’d argue that my proposed way is orders of magnitude easier than going through all of the upgrades any of which might fail.
@bladder Do you mean migration to TrueNAS Scale (Linux) or Core (BSD)?
If you are just trying to upgrade FreeNAS to TrueNAS Core, you would just go through the updates by downloading and manually applying the update files. So 11.3u5 to 12 Release. Update to 12.0u8.1 then 13 Release and then the 13.0 or 13.3 series. I don’t know if you can even update Jails anymore since FreeBSD 13 is EOL now.
If you are wanting to end up on TrueNAS Scale, it may be better to start with a fresh install and copying your old data from backups or doing a pool export in FreeNAS and importing the pool in TrueNAS Scale and fixing all the issues you may have with dataset ownership and sharing. There have been a lot of changes to how SMB sharing was allowed. You would have to figure out how to set up Plex again, too.
Read the Migration from Core section of the documents to see what is involved and what are deal breakers, like legacy encryption.
Thank you all very much.
This is obviously a larger thing than I thought it was!
I shall go away for quite a while, do lots of reading and make a proper plan of action.
I’m away on holiday soon and probably won’t look at this again for a while.
Best wishes to you all - Martin
You are most probably right!
I’ll have another look - others have pointed out the many potential pitfallsof the migration.
Thanks for your reply - Martin
