Hi, today I’ve tried to create a new Jail on My TrueNAS Core version TrueNAS-12.0-U5 server (old PC with AMD processor and Intel NIC) and failed. I’ve learned on the forum that it is because my version of TrueNAS is no longer supported. So I decided to update the system and done some more reading on the forum to see what issues to expect and how to potentially overcome them. From what I’ve read so far I should wait a few days for the latest release (13.3-RELEASE) but I’ve also read that its life expectancy is rather short and that it would be better to migrate to SCALE. I’m not really much of a Linux or BSD guy and at this point I’m starting to get a little lost so I thought I’d start a new topic and get some advice from the community as to how best to proceed from here.
If you aren’t set on either, I’d recommend using SCALE. That is all the latest rage these days.
Both of these are correct. However, you’ll be able to upgrade your jails to 13.3, and probably to 13.4 when it comes out, and have a working and up-to-date system for a while.
This is the direction iX is going–it appears near-certain that 13.3 will be the last release of CORE. But your jails won’t migrate to SCALE; you’ll need to replace them with apps (which itself is a system in flux) or sandboxes (which work somewhat like jails).
Ok, so if I understand it correctly whatever I decide now I’ll have to migrate to scale eventually. When you say my jails won’t migrate do you mean that they will be deleted during the migration process or the data in them will remain but the jail simply won’t work. Right now I’m leaning more towards updating CORE then migrating to SCALE because I don’t want to loose my jails but for how long is the last version of CORE going to work so I won’t find my self dealing with the same problem next year.
Pretty much. Unless CORE forks and you decide to follow the fork.
The latter. Jails exist in a dataset (series of datasets, really) on your pool, and won’t go anywhere, but they won’t run under SCALE.
It’ll likely work for quite a long time. Your jails will similarly continue to work. But you won’t be able to upgrade them past 13.4, and if I’m reading this right, no updates will be available after April 2026.
Ok, so I’ll get a few years out of it. That decides it, I’ll stay with CORE and by the time I’ll have to migrate to scale I’ll probably build a proper server with server components anyway so that is fine. In the meantime this is my first time updating the system, is there a procedure i should follow to maximize my chances of success or should I just make a backup of my config and press update? Is there a risk of data loss?
Pretty much this.
Is your pool encrypted? If not, then really no, and if 13.0/13.3 do things you don’t like you can always roll back to the 12.0 boot environment.
Hopefully by the time CORE is laid to rest SCALE will be a robust alternative.
That makes things are whole lot easier as for a time, you can run both machines and gradually convert things one by one. Maybe 1 jail at a time, etc. You can make sure you understand the new system and stuff runs.
IMO you should definitely stick with CORE for the moment and upgrade to 13.3.
As and when SCALE has a stable Docker based app capability, then you can switch to SCALE and reimplement all your Jails using Docker (either TN apps or something else).
You will need to wait to see how comprehensive the Docker-based apps are in ElectricEel and how comprehensive the app store is before deciding whether to move to EE or wait for the following release in 2Q2025.
@Hermit I recommend a review of the release notes, for any upgrade you will need to upgrade to 12.0-U8 before then moving to 13 versions. 12.0-U8 can then upgrade to the 13.0-U6.2 from which you have the choice if you want to move to SCALE or remain on CORE.
Oh, Thanks I didn’t know that. I’ll try to do the update over the weekend if the latest version is out by then.
Well, by definition the “latest version” is always out. But if you meant 13.3, it released yesterday.