I upgraded my TrueNAS server to Dragonfish thinking it was just another feature improvement and it broke everything on my system. None of the applications function, and TrueCharts apps can’t run anymore without creating a VM, something my machine can’t even do.
I want to go back to Cobia, reinstall my last configuration backup and just suck my thumb.
However, when I tried to do a manual install of the last Cobia release, the system brought up a warning that the system couldn’t downgrade from dragonfish?
My own upgrade from Cobia to Dragonfish worked perfectly first time and all apps worked entirely as before.
So as far as I can see there is nothing wrong with Dragonfish. Apps do work perfectly well under Dragonfish, but (as others have said) the TrueCharts catalogue is dead and you are stuck with the current version(s) of TrueCharts apps and cannot either reinstall existing TrueCharts apps from scratch again or find and install new TrueCharts apps.
(I have some opinions on TrueCharts - namely that they are over focussed on the technical wizardry of Kubernetes and far less focussed on providing more apps for TrueNAS users, many of whom are relatively non-technical. They have certainly suffered from the change of direction from Kubernetes to Docker which is painful, but had they worked with iX on providing solutions to TN users and lobbied for iX to provide both simultaneous Kubernetes and Docker in ElectricEel and a 3rd party catalogue for Docker apps in EE too, and then worked to provide a seamless migration path and not abandoned their existing user base, I might not feel as negatively about TrueCharts’ motives and stability as I do. All that said, I have heard some people talk about an alternative clone of the TrueCharts catalogue, but I have not seen any instructions on how to use it.)
One thing that has changed between Bluefin and Dragonfish is a switch (by K3S or K8S) from Docker to an alternative container infrastructure (which I think was outside iX’s control). Perhaps others can comment on any other apps changes which may cause issues.
Finally, I have found that sometimes Apps do not deploy fully first time after an upgrade - no idea why. Stopping the apps, waiting until they are stopped and then restarting them can often make them work.
My advice - persist with Dragonfish and get things working again. Do NOT uninstall TrueCharts apps in an attempt to get them working through a reinstall because you won’t be able to reinstall.
As I understand what I’ve read from them, much of their integration–Traefik, Gluetun, Homepage, Prometheus, etc.–depends on the Kubernetes/Helm environment and couldn’t be readily replicated in Compose. I can’t evaluate the accuracy of that claim, but that’s what I understand their claim to be. Their second claim is that they did and do intend their charts to have a broader application than just TrueNAS. I’d be curious to know what proportion of their chart users are running them on a different platform than TrueNAS, though.
They haven’t abandoned their existing user base[1], and are working to provide a migration path. If we take as given that Kubernetes is required, I don’t think it’d be possible for it to be as seamless as iX claims theirs will be (though it’s worth bearing in mind that, as yet, we only have their word on that). But the migration path is planned and work on it is well underway. Whether it will be acceptable to their users remains to be seen–even if I’m skeptical about OP’s claim that his server simply isn’t capable of running a VM (and if that is true, I’d argue it really isn’t suitable for running TrueNAS at all), many won’t want to go that way.
But with respect to your suggestion that TC have lobbied iX, the decision to jettison k3s and replace it with Compose was presented as a fait accompli. iX didn’t discuss it with the community at all prior to the announcement, and from the discussion that took place on this forum, it doesn’t appear they discussed it with TC either; TC appeared as surprised as the rest of us. And there’s no way iX was going to walk that back once they’d announced it.
Likewise on both counts. I’d be interested in that, but apparently I haven’t been interested enough to try to Google it.
They haven’t abandoned them in terms of migration, anyway. You could argue–and quite reasonably IMO–that pulling their apps catalog is abandoning them. ↩︎
@dan I respect your own opinions, but I have mine which are customer oriented.
I don’t think that iX have acted properly - they encouraged 3rd party K3S catalogues for their own benefit and that of customers (a broader range of apps that they don’t have to create themselves), and then after TrueCharts created a ton of apps, they dumped K3S without providing ANY migration path.
With hindsight (and some foresight from a different open source project with community written and supported plugins) I believe that it was an error for them to allow 3rd party catalogues rather than community contributions to a catalogue that they owned, but having done that they then screwed over TrueCharts.
And iX could have maintained K3S for a release or two to allow some overlap - but they didn’t and this is a retrograde step.
Personally I think that iXsystems have damaged trust with their home / family business user base who bought into TrueCharts.
That said, whilst TrueCharts didn’t have much (or any) opportunity to negotiate with iXsystems, nevertheless TrueCharts didn’t need to dump their own catalogue suddenly - they could have stabilised it or handed it off to others to maintain - but instead they screwed over their customer base by killing it off overnight, a retrograde step.
And TrueCharts never made clear to their users what risks they would be taking by using the TrueCharts apps.
So equally TrueCharts have damaged trust with their users too, and I don’t want to use some VM based K8S solution rather than a simpler docker one so I am done with them (and I think many many other users will feel the same way).
iXsystems has not announced anything about community supported docker apps in ElectricEel. So we are going to be back to sharing app recipes on forums like with CORE Jails for any apps that iX don’t want to support themselves. This is also a retrograde step.
Bottom line - both iX and TrueCharts have demonstrated a lack of concern for their customers, and neither of them look good in my own eyes.
My opinions are also customer-oriented–I’m not a dev or any other flavor of IT pro. And I agree with most of what you say here–neither iX nor TC come out of this smelling like roses, though I’m inclined to view iX in the worse light between the two of them.
Nor do I love the VM migration solution–at a minimum, it doesn’t seem very elegant. How it will end up in terms of resource usage remains to be seen; I recall TC suggesting it might use fewer resources than the apps did when installed on TrueNAS due to middleware overhead. But really, if you’re heavily resource-constrained, TrueNAS isn’t the NAS OS for you.
But though I don’t love it in principle, I’m willing to give their migration path a try. Because at the end of the day, I don’t care what technology is used to run the apps, whether Kubernetes, Docker, or Pure F-ing Magic–what I care about is how they work. And if TC’s VM solution gives me what I had with their apps under TrueNAS[1]–point-and-click to install, with check-the-box integration for their various other bells and whistles–that’s what I’ll use. Because I know iX’ apps won’t provide that. If their solution won’t provide that, then I’ll probably be running whatever on Proxmox. I don’t anticipate moving anything significant into iX apps for at least two years, assuming they still exist then.
which seems at best uncertain given some recent posts to their blog ↩︎
I disagree - if all you want is (say) <=20TB of NAS for backups of your PC files and for media streaming, then a 2-core 8GB memory system will likely perform quite well. You will still have c. 4GB of ARC, and the media streaming will pre-fetch and then serve from ARC.
But I would agree that a resource constrained TrueNAS server will not be great for VMs.
