I have an N54L Microserver with the AMD Turion II Neo CPU.
It is running 9.1.1 and I think it’s about time I upgrade it to a version that’s not over a decade old.
To my excuse, the server just works and I didn’t want to break anything by upgrading. The server is also only in the intranet so I didn’t worry about security issues (unlike my OpenBSD box which I do update).
I don’t have any plugins, just ZFS datasets, SSH and some Apple shares.
Any idea how an upgrade path looks like?
Must I go to 9.2.0, 9.2.1, then 9.2.1.1 - 9.2.1.9?
Note that I don’t need any new features. I just think that perhaps some bugs have been fixed in the mean time and it may be worth to move to a more recent version. Does not necessarily have to be the latest version…
If you did want to do it iteratively, I think you can find what versions you can come from, but you would likely just need to do the final versions of 9.x, 10.x, 11.x, 12.x, etc.
I honestly haven’t kept up with all the product lines. I most certainly don’t want to reinstall or get the Linux variant.
I mean… if I were to do such a big migration I might as well get some Ubuntu with the ZFS modules, mount my pool there and replace the Apple share with splain Samba. All I do is rsync so I don’t really need any fancy Apple FS metadata.
But coming back to my old FreeNAS install, I just want to bump the version from ancient category to “somewhat old version” category.
So, doing some point upgrades is fine. My question would be: are there some known point releases that I should avoid or skip?
For example, I see all these 9.2.1.1 - 9.2.1.9 tiny releases and I guess some of those may have been broken releases that were quickly fixed.
There were some major changes around 11.X on smb ( can’t share out root dataset anymore and root can’t be used to access smb shares anymore) so if you have your data placed directly in the root dataset you’d have to migrate it over to a child dataset beforehand, otherwise it’ll be a bit more complicated to migrate. If you data is already in a Child Dataset you’re good.
And as mentioned you’d need a different user then root to access your smb shares.
There should be release notes for all the versions, available with the installer, on the download page, and/or the iXSystems/FreeNAS community blogs. You may just have to read through them.
I think the AMD Turion II Neo N54L runs x86-64 instructions, but note that the last version of Freenas for 32-bit was 9.2.1.9.
I’d say straight to the latest 9.x (so 9.2.1.9).
Then you may experiment with the latest 11.x, the latest 12.x and the latest 13.0 or the latest 13.3 if you need jails (which is probably not the case).
Keep boot environments to revert and, of course, carefully read the release notes before each step.
If you’ve been happy with 9.1.1 all this time, 13.x should bring you around 2035…
Reinstalling would be less work, I think, than stepping through the upgrade path one major release at a time. And the FreeBSD version of Free/TrueNAS is dead; they just haven’t gotten around to burying it yet. But the flies are circling.
For something that old, I’d back up all the data to some other storage and start fresh.
Otherwise I would suggest update to highest level in the 9 train, then change to 10 train, then 11, etc. Big jumps scare me as pretty much everything changes in the 11’s (11.1?).
No matter which way you go, I’d make sure to back up all the data to a different device just to be certain.
That seems so long ago but yet still fresh in my mind. Her name was Corral, she was a trainwreck.
@fierarul
My advice (it is all just personal advice) is, if what you have works, why mess with it?
Some things to consider since I do not know your hardware configuration:
The boot drive cannot be a USB flash drive anymore, well it could be but it will wear out fast. That could be a deal breaker.
If your Apple shares are not complicated, I’d recommend making a backup of your FreeNAS configuration file, then installing Truenas 13.3. Then upload your configuration file and you should be good to go.
If you wanted to upgrade to SCALE, again your hardware is a concern.
WARNING!!! Do not update your ZFS pool Feature Set. If you do, you will not be able to roll back to FreeNAS 9.1.1. Odds are any newer features would not be something you would use, so no benefit. If you must upgrade the feature set, take a month or two before doing it.
There is one rule you should follow since you have been able to remain on 9.1.1 for so long and without any issues, “K.I.S.S.” Keep It Simple Stupid.
Yes, this is the reason I never bothered to upgrade. It was basically an appliance. All I did was add / swap some drives in time.
It’s a N54L Microserver with the AMD Turion II Neo CPU and 16GB of ECC RAM.
Guess what I am using? I do have the config saved so I figured I can always take the 9.1.1 image and write it again.
I don’t have any specific product in mind. I didn’t even knew SCALE is a thing before I opened this thread.
All I need is something that can take my ZFS disks and give me SSH and some way to read/write the datasets over AFP / Samba.
Yeah, I don’t need new features, just some bugfixes, if any.
I’m also starting to be restricted by the Microserver itself. It’s old and there’s no upgrade path. I think next I will need to find a bigger workstation or server which supports more disks and put Proxmox on that and virtualize FreeNAS using direct disk access.
I used this before and I like the idea of sharing (CPU) resources but keeping direct disk access which would mean I can move disks to a separate machine and still have a bootable system.
One idea, the one I previously used… Plan for a new system build about 6 months before you hard drives warranty expires. Then once your warranty expires, you can build that new system and replace the old one.
Of course if you have different warranty expiration dates that are very different, that may not work for you, but you get the point, pick a date where you desire to replace your hardware and then plan around that.
If you think your hard drives will last another year, then wait a year. If they are on borrowed time now, consider a new build now.
How much storage are you currently using? Going bigger and more powerful may not be the best solution. For a single user, doing nothing but storage, an n100 processor is probably plenty and will keep the power draw lower. Drives will probably be the majority of power draw in a small system. My personal feeling is that storage should not be virtualized unless it is hyperconverged over a pool. People do it and are happy, I’m not one of those people.
As far as the Microserver goes, Serve the Home had a video yesterday on a Lenovo that is pretty close to what those Microservers were. He was looking at the AMD version and it was fairly cheap, you’d need to look into it deeper to see about drive mounting, it didn’t look great. And it would need a drive controller card too. The slightly more expensive Intel version had at least 6 SATA ports on the board, but drive mounting still didn’t look great.
I do have the config saved so I figured I can always take the 9.1.1 image and write it again.