A year ago I built a NAS to reduce my reliance on cloud services, and set up an arr stack. I went with TrueNAS Scale, which was on Bluefin at the time. In the past 12 months, TrueNAS Scale has been through FOUR major OS versions, with a fifth already announced. At least one of those involved a release train switch so, despite diligently checking for updates in the dashboard, I was left in the dust with an obsolete OS, and didn’t find out until it was already a huge hassle to upgrade.
I’ve been really happy with the utility and benefit of having this tool, but holy smokes how is anybody supposed to keep up with all of this? This is far from my only hobby, and I simply do not have the time, patience, or interest for a constant race to keep up with vetting new release versions and fixing what breaks every 3 weeks. I have enough tinkering hobbies as it is.
On top of that, there’s the whole blow up with TrueCharts, which has also left me with an entire suite of obsolete albatrosses around my NAS that I need to deal with. Am I still waiting for them to figure out an upgrade path? I don’t even know anymore.
Sorry for the rant, but I guess what I’m looking for is: how do you keep up with the constant maintenance and updates, and where do I go from here, in February 2025, with a system running Bluefin 22.12, a 32TB ZFS pool (RAIDZ1) that has to remain intact, and a handful of TrueCharts apps that I don’t want to lose the data from (e.g. Jellyfin configs/watch history)?
You can choose a slower train for scale. Go for the stable release or even the enterprise release. Update once in a few months or so.
I went with Talos OS for my apps after the mess from IX-systems and for the most part it has been set and forget.
Do you run Talos on bare metal or on something like Proxmox? Care to discuss your k8s stack?
Currently I run Talos on a VM on scale. I went with Truecharts. The plan for me is to run it on bare metal at some point.
I’m looking at Talos on my Proxmox cluster as VMs. I’m trying to automate it all through ansible and currently stuck trying to bootstrap my secrets manager. Somewhat of an analysis paralysis at the moment. Thinking of using a cloud hosted one with some kind of a local passthrough cache in case the WAN connection gets disrupted.
ngl the newest truenas version is incomprehensible to me. Makes most of the videos on it obsolete, and the docs aren’t much better, all while trying to abstract docker compose in a way that makes it shit itself when you try to use anything not specifically developed to work with TNS’s storage layout.
It’ll probably improve with time but I clearly picked the worst time to pick it up.
I’ve decided either to return to https://dietpi.com/ or try prox mox and pray it’s more stable.
You might want to think about running a “stable” or “LTS” OS and spin up things in Docker instead. That way you only have to do OS level updates very rarely.
I learned this the hard way as well… I did a big OS update on mine once and it broke almost every application running on it. Docker worked perfectly still. I transferred everything I could to Docker after that.
Thanks for this. I’ve recently been recreating my home server on good hardware and have been thinking it’s time to jump into selfhosting more stuff. I’ve used Docker a bit, so I guess I’ll have to do it the right way. It’s always good to know what choices now will avoid future issues.
Thanks for a lot of useful replies, everyone. Sorry I ghosted my own post for a couple days. I’m seeing surprisingly few people who actually use or used TrueNAS, so maybe that’s something to consider moving away from. I’ll have to weigh my options.
For one I don’t use software that updates constantly. If I had to log in to a container more than once a year to fix something, I’d figure out something else. My NAS is just harddrives on a Debian machine.
Everything I use runs either Debian or is some form of BSD
Same, but openSUSE. Tumbleweed on my desktop and laptop, Leap on my servers.
And yeah, if I need to babysit something, I’ll use an alternative. I’ll upgrade when I’m ready to, which is usually over holidays when I’m bored and looking for a project.
OS updates I only bother with every 6-12mo, though I also use debian which doesn’t push major updates all that regularly.
As far as software goes; pretty much everything is in a docker container with watchtower automatically pulling new updates to those nightly at 4am. It sends me email notifications, so It’ll tell me if an update fails; combined with uptime-kuma notifying me if any of my services is unavailable for whatever reason.
The rest I’ll usually do with the OS updates. Just because an update was released, doesn’t mean you’ve gotta drop everything and install it right this moment.
First off, backups of the configs any user data that you can’t torrent should the inevitable happen.
Then set time aside to do updates, I spend Wednesday evenings updating and improving my setup.
Then find a way to track update announcements, I use both an RSS reader and newrealeases.io to know when something I run gets an update
I dont :) Mostly.
Honestly I have an auto backup system. And then set it up to auto update periodically. Then use Debian Server as it almost never breaks as a server distro.
Gentoo.
Daily automatic updates of the OS.
Services and containers are updated at random when i have time.
Its been many years, I have fun doing it.
Not a chore.
Similar to the others although I have messed with Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, and even a few others for like a day or two each.
At the moment I am using Fedora. My drives are raided and my main storage has all the data and the docker config directory’s.
Using docker for everything, watchtower for updates, and pertained to manage the containers with a gui. All the containers are directed to /mnt/drive/allMyData. In there is my data folders. Shows, movies, plex configs for recording over the air, ebooks, documents, etc.
Mainly I set it up this way so I can easily change distros if I wanted to and have all my services back up in an hour or so.
I started a text file that contains the command lines I have used to start all of my docker containers. This way if I need to I reference it and use the exact same commands mapped volumes to the same folders. Now I am back up and running in a few clicks. No need to backup the container if all the data in it is setup in folders in my main data directory.
However I am running a separate hardware raid setup prior to os. This way all my data stays safe as a separate volume.
I run Debian on most of my systems and run all of my services in docker (with rare exceptions for node_exporter or stable core tools). My base systems get automatic security upgrades, and then I’ll manually check in every few weeks whenever I feel like it.
My services in docker are version locked to a specific major version (when there’s a tag available) so I can usually re-pull to get minor version updates freely without breaking issues. My few more finnickey services get manual upgrades from me every 6 months or so only.
I usually stick to an OS version for as long as I can, and to that aim I stick to LTS versions with long support windows.
4 major versions in 12mo is…a lot. Especially if those include breaking changes for you. Yikes
I have automatic updates on everything. If it breaks, I fix it when I have time. If I don’t, it remains broken.
I could also just not do updates, but I like new features.
Is it exposed to the internet?
Mine is local only so I’m not as diligent with updates. I push them like once every 2-3 weeks. Some containers automatically update but some don’t because in the past that has broken associated scripts
I learned that I can’t rely on someone else’s recipes: in my case it was abandoned/badly configured unraid apps. I now exclusively use a docker compose yml where i control and tag specific versions. I intentionally stay behind 2 versions on nextcloud (stable = alpha; oldstable = beta), and for databases i stay on the LTS. Then i import the calendar from endoflife.date in my calendar app to see if i have to move the target up a bit.
Every once in a while i go there and i update manually everything
In life? Amphetamines.
