Dirty updates (rant)

[diedrichg]

I'd like to rant for a minute. I am completely shocked at how much trouble some people have updating their FeeeNAS installation. People are losing data, pools, can't connect to shares, etc. They are leaving services, jails, plugins, and external servers connected to their FeeeNAS installation during the update. No wonder they are having major issues! I've not had these issues and I've been on the upgrade path since v9.1!

Before an update I always make sure to stop all services (SMB, UPS, SSH, etc.). I also stop all plugins and then stop their respective jails. I want to be sure that there isn't anything running that could cause a problem or get "corrupted" during an update. Again, to date, I've not had any update issues. (Disclosure: I'm on 11.1-U6 and will probably update to 11.2-U2 when it comes out in the next month or so)

I strongly advise others to follow my update practices.

/rant

 

[Ericloewe]

People are losing data, pools

To be fair, this is extremely rare. I think we've seen a total of five cases. Snapshots also effectively mitigate this failure mode, which nobody understands or can even reproduce yet.
The latest case was the first that actually had snapshots (seriously people, snapshots are awesome, use them) and the snapshotted data was indeed recoverable.

 

[jgreco]

After having done the UFS->ZFS transition on several machines without a hitch a few years ago, I finally decided that our office fileserver, which is really a bit more complicated than I'd like, needed a refresh and I did a fresh install as a way to help clean out old cruft. Having been annoyed by the sheer amount of busywork this created, I decided to do a standard upgrade on one of the other less-complex fileservers, and it failed spectacularly. So I then installed the latest from media, wrote the configuration back, and let it boot, and it finished the upgrade. A third, theoretically identical, did an in-place standard upgrade with no drama.

Having written stuff like this in the past, I know it's difficult to get everthing 100% for every use case. Still, I'm usually impressed how well it works.