FreeNAS 8.0 to 9.3

[gcs8]

Hello boys and girls, I am going to ask a couple dumb questions if you don't mind. I thought it might be time to update my old ~40Tb FreeNAS implementation from 8.0 to 9.3, one of the problems being that it has been so stable that I have not looked at the webhead end in.... well since I set it up. Apparently in that time it has opposed the ability to present me with a web front end to do any upgrade paths that I am filimer with. So my question is what is my upgrade path that will let me keep all my settings in place? 8.1 > 8.2 > 8.3 > 9.3? Is there a command line way to make a backup of the config and I can reinstall 8.0 or can I just install 9.3 ontop of what I have now and just run a zpool version upgrade when I am done?

If anyone can point me in the right direction or has a guide for such a process I would deeply appreciate it.

 

[DJ9]

Post your hardware specs and such as per the forum rules and then we'll have better recommendations.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/forum-rules.22553/#post-134570/

 

[gcs8]

Two kits of Kingston 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Unbuffered DDR3 1333 Server Memory Model KVR1333D3E9SK2/4G
20 SAMSUNG EcoGreen F4 ST2000DL004 2TB 32MB Cache in RAIDz2
two Intel SASUC8I
SUPERMICRO MBD-X8SIL-F-O Xeon X3400 / L3400 / Core i3 series Dual LAN Micro ATX Server Board w/ Remote Management
Intel Core i3-540 Clarkdale Dual-Core 3.06GHz LGA 1156 73W Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics BX80616I3540

I was also a bit off on the release i was on.

freenas# uname -a
FreeBSD freenas.gcs8.net 8.2-RELEASE-p1 FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE-p1 #4: Sat Apr 30 10:39:46 PDT 2011 jpaetzel@servant.iXsystems.com:/usr/home/jpaetzel/freenas/obj.amd64/usr/home/jpaetzel/freenas/FreeBSD/src/sys/FREENAS.amd64 amd64

 

[SweetAndLow]

In curious to see what you end up doing.

I would suggest rebuilding your pool. Having 20 drives in a single vdec isn't recommended anymore. It drastically affects your performance and also running only 8gb of memory hurts your performance. The 8gb of memory also make your upgrade process painful since that is now the minimum recommended amount. Have you had many drive failures? And what's your performance like?

 

[gcs8]

Yeah, I could swear I had 16GB when I built it but it has been a few years. I have had zero drive failures from the time I built this unit, I seem to get anywhere from 40MB/s to 200+MB/s depending on file type. I would love to rebuild the pool but I don't have anywhere to migrate ~25TB of data while I do it. I do have a spare HP BL460c gen6 I can steal 32GB from if need be, might even just do that for fun.

 

[gcs8]

Nope, the super microboard does not like Hynix 8500R or 10600R kits I have. But I can always order more ram.

 

[cyberjock]

For a pool of that size, I'd absolutely hold off on upgrading until you have more RAM. That's a massive amount of disk space for the RAM. In older versions the RAM demands by the OS itself were much slimmer. But with newer versions things could get ugly fast. (for the record I'd *highly* recommend you redo your pool if at all possible).

What I'd do is upgrade to at least 16GB of RAM (more can't hurt) and then do upgrades in this order... 8.2.0, 8.3.0, 8.3.1, 9.1.1, 9.2.0, 9.2.1.9, 9.3. I would probably upgrade to 8.3.1 and keep it there for a week. Make sure everything works and such (do a zpool upgrade after the week is up), then go up the rest of the way to 9.3. If 9.3 behaves fine for a week or so then do another zpool upgrade so you are finally caught up with the rest of the world.

Yes, that's a lot of steps, but if you make any jumps you may screw up your config file in a way that may not be immediately obvious, and then later you are upset because your server took a dump unexpectedly. Also I'd download a config file at each step just in case something goes wrong.

You don't need the GUI to do the upgrades. You can do ISO upgrades (and considering how far behind you are that's what I'd recommend anyway). The ISO upgrades are equivalent to using "the big hammer" to get things done. It guarantees an upgrade where GUI upgrades can and have been known to fail. It's no more or less 'risky' for your user stored data, but ISOs virtually guarantee the upgrade process *will* work and be successful.

http://download.freenas.org/ has the files you will want.

 

[gcs8]

Thank you very much for the info, I am trying to hunt down a 32GB kit at the moment. I would love to redo my pool with a new set of disks and two stripes of RAIDz2 and move from iSCSi to letting FreeNAS handle the files. I may have to save up and build a new box just to do that. As it stands right now I can not even download my config file, is it in a location that I can just SCP a copy off or is it a script that compiles all the settings into a file? I can always wait for the upgrade but it would be nice to have a copy of the config file incase anything goes sideways in the mean time.

 

[gpsguy]

If it's mounted, you can find it here: /data/freenas-v1.db

Otherwise, it's on the 4th partition of the boot device.

As it stands right now I can not even download my config file, is it in a location that I can just SCP a copy off ...