Multiple upgrades, questions...

[danb35]

I'm currently running FreeNAS-9.3-STABLE-201602031011 on the hardware in my .sig, with several jails--a few plugins (Plex, Sonarr, Emby), and others (VirtualBox, BOINC, PlexConnect, UrBackup, and one with transmission/sabnzbd/couchpotato). I feel like I should upgrade to 9.10 soon, with 9.3 having been rather suddenly EOL'd on us. I'm also upgrading to new server hardware.

The easy answer would be to move the boot devices, drives, and 10G NIC to the new hardware, then run the GUI upgrade. But why keep it simple?

The new chassis has mounting locations for a few fixed drives. I'm thinking of mounting a 120 GB SSD to one of them for the boot device (yes, I know it's way more space than I need, but I had it laying around and don't really have any other use for it--will probably put the .system dataset there as well), and a larger SSD to create a separate pool to run the jails from. What I think would work in this case would be:

• Clean install of 9.10 to the SSD
• Move drives and NIC to new system
• Upload saved config
• Create SSDPool on the second SSD
• ZFS replicate jails dataset to SSDPool
• Update jails configuration to point to SSDPool
• Destroy tank/jails when it's clear that SSDPool/jails is working properly

But there's still the issue of the jails being built on the 9.3 template, not on the 10.3 one, and there seem to be a number of threads indicating problems with this (primarily, IIRC, that pkg upgrades don't work well or at all). If I want to address that, I'm thinking the "ZFS replicate jails dataset" gets replaced with "manually rebuild jails." Not a very pleasant prospect, though I have to admit it would be an opportunity to clean up some things I did when I didn't know any better.

Thoughts?

 

[danb35]

I went ahead and made the move today, and went for door #3--rebuild the jails from scratch. Along the way, I went for a manual install of Plex rather than the plugin (copying the entire plexdata directory to the new installation worked perfectly), went for a manual install of Sonarr into the same jail as transmission/SABNZBd/CouchPotato, and didn't bother with Emby. I'm not sure what I did with permissions on the initial transmission/SABNZBd/CouchPotato/Sonarr, but things seem to work as they are.

In case anyone's wondering, here's how I moved the VMs from the old VirtualBox jail to the new one:

• Copy /home/vbox/VirtualBox VMs (and all its contents) from the old jail to the new one
• Copy /home/vbox/.config, and all its contents, from the old jail to the new one
• From inside the new jail, su vbox
• For each VM, run 'VBoxManage registervm /home/vbox/VirtualBox\ VMs/VMName/VMName.vbox'

All seems to be running smoothly, but I think I need to play with my fan speeds a bit--drives are running warmer than I'd like.