SOLVED Painless upgrade to 11.1-U4

[adrianwi]

I've been running 9.10.1-U4 for quite a long time now, and whilst everything was still working fine, I was expecting some problems to start arising with my old jails now that FreeBSD 10.3 is EOL. The main reason for hanging onto 9.10.1-U4 was VirtualBox, although over the past few months I've weaned myself off this and can now do all the things I was using that for with bhyve/iohyve.

Given that I have some spare time over the next few weeks, I thought I'd be brave and switch to the 11.1 train and upgrade. This is simply to report that although it took longer than I was expecting (~45 minutes with a couple of reboots) it worked perfectly and everything appears to be working as it was before.

• My bhyve VM started up and ran CrashPlan and the Docker containers I've been playing with.
• My jails (emby, owncloud, wordpress, openvpn, calibre, nginx-reverse-proxy) all started up fine too
• AFP shares connected and Time Machine backups ran
• Replication to a second FreeNAS machine (still running 9.10.1) is also working!

Happy days. Now I can spend the spare time working out how to migrate/rebuild all the jails (some built on 9.3) using iocage, which hopefully I'll never have to do again now the jails can be upgraded too :D

 

[Chris Moore]

If you would share any tips that you picked up, it might be a big help to others that are making, or considering, the conversion.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[adrianwi]

I'll be honest, I always worry about updates, especially when everything is working perfectly running the old version. Since 9.3.1, I think I've only updated twice, and have been on 9.10.1-U4 for almost 12 months.

After this update, I really should worry a little less as it couldnt have been any easier. Simply changed the train in the GUI (system - update) and then applied the pending update. The only worry was the time it took as I was expecting 5-10 minutes but it rebooted a couple of times before everything came back so it was probably closer to 40 minutes. It helped being able to check what was happening with IPMI, but otherwise I did nothing until it was ready to log back in.

The only thing holding me back was VirtualBox, and bhyve in 9.10 can be used to replace that without too much effort. It lacks the GUI but the CLI commands are pretty simple once you've played with it a little, and from my experience it seems just as stable. I've had a ubuntu VM running CrashPlan and Docker for 2-3 months without any problems.

The big draw for upgrading is iocage, and the ability to update the FreeBSD version of jails, which was always an issue with FreeNAS however often you update. Looking forward to not having to rebuild jails every few years now.

 

[Jailer]

Thanks for your report on this. I'm in the exact same boat as you as I'm still on 9.10.2-U6 and have been waiting to upgrade because jails. I was going to wait for 11.2 but that's been pushed out too far for me to hold off any longer since I have a few internet facing jails that need to stay current. Mostly I've been waiting until I have an entire weekend free to make the switch as I've got several jails to rebuild.

 

[Jailer]

Well I'm on 11.1-U4 now and all my 9.10 jails are still functional. Now comes the hard part of rebuilding all the jails using iocage. The good thing is this should be the last time I have to rebuild them.

EDIT: One thing I did have to do was to delete the xmrig plugin and reinstall it. It would not start after the upgrade.

 

[adrianwi]

The good thing is this should be the last time I have to rebuild them.

:D

I've rebuilt my emby jail (pretty simple, although time-consuming) and nextcloud (slightly more complex) to replace owncloud (which I've been wanting to do for some time). Once you get to grips with the commands, iocage seems pretty straightforward and whilst it's not as simple as using a GUI, it's not too much of a pain, especially for the benefit of not having to build any again (fingers crossed). I have to keep remembering to type iocage and not iohyve though!

 

[Jailer]

Yeah I played around with it enough in a VM that it is pretty simple to learn.

I have discovered one thing that's not working post upgrade and that's my snapshot tasks I have set up. I'll have to investigate that further to see what's going on.

 

[adrianwi]

All my snapshots looked ok, and the periodic ones all fired last night. I'd also set one up for the new /mnt/tank/iocage dataset and that replicated to my 2nd FreeNAS box too.

 

[Jailer]

Ok I just checked and the snapshots are still running, they just don't display in the console any longer so everything is running as expected.

 

[adrianwi]

Well, after a good few hours this weekend I have most things rebuilt in iocage jails :D

• emby was pretty simple although took a while to get my head around adding various mount points, some with spaces in the name which I ended up changing to _.
• nextcloud was fine too. I did think about trying one of the latest scripts people have posted, but in the end did it manually based around the excellent @Joshua guide
• openvpn still has me beaten, which didn't really come as a surprise given this was probably one of the more difficult ones to get working in the warden jails. I really need to understand more about networking, but I'll hopefully get it sorted over the coming weeks
• nginx-reverse-proxy was really easy. Copied across service.conf files and letsencrypt folder from old jail and everything redirected first time and certbot ran to check certificates (none of which needed renewing, so not 100% tested but looked like everything was fine)
• unbound dns server using @DrKK guide was another simple one
• calibre was pretty simple too, other than the calibre-server options changing as the version I was running was pretty out of date. It's much nicer now, and even lets you configure user accounts

So 5/6 jails migrated successfully, and just my wordpress jails to go. I have two running multisite, although might just recreate one as I also have one running in Docker now for testing/development. Getting wordpress up and running should be simple enough, although moving the sites might take a little longer. Watch them come up with a stunning conversion tool in 11.2 now, which would have automated all of this :) A good way to learn about iocage though!

 

[Jailer]

Moving the wordpress site is easy, I just did mine yesterday.

• Create the new jail
• set up your FEMP or FAMP stack and configure php
• set up database with the same name as current database
• Use rsync to copy over server document root and server configuration files from current jail to new jail
• run databse dump on current jail using myslqdump
• use rsync to copy over database dump from current jail to new jail
• restore databse in new jail
• restart all services in new jail

I still have 6 more to go..... :(