SOLVED pkg hasn't updated anything in weeks

[NJMorf]

My Plex server is telling me that there are updates available. For at least three weeks, maybe four, I've been trying to update Plex, but pkg tells me that my repositories are up to date and there are no packages available to update for either Plex or any other software installed in the jail. It seems very unlikely that nothing installed in the jail has been updated in that time, so I think there's something wrong.

For reference: I'm not using either of the TrueNAS Plex plugins as I wanted Plex updates to come in more quickly than the plugin seems to allow. I therefore followed these instructions, manually creating a jail and using pkg to install the plexpass version of PMS. When Plex tells me that a new version is available, I manually run pkg upgrade, which usually finds something to update, even if it's not actually Plex. For further reference, I understand that the Plex updates obtained in this manner are not uploaded by Plex themselves, but by a third party as and when they are able, which means that the updates usually take a few days to appear.

As I said, I haven't seen anything at all updated by pkg in that jail for at least three weeks, and I've been trying every few days. Based on what I've read online, pkg upgrade should be enough on its own, but even when I run pkg update first, nothing is updated. pkg update reports that all repositories are up to date, pkg upgrade says my packages are up to date.

I only have three jails right now: one is running Resilio Sync via the plugin, so I assume it's being kept updated by TrueNAS itself (but the Plugins page is currently reporting the version as "N/A" for some reason) so I've left that alone. The other one is a test for Handbrake and isn't normally running: I just started it and ran pkg upgrade from the shell and it found and updated some packages successfully.

Is there some way I can test that pkg is working correctly in the Plex jail? Perhaps it isn't communicating correctly with the repositories?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Jailer]

Your jail is working as intended. The package repository by default is updated quarterly with the exception of security updates that get pushed through immediately. You can change this to the latest branch by creating a pkg override if you want more frequent updates.

https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/sorta-fresh-plex-in-iocage.60000/page-2#post-458489

 

[NJMorf]

Thanks for the reply. I appear to have applied that override already, and long enough ago that I don't know exactly when I did it. I have done some poking around and determined, as best as I can tell, that the latest version of Plex available through pkg is the same one I installed about six weeks ago, so with that override in place there's nothing to suggest that anything is wrong. There really must not have been any updates to any of the installed packages in the last few weeks. I guess I'll just keep checking.

Thanks.

 

[NJMorf]

Immediate follow-up: I found this thread about getting the latest versions on the Plex forums, which linked to this page showing PlexPass versions. The packages listed are:

Code:

ABI                    latest        quarterly
FreeBSD:11:amd64    1.24.2.4973    1.23.4.4712
FreeBSD:12:amd64    1.24.4.5081    1.24.2.4973
FreeBSD:13:amd64    1.24.4.5081    1.24.2.4973
FreeBSD:14:amd64    1.24.4.5081    -

I've got 1.24.2.4973 installed, while Plex says 1.24.5.5173 is available. Is it possible that my installation of TrueNAS (updated to 12.0-U6 about a week ago) isn't seeing the 1.24.4 version because my TrueNAS is somehow restricted to that "FreeBSD:11:amd64" row?

When I open a shell in the jail, it shows "FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE-p10.b26f74b5984(HEAD) TRUENAS". The jail itself is showing 11.2-RELEASE-p15, though I don't know the significance of that - should the jail release number match that of TrueNAS itself?

 

[Redcoat]

Looks like you would benefit from, reading the iocage instructions - see https://iocage.readthedocs.io/en/latest/basic-use.html

Use iocage fetch to get to the list and grab 12.2 to use to upgrade your jail's OS - then update the package - that'll get you the latest available using that route.

 

[Jailer]

The jail itself is showing 11.2-RELEASE-p15

You should upgrade your jail to 12.2-RELEASE by running iocage upgrade jailname -r 12.2-RELEASE and replace jailname with the name of your plex jail.

 

[NJMorf]

OK, I ran iocage fetch in the TrueNAS server's shell (I assume this is correct, given that running it in the jail's shell failed because iocage wasn't installed in the jail) to fetch and it didn't throw any error messages so it must have worked. I then updated the Handbrake jail using the button in the GUI for that jail and while it similarly didn't say anything to suggest that the upgrade failed, the release version of that jail remained unchanged at 11.3-RELEASE-p14. The version of Plex that I could have then installed in that jail was 1.23.4.4712, the quarterly release for FreeBSD:11:amd64, not even the latest release for FreeBSD 11. I ran pkg update again just in case it needed to refresh itself in order to offer FreeBSD 12 packages, but it didn't make a difference.

(As an aside, that list I posted above implies that there's a FreeBSD 14, but Wikipedia shows 13 as the latest release. Is 14 in beta?)

I haven't tried it in the Plex jail yet (it's busy recording something for me).

 

[Jailer]

You run the iocage upgrade command from the TrueNAS shell not the jail. No need to fetch the version beforehand, the upgrade command I listed previously will take care of that.

 

[NJMorf]

You run the iocage upgrade command from the TrueNAS shell not the jail. No need to fetch the version beforehand, the upgrade command I listed previously will take care of that.

I'm running that now. It's taking ages. And based on the messages it's putting in the console, it's not only downloading the same stuff as the previous attempt, but I'm half convinced that the second command has downloaded stuff twice itself. I may just be misunderstanding the messages, though. Maybe "fetching" means both downloading and unpacking?

 

[NJMorf]

Tried three times to upgrade two jails without success. First time the jail was still running; second time I stopped it first; third time was the Plex jail, stopped first. All three attempts went pretty much the same way: loads of checks and fetches, then a long time "preparing to download", then a while "downloading patches", then a list of files that will be deleted. This last step appears to be echoing a text file a page at a time (i.e. using something like [ICODE}more[/ICODE]): when it gets to the end of the list and displays "(END)", there's no indication of what I should do to continue with the upgrade process, and I'm not knowledgeable enough with FreeBSD/Unix/whatever to know. Neither Esc nor Enter does it. Ctrl-C aborts the installation, I found from the first two attempts.

Third attempt I googled the man page for more, found out that "q" would get me past it. Now I'm waiting for another "Installing updates..." line to complete. Hopefully the third time's the charm. I've been at this for 90 minutes so far with nothing yet to show for it. I'm also wondering what the "Update" buttons in the jails GUI are actually supposed to do, given that they had no apparent effect when I tried them earlier and didn't take anything like this long to do whatever they did. This is just painful.

 

[NJMorf]

OK, upgrade finally completed and lo and behold, a pkg upgrade turns up a huge great list of stuff to update, including Plex to 1.24.4.5081. I guess that having the jail running on version 11 of FreeBSD meant that it was no longer supported for anything other than (maybe) the security updates Jailer mentioned, while v12 has all the little patches that I usually expected to see on a frequent basis.

Thanks for the advice. I'll update the other jails and hopefully all will be well again, at least until TrueNAS changes to FreeBSD v13 or v12 stops getting updates as well.

 

[Jailer]

I'm also wondering what the "Update" buttons in the jails GUI are actually supposed to do

It updates the OS of the jail to the latest patch level. Running iocage update jailname from the TrueNAS shell does the same thing.

https://iocage.readthedocs.io/en/latest/advanced-use.html#updating-jails

 

[NJMorf]

So "updating" is just within the same major release (e.g. 11.1 to 11.2), while "upgrading" changes the release version (e.g. 11 to 12)?

 

[Jailer]

No. Updating applies security patches to the current OS. Upgrading is when you go from one version of the OS to another such as your example of 11.1 to 11.2 or 11 to 12. Both of those would be an upgrade.

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/cutting-edge/

 

[NJMorf]

Ah, thanks.