Safe to upgrade to 11.3?

[dnilgreb]

I am running FreeNAS 11.2-U7, and I´d like to upgrade to 11.3, now that it´s been released.
It is running a bunch of jails: unifi, Nextcloud, OpenVPN, Plex, Radarr, Sonarr, Transmission and jackett.
I´m wondering if there is any risk involved in upgrading?
Will it affect any data (or jails)? If I want to, will I be able to revert back 11.2, with jails and everything intact?
The OS is running on two mirrored SSD drives, 200GB or so, so free space is not an issue.

Are there any known issues/problems in doing this? How many here has upgraded? Any problems?

 

[amp88]

If you do want to upgrade, make damn sure you have backups of everything (which you should anyway, of course), and do not, whatever you do, update your storage pool(s) to the new 11.3 format. If something goes wrong and you need to go back to 11.2-U7, your pool(s) would be incompatible and you'd have to restore from backup.

That being said, I wouldn't do it. You only need to look through some of the other threads in this subforum to see numerous reports of people who've had problems with plugins and jails (forcing them to recreate them from scratch), UI problems (including inconsistencies between the user manual and interface e.g. relating to encrypted pools) and any number of other issues directly related to the upgrade (i.e. things which worked in 11.2 but are broken in 11.3).

I had numerous problems myself attempting to run 11.3 virtualised in XCP-ng which weren't there in 11.2-U7. I wanted to try 11.3 for the ACL permissions and to try and get data for some of the widgets on the dashboard (I don't get network traffic, RAM, CPU info in the 11.2-U7 dashboard, but it's there in 11.3), but after wasting hours trying to fix problems I just nuked my virtualised 11.3 install and went back to 11.2-U7 and I'm better off for it.

Unless there's a feature in 11.3 you feel you must have, or you have a desperate need to effectively beta test it, don't upgrade. Wait for a while.

 

[KrisBee]

I'm inclined to agree with @amp88, I'd wait for 11.3-U1 or 11.3-U2 .

 

[Basil Hendroff]

Make sure you've migrated off Warden jails and on to iocage jails before considering moving to 11.3. Review the 11.3 release notes to see if you're affected in any other way. I've successfully migrated the majority of my systems to 11.3, but only because I've taken the time to address beforehand all the possible gotcha's identified in the release notes.

 

[KrisBee]

@Seymour Butt What about the jail snapshot problem?

 

[Basil Hendroff]

@KrisBee If there's a problem, I've not personally experienced it. My issue around jails post-11.3 has been around upgrading the jail RELEASE, but that's a fairly minor issue. I'm curious though. Can you point me to a relevant thread regarding the jail snapshot problem?

 

[KrisBee]

@Seymour Butt It's probably this i was thinking of - https://www.ixsystems.com/community...very-slow-after-upgrade-to-fn-11-3-rc1.80940/

Also, in the changed UI, the snapshot listing no longer includes cols for used & refer size.

 

[diedrichg]

I was on 11.2-U7 and did the jail upgrade to the 11.3 system prior to upgrading FreeNAS to 11.3. My hiccup was that the system never assigned a web GUI address. I tried many things to fix the issue but gave up quick. I set the configuration to default and rebuilt my settings (this was okay in my mind since my config file had been upgraded all the way back to 9.3).

I later realized that I didn't have my CRON, SMART, or scrub schedules written down anywhere and wound up creating a Virtualbox installation so that I could upload my 11.2-U7 config. (I still didn't get a web GUI address but after some patience I was successful in resetting the network interface). I was then able to login to the 11.2-U7 VM, upload my config, and copy my schedules. I'm now on a fresh 11.3 install with everything up and running.

 

[amp88]

Also, in the changed UI, the snapshot listing no longer includes cols for used & refer size.

Good point; that change makes no sense.

 

[diedrichg]

Also, in the changed UI, the snapshot listing no longer includes cols for used & refer size.

Create a feature request, that's what I had to do for the Snapshot screen because they are missing some columns that existed in previous versions.

 

[Basil Hendroff]

@Seymour Butt It's probably this i was thinking of - https://www.ixsystems.com/community...very-slow-after-upgrade-to-fn-11-3-rc1.80940/

I wonder what circumstances trigger this? It's clearly an issue for some. Like Yorick in that thread, I've not experienced the problem, and like him, I only use plugin jails (five of them) and iocage list returns results immediately.

Also, in the changed UI, the snapshot listing no longer includes cols for used & refer size.

This is weird, but not a dealbreaker.

 

[Basil Hendroff]

Seems you need to proceed with caution if you use AD for authentication. I authenticate as a local user so don't see these issues.

 

[Basil Hendroff]

For lovers of Plex, here's another bullet I managed to duck, and that you need to consider if you decide to upgrade to 11.3 now. Why can i not upgrade my Plex jail using iocage upgrade command?

 

[markmuehlbauer]

I am having SMB issues with 11.3. I have factually determined this is a bug, or set of bugs with SMB on 11.3, and it relates to ACLs.
I am rolling back to 11.2u7 where I had zero SMB issues.
11.3 is just not ready for production level use. If you have a home setup, go ahead. . .and the UI looks promising. However, know that you may spend countless hours trying to fix what is very likely to be unfixable (aka, bug).

 

[dnilgreb]

If you do want to upgrade, make damn sure you have backups of everything (which you should anyway, of course), and do not, whatever you do, update your storage pool(s) to the new 11.3 format. If something goes wrong and you need to go back to 11.2-U7, your pool(s) would be incompatible and you'd have to restore from backup.

That being said, I wouldn't do it. You only need to look through some of the other threads in this subforum to see numerous reports of people who've had problems with plugins and jails (forcing them to recreate them from scratch), UI problems (including inconsistencies between the user manual and interface e.g. relating to encrypted pools) and any number of other issues directly related to the upgrade (i.e. things which worked in 11.2 but are broken in 11.3).

I had numerous problems myself attempting to run 11.3 virtualised in XCP-ng which weren't there in 11.2-U7. I wanted to try 11.3 for the ACL permissions and to try and get data for some of the widgets on the dashboard (I don't get network traffic, RAM, CPU info in the 11.2-U7 dashboard, but it's there in 11.3), but after wasting hours trying to fix problems I just nuked my virtualised 11.3 install and went back to 11.2-U7 and I'm better off for it.

Unless there's a feature in 11.3 you feel you must have, or you have a desperate need to effectively beta test it, don't upgrade. Wait for a while.

Ok, I waited. Now 11.3-U1 is here. Is it now considered safe to do the upgrade? Any caveats or steps to take beforehand (besides the mandatory data backup that is)?
And a bonus question: Appx half of my jails are on 11.3-RELEASE-p5 and the other half on 11.2-RELEASE-p7. Any risk to consider there?

 

[amp88]

Ok, I waited. Now 11.3-U1 is here. Is it now considered safe to do the upgrade? Any caveats or steps to take beforehand (besides the mandatory data backup that is)?
And a bonus question: Appx half of my jails are on 11.3-RELEASE-p5 and the other half on 11.2-RELEASE-p7. Any risk to consider there?

Don't upgrade to 11.3-U1 either. There's a bug in the SMB sharing mechanism where files copied to a FreeNAS 11.3-U1 share have their last modified and created dates overwritten with the date/time they were copied to FreeNAS. This can cause problems with backups or other applications which rely on date/time metadata. There's more information in this thread (there's also a manually applicable patch for the problem available in the thread, but at this point I wouldn't recommend doing it). This problem is supposed to be fixed in 11.3-U2, which is supposed to be released soon. I would wait for 11.3-U2 to be released and see which existing bugs it fixes (and if it introduces any more...) before upgrading.

I don't know about the risk to your jails from upgrading, but perhaps someone else can help you out there.

 

[cpfarhood]

I'll pile on with the "keep waiting". SMB was broken for me and wouldn't start post upgrade, rolled back and tried it again, same problem. Something is causing the smb4.conf file to not be created and I don't want to keep things broken long enough to sort it all out.

 

[dnilgreb]

Yikes.
I´ll hold off until U2 is out.
Thank you for the warning :)

 

[pschatz100]

A lot of posters on the forum are staying with 11.2u8. If 11.3 doesn't address any issues that you have, then there is no harm in waiting.

In my case, I updated from 11.2u7 to 11.3u1. The update went without a hitch for me. I maintain one jail for Plex and it was already an iocage jail, so no issues about that. After updating to 11.3u1 and making certain the system was stable, I upgraded my iocage jail. Everything went OK, but the jail upgrade took a very long time (longer than the FreeNAS update took) so you have to be patient and let things run to completion.

In preparation for the upgrades, I ran a backup up my FreeNAS configuration and the Plex database - just in case something went haywire and I had to reinstall. Note: I keep regular backups, but it never hurts to have an up-to-the-minute copy.

After updating FreeNAS, I did NOT update the ZFS feature flags just in case I needed to roll back to 11.2. So far, so good. The only issue I experienced was that I had to clear my browser cache in order for all the displays in the new GUI to work properly.

 

[amp88]

In my case, I updated from 11.2u7 to 11.3u1.

If you have any SMB shares on FreeNAS 11.3-U1 you should try copying a couple of files to them from a Windows client to see if the last modified and created dates for the files are overwitten with the time they were copied to the FreeNAS share. More information about this issue here.