Update to 11.2

[Joe Mays]

I have two freenas systems running here, both of which were at 11.1-U6 Stable. One is the primary server. The second one is a backup that is identical hardware, and is kept up to date with replication across a dedicated point to point link. Typically, when I do an upgrade, I do the backup machine first, let the backup run for a week or two under the new version, then if everything seems fine I will upgrade the primary.

To judge from the forum discussions here, I am not the first person to draw the wrong conclusion from the name of the 11.2-Stable train. So I decided to switch the backup to that, and the upgrade seemed to go fine, except for one problem. There is one point that throws a traceback during the bootup, and then I can't connect to the UI through a web browser. I just get a big blinking whale. It looks like the rest of the upgrade went okay though. I have the console menu, and I can ssh into the unit and it looks like it's working fine. Even the replications seem to be coming across okay.

So I guess my question is should I leave it as is in hopes of the problem being fixed in a future upgrade, try to roll back the upgrade (assuming there's a way to do that), or reinstall 11.1-U6 from a CD or something. I am not wild about that last option because I'd have to reimport the zfs volume and would have to set all the replication up again and everything. On the flip side, the purpose of the backup is to be a replacement in case of a catastrophic failure of the primary, and right now it's not that, certainly. Not sure what the best course of action is.

I would include the traceback here, but I'm not sure how to call that information back through the CLI. It doesn't show in dmesg or the message logs.

 

[dlavigne]

Please refer to the Known Issues section of https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/library/freenas-11-1-u6/ .

Are you able to boot back into the U6 boot environment from the boot menu?

 

[Joe Mays]

Yes, that worked, more or less, thanks for the direction. Oddly enough, when I tried to boot into the U6 boot environment, it was hanging after trying to load the CD driver, which certainly never happened before under U6. I tried several times, waited for a long time through the hang. I backed up to U5 and that booted fine. I tried U6 again, hung at the same place. So I backed it up to U5 and left it there, and it seems to be working fine now.

So from here should I leave it where it is in anticipation of a future upgrade to 11.2, "upgrade" it to 1.6 again in hopes of that fixing whatever happened to the CD driver, or do something else?

 

[Joe Mays]

FYI, both the machine running U6 and the machine running U5 show the same cd driver and version being loaded --

cd0: <TEAC CD-224E-N 1.AA> Removable CD-ROM SCSI device

So why it should be hanging on U6 on a machine after an attempted upgrade to 11.2 (but not under U5) is a mystery to me, but there is the info if it's useful.

 

[Ericloewe]

It's probably what comes after the CD drive that's causing trouble.

 

[Joe Mays]

Makes sense. I'm not really concerned about it, though. If I update to U6 now, while I have the system running in U5, will it restore U6 as the default environment, thus backing out the upgrade to 11.2?

 

[Ericloewe]

I guess.