Hello, thanks for the note.
Performed the 11.3-U2 upgrade from 11.1-U7, and did stop services because I read that somewhere else. They restarted automatically after reboot.
The upgrade worked fine, so very thankful for that. Did take an entire hour, 1/2 hour to download and install upgrades to my USB2 boot thumb drive, 1/2 hour to reboot (during which some kind of magic happens, not sure what).
Rebooted a few times after that, and now rebooting takes about 12 minutes from my USB2 thumb drive. Seems about twice as long as 11.1, but I guess that doesn't really matter.
After a few reboots, I figured things were OK, so did the pool upgrade, which worked fine as usual and took just a second.
I don't have any of the encryption or AD or anything other than file sharing, so didn't do the secret seed. Apparently didn't need it.
Very happy to see that my SMB shares still work, so didn't have to touch the permissions or access controls.
My rsync tasks all failed. I notice that my old configuration transferred over with the target as the computer name, no suffix. I found that if I ping with just the target computer name (hereafter "name"), the ping attached the suffix .local (name.local), which failed. I looked on the target and with ipconfig see that the DNS suffix is .home. I don't remember it being that way, maybe got changed somehow with a Windows update. No idea really. Anyhow, I found that I could ping name.home, so put name.home in the rsync target address, and now everything works fine again. Lucky that, I don't really understand complex networking but glad it worked out.
Maybe someday I will replace the USB2 boot thumb drive with an SSD drive, need to research that. Years ago when I started with FreeNAS, a thumb drive was the, or a recommended boot device. Don't know about now. Also need to learn how to mirror the USB thumb drive, if I stick with that type of device, good to have a fail-to device. I gather this is a relatively new feature.
Again, thanks for FreeNAS and glad to be back in business. Feel fortunate the upgrade went well.
Best, respectfully, IMF
Fixed this for you--really there's no reason to stop the services.
The secret seed is used to encrypt any credentials other than user passwords. If you're using any cloud services, Active Directory or other LDAP services, etc., those credentials will be lost if you don't check the box. I'd check it, and keep that config file in a safe place. Once you're sure 11.3 is running fine, you can delete it.
The other caution is to not upgrade the pool until you're sure everything is fine. If you don't, the system will give you a warning, but you'll be able to roll back to 11.1U7 very easily. If you upgrade the pool, 11.1 won't be able to use it any more.
