A year ago I built a NAS to reduce my reliance on cloud services, and set up an arr stack. I went with TrueNAS Scale, which was on Bluefin at the time. In the past 12 months, TrueNAS Scale has been through FOUR major OS versions, with a fifth already announced. At least one of those involved a release train switch so, despite diligently checking for updates in the dashboard, I was left in the dust with an obsolete OS, and didn’t find out until it was already a huge hassle to upgrade.
I’ve been really happy with the utility and benefit of having this tool, but holy smokes how is anybody supposed to keep up with all of this? This is far from my only hobby, and I simply do not have the time, patience, or interest for a constant race to keep up with vetting new release versions and fixing what breaks every 3 weeks. I have enough tinkering hobbies as it is.
On top of that, there’s the whole blow up with TrueCharts, which has also left me with an entire suite of obsolete albatrosses around my NAS that I need to deal with. Am I still waiting for them to figure out an upgrade path? I don’t even know anymore.
Sorry for the rant, but I guess what I’m looking for is: how do you keep up with the constant maintenance and updates, and where do I go from here, in February 2025, with a system running Bluefin 22.12, a 32TB ZFS pool (RAIDZ1) that has to remain intact, and a handful of TrueCharts apps that I don’t want to lose the data from (e.g. Jellyfin configs/watch history)?
OS updates I only bother with every 6-12mo, though I also use debian which doesn’t push major updates all that regularly.
As far as software goes; pretty much everything is in a docker container with watchtower automatically pulling new updates to those nightly at 4am. It sends me email notifications, so It’ll tell me if an update fails; combined with uptime-kuma notifying me if any of my services is unavailable for whatever reason.
The rest I’ll usually do with the OS updates. Just because an update was released, doesn’t mean you’ve gotta drop everything and install it right this moment.
You might want to think about running a “stable” or “LTS” OS and spin up things in Docker instead. That way you only have to do OS level updates very rarely.
I learned this the hard way as well… I did a big OS update on mine once and it broke almost every application running on it. Docker worked perfectly still. I transferred everything I could to Docker after that.
Thanks for this. I’ve recently been recreating my home server on good hardware and have been thinking it’s time to jump into selfhosting more stuff. I’ve used Docker a bit, so I guess I’ll have to do it the right way. It’s always good to know what choices now will avoid future issues.
In life? Amphetamines.
I dont :) Mostly.
Honestly I have an auto backup system. And then set it up to auto update periodically. Then use Debian Server as it almost never breaks as a server distro.
I use debian, so what’s to keep up with? Apt upgrade is literally everything I need. My home server doesn’t take a lot of my time except when I want to tweak something or introduce something new. I dont really follow all the trendy stuff at all and just have it do what I need.
I run a Fedora server.
All of my apps are in docker containers set to restart unless stopped by me.
Then I run a cron job that is scheduled at like 3 or 4am that runs docker pull on all containers and restarts them. Then it runs all system updates and restarts the server.
Every week or so I just spot check to make sure it is still working. This has been my process for like 6 months without issue.
Is it exposed to the internet?
Mine is local only so I’m not as diligent with updates. I push them like once every 2-3 weeks. Some containers automatically update but some don’t because in the past that has broken associated scripts
Just subscribe to the release channel. That varies from OS to OS or Software, but is worth it.
Use tools that are universal. For example, I have not used TrueNAS Scale because they did not support native docker at the time. OS specific solutions are more likely to break then universal once (truecharts vs docker)
To get up and running again after a complete failure i can just download the latest config and data from my backup and set up any distro that supports docker and my system is running again.
I do OS upgrades when they are available, usually within 1 or 2 days and containers are updated with watchtower daily.
You can choose a slower train for scale. Go for the stable release or even the enterprise release. Update once in a few months or so.
I went with Talos OS for my apps after the mess from IX-systems and for the most part it has been set and forget.
Do you run Talos on bare metal or on something like Proxmox? Care to discuss your k8s stack?
Currently I run Talos on a VM on scale. I went with Truecharts. The plan for me is to run it on bare metal at some point.
I’m looking at Talos on my Proxmox cluster as VMs. I’m trying to automate it all through ansible and currently stuck trying to bootstrap my secrets manager. Somewhat of an analysis paralysis at the moment. Thinking of using a cloud hosted one with some kind of a local passthrough cache in case the WAN connection gets disrupted.
I use Debian stable for my main OS for the stability, security and infrequent updates, and run all of my services in Docker containers to keep everything up to date.
Use Debian LTS or Ubuntu LTS (10 years support with free Ubuntu Pro). Turn on automatic unattended updates. Upgrade OS when you’re bored one of those years.
Keywords:
- Debian
- Ubuntu
- LTS
- ZFS
- Docker (compose)
I run Debian on most of my systems and run all of my services in docker (with rare exceptions for node_exporter or stable core tools). My base systems get automatic security upgrades, and then I’ll manually check in every few weeks whenever I feel like it.
My services in docker are version locked to a specific major version (when there’s a tag available) so I can usually re-pull to get minor version updates freely without breaking issues. My few more finnickey services get manual upgrades from me every 6 months or so only.
I usually stick to an OS version for as long as I can, and to that aim I stick to LTS versions with long support windows.
4 major versions in 12mo is…a lot. Especially if those include breaking changes for you. Yikes
Similar to the others although I have messed with Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, and even a few others for like a day or two each.
At the moment I am using Fedora. My drives are raided and my main storage has all the data and the docker config directory’s.
Using docker for everything, watchtower for updates, and pertained to manage the containers with a gui. All the containers are directed to /mnt/drive/allMyData. In there is my data folders. Shows, movies, plex configs for recording over the air, ebooks, documents, etc.
Mainly I set it up this way so I can easily change distros if I wanted to and have all my services back up in an hour or so.
I started a text file that contains the command lines I have used to start all of my docker containers. This way if I need to I reference it and use the exact same commands mapped volumes to the same folders. Now I am back up and running in a few clicks. No need to backup the container if all the data in it is setup in folders in my main data directory.
However I am running a separate hardware raid setup prior to os. This way all my data stays safe as a separate volume.
This is why I’m still using a Synology ¯\(ツ)/¯
I can install all the fun stuff I want in Docker, but for the core OS services, it’s outsourced to Synology to maintain for me
Thanks for a lot of useful replies, everyone. Sorry I ghosted my own post for a couple days. I’m seeing surprisingly few people who actually use or used TrueNAS, so maybe that’s something to consider moving away from. I’ll have to weigh my options.
