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)?
I run proxmox on the host with docker in a VM for 90% of my stuff, OS updates I do like every 6 months maybe, I've done 1 major version upgrade on proxmox with no issues at all.
The docker containers auto-update via Komodo, and nothing really ever breaks anymore other than the occasional container error that needs a simple fix.
Everything important is backed up nightly using both proxmox backup server, and to backblaze B2 with restic.
I've never heard of komodo, I've heard a lot about Watchtower but I found it more annoying to set up due to its labeling systems. Is there any added benefit for Komodo over using a standard watch tower setup?
I haven't set up either of them, but my main concern is having a breaking change be automatically updated
Komodo is a full management setup, similar to Portainer, Dockge, etc.. It works reasonably well.
Watchtower doesn't require any labeling unless you want to exclude a container.
Pinning to a major version usually solves this, ie; instead of using
postgres:latestusepostgres:14which will give you updates only from version 14.But also have backups in place, worst case you just roll back to before it updated.
Oh ok, thank you, I already use Portainer for my existing setup so it wouldn't make much sense to fully rework it. I haden't thought of version pinning though so I may implement that instead, it makes sense "breaking changes" wouldn't happen within the same major version.
Yeah pinning is great, you'll still need watchtower for auto updates too
Yea for sure, I plan to implement that as well when I have some free time.