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.
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
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.
Try watchtower instead of cron jobs
Depends on your stance on risk since WatchTower has to run as privileged
This is a good point. Generally if can accomplish what I want with my own scripts, I will go that route. I’ll probably avoid adding additional software to the mix since what I have works fine enough.
I’ll check it out! Thanks!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
At least you get updates. I’m running TruNAS core which isn’t updated anymore, and I have some jails doing things so I can’t migrate to scale easially.
The good news is this still works despite no updates it does everything it used to. There is almost zero reason to update any working NAS if it is behind a firewall.
The bad news is those jails are doing useful things and because I’m out of date I can’t update what is in them. Some of those services have new versions that add new features that I really really want.
I have ordered (should arrive tomorrow) a N100 which I’m going to manually migrate the useful services to one at a time. Once that is doing I’ll probably switch to XigmaNAS so I can stick with FreeBSD. (I’ve always preferred FreeBSD). That will leave my NAS as just file storage for a while, though depending on how I like XigmaNAS I might or might not run services on that.
The good news is this still works despite no updates it does everything it used to. There is almost zero reason to update any working NAS if it is behind a firewall.
if all users and devices on the network are well behaved and don’t install every random app, even if from the play store, then yeah, it’s less of a risk
Core is still getting updates?i got one last week.
only the most basic security. It is out of date according to the pkg system and so jails cannot be updated-
Super lame. BSD is very preferable for core systems like this.
In life? Amphetamines.
I use NixOS so if an update breaks, I just roll back. And since it’s effectively a rolling release distribution there isn’t any risk of being left behind on an outdated version.
Same here. I spent last month transitioning all my servers to NixOS and it feels so comfy! I do a small test on my desktop when I do something that might break stuff first, and then add it to server’s config later.
--target-hostand--use-remote-sudomakes it even better too.
Constant maintenance? What’s that?
Here’s my setup:
- OS - openSUSE Leap - I upgrade when I remember
- software - Docker images in a docker compose file; upgrading is a simple docker command, and I’ll only do it if I need something in the update
- hardware - old desktop; I’ll upgrade when I have extra hardware
I honestly don’t think about it. I run updates when I get to it (every month or so), and I’ll do an OS upgrade a little while after a new release is available (every couple years?). Software gets updated periodically if I’m bored and avoiding more important things. And I upgrade one thing at a time, so I don’t end up with everything breaking at once. BTRFS snapshots means I can always roll back if I break something.
I don’t even know what TrueCharts is. Maybe that’s your issue?
For one I don’t use software that updates constantly. If I had to log in to a container more than once a year to fix something, I’d figure out something else. My NAS is just harddrives on a Debian machine.
Everything I use runs either Debian or is some form of BSD
Same, but openSUSE. Tumbleweed on my desktop and laptop, Leap on my servers.
And yeah, if I need to babysit something, I’ll use an alternative. I’ll upgrade when I’m ready to, which is usually over holidays when I’m bored and looking for a project.
Docker: More or less automatically upgraded (compose)
Proxmox/TrueNas: My setup breaks so often or I want to do something that I will check it every once in a while and run updates
Main Debian NAS: Automatic updates. (apt)
Raspberry Pi: Automatic Updates (apt)
Windows: If it prompts me and I am shutting it down amyway: Fine. Thanks for notifying.I stopped chassing updates quite some time ago.
Debian, baby.
Yeah, everything that’s already been said, except that I specifically chose an off-the-shelf Synology NAS with Docker support to run my core setup for this exact reason. It needs a reboot maybe once or twice a year for critical updates but is otherwise rock solid.
I have since added a small N100 box for things that need a little extra grunt (Plex mainly) but I run Ubuntu Server LTS with Docker on that and do maintenance on it about as often as I reboot the NAS.
