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[TinTIn]

Hi All,

When selecting an old snapshot boot environment after reboot do you need to change the boot environment back to default to continue as normal or is this automatic? My concern is if I boot back to an old snapshot and make changes after a reboot it will boot me back into that old snapshot before the changes I made if that makes sense?

Thanks


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[cyberjock]

I'm 99% sure that when you roll back the boot environment the config file is not rolled back. So if you upgrade your system, create a new pool (or make some other config change), and then do a rollback to before the config change, you will still have that config change. I haven't tried to test this directly though.

 

[cyberjock]

Ok, I have tested this on TrueNAS 9.3 (behavior should be the exact same for FreeNAS 9.3).

If you have a clone environment and you do a rollback, the config file is included in the rollback. Ex:

You have a clone that was made on April 1.
April 5 you add a NIC to your system.
April 7th you install an update and realize the update sucks. So you roll back to the April 1 clone.

The clone *will not* keep the settings from April 5th. This is both a good and bad thing.

This is a good thing because if you've either used really stupid settings that break the OS from booting properly, the config gets corrupted for any reason (including a failed "upgrade" to the database), or any scenario occurs that makes the config "not a good thing" for the OS, then rolling back the boot environment does save you from a bad config.

This is a bad thing because you are rolling back your config, so changes you make to your config are potentially lost across clones.

So clones are great as they potentially save you from OS corruption as well as a fubared config file. But they won't save you from config problems. So having good configuration backups are just as important as before. For those that don't have an automated backup routine for the config file, might I recommend you read this link: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/backup-config-file-every-night-automatically.8237/

So what's the best way to tackle this potential issue? Make a clone just before you do an upgrade. I've also submitted a ticket for this: https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/9090

It might be a good idea for someone to test this on FreeNAS 9.3 with the latest build just to be sure the behavior isn't actually different. I'm a but confused because I was pretty sure that when I worked with FreeNAS 9.3 rollbacks it did not work this way. /shrug

 

[Ericloewe]

Heads-up: Ticket returns 403 for common users.

 

[TinTIn]

Thanks cyberjock that's really helpful. If I get some time over the next week or so I'll test it on FreeNAS and report back.

 

[sef]

That is both expected and as designed: the configuration information (aka "the database") is specific to a particular version of the OS. You can upgrade from an older version, but that changes the tables and possibly the content -- and then you may not be able to use that file with the older version. As a result, /data is part of the root for the freenas-boot pool.

Every time you make a change to the configuration, the database gets backed up to the system dataset (if there is one), but as I just said, you may not be able to use that with an older version.