FreeNAS 11.3 and EOL Jails. Upgrade to 11.4 jails?

[Mannekino]

I'm currently running FreeNAS 11.3-U5 and my Jails are on 11.3 also which is marked as EOL since September 30th.

Code:

root@freenas[/var/log]# iocage fetch
[0] 11.2-RELEASE (EOL)
[1] 11.3-RELEASE (EOL)
[2] 11.4-RELEASE
[3] 12.0-RELEASE (EOL)
[4] 12.1-RELEASE

Would it be safe and advisable to upgrade to 11.4? Or perhaps to 12.1 or is that not doable with FreeNAS 11.3-U5?

 

[Jailer]

You can't have a jail on a newer kernel version than the host so you will not be able to upgrade your jails to 12.1. You can however upgrade the jails to 11.4 and they will work fine. I have a couple of mine already on 11.4 and plan on upgrading the rest this weekend.

 

[Mannekino]

Alright, is there any documentation how to do the upgrade to 11.4. I found one other thread on this matter but no info there on how to do this.

 

[Jailer]

It's listed in the iocage documentation.

https://iocage.readthedocs.io/en/latest/advanced-use.html#upgrading-jails

 

[Mannekino]

OK thanks, I've upgraded two Jails so far without issue it seems.

A bit of a stupid question I can't find the answer to. I've done a little searching on Google but no success.

When you see this, is there any way to quickly go to the bottom or accept instead of holding down the Page Down key?

 

[Alecmascot]

pressing "q" works
At the end you need to do pkg upgrade within the jail

 

[InQuize]

After

Code:

root@nas:~ # iocage upgrade -r 11.4-RELEASE syncthing

Code:

root@nas:~ # iocage list
+-----+-----------+-------+--------------+----------+
| JID |   NAME    | STATE |   RELEASE    |   IP4    |
+=====+===========+=======+==============+==========+

+-----+-----------+-------+--------------+----------+
| 19  | syncthing | up    | 11.4-RELEASE | 10.2.0.4 |
+-----+-----------+-------+--------------+----------+

but

Code:

root@syncthing:~ # uname -v
FreeBSD 11.3-RELEASE-p14 #0 r325575+c936002dbe2(HEAD): Mon Sep 28 10:46:56 EDT 2
020     root@tnbuilds05.tn.ixsystems.net:/freenas-releng/freenas/_BE/objs/freena
s-releng/freenas/_BE/os/sys/FreeNAS.amd64

Which one to believe?

 

[Mannekino]

I think that refers to the actual kernel of the FreeNAS system and not the Jail.

You can check the Jail version by typing freebsd-version inside the jail.

 

[InQuize]

Makes sense. Thx

Code:

root@syncthing:~ # freebsd-version
11.4-RELEASE-p4

 

[ikke]

My jails are broken ATM again. I just tried upgrading one yesterday. To get packages, they'd need to go 11.4 instead of 11.3. And since that's ahead of kernel version of FreeNAS, it breaks the jail pkg system.

I did this:

Code:

iocage upgrade -r 11.3-RELEASE dbs

which should upgrade it to 11.3, like it looks like:

Code:

iocage console dbs
freebsd-version 
11.3-RELEASE-p14

but while running pkg update && pkg upgrade it didn't find any packages, as that jail release is EOL.

Code:

....
Proceed with this action? [y/N]: y
pkg: http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD:11:amd64/quarterly/All/readline-8.0.0.txz: Not Found

Then I tried force update for pkg, but that would think system is 11.4:

Code:

# pkg update -f
Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue...
[dbs-11-2] Fetching meta.conf: 100%    163 B   0.2kB/s    00:01    
[dbs-11-2] Fetching packagesite.txz: 100%    6 MiB   6.3MB/s    00:01    
Processing entries:   0%
Newer FreeBSD version for package finch:
To ignore this error set IGNORE_OSVERSION=yes
- package: 1104001
- running kernel: 1103000
Ignore the mismatch and continue? [Y/n]: n

So, I assume any updates for jails are doomed to fail until FreeNAS updates to 11.4.

Jails together with FreeNAS being released late from FreeBSD is a combination that really makes the jails risky business. They are every now and then in the state of not possible update or install anything into. So if one is planning to use jails, be aware they get broken every now and then, and stay in such state for unkown time until if FreenNAS or TrueNAS catches up with FreeBSD version at the time, for a moment.

The only way of installing stable system is unfortunately to sacrifice some of the performance and resources to run VM. Then you are able to run the normal automation on your favorite distro. Personally I am running now Fedora-IoT for minimal linux, and use cockpit and ansible to manage config of that within containers.

The downside is that every disk operation to ZFS needs to go either via NFS over network virtualization or virtualized filesystem layer, which then eats resources and performance.

I'm really looking forward for the scale linux version and containers!

 

[ikke]

About that performance, I know it's irrelevant in most use cases. I just aim for low powered silent home nas, and perhaps am a bit too stuck on staying in physical, not virtual level there. Since I run databases for mariadb and influxdb in this jail, I'd prefer it to be on non virtual level. But again, they are not super busy, so perhaps I just need to let go and buy memory and go to virtual level.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

@ikke that is why they switched to tracking a major stable branch instead of a release branch for TrueNAS Core 12. I suggest you update to that, it will probably be released this week. It will always run the latest 12.x as long as 12 exists.

 

[Jailer]

And since that's ahead of kernel version of FreeNAS

11.3 and 11.4 use the same kernel. What version of FreeNAS are you running and what is the output of freebsd-version from inside the jail you are trying to upgrade?

 

[ikke]

@Jailer see above, it was from within jail:

Code:

# iocage console dbs
# freebsd-version
11.3-RELEASE-p14

 

[ikke]

Sorry, forgot to answer your second question, the FreeNAS is 11.3-U5, the latest there is from stable.

 

[Jailer]

So to upgrade the jail the correct command would be iocage upgrade jailname -r 11.4-RELEASE that will get you to 11. 4 in your jail and you can then upgrade the packages. FeeBSD 11.3 is EOL and no longer supported.

 

[ikke]

Thanks, this worked. Now I did not get the kernel version nag.

 

[f00b4r00]

So to upgrade the jail the correct command would be iocage upgrade jailname -r 11.4-RELEASE that will get you to 11. 4 in your jail and you can then upgrade the packages. FeeBSD 11.3 is EOL and no longer supported.

Except that doesn't work for plugin jails, which are pegged to their plugin-set release.
Acknowledging that plugins suck, is there a clean way to convert a plugin jail to a regular base jail? I'd rather avoid starting back from scratch, although this appears to be a common thing in the freebsd world, judging by a number of post read here and elsewhere ;P

 

[Jailer]

I don't use plugins so I can't help you with that.

 

[ikke]

No matter how you do it, automatize it. I moved all more complex stuff to containers quite long ago, and set them up with ansible playbooks. So re-creation is not an issue. If you want to stay with jails, you can ansible that too. I found it the easiest to enable ssh server into the jail by a shell script, and then do the rest with ansible. You could also do it without ssh in jail, but it's more complicated.

If you accept the extra operating system in between, containers (podman preferrably) + ansible is the way at home. Kube when it get's into clusters.

My solution at home is freenas + fedora-iot + podman containers set up with ansible. And also containers on other hosts which use the NAS storage over NFS.