Migrate Tautulli data from an iocage jail to a plugin jail

[Basil Hendroff]

I recently upgraded to 11.3 and noticed there is an official Tautulli plugin. I originally installed Tautulli in an iocage jail using instructions on the Tautulli website. I would prefer to use the plugin instead. I would like to retain the history and statistics I have already accumulated. I suspect that the instructions located here are relevant, but does anyone have any other advice on moving Tautulli data from an iocage jail to the plugin jail?

 

[danb35]

I would prefer to use the plugin instead.

Seriously, why? Plugins are less well-supported and generally much slower to update. They're easier to install, to be sure, but you've already installed it. This really seems like it would be a step backward.

 

[Basil Hendroff]

Seriously, why? Plugins are less well-supported and generally much slower to update. They're easier to install, to be sure, but you've already installed it. This really seems like it would be a step backward.

I don't disagree at all, unless the objectives are to achieve an 'appliance' feel through the use of the comprehensive UI and to minimise 'tinkering under the hood' via the shell console. The less techy I can make FreeNAS appear to be, the more likely I'm able to convince a less technical audience to take it up. The techier it appears, the more I'm likely to be tied in to support those deployments. I'd like to loosely couple support of those deployments as much as possible.

On a personal level, I guess I'm of the ilk that I prefer the ‘appliance’ feel of FreeNAS with just the occasional need to roll up my sleeves and look under the hood. No doubt, there will be others that argue the other way (go FreeBSD I say), and everybody else will argue somewhere on the spectrum in between these extremes.

As a for instance, Plex is a storage hog. A less tech-savvy audience will naturally, primarily because of platform familiarity, gravitate towards a Windows or Mac solution for a Plex Media Server (PMS) before they consider a FreeNAS solution. What's not on the radar for them, and not an easy sell as they are somewhat abstract concepts, is the stability (long server uptimes), data integrity and redundancy (based on ZFS), and backup functionality (data replication, snapshots, rollback) that FreeNAS offers. FreeNAS is perfect for a PMS, but not if I'm tightly coupled into supporting those solutions.

Being on a Plex plugin version (currently 1.18.3.2129) compared to the latest version (1.18.6.2368 released today) is not a dealbreaker for me. This will be true (most of the time I hope) for other plugins as well. On the other hand, tying myself into supporting 'under-the-hood' solutions is a dealbreaker for me.

 

[ChaosBlades]

I would not use official Tautulli at this point. It runs on python 2.7 (EOL) and the developers have completely ignored anyone that even mentions migrating to python 3 since its EOL date was announced. I would recommend going back to a jail and installing the zSeriesGuy fork that runs on Python 3.5+.

GitHub - zSeriesGuy/Tautulli: A Python based monitoring and tracking tool for Plex Media Server.

A Python based monitoring and tracking tool for Plex Media Server. - zSeriesGuy/Tautulli

github.com

 

[Basil Hendroff]

@ChaosBlades Interesting perspective. Thanks for the insight.

 

[Basil Hendroff]

Well, I bit the bullet and moved my remaining iocage jails (DNSMasq and Tautulli) back to plugin jails. I'd like to report back that the experience was entirely positive. There were a couple of minor benefits to come out of this. For Tautulli, two things:

1. I could use NAT instead of a static IP; and
2. I can now manage Tautulli directly from the FreeNAS Plugins UI.

I'm generally impressed so far with the quality of the community plugins and I'm looking forward to trying some of the others out. Can't say the same about some of the official plugins e.g. I've just about given up on trying to get the NextCloud plugin working.