To FreeNAS or Not

[MurrayS]

I purchased server-grade hardware and built a decent machine with the idea of running my own home cloud, along with other utilities like home entertainment. I've been playing with FreeNAS for a couple of years now and while I have a lot to learn about it, here's my dilemma. If you want to chide me that's fine, but please provide some practical and production-grade advice as well.

I've configured a couple of jails and installed a few plug-ins. While jails are customizable and much more powerful than plug-ins, apparently updating FreeNAS messes up the jail configuration because the updated templates overwrite the old templates. At least that's been my experience after updating FreeNAS more than once. I had a nicely configured ownCloud jail with nginx and mysql (thanks to joshruehlig and others). My ownClould configuration got totally whacked up and the files were inaccessible.
The plug-ins on the other hand, are usually a few major releases behind. If it wasn't for security updates and features, I wouldn't care to update.

So here's my philosophical and practical question: Considering all the handy plug-ins and uses that FreeNAS offers, is the product really ready for production-grade? Or is FreeNAS a beefed up beta product? Is there a best-practice guide for maintaining the server without breaking the jails and the affiliated utilities, with each upgrade?

Appreciate constructive suggestions.
Murray

 

[Jailer]

apparently updating FreeNAS messes up the jail configuration because the updated templates overwrite the old templates.

That's not true. Old jails continue to function just fine. That's been my experience as well as several others. I'm on 11.2 and my Nextcloud warden based jail that was installed on 11.0 is still functioning fine.