Upgrade or NEW install

[BigDave]

I've finally purchased:D the remaining four hard disks (WD30EFRX) to set up my final
6 disk ZFS RAIDz2 single Vdev on my machine. With my little two drive mirror still
functioning flawlessly, I have installed the four new drives into the case and have
began burn-in testing on them. While I wait for badblocks to finish in two or three
days I would ask your opinion about upgrading to 9.2.1.7 OR just installing a fresh
full version with the revamping of my pool structure. Any thoughts?
Thnx, Dave

 

[joeschmuck]

My opinion is to stick with 9.2.1.6 if there is no reason to move. I had one hell of a time when I upgraded from 9.2.1.3 to 9.2.1.6, file permissions were all screwed up, what a pain. I figure that I will stick with 9.2.1.6 until 9.3 comes out. At that point I will be re-evaluating my pool as well.

 

[BigDave]

My opinion is to stick with 9.2.1.6 if there is no reason to move. I had one hell of a time when I upgraded from 9.2.1.3 to 9.2.1.6, file permissions were all screwed up, what a pain. I figure that I will stick with 9.2.1.6 until 9.3 comes out. At that point I will be re-evaluating my pool as well.

Thanks Old Man;), I was kinda leaning that way and you helped push me on over
to waiting on 9.3

 

[cyberjock]

Honestly, everyone should be on 9.2.1.7 because of the remote root samba exploit. And to be honest the difference between 9.2.1.6 and 9.2.1.7 can be counted on one hand. ;)

Here, look for yourself... https://bugs.freenas.org/projects/freenas/issues?query_id=87

There is literally nothing to be afraid of by going with 9.2.1.7 versus 9.2.1.6.

 

[joeschmuck]

@cyberjock I would have to agree that you are correct however my NAS is behind a firewall so I wouldn't expect to have any samba exploits. And since it works, I didn't want to mess with it. Please correct me if I'm trivializing the samba exploit unintentionally.

@BigDave Maybe Cyberjock has a point with respect to 9.2.1.7, I'll wait to see what he has to say.

 

[cyberjock]

Well, the official answer is:

All current versions of Samba 4.x.x are vulnerable to a remote code execution vulnerability in the nmbd NetBIOS name services daemon.

A malicious browser can send packets that may overwrite the heap of the target nmbd NetBIOS name services daemon. It may be possible to use this to generate a remote code execution vulnerability as the superuser (root).

I could see a situation where visiting a website might cause this to trigger, give someone root access and then promptly SSH from your server into their server.

Even if you blocked all outgoing connections from your server to the internet you could still have problems from inside your own LAN.

In any case, the official answer has been (and in my opinion still is), if you aren't on 9.2.1.7 you are at risk. Firewall or no firewall you are still "at risk".

 

[joeschmuck]

@cyberjock Hum.... But I thought you were also running older software on your system(s). Did you upgrade as well? Or is this the iX Systems answer you must give?

 

[cyberjock]

I'm all 9.2.1.7 at home now. Made the jump 3 or 4 weeks ago.

It's not the iX systems answer I must give. To be honest, they aren't particularly interested in telling me what to say in the forums as long as I don't say things like "IX sucks!" and "f*ck you you a**hole!"

I'd probably get a response like "ix may suck.. but your mom sucks much more" anyway.

My honest to god answer is that if you are on 9.2.0 and happy then feel free to stay there until 9.3, but anyone on any 9.2.1.x release *should* be on 9.2.1.7. The reality is that any problem you have with 9.2.1.7 is going to be a problem in 9.3 (especially related to file permissions) unless you have a known issue from some other 9.2.1.x release that was fixed and is tagged as resolved in 9.3 per bugs.freenas.org. I know there's some driver issues with 9.2.1.5 and 9.2.1.6 with some NICs and other hardware so if you have one of those NICs you might be stuck on 9.2.1.4 (or something even earlier) just because you're waiting for the fixed driver to be in 9.3.

But, by large and far, 99% of 9.2.1.x users should be on 9.2.1.7. If you don't have a ticket that you could link to arguing specifically why 9.2.1.7 won't work you are probably only hurting yourself in the long term. Without a bug ticket 9.3 will be "just as broken for you" as 9.2.1.7.

Edit: To be honest, if iX started trying to tell me to say something that I didn't agree with, I'd probably just say nothing at all. To iX's credit though, they really do want transparency and all that good stuff and aren't big on pushing people into saying things that they don't feel is their own opinion. I made it pretty clear a few months ago to iX that I wasn't about to have them dictate what I can say in the forums.

At my last job they often wanted us to play political games (worked in nuclear power.. so is obviously political). I'm not big on playing those games, even if my job was on the line (and of course the company always tried to make it sound like it was). My opinion was that if nuclear power can't compete with other sources of energy then maybe it shouldn't be around. Sure, I think it's cleaner, safer, etc etc etc but if it *truely* can't compete, then that's life. Maybe in 50 years mankind will smarten up and start using nuclear power again. :0

 

[joeschmuck]

Thanks for the response, I appreciate it. I have downloaded 9.2.1.7 but maybe I'll wait for the weekend to upgrade, if I upgrade. If I run into a problem I don't want to spend the entire evening screwing with it. The last issue I had was with file permissions and I ended up just backing up all the data, recreating the pool, restoring my data. It was actually faster then messing around with it any longer. But then again I can backup all my data on a 1 TB drive, I don't have 2000 movies to backup.

 

[BigDave]

Ok, having read all that (thanks cj and joe). I'm going to bring down my current 2-3TB
ZFS RAID1 VDev and build a 6-3TB ZFS RAIDZ2. Would you recommend upgrading
before rebuilding or after? Or would a fresh 9.2.1.7 install be better?
My badblocks testing is now finished, I've yet to do the last smart test and I can begin
playing with building my new pool. What say you?

 

[joeschmuck]

My opinion, it's a personal preference and there isn't anything to really gain either way. My personal preference is a clean install after a backup of all data, but my setup is not complicated. I will be upgrading to 9.2.1.7 this weekend but then again, I'm not rebuilding my pools or anything heavy. When it comes to 9.3, I will do a clean install for two reasons... 1) I know I'll be starting with a clean system. 2) I'll be using a different USB Flash drive and if there is any issues, I can revert back to my 9.2.1.7 Flash drive if needed.

 

[eduardoalvim]

Taking advantage of this discussion, what would you suggest? I have two Freenas systems on production, the "Main File Server" running 8.3.0 since 2012 and a "Replication Machine" running 9.something. The Main File Server uses a 2gb CF-Card and I want to upgrade it to the latest Freenas version. Knowing that would be inevitable to upgrade the CF-Card itself to 4gb or 8gb (correct?) what would be your advices and steps?

 

[joeschmuck]

The best advice I can give is to do your homework and read the manual and stay on top of the issues in the threads here. I'd hate to guide you down a path and find out you lost everything.

I am unsure what the system requirements are for version 9.3 but I have heard it requires 4GB Flash to run. With that in mind, I would opt for an 8GB Flash but then again, I haven't heard anything official yet. For me it would be a future-proof thing, not that 9.3 requires more than 4GB.

I guess my point to an upgrade is... If it's working, why break it. But if you're on the internet then it sounds like upgrading to 9.2.1.7 is the smart thing to do. As always, backup your data before making a change. Also, I would not upgrade your pools, it's not required when upgrading FreeNAS versions, also this gives you the ability to revert back to 8.3.0 if you need to, just ensure you keep a copy of your configuration.

 

[cyberjock]

The size of the drive in 9.3 is NOT determined at this time. There is likely to be a minimum size, but oversizing only means the boot device will be able to store more snapshots of the OS and such.

At the present time I wouldn't go smaller than 8GB, and I wouldn't spend gobs of money on upgrading to 16GB. If you can wait until 9.3 is actually released then you'll have solid release notes to make a decision on upgrading.

 

[joeschmuck]

At the present time I wouldn't go smaller than 8GB, and I wouldn't spend gobs of money on upgrading to 16GB. If you can wait until 9.3 is actually released then you'll have solid release notes to make a decision on upgrading.

16GB for the boot Flash drive? That would be gobs of money for a CF. Now I'm curious as to why. I'm ignorant as to doing snapshots of the OS and those being stored on the OS drive, but I have not been following 9.3. I'm not asking for an answer, I should be able to dig it up myself when I have some time to do that.

 

[Ericloewe]

16GB for the boot Flash drive? That would be gobs of money for a CF. Now I'm curious as to why. I'm ignorant as to doing snapshots of the OS and those being stored on the OS drive, but I have not been following 9.3. I'm not asking for an answer, I should be able to dig it up myself when I have some time to do that.

I'll save you some time - the system partition will be ZFS, which should allow for a number of nice things.

 

[cyberjock]

^^^ - that.

Tons of things are changing. I've actually gone overboard and bought 16GB SATA DOMs for my FreeNAS boxes in anticipation of 9.3. ;)

I would go into it in more detail, but I don't want to give anyone info that may be inaccurate and so far it seems that when I've put out info on 9.3 too many people immediately start taking it out of context. So at present I'll keep my mouth shut. The 9.3 betas and such will certainly have release notes that will firm up the expectations, changes, etc as necessary.

 

[titan_rw]

I've got a bunch of really really old jmicron based 32 gig ssd's that aren't doing anything. Should do ok for a boot drive.

 

[BigDave]

I've actually gone overboard and bought 16GB SATA DOMs

Are you sticking with SLC type or do you figure it won't matter?

 

[cyberjock]

I figure it won't matter for this. 16GB SLC seems to be like $100+.