A year ago I built a NAS to reduce my reliance on cloud services, and set up an arr stack. I went with TrueNAS Scale, which was on Bluefin at the time. In the past 12 months, TrueNAS Scale has been through FOUR major OS versions, with a fifth already announced. At least one of those involved a release train switch so, despite diligently checking for updates in the dashboard, I was left in the dust with an obsolete OS, and didn’t find out until it was already a huge hassle to upgrade.

I’ve been really happy with the utility and benefit of having this tool, but holy smokes how is anybody supposed to keep up with all of this? This is far from my only hobby, and I simply do not have the time, patience, or interest for a constant race to keep up with vetting new release versions and fixing what breaks every 3 weeks. I have enough tinkering hobbies as it is.

On top of that, there’s the whole blow up with TrueCharts, which has also left me with an entire suite of obsolete albatrosses around my NAS that I need to deal with. Am I still waiting for them to figure out an upgrade path? I don’t even know anymore.

Sorry for the rant, but I guess what I’m looking for is: how do you keep up with the constant maintenance and updates, and where do I go from here, in February 2025, with a system running Bluefin 22.12, a 32TB ZFS pool (RAIDZ1) that has to remain intact, and a handful of TrueCharts apps that I don’t want to lose the data from (e.g. Jellyfin configs/watch history)?

  • PieMePlenty@lemmy.world
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    28 days ago

    I use debian, so what’s to keep up with? Apt upgrade is literally everything I need. My home server doesn’t take a lot of my time except when I want to tweak something or introduce something new. I dont really follow all the trendy stuff at all and just have it do what I need.

  • mesamune@lemmy.world
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    29 days ago

    I dont :) Mostly.

    Honestly I have an auto backup system. And then set it up to auto update periodically. Then use Debian Server as it almost never breaks as a server distro.

  • irish_link@lemmy.world
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    29 days ago

    Similar to the others although I have messed with Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, and even a few others for like a day or two each.

    At the moment I am using Fedora. My drives are raided and my main storage has all the data and the docker config directory’s.

    Using docker for everything, watchtower for updates, and pertained to manage the containers with a gui. All the containers are directed to /mnt/drive/allMyData. In there is my data folders. Shows, movies, plex configs for recording over the air, ebooks, documents, etc.

    Mainly I set it up this way so I can easily change distros if I wanted to and have all my services back up in an hour or so.

    I started a text file that contains the command lines I have used to start all of my docker containers. This way if I need to I reference it and use the exact same commands mapped volumes to the same folders. Now I am back up and running in a few clicks. No need to backup the container if all the data in it is setup in folders in my main data directory.

    However I am running a separate hardware raid setup prior to os. This way all my data stays safe as a separate volume.

  • Akareth@lemmy.world
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    26 days ago

    I use Debian stable for my main OS for the stability, security and infrequent updates, and run all of my services in Docker containers to keep everything up to date.

  • DontTakeMySky@lemmy.world
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    29 days ago

    I run Debian on most of my systems and run all of my services in docker (with rare exceptions for node_exporter or stable core tools). My base systems get automatic security upgrades, and then I’ll manually check in every few weeks whenever I feel like it.

    My services in docker are version locked to a specific major version (when there’s a tag available) so I can usually re-pull to get minor version updates freely without breaking issues. My few more finnickey services get manual upgrades from me every 6 months or so only.

    I usually stick to an OS version for as long as I can, and to that aim I stick to LTS versions with long support windows.

    4 major versions in 12mo is…a lot. Especially if those include breaking changes for you. Yikes

  • kalleboo@lemmy.world
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    27 days ago

    This is why I’m still using a Synology ¯\(ツ)

    I can install all the fun stuff I want in Docker, but for the core OS services, it’s outsourced to Synology to maintain for me

  • Thunderbird4@lemmy.worldOP
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    26 days ago

    Thanks for a lot of useful replies, everyone. Sorry I ghosted my own post for a couple days. I’m seeing surprisingly few people who actually use or used TrueNAS, so maybe that’s something to consider moving away from. I’ll have to weigh my options.

  • InnerScientist@lemmy.world
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    29 days ago

    I have rss feeds for my main service updates so I know what new features I have, the services mostly run in podman containers and update automatically each Monday. I also have daily backups (timed to run just before the update on monday) in case anything does break.

    If it breaks I fix it depending on how much I want/need it, mostly it’s a matter of half an hour to fix it and with my current NixOS/Podman system I haven’t yet needed to fix anything this year so it breaks infrequently.

    Also why are you using Kubernetes on a single host if you want minimal maintenance? XD

    My recommendation is to switch to just managing containers, you should just be able to export the volumes out of kubernetes and import them as normal volumes, as long as they’re mounted in the right place you keep your data and if it doesn’t work just try again. Not like you need to destroy the current system to slowly replace it.

    Edit: I also recommend to update and reboot frequently, this stops updates and unstable configurations from piling up.