Over the weekend, I began to notice memory issues on my FreeNAS server which I use for many purposes, including hosting this site. Initially, my thought was a hardware problem with the memory, but at this point, I am suspecting it was either a problem with the FreeNAS OS code, or potentially just a bug with my installation.
However, before that conclusion, I also noticed that the latest version of FreeNAS, version 10, or what is being called FreeNAS Corral, had been released with a stable version. I have been watching the development over the last many months, so was very (perhaps overly) eager to update and upgrade. So on Monday morning, I pulled the trigger…
Unfortunately, the upgrade did not go as smoothly as expected. The upgrade itself was pretty painless, after about 20 minutes, the system was booting up in a fresh new Corral-version interface. However, it failed to properly configure my NIC connections, so I was unable to reach the UI, and had to decipher how to make those change in the console. Not too bad, but confusing.
Then I discovered that the jails did not convert into the new Container format – and there was no quick way to convert them. In FreeNAS’ defense, this was documented, I just didn’t do my research. However, this caused me to pause, and opt to roll back the upgrade, by rebooting into the previous FreeNAS image (a function that is supported).
To my dismay however, the conversion or process of the initial upgrade corrupted or changed the original version, making it non-bootable. Thus I was now stuck on the Corral version, and forced to move forward.
Without going into too much detail (yet), it has taken 2 days to get my Plex environment and this WordPress website operational again, and I have several other applications still to do. As a result of the conversion, you may notice issues with the website. I believe these are limited to text remnants here and there – the actual content appears intact. But further repairs are ongoing.
