I’ve been running FreeNAS as a file and application server for quite a while and love it. The FreeBSD jails are awesome for running applications like Plex or gitea in isolation. Recently the base FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE went end of life and 11.3-RELEASE was the new stable version (actually, it went EOL last October but I only realized it the other day). Updates for packages can still be done within the jails, but upgrading the base jail can’t be done from within the jail itself.
Instructions are around on how to do it, however I like blogging things that I know I’ll be coming back to and “consumer 1” for this blog is me. If you’re looking for a quick tutorial on how to upgrade the base jail on FreeNAS, then this may be of use to you. Undoubtably it will be useful to future me.
Unfortunately, as of the current FreeNAS 11.3-RELEASE this cannot be done in the GUI, so we need to resort to the shell. Open a console or ssh into your FreeNAS server, to an account with sudo privileges, and get a list of jails:
$ sudo iocage list
Password:
+-----+-------------+-------+--------------+------+
| JID | NAME | STATE | RELEASE | IP4 |
+=====+=============+=======+==============+======+
| 2 | gitea | up | 11.2-RELEASE | DHCP |
+-----+-------------+-------+--------------+------+
| 3 | inkdrop | up | 11.3-RELEASE | DHCP |
+-----+-------------+-------+--------------+------+
| - | openproject | down | 11.2-RELEASE | DHCP |
+-----+-------------+-------+--------------+------+
| 1 | plex | up | 11.2-RELEASE | DHCP |
+-----+-------------+-------+--------------+------+
On my system. the plex, gitea, and openproject jails were created quite some time ago and are running the 11.2-RELEASE version of FreeBSD. The inkdrop jail was created recently using the 11.3-RELEASE template. We’ll upgrade the openproject jail first since that one means less to me than plex or gitea.
The first step is to make sure it is at the latest patch release:
$ sudo iocage update openproject
Snapshot: storage/iocage/jails/openproject@ioc_update_11.2-RELEASE-p15_2020-02-16_08-14-35 created.
Updating jail...
* Updating openproject to the latest patch level...
src component not installed, skipped
Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... 3 mirrors found.
Fetching metadata signature for 11.2-RELEASE from update4.freebsd.org... done.
Fetching metadata index... done.
Inspecting system... done.
Preparing to download files... done.
No updates needed to update system to 11.2-RELEASE-p15.
WARNING: FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE HAS PASSED ITS END-OF-LIFE DATE.
Any security issues discovered after Wed Oct 30 18:00:00 MDT 2019
will not have been corrected.
src component not installed, skipped
No updates are available to install.
Run '/tmp/tmpqduc4ubh fetch' first.
When I did this first, update it looked like it created a snapshot. I don’t know if this is a feature or not (or I did something by accident?), but either way it’s a good idea to make sure you have a current snapshot. You can examine whether or not that is the case:
$ sudo iocage snaplist openproject
+------------------------------------------------------+-----------------------+-------+-------+
| NAME | CREATED | RSIZE | USED |
+======================================================+=======================+=======+=======+
| ioc_update_11.2-RELEASE-p4 | Sat Feb 15 10:23 2020 | 184K | 120K |
+------------------------------------------------------+-----------------------+-------+-------+
| ioc_update_11.2-RELEASE-p4/root | Sat Feb 15 10:23 2020 | 2.61G | 11.5M |
+------------------------------------------------------+-----------------------+-------+-------+
| ioc_update_11.2-RELEASE-p15_2020-02-16_08-14-35 | Sun Feb 16 8:14 2020 | 192K | 120K |
+------------------------------------------------------+-----------------------+-------+-------+
| ioc_update_11.2-RELEASE-p15_2020-02-16_08-14-35/root | Sun Feb 16 8:14 2020 | 2.67G | 1.44M |
+------------------------------------------------------+-----------------------+-------+-------+
If you do see your snapshots are out of date, you can create one using sudo iocage snapshot openproject. It also appears that it creates a snapshot as part of the upgrade, but I personally wouldn’t rely on the good will of computers and would create a snapshot anyways.
The snapshots look current so we’ll go ahead and do the upgrade to the new version. This will take about 10 minutes and may interactively ask you to do things like merge or edit configuration files. I note this not because it asked me for any of the three systems I upgraded, but because I had read elsewhere that it could happen.
The output below is trimmed but you should get a sense of what to expect. You need to specify the version to upgrade to (11.3-RELEASE) and the jail name (openproject in this case). When you’re asked about the the components that appear to be installed or not, and are asked whether it looks reasonable, answer y to continue (to be honest, I have no idea but it seemed reasonable enough to me!).
$ sudo iocage upgrade -r 11.3-RELEASE openproject
src component not installed, skipped
Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... 3 mirrors found.
Fetching metadata signature for 11.2-RELEASE from update1.freebsd.org... done.
Fetching metadata index... done.
Fetching 1 metadata files... done.
Inspecting system... done.
The following components of FreeBSD seem to be installed:
world/base world/doc world/lib32
The following components of FreeBSD do not seem to be installed:
world/base-dbg world/lib32-dbg
Does this look reasonable (y/n)? y
Fetching metadata signature for 11.3-RELEASE from update1.freebsd.org... done.
Fetching metadata index... done.
Fetching 1 metadata patches. done.
Applying metadata patches... done.
Fetching 1 metadata files... done.
Inspecting system... done.
[...]
To install the downloaded upgrades, run "/tmp/tmp7yqr2bxf install".
src component not installed, skipped
Installing updates...
Kernel updates have been installed. Please reboot and run
"/tmp/tmp7yqr2bxf install" again to finish installing updates.
src component not installed, skipped
Installing updates... done.
openproject successfully upgraded from 11.2-RELEASE-p15 to 11.3-RELEASE-p6!
When this is done, enter the jail using sudo iocage console openproject and run pkg update && pkg upgrade to upgrade all of the packages inside.
At this point you can use sudo iocage list to verify the release is as expected as well, or use the web UI to verify. That’s pretty much all there is to it. Everything should work properly. I successfully did this with all three jails with a minimum of fuss.