My FreeNas 11.3u5 to TrueNas 12 experience

Here is a synopsis of my upgrade story today. End result is everything is upgraded and running. I am by no means an expert, so this is just in plain language. I’ll just try to give my lessons learned, YMMV. I made a backup of my 11.3u5 config before I started.

  1. I had difficulty with the “in-place upgrade” from the GUI. Once the boot media was upgraded to 12.0, there was an issue booting from it “Solaris: Notice Cannot find the pool label for freenas-boot”. I was able to figure out that this was because once my boot USB drive was upgraded from 11.3 to 12.0, it wouldn’t boot from a USB 3.0 port. I saw a post regarding this and I think it’s also in the release notes.
  2. I made a bootable USB using Rufus on Windows with the Truenas 12 ISO and performed a fresh install on a separate USB drive (both plugged into USB 2.0 ports). Once it booted, I was able to login to the GUI and use my backup from 11.3 u5 to restore my config to 12.0-RELEASE, all pools and jails recognized and running at the 11.3 level at that point. All my SMB shares functioned without issue.
  3. I performed "iocage upgrade -r 12.1-RELEASE " This command seemed to upgrade any packages currently installed and remove obsolete ones (I went into each jail after and ran “pkg update” then “pkg upgrade” to no effect). Deluge, Jackett, UrBackup and Heimdall were fine, I had to reinstall Sonarr v3 (pkg install sonarr-devel) and I upgraded my Emby install manually.
  4. Once I verified everything was up and stable, I mirrored my boot USB drive to the original install USB drive.

I am glad I did it, despite the pain. At a minimum, I don’t have to worry about 11.3 EOL and file transfers seem a lot faster!