In life? Amphetamines.

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.

Just subscribe to the release channel. That varies from OS to OS or Software, but is worth it.

Use tools that are universal. For example, I have not used TrueNAS Scale because they did not support native docker at the time. OS specific solutions are more likely to break then universal once (truecharts vs docker)

To get up and running again after a complete failure i can just download the latest config and data from my backup and set up any distro that supports docker and my system is running again.

I do OS upgrades when they are available, usually within 1 or 2 days and containers are updated with watchtower daily.

If it works, I don’t update unless I’m bored or something. I also spread things out on multiple machines, so there’s less chance of stuff happening like you describe with the charts feature going away. My NAS is pretty much just a NAS now.

You can probably backup your configs/data, upgrade, then deploy jellyfin again, restore, and reconfigure. You should probably backup your data on your ZFS pool. But, I recently updated to the latest TrueNas Scale from ~5 year old FreeBSD version of TrueNas and the pools still worked fine (none of the “apps” or jails worked, obviously). The upgrade process even ported my service configurations over. I didn’t care about much of the data in the pools, so only backed up the most important stuff.

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.

Constant maintenance? What’s that?

Here’s my setup:

• OS - openSUSE Leap - I upgrade when I remember
• software - Docker images in a docker compose file; upgrading is a simple docker command, and I’ll only do it if I need something in the update
• hardware - old desktop; I’ll upgrade when I have extra hardware

I honestly don’t think about it. I run updates when I get to it (every month or so), and I’ll do an OS upgrade a little while after a new release is available (every couple years?). Software gets updated periodically if I’m bored and avoiding more important things. And I upgrade one thing at a time, so I don’t end up with everything breaking at once. BTRFS snapshots means I can always roll back if I break something.

I don’t even know what TrueCharts is. Maybe that’s your issue?

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.

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.

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

Unraid + Unifi network equipment. Everything is scheduled and automatic, with the exception of large Unraid updates, but those are only every ~6 months. Every night mover from cache SSD - > HDD array, then checks for plugin updates, then docker container updates, if Monday morning SSD trim, and if 1st of the month does an array parity check/repair.

After all that if it’s Monday morning, Unifi will check for firmware then software updates.

Sometimes a docker container will get a breaking update maybe once a year, and then I just go look @ documentation and see what needs to be changed to the config to fix.

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

ngl the newest truenas version is incomprehensible to me. Makes most of the videos on it obsolete, and the docs aren’t much better, all while trying to abstract docker compose in a way that makes it shit itself when you try to use anything not specifically developed to work with TNS’s storage layout.

It’ll probably improve with time but I clearly picked the worst time to pick it up.

I’ve decided either to return to https://dietpi.com/ or try prox mox and pray it’s more stable.

Ansible.

I’ve never used true nass, but I’ve never had any issue with keeping up with releases. I use a proxmox host with Debian containers mostly, and then I use ansible to do any major changes to the hosts such as replacing certificates or upgrading the packages

Being said my backup structure isn’t the most professional, I have a 8 TB external drive that I keep plugged in via USB and I have proxmox backup server on the same host and it creates backups nightly

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.