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)?
I don't use Watchtower myself for the same reasons described, but I was under the understanding if you had a container as a dependency on another container that if you took the dependency down it also took the container down. Is this not actually true?
I am not the person to be asking, I am no docker expert. It's is my understanding depends_on: defines starting order. Once a service is started, it's started. If it has an internal check for "healthy" I believe watchtower will restart unhealthy containers.
This is blind leading the blind though, I would check the documentation if using watchtower. We should both go read the "depends on" documents as we both use it.
Strangely it sounds like that's correct. I was under the understanding that depends_on cared about it past start as well but it does not. It doesn't look like there's a native way of turning containers that are depending on one another when you turn the dependency off. It looks like the current recommended way of doing it is either with a Docker compose file (which doesn't help if the process crashed/was concidered unhealthy), or having a third party script on the host monitor the dependencies and if one is considered offline, it turns the dependees off.
Looking into it the concern has been approached twice now on the GitHub page, however every time that it's been brought up it's been closed for stale because nobody ever replies to the question
That was my conclusion as well, however I am at work and it's not appropriate to be reading docker documentation. Thank you for the write up.