“I can’t use this RELEASE-quality product because it’s too new.”
“Why can’t I run this beta code! This is unacceptable!”
I assume you are aware of the FreeNAS Corral drama, so it is normal at this point for some people to wait and see what will happened.
For the ones who do not know it, the short version is FreeNAS 10 was a RELEASE product but they screwed so much with it that they cancelled and went back to the previous release and then skipped to version 11 based on version 9, like FreeNAS 10 never existed. And the worst, they left plenty of people stranded with an abandoned version in which you couldn’t go forward or backward.
I do not think TrueNAS will be the same, but with that experience, waiting some months to see what happens seems reasonable.
And comparing rolling back Plex with rolling back FreeNAS does not really make sense. Rolling back Plex takes 5 minutes if everything goes correct. And if Plex stops working it is not really that bad.
Again, have you set your jail to check the Latest pkg train instead of Quarterly? New releases of plexmediaserver-plexpass have been hitting 7-10 days after their announcement here lately.
Yes, I was on 9.2 and I missed all that, because I didn’t have a system capable of supporting ZFS at the time. By the time I built a new system the dust had all cleared.
If a FreeNAS update is not working out, it’s a reboot to roll back:
I even had an updating process go bad once where I could not load the interface. I booted off a FreeNAS install flash drive and reinstalled to the same boot media. The installer found my old data folder and used it (that’s the line you see there that says “default-20200207”). I don’t recall if I even needed to reload my config from the backup I’d made before the upgrade attempt. Recovery was that smooth.
You don’t have to upgrade to TrueNAS to keep updating Plex, but you have to be willing to override the warnings on your FreeNAS 11.3 jail. If you’re that risk-adverse, I’m baffled why you would want to run beta Plex releases to start with. Personally I generally only grab the “normal” releases. It’s not like they’re churning out must-have features on every build. 
Maybe you should go to iXSystems’s forums and bother them for sticking you with unsupported jails. But I can tell you, this is a discussion I have watched multiple times before. It wont go anywhere very fast.
Or you could try upgrading your jail to 11.4.
I will give you the benefit of the doubt and wait 10 days and see if the new version arrives in pkg, because that would be actually great and I could live with that. I accept in terms of pkg I am talking from experiences far old, because in the last couple of years I’ve been using Ports as recommended by Plex here.
P.S., Rolling back a version of FreeNAS is indeed one click away, if your pools were not upgraded with something that is not supported in your previous version because if this happens you won’t be able to read your data anymore. Just like the FreeNAS Corral drama. There wouldn’t be any drama if you could just reboot, is it? Having to redo your pools is the second worst case scenario you could have with a failed upgrade.
I don’t know what you use your storage pools for, but if there’s nothing in the new features you really, really want, there’s no reason to upgrade. I recently upgraded my pools for the first time – ever. That’s going back to when I first built this system. So my storage pools were readable in all those boot environments you see in my screenshot until a week or so ago. I wasn’t missing anything.
I only did it because I thought “i’ll be upgrading to TrueNAS here in the next 3-4 months… Maybe this will help smooth out the change to OpenZFS.” Just like you’d want to be on the latest FreeNAS 11.3 update before you update to TrueNAS.
And 1.20.4 just came in via pkg. This is awesome. I don’t know if this has been that fast lately or someone did it so I could finally shut up.
Anyway, it is highly appreciated it and I thank whoever is doing it. If this stays like this there is no reason to complain anymore, we can forget about Ports, shell scripts, copy/pasting binaries, and other similar sub-optimal upgrade mechanisms. This is heaven and this is the way it should always be. Thanks again.
@Havohej we do support FreeNAS and FreeBSD, and surely our biggest userbase is FreeNAS not FreeBSD (I’m actually speaking from the questions we get at the forums not real metrics).
But the fact that a package is not immediately available via their mechanisms does not mean we don’t support it.
This is not even a FreeNAS specific thing, check all other NAS vendors, WD, Netgear, Synology etc and you’ll find that oftentimes even public versions are more outdated via their store, and betas are not even available vai the store/package system they have.
In FreeNAS/FreeBSD you generally only need to wait for a little bit, hours to days… I just wanted to pass this point, if you think about it you’ll find this is very normal on any system when you use the built-in package/ports/stores or whatever they use.
The reason someone, possibly even me, suggested you to use the standard FreeBSD pkg/ports is cause you likely asked how to get it sooner… with ports you can even easly update the version on the Makefile and have it always up to date… (I posted a script somewhere in the forums).
But in practice, you have to choose, stability vs bleeding edge, if you go for the 1st you have to wait for the new shiny stuff, but you should have a more stable product, if you want the latest versions of everything you need to keep up the pace and often that means upgrading the system this is valid for ANY OS/NAS system.
Maybe you were unaware of this but it’s just how things work.
A sidenote: FreeBSD ports provide a “-plexpass” flavor port that aims to point at the last beta, which actually goes against our TOS of not distributing acess to beta builds for non-plexpass users, this I agree is a bit confusing… and shouldn’t even exist since beta are supposed to be installed manually and only distrubuted to plexpass users, but this was never blocked on our side, because it makes things easier on FreeNAS, as we don’t ship a ready to install build like say a “.deb” for debian/ubuntu; this I agree is something to improve.
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