Well, almost! It’s been a little while since I blogged about upgrading PHP here, and while I think I’ve done one update (from 7.4.4 to .13) I haven’t kept things all that up to date. I thought it was about time to change that, and overall they were pretty painless upgrades.
To be honest, the jail upgrades themselves really couldn’t have gone any better and were completely painless upgrades. It wouldn’t be much of a blog if I stopped there, so here’s a bit more about how each went.
WordPress
I thought I’d tackle this one first, as it has slightly fewer moving parts. WordPress keeps itself pretty much up-to-date, or at least as much as I let it. I don’t automatically update between major releases (e.g. 5.7 – 5.8) but I do the minor releases in between and pretty much all of the plugins too. I manually update the main themes I use, but I can’t remember the last time one caused me a problem, so could probably automate that too.
This update was more about the jail itself, so the backend components that allow WordPress to operate, from the database and web servers to the libraries and languages. The process is pretty straightforward, and one I don’t even have to remember anymore as I’ve blogged about it a few times in the past. It’s amazing how useful it is to be able to look back and remind myself!
So after a quick pkg update and pkg upgrade, the only thing I changed was to lock the WordPress package (pkg lock wordpress) as it suggested that would be updated to 5.7.2.1 and I’ve already upgraded to 5.8. The upgrade added 3 new packages and upgraded 81, including upgrading the 21 PHP components to 7.4.22, the latest version.
There were a few messages at the end, and I did run the command (mysql_upgrade -u root -p –skip-version-check) to upgrade MariaDB, although I don’t think it was required as it was just a point update and the server runs on another jail, which reminds me I should update that too!
Nextcloud
This is slightly more complicated and had been causing me some concerns as the built-in updater hadn’t been working for me on the few occasions I’d tried to upgrade from version 20 to 21.
21 has been released back in February, and I’d tried to upgrade at least twice before this attempt. The problem I’d encountered was a strange one, as it only impacted my device running Windows 10 and running the Edge browser, but as that’s my work machine and I can’t change either the OS or browser, it needed to work on that. After upgrading and visiting the login page, the login fields (e.g. username and password) and buttons weren’t available on the work device, but were fine on my Mac and Linux machines running Safari and Chrome!
I’ve kept version 20 up-to-date and there have been several point releases for that, with the last one taking me to 20.0.10, but by that time things have moved on to 21.0.4 and there were some changes I’d been looking forward to trying out so it was time to try and work out the problem.
I’d posted a few times in the forum and someone had commented on the number of Apps I was running compared to their install, which was working on Windows 10 and using Edge, so my first attempt was to strip out all of the things that they weren’t using. Still, no joy and a little more Googling suggested it could be related to the web server configuration or proxy-server settings.
It was and fortunately was a simple change to enable asset caching on my proxy server. A simple toggle switch that had been driving me slightly mad for the last few months. I’m still getting some new warning messages about webfinger and nodeinfo settings, but it looks to be working fine, and passed the SSLabs test with an A+ 🙂
The jail was another painless upgrade without even needing to lock anything, as Nextcloud wasn’t installed from a package. 5 new packages were installed, 120 upgraded and 1 reinstalled along with a mysql upgrade command.
So within about 20-30 minutes, I’d upgraded two of my main jails running on TrueNAS0, and certainly the ones that get the most use. I’ve got a live survey running at the minute, but once that’s finished I’ll do that one too, but I felt on a role so also updated my MediaWiki and OpenVPN jails, again with nothing more than a pkg update/upgrade!
I don’t know why but upgrading my TrueNAS system has become much less painless over the last few years, and some of that has to be down to this blog (well, not this one, but the whole site!). Perhaps my knowledge has improved too, which helps when firefighting is required, but today’s experience really was completely painless upgrades.
Recent Comments