TrueNAS 2026.5

My blogging fell off the radar again last year due to some personal reasons I really didn’t feel like blogging about (even though I thought about it) and though I drafted a few blogs I never got around to finishing them.  I’ve been playing around with AI, bought a new MacBook and have tested numerous other devices for work (including typing this on a MacBook Neo) and while these are usually things I would blog about, I’ve never really felt the urge.

I did spend a week at home at the beginning of April over the Easter holiday for a change and spend quite some time tinkering with my TrueNAS box getting everything up to date, so what better way to try and ease myself back in than a TrueNAS 2026.5 update!

One thing that’s hasn’t changed is that I’m still running TrueNAS 13.3 although FreeBSD 13.5 will be going EOL later this year which is likely to start to cause me some issues. There have been a couple of minor 13.3 updates (I think the latest version is 13.3-U1.2) but it’s not going to fix the underlying FreeBSD issues which I’ll get into a little later.  Let’s start with the Jails as usual:

Airsonic

No change.  This is no longer updated, but it still works and is a reliable backup for streaming music if I need it.  I don’t do anything and it automatically picks up any new music I add so is still running.

emby

It’s still my media server of choice and something I (and several family and friends) would be lost without. It’s running 4.9.3.0 which is the latest stable release.  I’m still not playing with beta releases as have fallen a little out of love with the emby community given the lack of support for various suggestions, not least MFA.  I still use emby daily though with no plans to change that.

Nextcloud

Still the most important jail.  Although I could use OneDrive or iCloud for this if push came to shove, I like the fact my data is kept local.   The integration with ONLYOFFICE still works reasonably well, although I’ve had a few issue with this losing the connection and updating the VM.  It is running the latest version 33.0.1 (from 30.0.4 in the last blog), with MariaDB 11.8.5 (from 10.6) and PHP 8.4.(from 8.3)

Limesurvey

I eventually found the problem I was having with this, which was an unsupported theme I’d installed.  I removed that which then allowed me to update PHP to 8.4 (from 7.4, which hasn’t been supported for some time), So everything is up to date including running a beta version of Limesurvey (7.0. from 6.6.6) and MariaDB 11.8.5 (from 10.6).  All that said I haven’t run a survey in over 2 years, but it is still handy to have it running, which is why I keep it up dated, or at least do now!

MediaWiki

I rebuilt this again at the beginning of 2026 as I’d left it as an open blog and it became ‘infected’ with pages and pages of spam posts, to the point that trying to clean it was not an option, so I wiped and reinstalled.  It’s now only available to logged in users and hidden behind my NGINX proxy.  It has the latest version of PHP 8.4 and MySQL 8

OpenVPN

Up to date but using this less as one of the other things I’ve been playing with and drafted a blog was zero-trust solutions.  I’ve tried Tailscale and Twingate and have been using them more to access things inside my network. It’s currently running 2.6.16 (from 2.6.12) so it doesn’t really change much anyway.

WordPress

Still just running this blog, so hasn’t really seen much use by I have kept it up to date, so it’s running WordPress 6.9.4 (from 6.7.1), MariaDB 11.8.5 (from 10.6) and PHP 8.4 (from 8.3).

The test instance on Docker is also running 6.9.4 but an unsupported version of PHP (7.3) and MariaDB (10.4) and I’s still thinking I should take this down. It was built when I was thinking about starting up a web development company, but that didn’t happen, and I suspect it never will.

I have deleted all the old jails except for calibre, although I’m not using that as I have a Calibre-Web Docker running.  I’m not sure why I’m holding onto that?

I haven’t neglected the Virtual Machines this year, and everything is now running ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS, although 26.04 was released earlier this week!  That gives me about 3-4 years to upgrade!  I’ve also been keeping all (well most of) the containers/applications updated as per the table below: 

So almost mid-way through 2026 I’m more up to date across my whole ‘micro datacentre’ stack, from an infrastructure-platform-OS-application perspective, than I probably have been for some years.

Storage is still a problem, but still not a major one, well at least not for my main machine.  I am down to 9.9TB on FreeNAS0 (76%), my HDD pool, and 243GB on FreeNAS0s (73%), my SSD pool (which is a slight improvement from 75% last time!)  Both are still much higher than I like, and the situation with TrueNAS is going to need some serious thought over the next 6-12 months.  

FreeNAS1 is my backup server, which I no longer run 24×7 due to energy costs and space.  It comes out every few months and I back up the important stuff from FreeNAS0(s), but that’s now over 90%, so I’m not backing up everything.  I even had to remove everything from FreeNAS1 and complete a full backup/resync as I reached the 100% limit due to some old snapshots from 2021.  CrashPlan continues to do the offsite stuff in the background, so my backup strategy is still robust, and it’s good I’ve never needed it, touch wood!  That said, FreeNAS0 is making some horrible noises at the minute making me think a drive is about to die.  The HDD pool is in a RAIDZ2 array, so I can afford two simultaneous drive failures without losing any data but just losing one and then resilvering a new drive would be nerve wracking, so I’m not looking forward to that.

I haven even more Raspberry Pi’s running stuff now but still have the Pi4 running a SATA-SSD, which runs an up-to-date version of the Home Assistant Operating System 17.2 (from 14.1) and an equally up-to-date version of Home Assistant Core 2026.4.1 (from 2025.1.0). In addition to providing all the home automation for my Philips Hue lighting and TP-Link switches, I have various integrations for my Tesla and Octopus Energy. Still, the most important is probably the Addon for NGINX Proxy Manager, which controls all access to my network and the Certbot certificate renewals every three months. This has worked brilliantly since I switched from doing this semi-manually in a jail, which I blogged about here!

Anyway, that was my mid-year TrueNAS update!  I’ve drafted this in Word on a loan MacBook Neo, so the big question is now whether this eventually makes it onto my blog.  I think I’m losing my ability to finish things I’ve started as I get older, which I need to address!  I genuinely thought I’d lost this after resetting the MacBook Neo as the supplier wanted it back, but fortunately it autosaved to OneDrive, so i thought I better upload before changing my mind!!