[TUTORIAL] PBS on TrueNAS - Have your cake and eat it too

[ashranpewter]

Thought I'd chime in here real quick, I did this but now I'm running into issues because I upgraded to PBS4 and I can't upgrade the LXC container's kernel (as reported by pbs3to4 --full)

Though it doesn't really seem to affect anything now I can see it causing issues in the future. Is there some easy way to migrate to a trixie lxc? or will I have the same issue since it uses or reports the base OS's kernel? I'm not familiar enough with the design of LXCs to navigate this properly.

I'm not super enthused having to reinstall PBS each time a version updates however sparse that upgrade path is.

 

[Johannes S]

I'm not super enthused having to reinstall PBS each time a version updates however sparse that upgrade path is.

Well now you know why it's not recommended to run PBS inside a lxc. You could still run PBS inside a VM in TrueNAS. If the TrueNAS itself a VM I would go with a PBS VM outside of the TrueNAS and mounting an ISCSI share as datastore.

Since an LXC always share the kernel with the host OS it's not possible to update the lxcs kernel. In general lxcs are less isolated and more dependable on the host os than vms.

 

[scyto]

I'm not super enthused having to reinstall PBS each time a version updates however sparse that upgrade path is.

tl;dr you don't need to reinstall pbs every time there is a verison update

just ignore the kernel messages, totally expected, you are in an LXC, LXCs can't change the host kernel they use, even if truenas used EXACTLY the same kernel major revsison and even if there were no differences in the kernel you will still get the messages because the kernels have different version strings

i upgraded mine at the weekend, its working just fine, there is no need to re-install each time, and if you hit an actual kernel issue the reinstall wouldn't help in the slightest anyway, if. you don't like doing it this way your other alternative is to run a pbs VM instead and have that connect over say SMB to the truenas host (this is how i had my PBS running for years on my synology) - the messages you see are mostly warnings, not errors.

i decided to trade the low-level access to ZFS dataset i get with an unpviliged incus LXC container for the risk it might stop working

given it seems incus LXC is going away for libvert managed LXCs in truenas it will be interesting to see what if any migration of the container will be possible - their product management decision framework is an utter mess tbh, or their issue is they let devs decide to run from one interesting-thing-of-the-week to another....

 

[Johannes S]

given it seems incus LXC is going away for libvert managed LXCs in truenas it will be interesting to see what if an migration of the container will be possible - their product management decision frameowrk is an utter mess tbh, or their issue is they let devs decide to run from one interesting thing to another....

First time I heard about the plan to migrate to libvirt-managed LXCs. I assumed the recent switch migration was only for VMs? Then I won't bother with a PBS LXC on TrueNAS, I'm not interested in needing to get my backups working again after an update of TrueNAS.

 

[scyto]

First time I heard about the plan to migrate to libvirt-managed LXCs. I assumed the recent switch migration was only for VMs? Then I won't bother with a PBS LXC on TrueNAS, I'm not interested in needing to get my backups working again after an update of TrueNAS.

yes i was mystified too, here is the post where i learnt it and the reference to Kris on staffwho made the statememt it will be libvirt all the way down

https://forums.truenas.com/t/truena...-enables-virtualization-blog/49312/18?u=scyto

which now means they have to license or build their own HA clustering for LXCs and VMs, rtaher than using incus's for free..... not the product management decision i would have made....

that said, currently goldeye nightlies is the same as latest fangtooth... classic truenas libvirt virtualization, docker based app, and incus containers.....