Been a while since I posted anything about my home server, but ended up having to a handle a distraction of the last day. Late last night, my home server decided to inform me that the boot drive was failing (a USB drive). After a reboot to validate, several of the applications ended up failing to restart, including our home media service.
Fortunately, not enough had failed that I had corruption, and I was able to create a backup of the configuration. From there, I found another USB drive and re-installed the FreeNAS software (using the opportunity to upgrade to the latest version, 11.2 u5). A short re-import of the saved configuration, and the system was back up and running.
The challenge became more a matter of adapting to the new version and the interface. All the application services ended up being re-installed (due to the change from jails to oicages), and I was able to transfer over each respective configuration and database. The last lingering issue was a networking issue with the new configurations (the media server could not see the internet), which I managed to resolve this afternoon.
At this point, the entire system is running and seems to be performing well. My next step is to likely change over from a USB drive to a small SSD drive for the boot device (or more likely a pair), so that I can reduce the chances of this issue in the future.
