First round of updates

I've had Proxmox for a year now, there has been a high flux of VM's and LXC containers coming and going as I tested different projects and decided what to use and what not so I never bothered too much on updates.

Recently, I realized that I hadn't changed my setup in the last few months, so I decided to do a full run and see how it goes.

The first thing I wanted to update was proxmox but somehow I'm on the latest version. I don't recall if I updated at any time but seems I did!

LXC updates

The second step was to update my LXC containers, I try to use tteck scripts whenever I can and they have a handy update command.

When that doesn't work apt-get update && apt-get upgrade or the Alpine equivalent apk update && apk upgrade.

This worked for all my LXC containers except NextCloud which I'll talk about it a bit later.

Home Assistant

I use a VM with HomeAssistantOS so the update is straightforward, a few clicks away, and done.

Dockers

Upgrading dockers in general is quite easy. Just review the list of dockers I have and the latest versions, check the release notes to see if there are any breaking changes, and pull the new images. Force pull in those that sadly only provide a latest tag.

In this case, I had to increase the disk a bit since it had to pull new images. A corn job takes care of running old images not used at night.

NextCloud

I did the LXC update method but it wasn't enough. The app was dead with a cryptic message of "apps [list of apps] are not on the same version".

I also had a problem running out of disk space during the upgrade which may have contributed to the issues...

Following some docs I tried issuing

occ app:update --all

This fixed most of the issues but an app named files_reminders was still not working. When I tried to remove or re-install such an app it was never found.

I'm unsure if this is because there were breaking changes on the app update since to be fair. I didn't even bother to check the previous version before upgrading.

I couldn't even recall a feature that made use of files_reminders so in the end I disabled it and ran the upgrade again.

occ app:disable files_reminders

For the next time, this is the orchestration of commands that I'll try.

occ maintenance:mode --on
apk update && apk upgrade nextcloud
occ upgrade
occ app:update --all
occ maintenance:mode --off

Backup server

Finally, it was time to update my backup server, it only contains a Proxmox with PBS installed and a backup PiHole instance.

Lessons learned

Overall the experience was easier than expected, I was waiting to spend a full weekend fixing the upgrades.

I got too overconfident over a few flawless upgrades and skipped a few changelog checks like NextCloud, which I paid in more time later on.

Most of the things seemed to not bother at all about upgrading and I learned that NextCloud may need a bit more care in future upgrades.