It’s been a while since I posted, which isn’t terribly unusual, but in part it has been due to performing a major systems upgrade on my home servers. I upgraded the operating system from Ubuntu 20 to Ubuntu 24, the Nextcloud from 25 to 30, and had to deal with my old friend/arch nemesis PHP, all while migrating an outdated Piwigo server and upgrading hardware to a 32 TB raid array.
So I was pretty busy!
Sometimes I honestly think I am the dumbest person I know. For the past few years, every week I log into the administrative panel of my home served Nextcloud and checked if there were any updates. Every week it said that there were no updates, leading me to believe I was running the latest and greatest Nextcloud.
Unfortunately, I was not correct. Apparently, the way it checks for updates, it takes into consideration the current system and what compatible updates are available. Or maybe it just looks within that version of Nextcloud (in this case 25) and only looks for version 25 updates. It did not look for, nor inform me, that there were updates to newer versions. So, my Nextcloud instance fell behind, by years, and I took it at face value when I logged into the admin panel. To be honest, I never visit the NextCloud official website, so I had no clue.
Well, my original hardware was a multi drive raid array on a Dell server with only 3.4 TB of space. Pretty good, but not so good for the long haul. Trying to be forward leaning, I decided to upgrade my servers hardware and build a 32 TB raid array instead. More on that in a future post. This server holds all of my families cell phone data, like our picture backups, our calendars, our contacts, our documents, etc. Pretty much anything most people use Google for, that’s what my server does, including watching movies and TV shows that I put on our Jellyfin server.
Further, if you are going to upgrade, you should update to the current OS, so you don’t fall behind. Thus, I jumped from Ubuntu 20 to 24, which brought it’s own new challenges for setup, as I couldn’t just copy paste all of my config files, as some had changed over the years. But what really changed over the years was PHP. I was still using PHP 7.4, even though they are past 8.3 now.
So more to follow on my ludicrous walk through updating Jellyfin, Nextcloud, moving Piwigo, and handling WordPress, most of which require different versions of PHP. It was painful, but now it is finally fixed.
Linux – keep it simple.