March 30, 2025
by dhoytt
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New Flower Garden Plots

Finally finished the new gardens/plots for the backyard. I get to use my final sprinkler zone again finally I put in anticipation of something like this 18 years ago. Always plan ahead!

Besides added scenery the flowers will complement my vegetables. That’s specifically why I picked the marigolds and alyssum. I just love roses so they will bring aesthetics and bees as well. I have lavender already but may add more of that or another variety later.

I started this a few other times over the years but the logistics of the small areas in my yard and other projects stopped me.

Flower pots didn’t work because they also brought things hanging off of them and additional maintenance. Plus more shade.

I placed a single rose midway on each fence line surrounded by marigolds and alyssum. I did the same next to the vegetable gardens removing portions of grass being careful not to hit the grass sprinklers.

I put a new 3 x 6 foot raised garden next to the patio on the east side. I placed four rose plants in that garden plus more marigolds and alyssum.

For the smaller flower placements I went down an additional 6 inches but not in the 3 x 6 space. The ground soil is so compressed that I filled my organic waste to the top and it had to weigh a couple hundred pounds. I recalled removing soil to put in my grass years ago and getting rid of that compressed soil took several truck loads.

Construction companies compress soils for foundation stabilization. They also I believe take the good top soil for growing plants unfortunately.

Tested the new watering zone and drip system in that zone and everything is working great!

I have two rose plants in the 3 x 6 area that have very dry roots and I left them in bad shape over this last year thinking I would get to this project last year. I have done this before and the roses came up and became my favorite and best producing roses in the front yard to this day. I hope the same happens this time.

Now time to make some changes to the front rose gardens and clear the backyard for the year of unwanted items!

Flowers midway down fence line on west side.

Flowers next to vegetable garden on west fence line.

Flowers next to vegetable garden on eastern fence line.

Flowers midway down the fence line on the eastern side.

3 x 6 raised garden next to the patio on the eastern side of the fence line.

March 22, 2025
by dhoytt
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Ducks on the Pool

These ducks have shown up a few times this time of the season the past several years. Have no idea how this got on their migration radar. Other pool owners in the area have similar occurrences.

Comes the same day I will be doing more chlorine to account for my garden dirt though.

March 16, 2025
by dhoytt
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Smoked Leg of Lamb

Smoked a leg of lamb Sunday and it was better than expected! Brined for about a week unexpectedly due to a busy schedule then slow smoked at 225 degrees Fahrenheit.

Covered with garlic and rosemary in ghee butter took it to 138 degrees. Was so tender and not gamey at all. Was like a prime rib roast of a veal .

I will be cooking a leg of lamb like this again for sure!

October 2, 2024
by dhoytt
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DIY Bacon Again

My homemade bacon from a 9.5 pound slab of pork belly is complete.

Finished smoking it at about 165 degrees on my Traeger with cherry pellets. I complimented with some apple chips in a smoke tube mixed with the cherry pellets.

Put in the fridge overnight and cut about half the slab into strips Monday. Placed everything in plastic ziplock bags.

Tonight I finished the process slicing the rest of the slab into strips and vacuum sealing into packages.

With what I already cooked and sliced tonight I ended up with about 64 thick slices of delicious bacon!

Some pics below of what 9.5 pounds of pork belly turned into bacon!

Getting a breakfast sandwich ready with just sliced bacon.

Just rinsed the brine off and inserted temperature gauges.

September 18, 2024
by dhoytt
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Starting Another Batch of Homemade Bacon

Got the pork belly bringing in the bag for the next week plus for my next batch of homemade bacon!

This is a 9 pound belly so I essentially doubled my recipe and then vacuum sealed it.

Will have pics later. I may post my prior times I made it later as well.

September 1, 2024
by dhoytt
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Migrated Web Site To New Server

I was finally able to migrate my web server to another system and OS (Operating System) to better keep up with updates. I was on Fedora 34 Linux, and I moved the web server over to Rocky Linux 9.x. Fedora only goes 3 versions back for updates and their current version just moved to Fedora 40. Fedora is a bleeding edge Linux OS with a lot of the latest SW which can add further incompatibilities if developers have not had time to update their programs or utilities to use those libraries\software. Fedora actually does a nice job of updating through the versions but that often leads to incompatible versions of PhP or other SW with applications such as WordPress plugins, the MySQL DB etc.

Since I have my own XCP.ng virtual environment I cloned my webserver and worked on that offline after changing the Ip. Address on the system and in the MySQL database.

First, I did the clone then updated to current versions of Fedora this led to a list of issues.
- Apache redirects in http.conf and .htacecss were highly customized and did not work
- Had to sync with MySQL dB Ip. Address entries as well
- The PHP version mismatches were all over the place
- Had to disable or remove many plugins
- This normally reliable method left me with an unusable website.
- I tried this a few times since it had worked for me in the past.
Next, I created a new VM/system with the same system specs using Rocky Linux 9.
- Started with a brand-new version of WordPress
- Setup WordPress networking multi-site
- Created each site the way I wanted with no data
- Installed WordPress plugins fresh if the plugins were maintained and updated.
- Found new WordPress plugins or did not install outdate non-maintained plugins.
- Installed the WordPress themes I wanted to use and checked they were updated and maintained.
- Did a copy of the website files using rsync.
- Used Heidi SQL to copy the MySQL DB’s over to this new system
- Changed Ip. Addresses in DBs, Apache web server and web configuration files.
- This site started working I then decided to increase my website mountpoints size.
  - Noticed it was under “/” which is root of course and it is not contiguous due to swap.
  - I have extended “/” several times over the years but this time it just crashed the VM by not booting.
  - I ended up restoring the VM (Virtual Machines) from a backup I do using the XCP-ng XOA (Xen Orchestra Appliance) source from GitHub.
  - I did not want to have a large “/” so I decided to split off the mountpoint to a new drive and copy data over which was just as problematic because I had some other system files in the mountpoint.
Since I decided I wanted more space on the website mountpoint I created a whole new VM with the drives sizes I wanted using Rocky Linux 9.x. Now I would be able to cleanly extend drives and mountpoint space if needed
- Initial install for some odd reason the system did not boot
  - Figured it was how I ordered the mountpoints with the boot partition, swap but may have been how I formatted it. I was resizing and moving mountpoints around prior to the OS install probably chose the wrong formatting option without noticing.
- Once I got the system to bootup properly on Rocky Linux 9 I installed updates, and the software packages needed to run a web server.
- Started with a brand-new version of WordPress
  - Setup WordPress networking multi-site
  - Created each site the way I wanted with no data
  - Installed WordPress plugins fresh if they were maintained and updated.
  - Found new WordPress plugins or did not install outdate non-maintained plugins.
  - Installed the WordPress themes I wanted to use and checked they were updated and maintained.
  - Imported the posts, comments and other data using WP-Import data from the original site to each multi-site.
  - Created new menus’ and exported them to the other sites using WPS Menu Exporter plugin.
Used Heidi SQL to copy the MySQL DB’s over to this new system
Did a copy of the website files using rsync.
Used Heidi SQL to copy the MySQL DB’s over to this new system
Changed Ip. Address in DBs, Apache web server and web configuration files
Moved over ssl certificates to the new web server
Fine-tuned settings for performance and SEO.

I still have a few things to accomplish but it’s comforting to get on Rocky Linux 9.x which is a long-term OS that will be around with updates for years instead of the bi-annual update cycle of Fedora that is only has. Just an FYI all places I have MySQL it’s the fork MariaDB.

May 1, 2024
by dhoytt
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Updated Dhoytt Site SSL Certificates

Updated my site ssl certificates so just refresh your browser and you will see the site is secured.

March 24, 2024
by dhoytt
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Vegetable Garden 2024 Spring

The vegetable garden is in motion this 2024 year! I had to scalp the top soil about 4 inches deep to get the clumps of weeds out of the garden. Had about 300 lbs of debris in the yard waste can 2 weeks in a row.

Then ended up getting some compost and new top soil to mix in then mixed in with the rototiller. The dry top soil let my feet sink in about 8 inches right after tilling the soil .

I planted big beef, early girl, cherry, and yellow pear tomatoes. Planted zucchini and crook necked squash, Japanese long cucumbers , eggplants, cabbage and Swiss chard. Added peppers like jalapeño, habanero, Fresno and poblano . Other plants, garden beans, romaine lettuce, herbs like purple basil, sweet basil, cilantro, French tarragon, and fennel.

Did dense seed plantings of collard greens, garden beans, peas, sugar pod snow peas, arugula, romaine lettuce, okra, green bunch onions, scarlet antes carrots, and beets.

I’ll add a few other veggies as I go and I always have my raspberry and grape vines as well.

This year the dense planting without rows will be different. I have gone without rows before but never purposely planted seeds densely. Going to be very interesting.

I intend to go almost purely with low lying bubblers on my drip system I already have in place for the vegetable garden and the flower garden. I actually the flower garden ready before the vegetable gardens. The vegetable garden gets the attention because it’s more work.

Yard waste full to the top with top soil intertwined with weeds.

How I had to “scalp” the top soil down 3 to 4 inches to get the root of the weeds.

West garden after pulling weeds and tilling.

East garden after tilling and trimming rosemary bush.

December 12, 2023
by dhoytt
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Bounced Site for XCP-ng VM Host Server Updates

I had a plethora of patches to update on my XCP-ng systems and I ended up having to restart the toolstacks on my systems. I started on my slave server restarting my “XCP-ng toolstack” which caused issues as it could not contact my master in the pool due to them talking to different versions of the software packages.

Took me a while to see this was the issue because problems started when I updated the Rocky Linux 9.x system and rebooted it and it would not restart. The Rocky Linux 9.x system was of course running on my slave XCP-ng server. After a while I recalled I needed to restart the XCP-ng hosts server’s toolstack which doesn’t interrupt the VM servers running on it as that was the likely issue . When I restarted the toolstack then suddenly the slave wouldn’t come out of maintenance mode. Tried several toolstack restarts and restarting the XAPI service without luck.

I looked at some documentation and saw I needed to disable HA (High Availability) before restarting toolstack and that didn’t help. I decided to reboot but move over my VMS to the master but couldn’t due to the master being a lower version after my tootstak restart. I finally rebooted and had the same issues and took down some other VM’s I couldn’t control but were still up while the server was in maintenance mode.

After rebooting the slave XCP-ng remained in maintenance mode but with my VMs down of course. I had my ShoutCast and IceCast servers for https://dhoytt.com/snake-ice-radio-blog/now-playing/ on my XCP-ng slave host so no one was able to listen while I was doing this however my web site was till up as that VM system was on the master.

After finally looking through logs I saw that the slave was trying to communicate with the master since they were in the same resource pool. The logs showed the reason the slave would not fully boot was it could not communicate with the master. The networking was fine so I figured it was the version causing them to no communicate.

This is when I decided to gracefully shutdown the web server and other VM serves on the XCP-ng master just in case the server needed to be rebooted and not the toolstack just restarted.

Well the simple XCP-ng master toolstack restart allowed the slave to communicate to it and then come back up. The lesson I need to remember is to do all updates and restarts on the master first or switch over the slave to the master if I do it backwards which is too much unnecessary work.

Back and running with a lot of maintenance and updates needed in my server environment as I have been working tirelessly on getting the rental back up to speed and about 4 other projects that consumed my time this year.

June 29, 2023
by dhoytt
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Rental Pool Prepped and Painted

Finally finished painting the pool after lots of prep work after years of neglect in my rental. With Covid restrictions gone, I was finally able to move forward clear debris, prep surface (lots of hours) and paint. I used Dura Seal epoxy with an 8-year life.

I had debris and sludge built up from the tenants and some campers who trespassed and dumped in the pool, very nasty.

After cleaning the sludge, I had to pump the water out several times with my trash pump after the atmospheric rains this season.

I then washed the entire pool down with muriatic acid. After finding different waste hazard places to dump the acid. I washed the pool with TSP.

Due to the years of tenant abuse, there was still scaling. I tried sanding with an orbital sander and that barely “scratched the surface “. Then tried sandblasting and that was going to take way too much material and cost.

I finally found a BAUER 9 Amp Surface Conditioning Tool surface preparation tool from Bauer and sanded the entire pool removing that hard white scale! I took several hours through a couple of weeks after work and weekends to complete this.

I then wanted to etch with something other than acid again prior to painting and tried several chemicals like CitrisStrip but that left a residue I had to clean up with acetone and the surface prep sander again. I finally acetone etched the whole pool and did another round of sanding with the surface prep tool.

I had to wait a while after taping the pool off for painting. I did light washing with the hose pipe and not pressure wash to get surface dirt after doing some patching of cracks and areas when someone dropped a heavy object in the empty pool. I then waited an extra day and painted!

Finally, I will get a chance to get water in the pool and test out the pump. I hope they did not damage the pump or that equipment! It was working fine when they moved in!

No more amateur time, the pool will have a professional pool service maintain it and that will be written in the lease!

Pictures from start to finish as of today.