Darryl Hoytt's Personal Blog

February 26, 2015
by dhoytt
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Straightened Out Air Flow Issue in NAS

I corrected a hardware error which had one of my my CPU turbo fans directed the wrong way in one of my NAS chassis. The past week I have been doing incremental work on getting my NAS and Virtual infrastructure environment updated with more disk space and newer versions of FreeNAS and XenServer. The resilvering process of FreeNAS takes a very long time 24 hours and another 34 hours and I have other chores but that is for a much longer post coming soon.

Since I had migrated all of my data to my other NAS I was free to look into a few other issues that have been bugging me about this NAS. After plugging in and insuring I could recognize another new drive I pulled the NAS partially out of the rack to see if I could tell why the high velocity chassis fans were kicked on more than the other identical NAS. Initially I blew out and moved the fans to other spots but whatever fan was near my power supply kept blowing full speed regardless if the system needed cooling or not. I then spotted the issue and I had placed one of my turbo CPU fans the wrong way!

The turbo CPU fan was pointing straight into the chassis fan that is why it was always blowing and mt temps were off!

You can see the arrow going the wrong way even! What was I thinking when I did this I don’t know! This makes for horrible airflow turbulence in a system that should have a steady consistent flow out the back of the system away from the hard drives over the RAM straight out the back to some more waiting fans pointing out of the back of the system!

Well I should just have been able to loosen the screws on the offending CPU fan put down some more thermal compound on the CPU and fan assembly but that would not make me suffer enough. the standoffs decided to come loose from the chassis and not the fan assembly so I had to pull this heavy 70 pound system with drives out of the bottom of my rack late at night and take it to the hallway on my test bench after moving some other items I was working on from the bench. I had to take the motherboard and all the components completely out of the system to properly unscrew the chassis standoffs from the CPU cooling assembly.

Also if you look close enough you can see the second set of standoffs for the other CPU that had the fan assembly pointed in the proper direction had no issue staying in place. Well I put the standoffs tightly back in place then put the system back together and used my leveraging tricks to get my heavy system back into the rack. The system sounds so much better without two high powered fans blowing right into each other from about an inch away!

Tomorrow I resume my other upgrades!

Here is my NAS baby back in in place at the bottom of my 7 foot rack with a stack of my leverage pieces in the foreground.

February 15, 2015
by dhoytt
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A Late Move From Movable Type to WordPress

Well it took me a while to move CMS platforms but the reasons I moved mainly had to do with Movable Type having so few development plugins\extensions and their almost total abandonment of the Open source version. I was a few years late moving from Movable Type to WordPress and there were several reasons including time and life’s normal flows.
One reason it took me so long to migrate off of Movable Type is that Movable Type was very flexible so any plugins or widgets as they call them in Movable Type you can create easily by embedding that code into custom widgets.

The main reason it took me so long to go to a new CMS is that Movable Type Pro has in it’s core a method for easily creating sub-domains and sites that other CMS’ didn’t have off of one code base and database. WordPress has had multi-sites for several years but it didn’t seem to be a core function and seemed to require additional plugins to use how I wanted to use it.

Movable Type is also very portable so moving from site to site even with simple names is very intuitive and easy. Worpress even in its recent development cycle it takes some tedious work and there is no native built in function as there is in Movable type. Movable Type makes it easy to use root relative paths while WordPress hard codes domains into the database. Unfortunately Movable Type could not parlay their strengths and involve more of the development community and still seem to be far behind other CMS in involving developers.

Another reason it took so long for me to switch CMS’ is I was also experimenting with other CMS’ like Drupal, Joomla, Plone and a few others. Easily having sub-domains off of one code and database was the reason I didn’t go with Drupal. The reason I didn’t go with Joomla was I was not comfortable with the blogging within Joomla it seemed adding content/posts was not a cohesive process and I didn’t want to be tied into any of the leading blogging extensions offered as a Joomla extension.

I wish WordPress was more portable is my biggest gripe. I tend to get my sites working on a local virtual system on my LAN and then just clone and forward the appropriate ports to the outside world. With WordPress I need to get into the database and get this done through searches or a script that has been supplied @ https://interconnectit.com/products/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases/. There is sufficient documentation on moving sites (http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress) even for multi-site but I wish it wasn’t so tedious. I will also watch my naming conventions on my systems going forward as well so that in the future I will be able to use the script much more easily to change unique names without having to go through the scripts output to exclude items if I use common system names.

Wordpress has a wide range of themes, tons of plugins, a very active community, multi-site seems more part of the core now, and is more flexible than I thought. I can have sub-domains off of one code and database in WordPress making administration easier. Adding content, posts, pages, managing comments, putting custom code into widgets and plugins etc is very straightforward in WordPress which is what I was after so overall so far very happy with my WordPress move.

February 7, 2015
by dhoytt
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On New Blog CMS WordPress and Joomla

Well I finally switched off of Movabletype blogging\CMS for my site. I moved to WordPress mainly for the blogging and I have WordPress and Joomla for my Internet Radio site “Snakeice’s House of Beats”.

Importing the textual posts wasn’t that difficult but trying to massage the URLs for the same previous paths and getting images to show I had to do some behind the scene tweaks in my filesystem and with Apache rewrites and redirects.

I still have some tweaking to go but feel free to browse through the site there is quite a bit of items under the hood and I hope to get single-sign on going between WordPress and Joomla

July 28, 2014
by dhoytt
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Late Season Vegetable Garden Getting Better With Much Work

Well the late season vegetable garden has had its first harvest a few weeks ago and has had a ton of weeds in between when I started the garden and now. The last of the weeds I mostly removed over the past weekend. The weeds sprang up very thick and plentiful due to me using compost from local horse stables last year which of course had seeds that had not been sterilized in the compost. The seedlings produce what looks like crab grass but I think it’s called “quack grass”. They spread further from my rototilling.

This quack grass spreads like a small carpet once it gets in the soil. The good thing about this quack grass is that once you pull it up by the roots it never grows in that area again. I tested that a few weeks ago when I pulled up about 4 x 33 gallon yard bags of the grass up and the places I pulled up the grass it never grew again. I then waited until the patches left grew to a size where I could pull them up as well by the roots. At first I was going to put down some weed block to kill them off but that would have ruined my flexibility with planting more seedlings and plants later in the season as I like.

I planted some more hot peppers, basil and some bell peppers. The plants I planted already are producing jalapeno peppers, tomatoes (early bird & yellow pear), egg plants and the cucumber vines are running and cucumbers are sprouting all over the place.

Here is my first small harvest a few weeks ago:

Here is the out of control weeds:

Here is what it looks like after the weed extraction process this past weekend:

Some veggies showing promise:

June 28, 2014
by dhoytt
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Late Season Vegetable Garden in Place

My late start on a vegetable garden is finally done. Will probably add some more items here and there plus fine tune the sprinkler drip system as the season moves along but that’s to be expected.

This is the final look with a bit of cement cleanup to do:

These are pictures after running the rototiller some more to really turn over the dirt and break it up with that good soil I used the wheelbarrow to get in the last few years. This year the soil was not sticking and I have pretty much diluted that hard packed clay soil that can be common around here in spots.

Oh well break is over time to hit the front yard a bit and then take the items I took out the garden to the dump along with a few other items. Plus I have a bunch of bugs crawling on me from the garden.

June 25, 2014
by dhoytt
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A Hump Day Evening after Work Gardening Triumph

I had the perfect storm this evening for getting my weeds chopped down in my garden this evening. First I happened to work from home the end of the day due to a family emergency that turned out ok. Then the skies were overcast and the work I had schedule for later that night for work I was really on top of already! I put on some shorts I didn’t mind gardening in that already had some tears, a shirt that was well worn, some old running shoes, a water proof hat that provided shade and protection from vegetation, some gloves that were tough yet flexible and my knee pads that were built for flooring and I was ready!

Here is the disaster I was starting with:

This is the middle stage where I was going to leave things since I didn’t think that my rototiller was going to work since I had left gas in there for a long period without using it:

This is what I ended up with by the end of the evening after realizing my rototiller was working ok:

So now I jus have to rake though the rototilled ground to get the remainder of the vegetation and then place my drips hoses back into place and start a late vegetable garden. I already have the plants scoped out at local stores that are already matured for a late start on a garden for this year!

April 14, 2014
by dhoytt
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Hammock Rest Gone Wrong

Well after a few hours cleaning up in the yard there is nothing like a nice stay in a hammock with a cold drink by your side unless the hammock feels you are not quite done cleaning up the yard! As you see in the pictures I’m not quite through with the yard, a trip to the dump and some pressure washing the concrete and a bit more lawn maintenance.

Thanks hammock message received I will commence to fixing up the rest of the yard!!

March 12, 2014
by dhoytt
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Updated NAS Systems Again

Well added more functionality to both NAS systems. Yesterday I added the second Dell Perc H310 to one NAS system plus added two more 2 TB SAS 6 GB/s drives. Tonight after a very long session working on some clusters at work I finished up my second NAS adding another H310 plus identical drives as the first system.

The only thing I didn’t do on the second NAS I did yesterday on the first NAS was to create new storage and another iSCSI target. Yesterday I moved virtual data to the first NAS that I had on the second NAS. Tonight I didn’t much feel like creating additional storage groups; I’ll do that on another date soon.

I now have the capabilities to talk to all sixteen SAS slots in my chassis. I could have went many routes like another expander, funky cables but adding the second set of SAS controllers was the most efficient and direct solution believe it or not. I would have liked to been able to daisy chain one section of the backplane to the other slots but I didn’t see that option. Plus the price was right for the controllers from an EBay dealer so this closes this chapter, for now I can just add storage as needed and start to migrate off of my 3 GB/s drives.

Soon will update to the new FreeNAS point release I think there was some items in the release notes I could benefit from, I’ll have to look again. I will also look into the latest updates of XenServer and then its diving back into looking into different CMS/Blog for my sites.

February 9, 2014
by dhoytt
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Replaced Backplane on Second NAS

Well I finally replaced the back-plane on the second NAS system I had built. The back-plane had come damaged and reseller had sent me a replacement a couple of weeks ago but today is the first time I had time to replace it.

I thought I could replace it while in the rack but the grounding screw for the back-plane was blocked by the rail for the rack so I had to pull the whole system out of the rack. The big deal about pulling the system out of the rack is it is about 100 lbs plus filled out and at the bottom of the rack so it is not optimal for one person putting it back in. To assist me placing the system back into the rack and lining up the rails I stacked up some thick books that provided me a platform to line up the rails in the rack.

Here is a close up of the damaged SAS interfaces on the back-plane. This is the reason I needed to replace the back-plane.

I had to pull out the drives & empty drive bays so I could slide the backplane into place.

This is the inside front of the NAS system minus the back-plane.

This shows damaged backplane next to replacement backplane.

Some backplane connections I had to temporarily disconnect to slide in the replacement back-plane.

Everything tested fine and all drives are seen and the storage is presented to virtual environment and systems just fine again. Only issue is one of the LED connections that shows blue power on LED is out in upper right.

January 12, 2014
by dhoytt
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Second NAS Rebuild Compete

Well finished rebuilding my second NAS into a new chassis identical to the other with the same specifications as the other NAS today with a few issues. Everything went pretty much the same as the other NAS rebuild except that I discovered damaged bays on the backplane on the upper right hand bay and then the bay just below that are completely smashed preventing the drives from sliding in.

So being that this chassis has 4 bays across and 4 bays down and the controller plugs into each row and I have 8 drives to place into these bays means I need two complete rows to make my current situation work in this chassis. Thankfully when I checked the two lower bays they had no damage. Still I could not get the drives into the end slots.

With the top of the case off I looked at the backplane and noticed that the right side was not seated properly and apparently someone had done the no-no for computers and tried to torque the drives into the end slots anyway without figuring out why they didn’t go in smoothly!

So I made sure no drives were in the bays loosened the screws on the backplane and straightened out the backplane and was able to get the drives to slide in on the bottom rows all the way across. I then had to run the cables from my SAS card to the bottom rows of the backplane. Next step trying to get backplane replaced for future expansion and get the accompanying and missing SAS cable for the backplane as well.

So I was able to get FreeNAS up again and it’s interacting with my virtual environment just fine plus sharing out other storage as well but need to get that new backplane in house for the future to have that warm fuzzy feeling that everything is okay.

I will have more pictures that will be fairly identical to the other later except placement of the drives due to the backplane damage.