I updated my dhoytt.com Linux web server, my W2019 Data Center music streaming server, my Linux IceCast and ShoutCast streaming servers with the latest security patches. I also updated several other backgrounds servers.
I also updated the CMS WordPress to the latest version along with the plugins and themes.
Contending with rototiller issues not off to a smooth start with the vegetable garden so went with a different approach this year. The rototiller stalled on the east part of the garden last week so after the small engine came by again I finished turning over the dirt in that part of the garden.
I then made some rough rows moved some transplants from the west part of the vegetable garden to the east. I set my drip system back up and we will see how my transplants do! I have had good results with transplants in the past as long as there’s green in the stem and roots.
The transplants were jalapeno, poblano, chili relleno, habanero, bell peppers. I also transplanted collard greens and Swiss chard.
Earlier I also trimmed up the front flower gardens so they will bloom big very soon.
I have a bunch of seedlings yet to plant so stay tuned.
Finally on the last day of the year I migrated my Zoneminder CCTV/Plex physical server to Rocky Linux from CentOS 8 using the script from Rocky Linux https://docs.rockylinux.org/guides/migrate2rocky/ . Came back from a trip to Costco saw a reference to Linux and ding hey I still need to migrate away from Centos 8 since it will no longer be supported after today. I checked from my Rocky Linux VM that Zoneminder was in the Rocky Linux repos, then did my last update at Centos 8 rebooted and started my Rocky Linux migration after downloading the files from the Rocky Linux GIT repositories.
I have been using Rocky Linux for a few months on one of my VM’s and it seems to be keeping pace with the updates and kernel versions out there. I don’t have a VM testing out Almalinux https://almalinux.org/ yet but it seems solid from everything I have seen and I may start using that as another long term stable CentOS 8 alternative as well.
I currently am running Fedora 35 the latest version on my physical Linux workstation and will switch to Ubuntu on my older physical Linux workstation eventually to test out a few things. I have Windows 10 Workstation version on my other main physical workstation. I’ll switch my prior physical Windows 10 server over to gaming uses with a couple of other physical workstations I have but will make one a Linux gaming station as well.
My servers are running various flavors of Red Hat from CentOS 7 to Rocky Linux 8.5, except one running Windows Datacenter 2019 on. I have CentOS Stream 8, different versions of Fedora and Rocky Linux in my XCP-ng virtual environment. I will reintroduce a VMWare ESXi server on one of my C7000 blade servers eventually once I have the time. I like the XCP-ng for most of my virtual systems as I can do my hardware migrations and server migrations without added costs of licenses or scripts unless I feel like paying. Then of course I’m running FreeNAS on my NAS of FreeBSD origins and will eventually move to TrueNAS Core still consisting of FreeBSD. May test out TrueNAS Scale at a later time which has Debian as the base OS.
That is an overall of OS’ in my environment with Rocky Linux forecast as my main stable OS from this point into the future. My Plex and Zoneminder came up just fine so now it’s on to the next project!
Script checks your current repos, then packages plus runs updates all going quite smoothly (skipped to the end to miss all packages being updated and reinstalled) so you can see how painless the process is from a pure OS perspective absent of proprietary applications and other down time considerations of course.:
migrate2rocky - Begin logging at Fri 31 Dec 2021 02:16:31 PM PST.
Removing dnf cache
Preparing to migrate CentOS Linux 8 to Rocky Linux 8.
Determining repository names for CentOS Linux 8.....
Found the following repositories which map from CentOS Linux 8 to Rocky Linux 8:
CentOS Linux 8 Rocky Linux 8
appstream appstream
baseos baseos
extras extras
Getting system package names for CentOS Linux 8..........
Found the following system packages which map from CentOS Linux 8 to Rocky Linux 8:
CentOS Linux 8 Rocky Linux 8
centos-logos-ipa rocky-logos-ipa
centos-backgrounds rocky-backgrounds
centos-gpg-keys rocky-gpg-keys
centos-logos rocky-logos
centos-indexhtml rocky-indexhtml
centos-linux-release rocky-release
centos-logos-httpd rocky-logos-httpd
centos-linux-repos rocky-repos
Getting list of installed system packages.
We will replace the following CentOS Linux 8 packages with their Rocky Linux 8 equivalents
Packages to be Removed Packages to be Installed
centos-backgrounds rocky-backgrounds
centos-gpg-keys rocky-gpg-keys
centos-logos rocky-logos
centos-indexhtml rocky-indexhtml
centos-linux-release rocky-release
centos-logos-httpd rocky-logos-httpd
centos-linux-repos rocky-repos
In addition to the above the following system packages will be removed:
centos-linux-release
centos-linux-release
Getting a list of enabled modules for the system repositories.
Excluding modules:
libselinux-python:2.8
Found the following modules to re-enable at completion:
container-tools:rhel8
httpd:2.4
javapackages-runtime:201801
llvm-toolset:rhel8
mariadb:10.3
nginx:1.14
perl-DBD-MySQL:4.046
perl-DBD-SQLite:1.58
perl-DBI:1.641
perl-IO-Socket-SSL:2.066
perl-libwww-perl:6.34
perl:5.26
php:7.2
python36:3.6
satellite-5-client:1.0
virt:rhel
Running dnf update before we attempt the migration.
Last metadata expiration check: 0:00:49 ago on Fri Dec 31 14:16:53 2021.
Dependencies resolved.
Nothing to do.
Complete!
Added rockyappstream repo from https://dl.rockylinux.org/pub/rocky/8/AppStream/x86_64/os/
Added rockybaseos repo from https://dl.rockylinux.org/pub/rocky/8/BaseOS/x86_64/os/
rockyappstream 19 MB/s | 8.7 MB 00:00
:
Complete!
Subscription Manager found on system.
If you're converting from a subscription-managed distribution such as RHEL then
you may no longer need subscription-manager or dnf-plugin-subscription-manager.
While it won't hurt anything to have it on your system you may be able to safely
remove it with:
"dnf remove subscription-manager dnf-plugin-subscription-manager".
Take care that it doesn't remove something that you want to keep.
The subscription-manager dnf plugin may be enabled for the benefit of
Subscription Management. If no longer desired, you can use
"subscription-manager config --rhsm.auto_enable_yum_plugins=0" to block this
behavior.
Some Subscription Manager certificates were restored to /etc/rhsm/ca after
migration so that the subscription-manager command will continue to work:
redhat-entitlement-authority.pem
redhat-uep.pem
If you no longer need to use the subscription-manager command then you may
safely remove these files.
Done, please reboot your system.
A log of this installation can be found at /var/log/migrate2rocky.log
I wanted something for the cold weather that had that comfort food vibe Saturday so picked up a chuck roast and was planning on doing this in a slow cooker yesterday but did too much running around and ran out of time. I stayed up too late last night working on some systems that didn’t affect what I put out on the internet, thus slept in this morning.
Since I still needed some ingredients and I started cooking later than I wanted I went with the dutch oven instead of the crockpot slow cooker. Turned out just fine as I seared the chuck roast, browned the onions, garlic and got my rosemary, cilantro ,in place of fresh thyme, from my garden. Then put that along with the chuck roast in the oven for a couple of hours and then put in some potatoes, celery and carrots for the next 1.5 hours and after checking decided to let go another half hour.
The pot roast turned out nice and delicious! I put some pictures of my new thing now which is making bread in my new breadmaker down below as well!
Looking for a nice small brisket to smoke and instead found some short back beef ribs and some plate beef ribs. I made my custom beef rib rub with a new twist, put that on the ribs and decided to start smoking them on my Traeger in the early morning at 2 am so that I would not be into the evening waiting for them to get ready.
The ribs came out excellent and were ready a little before noon, but I was not so let them sit staying warm on the smoker a bit too long without lowering the temperature below 225. A little overdone but still fall off the bone delicious! Had sides of corn on the cob, asparagus, and made a small batch of potato salad.
Showing my prep, making fresh batch of beef rub, removing membrane,seasoning the ribs.
I created a new Linux web server and moved over to it so that I could use the latest versions of applications like PHP, MariaDB, Apache etc. without over modifying my source repositories for updates. I went from Centos 7 to Fedora 34. I was going to move to Centos 8 last year until they forked to Centos Stream 8.0. I figured if I was going to be out ahead of RHEL 8 may as go all the way with Fedora. This will also help me stay current by prompting me to update my Webserver more often. This is full circle from when I didn’t want to update the Webserver so often, but security and performance is much better with updated OS and applications.
I ran into your typical needs to setup Selinux policies, open and close appropriate ports, make sure that networking to the proper domains was set, transfer over domain certificates etc. I swapped over a bit early actually because in syncing the database from my old system to my new system I had to constantly edit the database on the new system and my WordPress CMS sites before proceeding on to make changes. WordPress holds many changes in the databases as well, so targeted syncs were a pain and so after a certain point it was way too much work or go with a more fruitful approach of creating another isolated vlan at this point.
I also had to get my ftp setup correctly I use locally as it was working but with a great deal of hesitation pausing at specifying the password but then a minute or two later successfully resolving. Seemed to be a slow network resolution issue so I made sure my /etc/resolv.conf was updated and even made entries for local systems that feed my webserver in /etc/hosts but still the slow performance. Then in comparing settings in /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf between old and new systems I noticed that the “Listen” parameter was off so that defaulted to IPv6. I enabled the “Listen” directive and then vsftp wouldn’t restart saying it had to run two instances of vsftp for IPv4 and IPv6. Going back into /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf I commented out the IPv6 setting and vsftp restarted and vsftp is fast as ever now. I use VSFTP to load updates to my WordPress so that was critical to get working with ultimate performance.
listen=YES
#
# This directive enables listening on IPv6 sockets. By default, listening
# on the IPv6 "any" address (::) will accept connections from both IPv6
# and IPv4 clients. It is not necessary to listen on *both* IPv4 and IPv6
# sockets. If you want that (perhaps because you want to listen on specific
# addresses) then you must run two copies of vsftpd with two configuration
# files.
# Make sure, that one of the listen options is commented !!
#listen_ipv6=YES
pam_service_name=vsftpd
This past week I had some good food adventures making Ahi tuna paired with my garden vegetables plus sticky rice and then made some chili a couple of days later also using garden vegetables. The tuna dish I kept simple with the fillets and used this for my base recipe: https://www.bowlofdelicious.com/six-minute-seared-ahi-tuna-steaks/ . The tuna turned out excellent with eggplant, green beans, tomatoes, jalapenos and okra from my garden brushed with olive oil then dusted with salt, pepper, garlic, fresh basil and rosemary on both sides. The okra I will never do like that again but the other vegetables turned out delicious. I used the sauce to marinate the tuna and made another batch for dipping, it was so good!
Next I took a chuck roast and placed it in brine overnight and cooked it nice and slow on my Traeger grill. The chuck roast came out with the right tenderness and flavor but when I put it back in it’s au jus which I didn’t taste beforehand it became too salty. I made a few side dishes the past days like tacos and breakfast dishes as I always do when I smoke meats but wanted to do something wholesale to be able to use this chuck roast and diffuse the salt and decided to make some chili. I used this recipe as the base: https://www.cookingclassy.com/slow-cooker-chili/ leaving out the salt and beef broth so I could soak the salt out of the chuck roast meat. I also added some more beef cut into taco meat sized chunks not totally ground and that worked out well. I used tomatoes from my garden plus come canned diced tomatoes. I put a habanero pepper from my garden to provide some kick!
I had a couple of spoons of the chili to test out while watching the Dodgers game and it was so delicious I decided to have a couple of small bowls late after the Dodgers beat the Braves and took first place from the SF Giants who lost to the Brewers.
The chili is so good but now I have to stay up late, wait for it to cool and put in the refrigerator where I already cleared space. The overnight process that will blend all the flavors and spices together will be awesome. The saltiness is gone from the chuck roast and I like the addition of that cocoa powder to the chili, which gives good depth. I just recently found the powdered cocoa on the very top shelf in my spice cabinet way to the back wondering when I would use it. Now I can’t wait to eat this chili out of a bowl traditionally, in breakfast meals and with foot long beef hot dogs I have with sesame seed gourmet buns. I may even freeze some of this chili!
I bought a new larger hard drive locally and finally got a chance to increase the root size of my bl460 g7 blade server that serves as my CCTV Zoneminder system and Plex movie streaming system. The Plex database gets large due to the amount of media I have for Plex. The files are accessed via network, but the database stays local. I started running out of space on “/” because I didn’t feel the need to split off /var and I should have.
Anyhow I went from 146GB 15K SAS drive to a 15K 300GB SAS drive. I like to keep my boot drives fast as possible.
What I did was downloaded the latest ISO version of Clonezilla along with the latest version of Balenaetcher, which I used to burn Clonezilla to a USB making it bootable.
Once I booted into Clonezilla from the USB I created with Balenaetcher I used Clonezilla to create an image of my boot dive with “/” on to my NAS drive via NFS. I then switched out my 146GB drive and put in my 300GB drive and restored the image to that drive. I then increased the partitions and voila I have a ton more space and could expand more if I needed.
Here’s the basic steps bulletized:
Created Clonezilla bootable USB using Balenaetcher from my Fedora Workstation
Booted off Clonezilla USB and copied boot image to FreeNAS via NFS
Shutdown system and took 146GB boot drive out and put in 300gb drive as replacement
During boot went into RAID utility and deleted 146GB virtual drive.
Still in RAID utility created new virtual 300gb drive to encompass full size of 300gb drive RAID0.
Booted back into Clonezilla Live USB and restored disk image from NAS via NFS.
Rebooted off the new drive into the OS successfully and verified everything was working
Deleted and extend the partition for “/” in fdisk.
# fdisk /dev/sda
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/sda: 279.4 GiB, 299966445568 bytes, 585871964 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x750d2bfe
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 * 2048 2099199 2097152 1G 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 2099200 286676991 284577792 135.7G 8e Linux LVM
Command (m for help): d
Partition number (1,2, default 2):
Partition 2 has been deleted.
Command (m for help): n
Partition type
p primary (1 primary, 0 extended, 3 free)
e extended (container for logical partitions)
Select (default p):
Using default response p.
Partition number (2-4, default 2):
First sector (2099200-585871963, default 2099200):
Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G,T,P} (2099200-585871963, default 585871963):
Created a new partition 2 of type 'Linux' and of size 278.4 GiB.
Partition #2 contains a LVM2_member signature.
Do you want to remove the signature? [Y]es/[N]o: N
Command (m for help): w
Rebooted since the partition was busy.
# shutdown -r 0
After reboot I still don’t have enough physical extents to expand the logical volume.
--- Volume group ---
VG Name cl
System ID
Format lvm2
Metadata Areas 1
Metadata Sequence No 5
VG Access read/write
VG Status resizable
MAX LV 0
Cur LV 3
Open LV 3
Max PV 0
Cur PV 1
Act PV 1
VG Size <135.70 GiB
PE Size 4.00 MiB
Total PE 34738
Alloc PE / Size 34738 / <135.70 GiB
Free PE / Size 0 / 0
VG UUID Yfe0bt-qxYw-Vme0-nioR-WexB-4Rku-xfW5SG
--- Logical volume ---
LV Path /dev/cl/root
LV Name root
VG Name cl
LV UUID FnDp59-R9uo-kaTr-jRrF-WW35-maSm-qMmNze
LV Write Access read/write
LV Creation host, time coral, 2020-08-28 00:46:01 -0700
LV Status available
# open 1
LV Size 50.00 GiB
Current LE 12800
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors auto
- currently set to 8192
Block device 253:0
--- Physical volumes ---
PV Name /dev/sda2
PV UUID e3FYP0-Us7d-fjUO-MfNI-BpbG-L1eU-jbqwYN
PV Status allocatable
Total PE / Free PE 34738 / 0
So now I make the rest of the drive accessible to LVM:
# pvresize /dev/sda2
Physical volume "/dev/sda2" changed
1 physical volume(s) resized or updated / 0 physical volume(s) not resized
I now have space to expand within LVM:
--- Volume group ---
VG Name cl
System ID
Format lvm2
Metadata Areas 1
Metadata Sequence No 6
VG Access read/write
VG Status resizable
MAX LV 0
Cur LV 3
Open LV 3
Max PV 0
Cur PV 1
Act PV 1
VG Size 278.36 GiB
PE Size 4.00 MiB
Total PE 71261
Alloc PE / Size 34738 / <135.70 GiB
Free PE / Size 36523 / <142.67 GiB
VG UUID Yfe0bt-qxYw-Vme0-nioR-WexB-4Rku-xfW5SG
--- Logical volume ---
LV Path /dev/cl/root
LV Name root
VG Name cl
LV UUID FnDp59-R9uo-kaTr-jRrF-WW35-maSm-qMmNze
LV Write Access read/write
LV Creation host, time coral, 2020-08-28 00:46:01 -0700
LV Status available
# open 1
LV Size 50.00 GiB
Current LE 12800
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors auto
- currently set to 8192
Block device 253:0
--- Physical volumes ---
PV Name /dev/sda2
PV UUID e3FYP0-Us7d-fjUO-MfNI-BpbG-L1eU-jbqwYN
PV Status allocatable
Total PE / Free PE 71261 / 36523
I then extended the logical volume and filesystem:
Enchilada’s have become a new way to use my garden produce starting Friday for the beginning of this weekend. I used a mix of tomatoes and peppers from my garden cooked in a skillet and then pureed in a blender. I then used some of the pulled pork leftover from earlier this week and the dish turned out delicious!
Then for breakfast Saturday I used more of the enchilada sauce along with the leftover pulled pork. For breakfast I warmed the pulled pork in the skillet with a couple strips of bacon, started heating the enchilada sauce in a smaller skillet and then transferred the pulled pork to the smaller skillet with the enchilada sauce. In another skillet I cooked up some breakfast potatoes with onions and sweet peppers from the garden. After moving the pulled pork and bacon out of the larger skillet I washed the larger skillet down and heated up some corn tortillas and then built a delicious enchilada styled breakfast treat.
After minor kitchen cleanup I still wanted to keep going to work off the enchilada treats and clipped my bushes and roses in the front yard and then went out back and trimmed the grass and did a little straightening up.
I then put some roses I inadvertently clipped in a rose vase on one of my bars.
A nice active start to a mild weathered Saturday with decent air quality I was determined to take advantage of.
This is just some pictures with short captions of what’s going of how I include my garden in what I eat the past few weeks. Eating these veggies is hat my body asks for when i’m getting into my workouts. When I smoke thee meats ?I normally eat of of what I smoked for 4 or 5 days with some dished overlapping for variety.
I even threw in some pictures of my maintenance of my watering drip system I built over 15 years ago by myself for my gardens. I always make things for minimal work if I have to perform maintenance it it paid off as I was able to make a quick replacement of pipes with ease.
Variety of tomatoes with jalapeno peppers, basil and tarragon with homemade I originally had left over from some wings with a sesame theme.Burgers with Beek eater tomatoes and swiss chard from the garden.
Made some home made spaghetti sauce with my tomatoes and spices from the garden, was delicious!
I had to fredo my main irrigation into the vegetable garden. Replaced the pipe to the main pvc pipes down below to the drip system on west side of the yard. I made everything modular 15 years ago so these repaired would be simple and it worked out nice and quick as planned. I replaced the metal coupler with a plastic one to prevent cross threading that lead to some issues as it will when using plastic with metal if not very careful.
MAking some tea from my herbs again this is becoming a staple for me! Mint, stevia, chamomile, basil, rosemary and sometimes i’ll use the zeste and put some peppers in there.
My smoked chicken from brine to plate. This was garden rosemary themed starting with the brine. I then hit it with some salt at the end. The vegetables are eggplant and tomatoes with rosemary and basil.
This is maybe the best pulled pork I have ever made or tasted (biased of course). I’m pretty big critic of my cooking this just hit a lot of great notes, tender after 48 hours plus of brining with rosemary, sugar and salt. Then hit it with my custom rub to create an amazing bark and it was fantastic. Just fell apart after I wrapped it at 165 degrees and took it up to 205 degrees, I just have to learn to start the night before low an slow.