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.
I had a massive harvest today partially due to not picking produce everyday for the past week. So much else has been popping up I got out of my routine. I didn’t want to pick items without being ready to do something with the produce and that caught up to me big time!
I ended up with huge zucchini squash hidden by the big leaves, tons of Early Girl, Beef Eater, lemon boy ,a few yellow plum, black plum, and husky red cherry tomatoes. Got some more huge jalapeno peppers, Serrano, Poblano, sweet orange peppers plus orange and red habanero peppers. I got some more Ichiban eggplants, cucumber and picked my first bunch of green beans.
After working around in the computer room all day I had neglected getting my dinner ready which was going to be a whole chicken so I did that on my Traeger smoker and then cut up some produce and grilled that on my gas grill. Basically cut up squash, jalapeno, habanero, eggplant, sweet orange peppers, tomatoes along with rosemary, sage, purple and sweet basil from the garden thrown together I just brushed them up with some balsamic vinegar and dressing, garlic, coarse kosher salt and pepper.
Though it was a late dinner it was tasty with some leftovers for tomorrow. Chicken was fall off the bone tender and still moist and the veggies nicely complemented each other with that roasted flavor. I stay up late a lot anyway so I still will not go to bed within 3 or 4 hours of eating.
Next figuring out my different methods of preserving which will include bagging, pureeing, freezing and maybe even canning. I seriously don’t have much space for storage anywhere now which will need to be resolved but I always find a solution!
I made some changes on my Zoneminder server that also hosts Plex media server plus extended the drives on one of my virtual Plex media servers that also is a Salt master, plus had to extend my boot partition on my Linux workstation.
Linux workstation /boot Extension
First I decided to extend /boot on my recently re-installed Fedora 34 boot partition. During the re-install I didn’t notice that the /boot kept the older size of prior installs. Seems /boot needs more room these days so I decided to increase to 1gb from 265mb. You want contiguous space for /boot so the best bet is reinstall to keep that space from skipping all over the disk. This is not that big a deal for me especially on my Linux workstation as I always have a separate hard drive for my /home with all my environmental settings that I also backup to my NAS regularly. I even backup /etc to a directory in my /home so I can nitpick thinks like my PhpMyAdmin settings I have for various servers after a reinstall. Then my hard drive I can take the fastest 12gbs SAS or even and SSD to improve performance and then clone or just reinstall to my boot drive
In prep for the reinstall I made a list of all my packages in a file so that I could just get my repositories in place point to that file and do a reinstall. However I also like discovering new opensource software in Linux which is why I love using Linux so I also made a list of the repo and group install commands I used. This made the reinstall a breeze and took about 2 hours including making breakfast of potatoes, eggs, bacon and sausage in parallel and eating that breakfast.
I ended up booting off a live Fedora 34 CD since I ran out of USB’s and the IPMI on this ASUS board doesn’t work as well as my ASrock board for my Windows system. I did a workstation reinstall creating my newly sized /boot partition. Mounted my /home and made an entry for it in /etc/fstab did a “mount -a” to test it. Then ran the “dnf” commands above and then did:“dnf install $pkgs’ >> fedora-app-re-installer.sh” but packages were already installed. Did some updates logged into my workstation with my username and it had all my prior settings as if I never left, except I had to redo my selinux policies I had in place from before and my workstation was up and running again. Nothing fancy just planning ahead which is what IT is all about.
Extend / Partition of XCP-ng Virtual System Hosting Salt and Plex server
I them tackled making my virtual system that hosted my Salt master and Plex media server instance a larger drive because when I went to update Plex it said it was out of space. Since it’s a virtual system and I have plenty of storage space I simply did the following:
shut the system down
extended the drive in XCP-ng.
Booted into the system went into fdisk created a new partition
No big deal done in like 15 minutes going from 50gb to 100gb partition. Since I have so many movies and TV shows plus tons of music the Plex database is quite large and I don’t have time to prune it constantly. I could also have used the disk space created another directory and created a symbolic link to that file but this was cleaner.
Updating RAM on my Zoneminder and Plex Server on bl460c Gen 7 Blade
My Zoneminder after updating to 1.36 started having memory issues and camera streams kept stopping and starting. seems they made some improvements to capture more frames instead of skipping them. I’m not fully in tune with what hey did and I have other priorities now though I did try a lot of different buffer settings and finally ended up settling on “Maximum Image Buffer Size (Frames) =500” with my 49GB of RAM and 5 cameras that seemed to get me at a good place where everything was capturing all CCTV events plus camera streams were not stopping and starting as memory filled and was released.
I had contemplated throwing more memory at it since I could easily go up to 192GB on this bl460c gen7 blade of DDR3 RAM. Things looked rosy but I still wasn’t satisfied so I called up my local place to get surplus server equipment picked up 2 more 16gb ddr3 1333mhz ecc ram sticks and put them into the banks previously occupied by 8gb sticks, moved the 8gb sticks to the last banks occupied and now I’m at 80gb of RAM on this system.
After booting back up wow Zoneminder is running so smoothly now as it’s no longer writing to swap and staying only in RAM. I’m sure this will also help my main Plex Media server instance that runs on this system. This is also the system that used to hosts my ShoutCast and IceCast music relays. This is one reason I moved my music relays off of this system so that I could experiment more with improving my CCTV Zoneminder without affecting the music streaming of Snakceice’s House of Beats.
This is an example of how my system was swapping to disk and isn’t now:
[root@coral ~]# free -m
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 48070 15207 29925 366 2937 31938
Swap: 13999 8739 5260
[root@coral ~]# free -m
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 80262 10307 68450 231 1503 69004
Swap: 13999 0 13999
There were times before adjusting various buffer settings in Zoneminder that swap and memory were both near zero free when using unlimited for “Maximum Image Buffer Size (Frames) =500” or larger settings for that. Now my Zoneminder is so fast and I’m sure Plex will benefit as welI. I wish I had increased memory before. This may keep me from virtualizing Zoneminder anytime soon though . I will have to dive someday dive deeper into Zoneminder to make it more efficient so that I could virtualize it potentially. Currently I have spare blade servers for my HP C7000 so will go with this.
Just a sample of a few simple things I have done this week, nothing special just keeping the environment alive. I think recalling and writing this took longer. I am also doing a lot of work on my website on a new virtual server updating themes, database etc. plus doing syncs with my active websites. Fittingly the Michael Jackson son “Working Day and Night” just came on.
My Zoneminder/Plex bl460c g7 blade server blew dust out and put in new DDR3 ECC 2 x 16gb Ram sticks.
Well my Fedora 33 workstation desktop kept freezing and crashing whether I used KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, MATE or Gnome desktop environments this happened with various applications. I suspected my Nvidia Quadro K1200 drivers and was going to really dive into that when I had time. I first updated to Fedora 34 which I wanted to do anyway and had the same issues so looking through the logs and then noticed some selinux alerts I simply ran the sealerts listed and created selinux policies suggested and now my workstation’s desktop is noticeably more responsive and stable.
This is what I found in the logs:
SELinux is preventing gnome-shell from write access on the sock_file dbus-O849AHv64T.
Plugin catchall (100. confidence) suggests *
If you believe that gnome-shell should be allowed write access on the dbus-O849AHv64T sock_file by default. Then you should report this as a bug. You can generate a local policy module to allow this access. Do allow this access for now by executing:
There appeared to be another sealert that I found that also affected my desktops stability and possibly spoke to issues with the Nvidia driver:
SELinux is preventing gdb from read access on the chr_file card1.
Plugin catchall (100. confidence) suggests *
If you believe that gdb should be allowed read access on the card1 chr_file by default. Then you should report this as a bug. You can generate a local policy module to allow this access. Do allow this access for now by executing:
ausearch -c ‘gdb’ –raw | audit2allow -M my-gdb
semodule -X 300 -i my-gdb.pp
Additional Information: Source Context system_u:system_r:abrt_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023 Target Context system_u:object_r:dri_device_t:s0 Target Objects card1 [ chr_file ] Source gdb Source Path gdb Port Host mamba Source RPM Packages Target RPM Packages SELinux Policy RPM selinux-policy-targeted-34.14-1.fc34.noarch Local Policy RPM selinux-policy-targeted-34.14-1.fc34.noarch Selinux Enabled True Policy Type targeted Enforcing Mode Enforcing Host Name mamba Platform Linux mamba 5.13.4-200.fc34.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jul 20 20:27:29 UTC 2021 x86_64 x86_64 Alert Count 384 First Seen 2021-07-12 22:04:07 PDT Last Seen 2021-07-23 22:38:06 PDT Local ID 88f4d8fa-ca05-404e-8449-bd42cfc3bedb
Raw Audit Messages type=AVC msg=audit(1627105086.850:543): avc: denied { read } for pid=27221 comm=”gdb” name=”card1″ dev=”devtmpfs” ino=523 scontext=system_u:system_r:abrt_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023 tcontext=system_u:object_r:dri_device_t:s0 tclass=chr_file permissive=0
Hash: gdb,abrt_t,dri_device_t,chr_file,read
Once again I just followed the notice from selinux and ran the following:
I also went ahead migrated virtual systems from one XCP-ng to another updated both XCP-ng hosts hypervisor systems after the migrations and then moved the virtual systems back to their respective hosts after performing the updates on each physical host. During the migration of the relays server that brief microsecond may have affected people streaming Snakeice’s House of Beats without a media streaming player that buffers and does not attempt restarts after minor interruptions .. All in all a very productive morning now time for breakfast.
