August 22, 2021
by dhoytt
0 comments

Increased Drive Size Zoneminder CCTV and Plex Physical Server with Clonezilla

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:

]# lvextend -L 100G /dev/mapper/cl-root -r
  Size of logical volume cl/root changed from 50.00 GiB (12800 extents) to 100.00 GiB (25600 extents).
  Logical volume cl/root successfully resized.
meta-data=/dev/mapper/cl-root    isize=512    agcount=4, agsize=3276800 blks
         =                       sectsz=512   attr=2, projid32bit=1
         =                       crc=1        finobt=1, sparse=1, rmapbt=0
         =                       reflink=1
data     =                       bsize=4096   blocks=13107200, imaxpct=25
         =                       sunit=0      swidth=0 blks
naming   =version 2              bsize=4096   ascii-ci=0, ftype=1
log      =internal log           bsize=4096   blocks=6400, version=2
         =                       sectsz=512   sunit=0 blks, lazy-count=1
realtime =none                   extsz=4096   blocks=0, rtextents=0
data blocks changed from 13107200 to 26214400

Confirmed new filesystem size and system was operational and I was done.

]# df -kh
Filesystem                                  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs                                     40G     0   40G   0% /dev
tmpfs                                        40G  198M   39G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs                                        40G  9.8M   40G   1% /run
tmpfs                                        40G     0   40G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mapper/cl-root                         100G   49G   52G  49% /
/dev/mapper/cl-home                          72G  3.1G   69G   5% /home
/dev/sda1                                   976M  341M  569M  38% /boot
/dev/mapper/zoneminder-lvol0                1.8T  1.4T  401G  77% /zoneminder
192.168.0.8:/mnt/file-storage2/sonora-nfs1   32T   26T  6.1T  81% /nfs1
tmpfs                                       7.9G   20K  7.9G   1% /run/user/42
tmpfs                                       7.9G  4.0K  7.9G   1% /run/user/1000

]# ps -ef | grep plex
plex        1983       1  0 23:12 ?        00:00:03 /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex Media Server
plex        2967    1983  0 23:12 ?        00:00:02 Plex Plug-in [com.plexapp.system] /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Resources/Plug-ins-e2e58f321/Framework.bundle/Contents/Resources/Versions/2/Python/bootstrap.py --server-version 1.23.6.4881-e2e58f321 /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Resources/Plug-ins-e2e58f321/System.bundle
plex        3232    1983  0 23:12 ?        00:00:00 /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex DLNA Server
plex        3245    1983  0 23:12 ?        00:00:00 /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex Tuner Service /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Resources/Tuner/Private /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Resources/Tuner/Shared 1.23.6.4881-e2e58f321 32600
plex        3297    1983  0 23:12 ?        00:00:02 Plex Plug-in [com.plexapp.agents.imdb] /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Resources/Plug-ins-e2e58f321/Framework.bundle/Contents/Resources/Versions/2/Python/bootstrap.py --server-version 1.23.6.4881-e2e58f321 /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Resources/Plug-ins-e2e58f321/PlexMovie.bundle
root        8171    4424  0 23:18 pts/0    00:00:00 grep --color=auto plex

]# systemctl status zoneminder
● zoneminder.service - ZoneMinder CCTV recording and security system
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/zoneminder.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
  Drop-In: /usr/lib/systemd/system/zoneminder.service.d
           └─zm-httpd.conf
   Active: active (running) since Sat 2021-08-21 23:12:36 PDT; 6min ago
  Process: 3342 ExecStart=/usr/bin/zmpkg.pl start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
 Main PID: 3842 (zmdc.pl)
    Tasks: 26 (limit: 513304)
   Memory: 9.3G
   CGroup: /system.slice/zoneminder.service
           ├─3842 /usr/bin/perl -wT /usr/bin/zmdc.pl startup
           ├─3886 /usr/bin/zmc -m 1
           ├─3890 /usr/bin/zmc -m 2
           ├─3904 /usr/bin/zmc -m 3
           ├─3910 /usr/bin/zmc -m 4
           ├─3914 /usr/bin/zmc -m 5
           ├─3919 /usr/bin/perl -wT /usr/bin/zmfilter.pl --filter_id=1 --daemon
           ├─3924 /usr/bin/perl -wT /usr/bin/zmfilter.pl --filter_id=2 --daemon
           ├─3929 /usr/bin/perl -wT /usr/bin/zmwatch.pl
           ├─3934 /usr/bin/perl -wT /usr/bin/zmtelemetry.pl
           └─3945 /usr/bin/perl -wT /usr/bin/zmstats.pl

Aug 21 23:18:42 coral zmc_m2[3890]: INF [zmc_m2] [Front-Porch_Speco-2: 11000 - Analysing at 29.91 fps from 10999 - >
Aug 21 23:18:42 coral zmc_m5[3914]: INF [zmc_m5] [Upstairs-Uview-2: 9300 - Capturing at 25.37 fps, capturing bandwi>
Aug 21 23:18:44 coral zmc_m4[3910]: INF [zmc_m4] [Kitchen-Uniview-1: 9300 - Capturing at 25.38 fps, capturing bandw>
Aug 21 23:18:44 coral zmc_m3[3904]: INF [zmc_m3] [Front-Driveway-Vitek-1: 10900 - Capturing at 29.65 fps, capturing>
Aug 21 23:18:44 coral zmc_m3[3904]: INF [zmc_m3] [Front-Driveway-Vitek-1: 10900 - Analysing at 29.64 fps from 10899>
Aug 21 23:18:45 coral zmc_m1[3886]: INF [zmc_m1] [Backyard-1-Speco: 11100 - Capturing at 30.12 fps, capturing bandw>
Aug 21 23:18:45 coral zmc_m1[3886]: INF [zmc_m1] [Backyard-1-Speco: 11100 - Analysing at 30.12 fps from 11099 - 109>
Aug 21 23:18:45 coral zmc_m2[3890]: INF [zmc_m2] [Front-Porch_Speco-2: 11100 - Capturing at 29.94 fps, capturing ba>
Aug 21 23:18:45 coral zmc_m2[3890]: INF [zmc_m2] [Front-Porch_Speco-2: 11100 - Analysing at 30.15 fps from 11099 - >
Aug 21 23:18:46 coral zmc_m5[3914]: INF [zmc_m5] [Upstairs-Uview-2: 9400 - Capturing at 25.39 fps, capturing bandwi>

August 21, 2021
by dhoytt
0 comments

Enchilada, Flowers and Gardening Weekend Start

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.

I used this recipe https://www.asweetpeachef.com/homemade-enchilada-sauce/ with changes of Poblano chili and Serrano pepper with Early Girl, Black Plum and Lemon tomatoes and a touch of cinnamon.

Here’s the pictures:

August 19, 2021
by dhoytt
0 comments

More Garden Themed Dishes

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.

July 29, 2021
by dhoytt
0 comments

Massive Garden Produce Harvest for the Day

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!

July 29, 2021
by dhoytt
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Updated Zoneminder/Plexmedia Server and Linux Workstation

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 had a prior method of reinstalling packages but looked for a different method and went with what I found on this site to prep for reinstall: https://www.addictivetips.com/ubuntu-linux-tips/quickly-re-install-all-installed-apps-on-fedora/

rpm -qa | sort > ~/pkgs.txt
cd /home/backups/
touch fedora-app-re-installer.sh
echo '#!/bin/bash' > fedora-app-re-installer.sh
echo ' ' >> fedora-app-re-installer.sh
echo 'pkgs="' >> fedora-app-re-installer.sh
cat pkgs.txt >> fedora-app-re-installer.sh
echo '"' >> fedora-app-re-installer.sh
echo ' ' >> fedora-app-re-installer.sh

dnf groupinstall "KDE Plasma Workspaces" "Xfce Desktop" "Cinnamon Desktop" "MATE Desktop" "Development and Creative Workstation" "Firefox Web Browser" LibreOffice "3D Printing" "Basic Desktop" Cinnamon "FTP Server" "KDE Applications" "KDE Multimedia support" "KDE Office" "MATE Applications" MATE "MariaDB (MySQL) Database" "Office/Productivity" PHP "Basic Web Server" Xfce "Extra plugins for the Xfce panel" "Multimedia support for Xfce" "Xfce Office" "Graphical Internet" "KDE (K Desktop Environment)" "Games and Entertainment" "System Tools"


dnf install hplip-gui.x86_64 hplip-common.x86_64 hplip-libs.x86_64

dnf install meld
dnf install tali
dnf install skypeforlinux
 dnf install gimp
dnf install google-chrome
dnf install /home/<user>/Downloads/google-chrome/07-12-2021/google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm
dnf install chromium
dnf install evolution

dnf install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm
dnf install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm
dnf install https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

dnf install \*-firmware
dnf install rpmfusion-nonfree-release-tainted
dnf install rpmfusion-free-release-tainted
dnf groupupdate sound-and-video
dnf groupupdate multimedia --setop="install_weak_deps=False" --exclude=PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin
dnf group update core

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
rebooted the system
fdisk -l < confirmed drive device file
pvdisplay -v /dev/xvdb3
pvcreate /dev/xvdb3
vgdisplay -v
vgextend centos_smaster /dev/xvdb3
vgdisplay -v
lvextend -L 99G /dev/centos_smaster/root -r
df -kh
yum install /home/<user>Downloads/Plex/plexmediaserver-1.23.5.4862-0f739d462.x86_64.rpm
systemctl status plexmediaserver.service

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.

July 24, 2021
by dhoytt
0 comments

Fedora Workstation Crashes Possibly Resolved/ Updates of XCP-ng Packages

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:

ausearch -c ‘gnome-shell’ –raw | audit2allow -M my-gnomeshell

semodule -X 300 -i my-gnomeshell.pp

Additional Information:
Source Context system_u:system_r:xdm_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023
Target Context system_u:object_r:tmp_t:s0
Target Objects dbus-O849AHv64T [ sock_file ]
Source gnome-shell
Source Path gnome-shell
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 223
First Seen 2021-07-12 22:03:50 PDT
Last Seen 2021-07-23 22:38:07 PDT
Local ID c4845b11-2638-4728-8e79-27e115f54210

Raw Audit Messages
type=AVC msg=audit(1627105087.981:551): avc: denied { write } for pid=27398 comm=”gsd-power” name=”dbus-O849AHv64T” dev=”tmpfs” ino=657 scontext=system_u:system_r:xdm_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023 tcontext=system_u:object_r:tmp_t:s0 tclass=sock_file permissive=0

Hash: gnome-shell,xdm_t,tmp_t,sock_file,write

For this alert I simply followed directions after changing directories into my security folder I store my selinux policies and then ran:

# ausearch -c 'gnome-shell' --raw | audit2allow -M my-gnomeshell
#semodule -i my-gnomeshell.pp

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:

#ausearch -c 'gdb' --raw | audit2allow -M my-gdb
#semodule -i my-gdb.pp

For the second alert addressing the “gdb” issue I discovered a number of people are having similar issues that are listed in bug alerts at Red Hat: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1896648

I decided to look up the first sealert as well and there are a number of bug listings for that as well plus a forum discussion I found: https://ask.fedoraproject.org/t/selinux-is-preventing-gnome-shell-from-write-access-on-the-sock-file-dbus-xodxlwour5/14515

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1942775

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.

July 21, 2021
by dhoytt
0 comments

Updated XCP-ng from 8.1 to 8.2

I’m prepping to move the dhoytt.com web server to a different web server. So I decided to update the underlying hypervisor XCP-ng first.

First I migrated all of my virtual systems off of my slave Xcp-ng system then loaded the XCP-ng 8.2 ISO via ILO of my BL460c Gen 8 blade system, rebooted booted of the XCP-ng ISO, verified the XCP-ng and started the install.

The reasons I want to move the dhoytt.com web server to a new version of software was so that I could have the most recent versions of PHP and MariaDB without having to manually just update the packages or the repositories. I just want to use the OS’ current repositories for less work.

In doing the updates I updated my slave XCP-ng system first which is the incorrect procedure so I had a little downtime as I shutdown the VM’s on the master installed it and then brought my webserver and relay server back up after in updating the XCP-ng master server. Since I took down the relays for the streaming server I decided to update the W2019 server that hosts my music and then streams to my relay servers of IceCast and ShouCast which took me down quite a bit longer since the W2019 Data Center updates were large and took two reboots of my physical BL460c gen8 blade system.

Everything is up to the outside world after updating and rebooting my w2019 music server, relay server and web server but still have to get the slave in my XCP-ng pool correct since it was not showing the network properly because I updated it first. Even after updating the master of the XCP-ng pool then rebooting the slave it never picked up the networking information from the master of the XCP-ng pool. I restored the old 8.1.1 version of XCP-ng then perform the upgrade of the XCP-ng slave again and that failed as well. After trying a slew of things I finally just did a flat new install on the slave system, redid the networking and everything is solid again.

Next step create a new VM and make sure it has the correct versions of software and move the bits and about 7 databases running on the MariaDB instance over and start making some long needed changes to the site.

Just a curiosity note I did notice a brief microsecond loss of network connectivity from my relays when doing a live migration of the relay stream server that hosts IceCast and ShoutCast. I will investigate that at a later date if I remember. This is one reason I write to this blog as some historical reference and weird partial biography.

July 14, 2021
by dhoytt
0 comments

Mid-Morning System Updates

Had some critical system updates of my w2019 Data Center system that hosts my Sam Broadcasting system here from my home data center and decided to also update my Centos 8 Linux system and Centos 7 Linux web server.

The Centos 8 system hosts my IceCast and ShoutCast relays that you connect to when streaming the music from my W2019 system. The Centos 7 system of course houses my WordPress CMS system and a database that syncs with the w2019 system and then publishes information to that Snakeice House of Beats blog https://dhoytt.com/snake-ice-radio-blog/.

The Centos 8 Linux system also hosts my Zoneminder CCTV system which was also updates along with one of my Plex server instances.

July 14, 2021
by Mid-Morning System Updates |
Comments Off on By: Mid-Morning System Updates |

By: Mid-Morning System Updates |

[…] The Centos 8 system hosts my IceCast and ShoutCast relays that you connect to when streaming the music from my W2019 system. The Centos 7 system of course houses my WordPress CMS system and a database that syncs with the w2019 system and then publishes information to that Snakeice House of Beats blog https://dhoytt.com/snake-ice-radio-blog/. […]

July 5, 2021
by dhoytt
0 comments

Utilizing Garden Produce

The utilization of all that great produce from your garden is why you go through the trouble of growing a garden in the first place. Once that production of food stops you long for that season to begin again so you do not have to make trips to the store for fresh vegetables. Here below you can see me frying squash, Lemon boy and cherry tomatoes. I tried lightly battered and egg batter to find my preference was lightly battered fried vegetables not double dipped in egg batter. I made some salsa numerous times as you can dress up many dishes with salsa as well as use as dips for chips as you watch TV. I made a salad of squash, cucumber, Swiss chard, lemon boy, black pearl, yellow pear beef eater and early girl tomatoes. I added in some sweet onions, mushrooms not from the garden and then basil, rosemary, tarragon and chives from the garden. I then put some salmon over the salad and dressed it with white balsamic dressing. Another way I always utilize my garden produce is making teas and today I gathered up my herbs of mint, basil, sage, lemon thyme, rosemary, I forgot my stevia this time, but it still came out just fine. I had the tea a little warm and put the rest into a container in the refrigerator and will in indulge in that tea for a few days. That nice clean refreshing taste is something I long for now. There are so many ways to use what I have in the garden, and I still have not even made the pizza sauce as I did last year or used my food storage device. Today I had my first cucumbers of the season and habanero peppers as well. The habanero peppers kicked the salsa up a few notches with the jalapeno and serrano peppers and the cucumbers were refreshing with the salad.