In a very virtual sense grabbing music from the walls and placing it into rotation to form a nice flow that goes from hard to slow to upbeat party, then contemplative.
I grabbed as always all genres since I think just getting stuck in one place or sound is rather boring!
This is Friday so kicking it into the fun column then taking a bit hardcore, then a little more fun, hard again, throwback old school style, then bringing you to the present then slowing it down a bit.
I cleaned up the front yard and did some work in the backyard and the vegetable gardens in the backyard as well. I’m getting ready for the late season for when it starts to cool a bit and some vegetables grow better in the Sacramento/San Joaquin valley Here is some of what is going on in the vegetable garden at this time
Here is some purple okra, Collard greens, purple basil, with sweet basil in view as well:
Here are some peppers with stevia in the foreground:
Here’s some jalepaeno peppers going strong:
In the background is a tomato plant I had to rescue and stake up today plus some more stevia and mint in the foreground:
Here’s a top and bottom shot of my eggplants:
Some chives:
Some new straight neck squash after picking quite a few this week:
Overall of the west side of the vegetable garden with mint plants providing protection in the front concealing some of the other vegetables:
Just a clump of beef eater tomatoes, chives, mint, basil and yellow pear tomatoes:
More stevia:
East side of the garden with some new seeds I planted to get a start in planted pots first and then I will transplant them into the garden. Note the swiss chard standing strong that I replanted from last year.
August 23, 2015
by dhoytt Comments Off on Updated Blog Software Friday Revisited XenServer Repair
I updated the WordPress blog software after I took some manual backups of the database. Everything went fine but of course I had to go in and manually put back in some customization’s I have made for the sites that the theme updates erased but that went smoothly.
I spread out my virtual machines more evenly in my XenServer environment and reset the HA settings on my XenServer pool. I had a couple of months ago replaced a motherboard that had failed on one of my XenServers and decided to double the RAM from a system I wasn’t using. That system kept randomly restarting as I increased the load. Finally earlier this week I ran memory check from memtest.org and received a flood of errors deep into the test (about 60% in).
I took the memory of the same speed but a different manufacture out of my XenServer system I had repaired then reran the memory test and everything was fine. This memory I took out ran the memory test fine in the other system as well but together the two memory modules from different manufactures didn’t perform together well. Had this went well I would have updated the other system to this memory level as well.
Now my environment is purring along and seeming very stable.
Well now questioning if the XFS filesystem is the panacea I thought it would be for my configuration. I had an issue with my XenServer master I didn’t notice for a bit due to the monitoring text message coming when I ws sleep. I easily recovered the XenServer system (still need to look into why it lost it suddenly lost its identity though it never went down). With XFS normal “fsck” doesn’t quite work there is and “xfs_check” and “”xfs_repair” command.
I went to the Centos rescue CD and tried to run the “xfs_check” and that command is not found. Then tried running “xfs_repair” but it let’s me know that the xfs filesystem has logs that need to be replayed to repair and to mount the filesystem so this can happen but the filesystem will not mount since it needs to be cleaned! I looked around the internet and found the following commands:
#xfs_metadump <filesystem> md4.metadump
#xfs_mdrestore md4.metadump.img
#xfs_repair -L md4.metadump.img
Seems this is a trila run of using the “-L” option with xfs_repair which per the man page and other warnings could lead to greater filesystem corruption.
Finally I had no option but to boot into the resuce CD and run “xfs_repair -L /<root-filesystem>.
Everything seems up and not sure if all the valuable metadata got replayed so later will recreate another system and move the data over once again.
Maybe xfs isn’t any more resilient than extfs4 filesystems after all, well will keep using for a bit but keep some backups.
July 24, 2015
by dhoytt Comments Off on Time For New Router ASUS RT-N66U Power Switch Failure
I have been having sporadic Internet connectivity issues lately and today noticed this happened several times Finally about 30 minutes ago I get texted from monitoring I have on my site notifying me my site is down, I discover I cannot contact my router and it’s literally powered off. I look over the router and the power switch is no longer depressed and will not stay depressed to keep the power on!
I had to use duct tape since electrical tape wasn’t quite adhesive enough and some folded paper to keep the power switch depressed with electrical tape keeping the edges down and smooth.
Then went on Internet and found this is a consistent issue with all ASUS routers. I have already had my share of issues from the “kernel: VFS: file-max Limit 22684 reached” error which causes me to have to occasionally reboot since that simple kernel parameter cannot be changed in ASUS’ firmware. Yes I know I can use “dd-wrt” or “tomatoe” open source router firmware but I have the VPN working nicely with this router.
Besides this recent power button issue and the kernel parameter issue I’m also not a huge fan of their interface, specifically the “Virtual Server/Port Forwarding” interface is clunky and a time sync! When I clone or switch web servers I like to just point to the new server in my environment. With ASUS I have to totally delete each prior entry and add a totally new entry for that port forwarding to the new system! Every other router interface you just change a few alphanumeric characters and apply and your done.
Time to get a new router GRRR!!!!
July 11, 2015
by dhoytt Comments Off on Moved Site to New System and OS
Well I moved my website over to a new OS Centos 7 from Fedora 21. Centos seems to be handing my enviornment better with the XFS filesystem than Fedora has been with the ext4 filesystem. I am also still making changes to the infrastructure and updated some features on the “House of Beats” (http://dhoytt.com/snake-ice-radio-blog/now-playing/) blog on this site.
I even gave the system a bit more RAM.
June 13, 2015
by dhoytt Comments Off on Home Tea From Garden Mint Stevia & Hot Sun
Can’t wait to taste this home made concoction made from some mint plants running amok in the garden and some stevia plants I added for a bit of sweet. I didn’t place a lot of stevia in the mix but will add more later to individual cup of tea to sweeten it up a bit.
This is the tea brewing in the sun with some mint in the background I let grow a bit unchecked:
This is the tea done steeping in the sun all day (note tea basket with mint & stevia on bottom of container):
This shows a couple of patches of mint in my garden that is full of mint:
This shows a couple of patches of stevia in my garden:
May 30, 2015
by dhoytt Comments Off on Work On Site This past Week
As I was migrating data from one NAS to another this week my XenServer pool master had a memory failure while I was away at work. Well after isolating the DIMM with the issue I also had to go in and change the bios settings for the fans. I noticed that the IPMI log files had numerous references to the fans and noted not all internal fans were set at optimal server fan settings.
Once I had the XenServer back in the rack cabled up it I could not see it boot up and had to switch it to another port on the KVM to see it boot and make subsequent updates. I’ll have to test the KVM port later but I suspect all is okay since other ports on that KVM are fine and it’s connected with my other KVM that also works fine. The other issue that manifested itself was that the XenServer that had the memory issue could no longer see storage from the NAS system I was moving the data off of.
I ended up doing the following to get my storage seen on my XenServer host that had the memory error:
Switched XenServer pool masters
xe host-list <— Get UUID of =desired new XenServer pool master
Performed Full Copy of critical VM’s to other NAS storage through XenServer
Exported critical VM’s to workstation in OVF format for another bbackup
Brought up site on copy of VM on desired NAS storage
Updated FreeNAS NASto new version.
Detached storage from XenServer that had bad PBD plugins to the NAS I was moving data off for update.
Added detached storage successfully back into XenServer
I still want to reconfigure my NAS storage to make it more efficient and still have a lot of work to be done still configuring my applications that serve up my website. I just performed OS updates of the VM I have the site on and noticed Xen library updates which I hope helps in Fedora. I notice Centos behaves a little better in XenServer environment so I may switch this site to a Centos VM.
Ahh well time for a late breakfast!
October 18, 2014
by Darryl Hoytt Comments Off on Exciting Friday Night Updating NAS and Virtual Environment
It has been a while since I updated my NAS systems which run FreeNAS and my XenServer hosts which have my virtual hosts that I share to the world via my blogs and websites. My music server due to the high CPU utilization from running multiple audio streams with varied bit rates is a physical system that was unaffected except you couldn't see the website.
I decided to update the storage first but since I wanted to cut down on the time I decided not to migrate the storage and just shutdown all of the virtual systems. While the VM's shutdown I saved the FreeNAS configuration from both of my NAS systems to one of my local systems. Once the VM's shutdown I updated from the GUI my first NAS system I call "baja".
FreeNAS Update
Baja my first NAS system took the FreeNAS 9.2.1.8 update rebooted and looked ok until it hung with an "istgt_acceptor" error. I looked the error up didn't find much and decided to shut the power off of my NAS and then powered it back up performed a reboot on its own after coming all the way up almost then came up just fine. I tested by bringing up a couple of VM's that had used the iSCSI targets from that device and they came up nicely as well.
Mojave my second NAS system which I also use FreeNAS now that really caused some headaches! After updating to FreeNAS 9.2.1.8 from the GUI it started to come up and it had a CPU issue with some errors that had been logged. After I took care of the CPU issues on my NAS system "Mojave" I turned on a switch to stop on serious errors in the motherboards bios.
Well reboot my system stops in a bios error window with an "8525" memory error on DIMM B2! Well I located a system that I don't use as frequently and could stand a little less RAM and started to open it up and then stopped. I went ahead and opened up my "mojave" NAS system reseated DIMM B2 and confirmed the system would bypass that error and then slid it back into the rack. On reboot of second NAS system I now started getting a timeout error on my USB drive with my FreeNAS installation.
The error code I get now on my "mojave" NAS system is a timeout associated with the error "quirks no_6_byte" and it refuses to go any further. I powered the system down removed the USB blew on it and placed it back in and then the system hung on my iSCSI target just like my other NAS so I rebooted and then got hung up on the USB issue again. I went back and forth on this with reboots about 5 times with different results.
Wanting to take the USB out of the equation I downloaded the USB FreeNAS 9.2.1.8 image, placed the original USB I had the image on into another USB slot on my NAS server booted the system while I went to locate my travel bag of USB sticks. As I sat down to update my new USB stick that I had just removed some files from my second NAS system booted up just fine on the original USB stick on the different USB port. I tested with a few VM's and everything looks fine.
XenServer Update
I then installed about 5 patches to catch up on my XenServer patching I hadn't done since I updated to XS62ESP1 XenServer SP1 around December last year. The patching (patches I put on system: XS62E015, XS62ESP1003, XS62ESP1005, XS62ESP1009, XS62ESP1013, XS62ESP1014) was uneventful except for the multiple reboots. I updated via a putty shell ssh into my XenServer slave hosts that used to be my master. Everything looks good except I have two Centos 7 systems that have disks that are not activein XenServer. All my Fedora and Windows systems seem to be coming up fine.
I'm still working on trying to activate the disks on the Centos 7 VM's. I am taking two approaches on activating the disks. One VM system I had done some work but it's not a lot so that one I am in the process of exporting and then will import back to see how that works. A slow process so started writing this. The other centos 7 VM system I will try to activate by using the "vbd-plug" command and see how that flies.
My XenServer update to be continued later tonight, this morning or sometime this weekend. This post is just another test to see if my blog running on Fedora is working.
******************Update of XenServer Update****************
I took care of the two Centos 7VM's that I could not bring up after the updates of my FreeNAS and XenServer. I ended up going to the XenCenter console and placing the XenTools into the DVDCD and with the XenTools attached both VM's came up.
I then mounted XenTools ISO and installed XenTools without the supplied script:
