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.
This is the cooking process.
Time to eat!
September 28, 2021
by dhoytt Comments Off on Moved to New Web Server
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
September 28, 2021
by dhoytt Comments Off on Change In Music Relay Ports for IceCast Streams Plus adding SSL to Streams
I am consolidating all my streaming ports to 8000 for ShoutCast unencrypted and 8002 for encrypted then IceCast non-encrypted streams to port 8030 with encrypted IceCast on port 8032 with the same mounts for all bit rates. I’m making this change not solely for the benefit of streaming ssl so modern browsers and some applications will not block the unencrypted streams I wanted less ports opened. I ad intended to do this for a while but had to prioritize and get my infrastructure in place first before implementing changes on top of that layer.
You can still stream at different bitrates but now to get the ssl version of the streams for IceCast you would use port 8032 instead of 8030 and 8002 for ShoutCast instead of 8000 for unencrypted.
Here’s a list of the streams you can type of copy and paste into your favorite application or browser (use encrypted for modern browsers) to play the music streams:
As I tend to, I made this a modular change and made it as robust as possible, I tried different methodologies using Apache and Nginx I was familiar with but ultimately opting to go with stunnel which seemed to work better for streaming unencrypted music without added modules. My embedded music players on the site will now have the appropriate encrypted music streams in them. Since my stream is sourced by my W2019 Data Center server and must interact with that applications encoder unencrypted I wasn’t sure how the binds to the network ports would behave on my Linux system I use to relay the streams but worked that out and things are looking good!
September 28, 2021
by dhoytt Comments Off on Streaming Servers Down For Major Updates
Performing OS maintenance patching on my music streaming and music relay servers. One server is running Linux Fedora and the other is running the application and database for the music I play along with hosting the music files.
Will be rebooting and then bringing the servers right back up after the patching and verification services are running.
September 20, 2021
by dhoytt Comments Off on Snakeice House of Beats Music Server Patch Maintenance
Performing OS maintenance patching on my music streaming and music relay servers. One server is running Linux Fedora and the other is running the application and database for the music I play along with hosting the music files.
Will be rebooting and then bringing the servers right back up after the patching and verification services are running.
September 2, 2021
by dhoytt Comments Off on Delicious Meals Ahi Tuna and Chili
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!
September 2, 2021
by dhoytt Comments Off on Delicious Meals Ahi Tuna and Chili
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!
August 22, 2021
by dhoytt Comments Off on 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:
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:
