September 13, 2026
by dhoytt
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Nothing like being anchored up hoping to catch a salmon or even get a bite and then sea lions explode around your anchored boat body slamming and devouring salmon!
August 29, 2026
by dhoytt
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Created two different relishes today with produce from my garden. I did a hot pepper relish and a sweet cucumber relish.
Both relishes were pretty simple and I started with the pepper relish first. A mixture of Jalapeños, Serrano, Habanero and chili peppers, garlic, onion, vinegar, mustard seeds, sugar and salt. Chop together and heat on the stove, simmer and throw on a jar. Tasted sooo good and had a great bite of heat with lots of flavor!
The pickle relish was a similar process except I used the food processor for the ingredients of cucumbers (seeded), peppers, and onions plus added celery seeds minus garlic. Once again tasted fantastic!
During part of this process I was tasting which vinegar to use and the effect was that the vinegar seemed to help this sinus allergy type malaise I was having! Tasting the hot relish seemed to relieve the sinus pressure the medicine I had taken didn’t immediately! Amazing what happens on trying different things!
Hope to do more of this canning and preserving my produce from my garden!
August 21, 2026
by dhoytt
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I decided to updated my Rocky 9.x virtual server and WordPress version to their latest an that went much faster than in the past on my hypervisor servers I built the first of this year. My blade chassis I had been using previously were beefy (7 years old) but the new hardware I have noticed updates of my virtual servers is extremely fast. They went so fast I decided to update the XCP-ng hypervisor servers themselves and since they had kernel updates I decided to reboot onto the new kernel.
Since my I now run my music server as a virtual system and not a physical system I was wondering why I couldn’t migrate from one system to the other and then I recalled I had a USB pass-through so it couldn’t migrate to the other hypervisor so I shutdown the music temporarily for the reboot. Then brought the server back up on my master XCP-ng hypervisor once it was back up. I then migrated the VMs off of the slave XCP-ng hypervisor patched it and rebooted onto the new kernel. Now migrating some Vms back to the XCP-ng slave evening the virtual machines between the two hypervisors.
August 21, 2026
by dhoytt
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Always expanding my repertoire, this time by creating hot sauce with peppers from my garden! Was mostly jalapeño, some Seranto and a bit of chili peppers.
I fermented for about 10 days and then blended with the brine for more liquidity plus it seems like it had a good portion of the heat.
The sauce isn’t as hot as I expected but has a good light taste. Can’t wait to use it on some food. Tonight I’ll try on some wood fired left over chicken!
August 15, 2026
by dhoytt
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Received all of my parts to build my OpenSense router and firewall this week. Put it all together and got it fired up and connected to the networks I want but not controlling anything just yet as I learn what OpenSense can do for my environment.
This is a mini ATX system. Consisting of the following:
Onward with the testing!
August 3, 2026
by dhoytt
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Getting the squash from the garden preserved and bacon made at home, ready for the upcoming months. Making my 5th loaf of squash bread as well.
The bacon I wet brined in a vacuum sealed bag for 10 days in my custom brine. I tasted a piece and may be my best bacon so far!
Next my latest loaf of squash bread it this time I used granulated sugar instead of brown sugar. Tastes good but I prefer it with brown sugar.
Next I cut up some squash from the garden flash freezing it for a couple of hours, then vacuum sealed.
August 1, 2026
by dhoytt
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As of Wednesday of this week I was switched over to the 5gb fiber ISP service from ATT. Friday July 31 2026 I received and setup my new TpLink BE19000 Tri-Band Wi-Fi 7 Router with 10gbe LAN and WAN connections to be able to access that full bandwidth of 5gb. Everything setup fine I forwarded the ports needed for my servers to work mirroring what I have with my TpLink ArcherAX11000. I have my entire server operation at 10gbe withing my lab and house now except some camera subnets.
Was looking at ways to measure my speeds but there aren’t any sites I see that can measure speeds up to 5-10gbps. Everything seems 1gbps max for internet speed tests. I’ll try to find some server with iperf or something to test with possibly. Interestingly enough the ATT modem shows it’s at 10gb.
Things do seem to be moving faster even for my wireless. We will see. for now due to the finicky behavior of switching over some of my IOT devices I kept my TpLink ArcherAX11000 connected to them as an access point.
More testing and usage to come!
July 23, 2026
by dhoytt
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Doesn’t look pretty but I now have both!of the XCP-ng servers I built, fine tuned and stress tested in my rack. I’ll post specs later. Now my C7000 is retired I just have to clean it up and find it a new home!
I had to enlarge one hole in one of my rails attached to my 4U server case and move my rails down an inch. Physically besides connecting the networking that was the only hiccup. Now my hallway is empty and its time for cleanup. This will now give me back my work space for testing and building new equipment.
The servers are still a bit noisy as I went with the high end 8k rpm fans even though I have active heat sinks with fans. I’ll explore more liquid cooling but its a lot more work with server class CPUs. A bit more work than I set out to do with all of the updates but saves me time and gives my weekends more time for other things I’m hoping. Would have completed this earlier this week but I was really ill, still feel something and have to visit the doctor tomorrow so will see.
I officially removed my Bl460 HP Gen 8 Blades from being XCP-ng servers in my pool as well. They did a great job but I can already tell these new servers are much faster!
Made sure my Xcp-ng were at the latest patch revisions for XCP-ng 8.3 plus updated my community XO version via git. Then updated my web server, music relay server for IceCast and ShoutCast and music server. Had to swap my VMs between virtual servers as some patches required a reboot. Reminded me why I wanted more memory before this AI trend of gobbling up the computer chips.
I obviously need do cable management, I will rack my switches in a new manner plus a host of other things like a custom built open source router rebuild. I needed to reboot my router I was using for NAT forwarding.
July 18, 2026
by dhoytt
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One of my custom built XCP-ng virtualization servers is finally in my rack, connected and working. I will soon have my hallway space mostly back which is where they have been running serving up my virtual environment for the past few months. The primary issue has been locating racks, rails and hardware and piecing them together.
I also had to go pickup a mounting bracket for my 2.5” boot drive to mount into my 5.25” bay. I was going to use ssd’s and had purchased hot swap bays for the boot drives but one of my ssd’s died so I went with mechanical 2.5” drives I had lying around that used to be inside C7000 blade servers. They will not get hammered since they are just the boot drives.
I ended up using a really old rack and rail system to rack my systems. I have had these rack and rails for well over 25 plus years now and cannot recall where I got them. They are plain straight forward and unlike any I have ever seen in the enterprise world but they work well for me with 2u and up rack mount cases. I am using 4u cases in this iteration of virtualization servers.
Not all the holes lined up and I ended up doing something I was hoping I wouldn’t have to do again which is drilling additional holes in the rail portion that connects to the case. This wasn’t bad considering in the past I have had to drill in cases to put things like support studs for motherboards and bolts and screws to act like rivets to connect rail kits. I have even did some specialized work for airflow baffles in the past.
Anyway I have the template needed for the other case to get racked and will hopefully get to do that tomorrow after moving all the VMs to the system in the rack currently. I need to make the system in the rack the master server in XCP-ng before moving the VMs over.
July 18, 2026
by dhoytt
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Updated my version of WordPress along with my music servers and my web server as well that runs on Rocky 9.x.
