Porkchop Sandwiches

Today Nora turned 7 & Heather got accepted into Nursing School!!!

I was thinking about GUI’s for a few minutes tonight and it kind of shocked me how far we’ve come… It’s great and all AND it started me on a trip down memory lane and why it is I know we’ve come so far. My Dad used to play games with me when I was 4 or 5, sometimes he would late me stay up late to play “Cannon fodder”, “Spilunx”(sp?) or SimCity Classic on a Mac SE b/w w/ 512k of RAM. My cousin showed me Napster and The Scour Exchange, Doom, Unreal. Thanks to these two great people I found a passion for technology that will forever burn.

UPDATE 06/13/2023 – I am now 25,248 out of 2,963,492 which equals 0.008519%! I also realized that both of these placements mean I’m in the top 30,000 for Donor Rank 🙂 I have placed a Folding@Home Stats tool on the ride-side menu of my blog too for daily tracking.

It’s official… I am in the top 1% of Folding@home donors worldwide! As of today May 11th I am ranked 27,618 out of 2,961,706 donors. Doing the math (hopefully the right way) makes me in the top 1% or 0.009325% to be a little more presise. I’ve been folding for many many years and thanks be to my cousin F.M. for introducing me to folding. He showed off a “toolbox” rig running a PII-450MHz (Deshutes 80523) w/ 128MB of RAM on Win2k 🙂

Folding@home uses spare/idle compute resources to process complex bio-chem math in order to accurately model how life works on a cellular level (I think this statement is mostly correct?)* Check them out and participate! Folding for science advances life.

* here’s the actual excerpt from their website.
” “Folding” in our community refers to running simulations of proteins, the molecular machines that perform most of the active processes we associate with life, from muscle contraction to sensing light and digesting food. We exploit the biological insight these simulations provide to inform drug discovery and other efforts to combat global health threats.”

March was kind of a big month…?

I’m currently working on a graphically pleasing option, spreadsheet-wise, to show historical data over time to get a more accurate picture of what usage looks like. Getting my data-science on! 🙂

In 78 days I will hit the 5 year service mark with my Plex server! Incredibly exciting time. I’ve had plexpy, now known as Tautulli installed since day 1 so I will also get to review 5 whole years worth of viewing stats 🙂 Data science is fun and a major reason I started this whole project in the first place.

I’ll try to mark this milestone with a salute to Plex, self hosted media server enthusiasts and the FOSS community (long live open-source!) so stay tuned!

*Quick note: the text inside <> is console derived, either output or commands

Scenario: Two TrueNAS hosts; inside of a jail, hosted on Server1, mount an NFS share residing on Server2.
– Server2 exports </mnt/dozer/test> as an NFS share
– Created mount point in jail <mkdir -p /mnt/nfs>
– Tried <mount -t nfs Server2:/mnt/dozer/test /mnt/nfs> in jail

I’ve tried for quite some time now to accomplish this but to no avail… UNTIL TODAY! I sat down, thought about it good and hard and then had a crazy idea; What if I mounted that NFS share from Server2 on Server1 (proper) first then created a mount point in the jail configuration for that path?

On Server1 (proper): <mkdir -p /mnt/nfstest> then
<mount -t nfs Server2:/mnt/dozer/test /mnt/nfstest>
In jail on Server1:
<mkdir -p /mnt/nfstest> then
<mount -t nfs Server1:/mnt/nfstest /mnt/nfs>

But that didn’t frickin’ work so I thought about it some more, for about 5 seconds, then I began Google Fu’ing. With new key words in mind from the crazy idea experiment I was able to find at least a dozen posts/articles outlining the solution I’ve been searching for!

Now, this is NOT supported by iX or the TrueNAS project BUT it’s totally doable and it works exactly as it should. I had the first part right, SSH to Server1 then using the console, mount the NFS share from Server2. Here are the missing pieces;

1. When mounting the share on Server1, do it inside of an existing dataset instead of creating a new mount path (/mnt/dozer/nfstest vs /mnt/nfstest).
2. An NFS share on Server1 has to be created via the webUI, using the new console-mounted directory from above.

Finally, via the webUI on Server1, create a new mount point in the jail configuration using mount path from missing piece #1 as the source and wherever you want the destination to be inside the jail ( I used </mnt/test> ).

• Using console on Server1: <mkdir -p /mnt/dozer/nfstest> then
  <mount -t nfs Server2:/mnt/dozer/test>
• Using webUI on Server1: Create an NFS share using the path </mnt/dozer/nfstest>
• Inside jail on Server1 using console: <mkdir -p /mnt/nfs> then
  <mount -t nfs Server1:/mnt/dozer/nfstest /mnt/nfs>

And there you have it… remote NFS mounted storage inside of a jail. 🙂

RRD Summary, monthly, from Jan 1st 2021 to the present

Here’s a screeny of the RRD totals for 2020. There are two months missing… dunno what happened. And you can see that I closed out the year with a bang 🙂