End Of Summer 2025

Technically still summer, tomorrow will be last day, but we are going to go to the Washington State Fair. I got the tickets at least.

Going to go with a mission, because it will be late and we don’t have that much time.

Dropping off son to school right after.

Good weekend, Seahawks Won by a lot, Huskies won the Apple Cup by a lot, moved services to a cheaper box, cracked 330 officially.

Hoping tomorrow I will hit under 330 keeping my streak going.

Edit: Adding this after going to the fair. I lost my keys at the fair, but I was able to locate it because of the tile attached to it last year. I dunno if I feel stupid for losing my keys or smart for having a tile on it.

Weight: 332.8

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Production VMs on KVM

Pretty big accomplishment, the first was a simple DNS server, then was a little bit harder with the main LDAP server. But the tough one, which I knew was going to be it was the Unifi Network Application server. I decided on the container route for both the Mongo DB and the application server itself.

A mix of forums, chatgpt, and what I knew got me through it and now I am on the latest version 9.4.19 on a VM using a container.

Bonus is that I was able to backup and restore my old settings making it simple.

This allowed me to upgrade home assistant because it needed an updated UniFi controller.

As a bonus I was able to update firmware for the Access Points and couple IoT devices.

Summer definitely coming to an end, getting colder.

Weight went back up, got two more days to bring it down to keep it official.

Weight: 331.6

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Officially Under 330

Three consecutive days of being under 330 makes it official, I am under 330. No weirdness too like wearing light clothes or fasting a day and weighing in right before and after midnight to get two days. This was legit (all my weight crosses are legit I just thought about doing it).

Thinking about going to Washington State Fair, may just be a token visit though.

Tomorrow or Sunday I will need to upgrade my ubiquiti server though. Kind of nervous.

Big weekend.

Weight: 329.6

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Playing With QEMU KVM

Now that I got 1 QEMU server going, planning on getting more. Probably another production one and a development one.

It is cool, I got a pair of Linux templates on my QEMU server now and am ready to move production workloads to QEMU.

Need to start tracking VMs like how I did in the VM upgrade.

Weight: 328.4

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First Production KVM Host

Got my first production KVM host built, this is based on a Lenovo M910Q, has a quality NVME storage for VMs and a cheaper 256GB SSD for the OS. There is a USB Ethernet for management while the onboard one has VLAN tags.

This is running Rocky 9, an OS I can manage well.

Weight: 329.6

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Vlans on QEMU-KVM

Cool. I figured out how to configure my KVM host to use a trunked VLAN for multiple subnet access. I can now land a VM on any subnet. Still reviewing if my process is right but here is a script.

#!/bin/bash
VMINT="en0"
VLANINT="vmnetwork"
BRIDGE="vmbridge"
VLANTAG=199

# Bridge should already exist but here is how to create it
nmcli connection add type bridge \
  ifname ${BRIDGE} \
  con-name ${BRIDGE}

# Attach VLAN interface to the bridge
nmcli connection add type vlan \
  ifname ${VLANINT}${VLANTAG} \
  con-name ${VLANINT}${VLANTAG} \
  dev ${VMINT} id ${VLANTAG} \
  master ${BRIDGE}

nmcli con mod ${BRIDGE} ipv4.method "disabled"
nmcli con mod ${BRIDGE} ipv6.method "disabled"

cat << ENDOFFILE > $VLANINT.xml 
<network>
  <name>'$VLANINT'</name>
  <forward mode='bridge'/>
  <bridge name='$BRIDGE'/>
</network>
ENDOFFILE

virsh net-define ${VLANINT}.xml
virsh net-start ${VLANINT}
virsh net-autostart ${VLANINT}

Really cool, another step towards bailing on ESXi.

Weight: 330.6

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ESXi to KVM

Taking the first steps in getting VMs on to a Rocky 9 box in production. This will lead to my migration off of ESXi. Doesn’t look like it will be an easy or quick journey, trying to figure out how to simply run VMs on a different tagged VLAN.

Got ideas, we will see how it goes.

Kind of tired today, hoping to sleep early.

Weight: 331.6

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Weekend To Do List

Like most weekends lately, I have setup a todo list, this is one weekend I felt like I got a lot done.

One thing was cleaning up the office, although not completely done, looking much better, but I did sacrifice the living room a bit.

During the course of the week I hope to finish cleaning up the living room.

The two things I did not do that I wish I got done was the UniFi and HomeAssistant upgrade.

One holdup was a QEMU-KVM host, I thought I would have all the parts sooner. Also my zoneminder server, the new fan totally dropped the temps.

Weight: 334.4

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Office Clean Zoneminder Overheating

Still not 100% sure what is going on with zoneminder NVR, I did replace the power supply and looks like it added some stability. But today as it was running I noticed it was overheating, it did hit some high temps over 100C which is considered critical.

Going to try a new fan I got. Need to get this right.

I am also adding a nagios monitor for CPU temps.

Got my steps done, but still a lot more things to do.

Weight: 332.4

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Cracked 330, Hard Day

Although today was a day off, it was a struggle today.

We did get home late last night, by the time I went to bed it was 6AM and I did weigh in anr cracked 330, so that is the official. But I did eat dinner (by then breakfast) and the rest of the day I did not crack 330, but I did taste cracking 330.

Which technically makes it the lightest I been this year. Not only did the scale show it, but a shirt that used to be tight on my was not so tight.

After my swim today was too tired to clean. It is because a mix of not enough sleep, and the swim. I did not want to go swimming today, but I did, I pushed when I was lazy, shows the ability to overcome.

On a positive note, I got the zoneminder running again, I think the problem may have been with an unstable firmware to the motherboard. It also could be a bad power supply. I will probably return the CPU I got.

Also tried to upgrade my Windows 10 to Windows 11, failed again. May have to install everything from scratch.

I thinking I will go to bed early and sleep in. Won’t help tomorrow but will help Sunday.

Weight: 329.4

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