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What happened to “The Truth”

Did our society lose track of the concept of truth and the basics involved in it. I think so. We’ve become so confrontational when we don’t agree with something or someone we lose track of the idea that it may not be the truth. We would rather go down swinging than listen to facts that may eventually prove us wrong. It works both ways. Sometimes the confrontation is when we have the facts and others wont listen to reason. We’re so eager for the other to believe us we’re blinded by the fact that they may believe the opposite. It’s they’re choice. We don’t, can’t,  and shouldn’t tell people what to think. That’s been tried for thousands of years. Ask the North Koreans how that’s working out for they’re economy.

We can believe so blindly in something that when we are confronted with facts or an alternative theory we disregard it instantly and completely. Blindly.

It’s not new at all.

Think of the poor guy who offered up the theory that the world was not flat, cars would never replace horses. I could go on and on. They were intensely scrutinized and ridiculed for what they believed in but are now praised for what they stood up for.

Image result for aristotle

Image result for einsteinCan you imagine what Einstein and even Aristotle were viewed as when they theorized some of the greatest answers we now see as reality. Friggen crack pots! They were giving truthful answers to things individuals had blindly thought and believed were the truth for they’re entire lives, even history. Really, Einstein theorized gravity from an acorn falling out of a tree and a distortion of space? You know they thought he was nuts! Pun intended.

Sometimes I see us as basically stupid beings determined to fail again, and again, and again. History says it’s the truth. Even today it happens in our society and world.

George Santayana said it, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Churchill too, “We must always look forward, but we have to understand our history in order to not repeat the mistakes of the past. I have seen too many instances where people continue to pursue wrong courses of action because they do not take the time to think critically about what has happened in the past.”

I’m thankful that I find myself in the world with an engineering/science style of thought. Things are more zeros and ones for me. Black and white. They work or they don’t. I think my life is so much easier if I face truth and live truth. I try not to pollute things to much, which is difficult for me, and see things in a realistic way. Black and white. I may be wrong sometimes, I am and I accept that, but things seem to just work out better if I simplify them.

Every time I’ve stuck my nose in where it doesn’t belong, it just doesn’t seem to work out well for me. (a good friend told me that)

I tend to follow facts, evidence and truth. Makes me an outcast! A sane outcast.

ODroid HC2

OK….

This is a cool little SBC (Single Board Computer) on a big ass heat sink from ODROID. I saw this and thought ‘what can I do with it’. I already use a RPi 3+ and Pi-Hole to run my DNS service inside my local network and to block ads and garbage.ODROID-HC2 I use an old Dell machine to run my firewall. I built the Freenas system which has so many features and options I haven’t even touched the surface of it yet. What am I going to do with this?

Before I tell you what I did I’m going to explain a bit about this thing and what attracted me to it. First of all cost. The complete package consists of board, power supply, case and the SD card for $78 USD. It’s a bit more than the RPi 3+ but an added feature is the SATA connector which allows you to install a drive onto it. If you use a SSD drive you have a full solid state system. Use a big ass spinning drive and it’s a storage appliance. Dream shit up. Like the RPi, it’s a great project starter.

There are a bunch of pre-packaged OS images for it and a small community out there for support and sharing of ideas, uses and development. Loading the OS onto the SD is straight forward, even easier when you read the instructions first. Duh! A cool thing is with SD cards it was simple to create a few different images and swap them back and forth. As long as the mount and share permissions with the drive are consistent you can swap OS systems on SD cards in seconds.

I started out loading a straight up Ubuntu 16.04 Server package to see how it performed so I could get a better idea of capabilities and what I could possibly do with it. It’s actually pretty fast as long as you don’t bury it with overhead like a desktop GUI. I loaded Webmin and it seemed to handle it fine. They do have a desktop version of Ubuntu 18.04 with Mate as it’s GUI but I didn’t try it.

Next I found a package based on OpenMediaVault. Simple install and worked fine. My issue here is that I just built a FreeNAS system with 50 TB of ZFS storage. Do I really need a 2 TB file server? Nope. But it did work and was straight forward to get the whole thing up and running in minutes.

Next up KODI. Simple and fast install and worked easy. Mount the drive and load up whatever you want. You could spend a few bucks and buy a big drive like a 8, 10, or 12 TB drive and have tons of KODI storage for music and video. Here again My FreeNAS box. I loaded Plex Media Server in a Jailed environment and pointed it to over two thousand  HD movies and over a million tracks of music. I really don’t need KODI.

Odroid offers all kinds of SBC, parts, and pieces for great project starters. Prices are decent if you buy from the US distributor. ameridroid.com rather than Amazon. You wont get you parts the same day but for us in small town USA it really never makes a difference anyway.

So my intention is to make a caching DNS, Pi-Hole server out of it. I’ll keep you posted.

 

Follow the MONEY!!

So…

You have to wonder where the money is coming from to pay off all the idiots who are coming out of the woodwork to oppose the Kavanaugh confirmation. Trust me, it’s going to get worse. The Kennedy Supreme Court seat that’s vacant is really that important.

It’s about money. What did they offer Senator Flake? You know they did it.

All this costs money and there are only a handful of fringe Leftist individuals/groups who could actually line up all of the dots, connect them together, and understand the long term affect that the confirmation of a strict constitutionalist onto the Supreme Court would have. Oh, and pay for this whole circus while covering it up. The jackasses who block elevators and hold signs in front of restaurants are just lemmings that get a scrap here and there. There’s not a single brain cell among them.

Example: Dr. Blassey Ford. They used her and they’ll toss her back more distraught and shredded than ever. If she actually thinks that her troubles regarding her past are finally behind her and she can move forward with her life, she is surely mistaken. Her shit just started. It will never end. I believed her story, maybe not the who part, but she believed it and that’s what made me have empathy for her. They’ll shred her. Both sides.

I found a report that described the trail of money ending at an ex-Clinton staffer emanating from non other than Left Wing extremist George Soros routed through multiple layers of non profit corporations to hide the source.

Go figure. Soros and the Clintons. The Left wing’s bank manager and the orchestrators. You know the ‘California Bullet Train to Nowhere’ Feinstien’s are padding their retirements off of this Soros money too. What did they get out of it!

Liberals! Don’t get your panties in a bunch! This shit happens on the Right too! I’m not talking about the middle of either party. I’m talking about the fringes. They exist on the sphincter of both parties. The same sphincter muscle that wrote that shit filled Op-Ed for the NY Times, although that might have been a small piece of shit stuck to the sphincter itself.

Soros and the Clinton’s are involved in all of this. Go figure. The Clinton’s have been really quite during this whole process and it made me wonder when their name would seep up from the cesspool of shit and taint the whole process. They’ve been in it all along! They would fully understand what it would do to the current and future of the nation. Who else but a guy that stuck a cigar up a woman’s tush would dream this shit up. People are worried about the possibility, possibility people, of a fourteen year old high school boy touching a girl’s booby at a party but then take the knee for a guy who was proven to have cigar banged a woman in the Oval Office, What the fuck is wrong with people!

They are so hell bent on power they have no issues with shredding anyone. Ford, Kavanaugh, Judge, Lewinski, Trump. Anyone who stands in the way is only an obstacle. They don’t care about anybody and will screw individuals or groups opposing them into a mashed pulp in a whim and without even losing a breath or moment of sleep.

Someone to admire, so far, is Mark Judge. He had a problem and dealt with it. I commend him on that and wish him all the sobriety he can gulp down. Hold your ground. Call your sponsor! Go to a meeting!

Alcoholics Anonymous

I need to go puke….and it ain’t from drinking to much playing ‘Triangles’ with my buddies.

Yup! I did touch her booby!

Now We’re Talking! Let’s Have Some Fun Lake Havasu Style!

Now we’re talkin! This week in Lake Havasu!

I heard them practicing at 5:30 this morning as the sun was coming up!

Blowsion World Finals

The Blowsion World Finals is the most venerable and prestigious single personal watercraft event in the world. With an invitation-only policy attracting over 750 of the world’s best personal watercraft racers, the World Finals have been the cornerstone of International Jet Sports Boating Association (IJSBA) racing. In its 37th year, racers from around the world make the pilgrimage to Lake Havasu City every October for the opportunity to vie for the world champion title on the international stage.

September 29 – October 7

Crazy Horse Campgrounds, 1534 Beachcomber Blvd., Lake Havasu City, AZ 86403
ijsba.com | Admission Price: Entry to event is free

Pictures and text taken from www.golakehavasu.com

Flashing the LSI SAS 9211 into IT Mode

What a way to start a post. I’m sure the title alone will kill off anybody reading this one. Read it or not. Don’t care. But if you ever have the need to flash a LSI RAID card here it is!

So……

FreeNAS uses a different method of creating a volume of disks than traditional RAID does so the controllers used for the hard drives need to be in a different mode to run them. I am going to control the file system with software instead of hardware. However it is possible to use the same disk controller card to do either traditional or software volumes.

The motherboard I chose to use in my FreeNAS system, Supermicro Micro ATX DDR4 LGA 1151 Motherboards X11SSM-Fis a server quality board and has eight SATA ports built onto it. You can see them in the lower right corner of the picture. The configuration I am creating has the need for fourteen SATA ports. Doing the research for the correct controller card I found through the FreeNAS forums the model of card that was most widely used and proven to work in the configuration of system I am building.

 

 

The card I chose was the LSI SAS-9211-8i. This was a part that others have used and it’s a known, proven controller in the FreeNAS system. The card comes in two programmable flavors or modes, IR (Integrated RAID) and IT (Initiator Target). I purchased the card from Amazon however they can be found used, all over the internet and can be purchased in either IT or IR modes. For my application I was after a card in IT Mode since I didn’t require the hardware to control my volume, software was going to handle it. I did however want to make sure I used the latest firmware available so I didn’t care which mode it was in since I was going to upgrade it anyway. Once I was upgrading the firmware I could easily switch it to IT Mode.

Once again. RESEARCH RESEARCH RESEARCH

Follow along as I step through this. I am using information from other’s sites as well, don’t need to reinvent the wheel, and will properly give credit at the bottom of this post.

I used a Dell Optiplex 980 configured to boot from a bootable, MS_DOS, USB thumb drive I created with Rufus. I pre-loaded the thumb drive with the firmware and updated BIOS for the LSI 9211 to run in IT Mode. Just in case I unplugged the hard drive and CD ROM of the 980 so if I made a mistake it wouldn’t erase the OS I had on the hard drive. I also made note of the 980 BIOS configuration prior to changing it to boot from a USB drive just so I could get it all back together again. It’s not brain surgery so don’t make too much out of it.

Install the LSI 9211 card into a suitable PCI slot and enter its configuration page by pressing CTRL-C during boot Post sequence. You will see a page confirming the model and firmware revision installed on your card as below.In my case, my card is a 9211 with 8 internal ports, firmware 5.00.13.00 in IR (Integrated RAID) mode.

initial_IR_mode

Now reboot from the USB stick and wait for the command prompt to appear. You may need to adjust your BIOS boot settings to enable booting from your USB stick. I did.

C:\

I am going to use the sas2flsh program to perform the update. Enter the command

sas2flsh -o -e 6

This command will put the card into advanced mode -o and then erase the flash memory -e 6.

You should see the following output

C:\SAS2FLSH.EXE -o -e 6
Advanced Mode Set

Adapter Selected is a LSI SAS: SAS2008(B2)

Executing Operation: Erase Flash

Erasing Flash Region…

Erase Flash Operation Successful!

Resetting Adapter…
Reset Successful!

Finished Processing Commands Successfully.
Exiting SAS2Flash.

Lunch time…… I’ll be back. Don’t reboot or shut off the machine! Very important

It’s all about the Supreme Court

OK! I’m embarrassed. We voted for these morons!

I’m embarrassed how my government works. How far the two sides of our government/society are willing to go to advance their agenda. How many of us can claim total innocence all the way back to high school. Be honest. Can you?

Where were all of these people when Kavanaugh was appointed to the District Court over twelve years ago? Where were they when the hearings first began? They are being created by politicians on an ‘as needed’ basis. They will be disgraced, dismissed and discarded in the end. They’ll fade back into obscurity. Just as the Left has it planned. These people are being used, even if they are right or wrong and telling the truth, they are being used and will get discarded in the end. It’s our society. We made this shit up!

Where were all of these people when Bill Clinton stuck a cigar up Monica Lewinski’s vagina while he was in the White House? In the Oval Office!! These are the same people who slammed Monica Lewinski! They made it all her fault! The covered it all up and said it was OK. It’s the same thing. They’re still doing it! It’s called getting Borked. It all happened before. Put your fucking phone down and pick up a history book!

Here’s what I see.

  • The Left hates Trump. More over they hate the Right’s ideology. It’s working.
  • The Right hates the Left and it’s ideology. It’s not working.
  • The Left knows if Trump gets Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court it will potentially stack the court for decades and they are willing to go to any means to stop it. Even if it means sacrificing short term goals. It’s they’re ‘Spartacus Moment’! Thanks Cory Booker for that phrase!
  • It has nothing to do with Kavanaugh’s background. It’s simply a way to stall off the vote until after the mid-term elections that the Left believes will give them back either the Senate or House and then they can stop Trump’s agenda.

This is what we are now. This is what we have driven our society to become. We are based on slander and innuendo which never needs to be proven. We are letting our society dissolve into a media controlled and manipulated bucket of slanderous shit. Nothing needs to be proven or retracted.

Every IT nerd out there is thinking they’ll never get a date because they will get sued if they even ask someone else out or show any interest at all.

I cant ever run for any office, not that I ever would, simply because I did cop a feel! I did touch her ass. I did have sex with a girl in high school. I did say stupid teenager shit that would now get me disgraced in the public court. I did! I was a stupid adolescent, testosterone filled male idiot. Who fucking cares. It was the 60’s and 70’s hell yes I did it!

How about it. Can you claim innocence and purity since the day you were born? I’m guessing here but thinking not.

Check this out! ODROID HC2

I had an idea that was motivated by a user in the FreeNAS forums. OK, not really my idea but I thought this would work for me in my system. Here’s my thought. I use a Raspberry Pi v2 for my Pi-Hole Ad-Blocker.ODROID-HC2 Since this little device can actually run full versions of server level OS, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, I could take my low resource  applications. Pi-hole, DNS, etc. along with a couple scripts that backup some configurations from FreeNAS, and simply add this to my system. I’m planning on using one of the WD SSD 240 GB drives that FreeNAS didn’t like during the NAS build and use it as an appliance.

Here’s where I bought it: www.Ameridroid.com which is a SF Bay area distributor. I bought board, power supply, case, and 16 GB SD card for $78.00 US. I kind of figure if it doesn’t work I have a RPi on steroids. HAHAHAHA!

Get it? It’s called a ODROID! I crack my self up.

 

Pi-Hole! Nice name huh?

One thing I had during the FreeNAS build was some time to read and research the FreeNAS forums and other tech related sites. I had built a pfSense firewall after getting frustrated with the lame consumer level products and struggling to make them do what I wanted. pfSense was simple and a straight forward firewall.

During the process I started testing an application for pfSense called pfBlockerNG which is designed to filter all kinds of ads, attacks and all around crap coming from both inside and out side of your network. It works really well.

I also found Pi-Hole. Killer name!

I’ll do a write up on both but I’m using them in combination and it amazing to see what these applications catch. If you think your network is secure your wrong. The other benefit is how each of them deal with ads and pop up iFrame type windows. Even my cell phone is faster!

Week 2 with FreeNAS

So…..

It’s been two weeks since I started learning FreeBSD and the FreeNAS application. I have certainly burned a few brain cells through the process, but have also learned so much I think I’m in over load a bit. Thanks to the community forums at FreeNAS. Without the research vessel the forums and the individuals there provide I would still be bumbling around trying to figure things out to install the system and avoiding the inevitable pitfalls.

I spent a lot of time reading and following the threads to understand more of what not to do so I wouldn’t jump in and build my system with the wrong parts. Avoiding pitfalls was what I was after. I didn’t need to reinvent the wheel and I was looking to build a ‘know quantity’ system that had been proven. The forums are filled with people who try and fail at putting together the wrong parts and lose things rather than taking the advice of others.

So I had a few benefits. One was building a test environment in VirtualBox that was similar to the system I had planned in reality. Trust me, I blew it up a couple times making mistakes but I didn’t lose anything and that was my intention. The other was creating my production system correctly.

In the beginning my intention was to use all surplus parts from all the pieces I had. I did. However I also purchased a couple of the system parts that were key to building a system that would last and be secure. A server level motherboard, ECC RAM and decent power supply started me with a package that would be reliable.

 

TBC….

FreeNAS, It’s Not for Everyone

Can you say learning curve! I’m not talking YouTube video learning curve, I’m talking full on technical for the really nerdy IT Systems Administrator learning curve.

I feel lucky because I have my own home lab to research my projects before I really get to it. Between virtual machines in the lab and Digital Ocean I can package almost anything in an environment similar to production. If I blow it all up it takes minutes to reassemble it. I blow a lot of shit up during testing!

I totally underestimated FreeNAS. I thought I knew enough about RAID, volumes, clusters, de-dupe and all that stuff to simply walk right on in and have the killer NAS up and running over the weekend. HAHAHAHAHA! Welcome to FreeNAS and ZFS file systems.

I thought I would do some research to get a basic understanding. I knew I was in for a ride when I realized ZFS was originally created by Sun Microsystems. After Sun Microsystems was bought by Oracle the ZFS project was removed from open source. A group of the original design engineers spun the project into OpenZFS in 2013 and maintain it as open source.

Here’s the Wiki link for a ZFS history lesson: Wikipedia, ZFS

Here’s the link to the OpenZFS Wiki: Wikipedia:OpenZFS

Just the names of the companies involved let me know this was enterprise level stuff and not the typical end user Best Buy, Seagate or Western Digital backup system. If you want a storage device to backup your PC and keep your ITunes music on, this aint it! Go to Best Buy and get a USB drive with a pre-loaded app. It will save you some brain cells, sleep, coffee and weeks of reading to get a basic grasp of ZFS.

I’ve reloaded my test rig so many times I think my USB drive started to smoke. I really had to let go of some standards from RAID technology to understand how the whole ZFS thing works. Trust me, I feel like I only read the introduction of a book that’s a thousand pages long.

Amazes me when I consider the individuals that dream this stuff up. There are some really smart people out there. Scary smart.

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