Its_All.Lost
Because hope just breeds everlasting misery…

The Node is Red Long Live The Node

The Node is Red, long live the Node! I got back into the Pi recently after a few months off of fiddling with it. I had already made the sub board for the alarm, I decided to remake the temperature board as well (it didn’t work either). So I had the boards ready now I needed the software. I could try to put back together the original scripts I had, or I could just start fresh. I decided to start fresh. While Googling something (I don’t remember what) I came across Node-Red. Completely unfamiliar with it. I have seen Node.js here or there but thats it. Looked a little further and then I installed it. It’s awesome really. I am nit the best at Javascript so it’s a curve to me but the GUI makes up for that. I got Node-Red up and running on the Raspberry Pi in about 15 minutes. I won’t go into install details as they are out there already. What is not out there, or at least is very hard to find, are examples of GOOD flows, or tutorials on how to get things done. Like what code is needed to do the simple things, but I guess they are expecting you to know that already.

Getting Node-Red installed was easy, besides not finding much help on the web I also didn’t realize that you need to install all the modules you will be using before hand. So things like Twitter, Pushbullet, BMP temp sensors won’t work until those modules are installed. Installing was no problem, but it took the little RPi forever to install them all. I would say it took the better part of half a day to search and get them all loaded.

Because of the lack if examples (and my lack of JS) it took me a few days to figure out how to grab part of the URL and pass it to a page to spit it back at you. Simple right? So here it is, copy and pasted in all its glory (taken from http://sharpk60.blogspot.com/2014/10/first-steps-with-node-red.html):

ClearOS and SMTP with Comcast

With ClearOS 6 I was never able to get outgoing mail to work decently. Sure I could have used Comcast as a relay but then all my mail shows a bunch of Comcast junk as the sender. Pass. For some reason I don’t remember I could not get it to work well with Google;s servers either.

Well now I am running ClearOS 7, and the email seems to work flawlessly out of the box. I simply entered my Google mail settings (worked just fine with a Google Apps Domain) and hit the “Update and test” button – BAM! Email delivered. I am so happy right now.

There was one small catch, not any Gmail config worked. Here is what I used: Port 465 with SSL, 587 with TLS wouldn’t work for me. This was for ClearOS using Google SMTP servers with Comcast as the ISP.

OS X and transferring files (with Transmit)

In my last post I mentioned how one of my server hard drives died and I ended up purchasing a replacement. I had done some thinking on what I wanted to do with regards on how to utilize the new drive, and that ClearOS 7 was now available. I decided to use the new 3TB drive as added storage, and migrate some files. I wanted to merge my Plex media to one source instead of being spread over three drives like it was. To do this was very easy, just time consuming due to the amount of movies I needed to move, somewhere around 450GB worth. I didn’t even think of using the terminal and issuing a “mv” command as I am sure it would have been faster and this issue wouldn’t have occurred. I fired up Transmit FTP and opened two windows. One window was the old drive and the other the new. I simply drag and dropped the files, copying them, and let it run while I went to sleep. I awoke the next day to an error of no free disk space on my Mac Pro. WTF? Upon investigation I found that Transmit was caching the file transfers locally on my Mac. Thats just fucking stupid. So I’m assuming that you cannot transfer more files than you have free disk space, because apparently it will run your drive down and crash your shit.

A reboot will clear the cache (for Transmit) or you can manually delete the cache. Its located at:
~/Library/Cache

There is a ton of other crap in there as well. Most of it should be safe to delete, it is just cache right?

Hard drive failure and adventures in ClearOS 7

I woke up Friday morning to the wife, “hey wake, the computer in the closet is making noises” (I have the server in the family room front entry closet with the door open). Oh great, fantastic way to wake up. Sure as shit it was making noises, zzzzzzzz-click zzzzzzz-click. Thing is toast. Good news or bad news first? Good? It was only a 160GB SATA 3GB/s drive nothing massive, and it was not the OS so the intarwebs and therefor our lives are all still functioning. The bad… it was a storage drive, a rather old storage drive – that was not backed up as it was rarely used. It contained all of our digital family pictures for the last 15 years. From the birth of our first daughter to the camping trip we had this last July. Gone. I never did like digital pictures.

In the wake of the disaster I ran out to Fry’s and purchased a replacement drive. Wow, drives are cheap now. I haven’t bought a hard drive in ages it seems. I was able to snag a 3TB 7200RPM SATA 6GB/s for $99 (without shopping around). 1TB drives as cheap as $40 bucks, damn! Even the 2TB hybrid-SSD drive was only $100 dollars.

Here is where the fun really begins. Since I had a shiny new, and massive, drive should I just do a fresh install and migrate to the new drive? Should I just toss it in as storage and rock on. Or, should I do a fresh install of ClearOS 7 that just recently dropped? I opted for a clean ClearOS 7 install. Sadly I feel it still hasn’t come very far from when I tried it back in Beta. It installed flawlessly this time and in a fairly decent amount of time. No issues with the quad-gigabit PCI-e network adapter which was nice. The thing that I noticed overall that worked out of the box with zero issues was the server sending email. My ISP blocks port 25 and I found ClearOS 6 to be a pain in the ass to get it to send mail, in fact I was unsuccessful in my attempts (I do not want to use my ISP as a relay). With 7 I was able to change the settings very easily to use GMail servers with no problems. However but it was not by any means a smooth configuration process. In fact I write this from my ClearOS 6.6 network, I booted back into the old drive (I didn’t wipe it!). I had nothing but problems trying to get Flexshares to work over the network, mainly because Samba was being a bitch. OpenLDAP and Samba were not playing nice. I am gathering from all the research and tweaking conf files that I installed some modules in an “incorrect” order. I found a post somewhere that mentioned the SMTP module was required to get Flexshares working 100%. WTF?

Anyways after some thinking I decided what I was going to do. I am currently transferring all my Plex media to the new 3TB drive where it will live. I am going to use one of the 80GBs as a torrent scratch disk (to prevent future catastrophes), and the other 80GB or 160GB as the new ClearOS 7 drive. Then I’ll migrate whats left to the 3TB for storage and wipe the other drives. Seven in all, about 5TB of space. I am thinking of playing with ClearOS 7 as a virtual box to get it right before getting dirty. I have one year before 6 goes EOL for support/updates. No problem.

Double your speed double your fun

I was at one of my in-laws neighbors homes the other day, he needed some help setting up Rabbit.TV and his Chromecast. I had never heard of Rabbit.TV, while it is cheap, $10 for the year, I found it very hokey and very difficult to navigate. Plus I believe it just links you to all the free content, but places it all in one convenient spot – I don’t know and not the point.

When I was all finished he asked if I wanted an extra cable modem he had. He had been mailed the modem in error or ended up not needing it after he bought it, I can’t remember which. I hesitated at first as I really need to stop collecting ewaste, but I took it and I am glad I did. I looked it up when I got home, nothing fancy just a Motorola SB6141. I was using a Ubee DDM3513 at the time. I originally has some Motorola Dinosaur but it had died, the Ubee is what was given to us in its stead. I haven’t had a lot of issues but I do feel it was sluggish at time. Not evidence to back it up thats just the overall feeling I was given from The Family. They two modems are both DOCSIS 3.0 the difference is (that would make a difference) that the SB6141 can handle “channel bonding of up to eight downstream channels and four upstream channels” (up to 300 Mbps downstream, 100 Mbps upstream). The Ubee is 4/4 (up to 171Mbps downstream, 122Mbps upstream). I Googled the hell out of the Motorola for a few hours and I came up with a lot of posts and forum comments on the performance. Most people advertised they were getting a higher Mbps with the SB6141 than other modems for their current speed tier (hitting 12Mbps on a 6Mbps account for example). So I decided to swap the modems out.

It actually went very smoothly, on Comcast’s side. I connected the new modem (SB6141) in place of the Ubee and plugged my netbook directly into it. It connected to the net within about 3 minutes or so. When I transferred the modem to the server/router is when I hit a snag. My ClearOS box wouldn’t grab a new IP address from the modem. If I watched it closely I could see it get the local 192.168.100.10 address, then drop it, then switch to the ISP public and then drop it 10 seconds later. Then I got to stare at the spinning loading logo forever. The netbook would grab it no problem every time. I power cycled the modem and the server/router many times, made no difference. I even tried cloning the MAC of the netbook on the server/router, it did take the clone but it made no difference either. What worked for me was to delete the ethernet card under “IP settings”. Mine is eth11 so I just deleted eth11 and then added it back in again. Voila it worked.

Speed tests ran from speedtest.net and speakeasy both report 12Mbps down, 1Mbps up. Prior to the modem switch I was only hitting 6.5Mbps, which is my speed tier cap. So 12Mbps on a 6Mbps speed tier – score, at least for now.

Update 10-22-2015: I have come to find an easier solution (other than not using Comcast and therefor not needing a cable modem). If you SSH into the box you can simply release and renew the IP of the ethernet port.

sudo dhclient -r your_nic followed by
sudo dhclient your_nic

For example my card is enp3s0 so I would type:

sudo dhclient -r enp3s0

That should release and renew the IP for you. I found this out after upgrading to ClearOS 7. The old trick of deleting and re-adding the NIC wasn’t working anymore. So it appears that it is not just Comcast and their cable modems, ClearOS has something to do with it.