Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Category: Me (Page 5 of 26)

Alien Pastures is moving soon

November 18, 2017 / / 14 Comments

The URL for my blog is going to change.

I need to have full control over my content. At this moment I do not own the server my blog is running on, and I do not own the domain.
To prevent running into weird situations down the road – for whatever reasons – the blog will move from its current location to https://blog.alienbase.nl/ soon.
I will of course configure an automatic redirect from the current to the new URL to ease the transition.

The current url (alien.slackbook.org/blog) may not be available forever after the migration, so it is best is if you already bookmark the new URL – a placeholder page is waiting there.

If your browser complains about not trusting the CaCert organization then follow the steps outlined in a previous article “adding CaCert root certificates to your Slackware” to silence these warnings.

Brabantse worstenbroodjes – take two

November 13, 2017 / / 5 Comments

A year ago, I already wrote a lengthy article about Brabantse worstenbroodjes or dutch sausage rolls as you would call them in english. They are a regional delicacy in the area where I live, and have a unique flavor due to use of freshly ground nutmeg and a sizable amount of white pepper. You can read that older blog article with the recipe and the historical background here. So why am I re-visiting the subject of baking these Brabantse worstenbroodjes?

Brabantse worstenbroodjes

Brabantse worstenbroodjes

The biggest issue I had with then was that half of the bread rolls would inevitably tear in the oven and the meat juices would flow out, leaving a less pretty impression to the end product and causing the meat inside to dry out. So when I promised my team at work to return from holiday with a bunch of home-baked sausage rolls, I had to dive into online information about what causes this bread dough tearing in the oven.
And that resulted in a slightly altered recipe. In particular, the proofing stages for the dough are altered significantly. When following the below steps, the resulting bread rolls come out of the oven intact and with the meat nicely cooked in its own juices.

What are the basic premises for prevention of tearing the dough while baking in the oven?

  1. The dough should be supple by adding sufficient moist ingredients (water, butter): at least 60-65% of the flour content.
  2. Allow sufficient time between the creation of dough balls (which tightens the gluten framework) and flattening/rolling them out (for which the gluten should be in a relaxed state).
  3. Allow sufficient time for the second proofing stage (after the meat sausage has been rolled into the dough): at least 60 minutes. This again relaxes the gluten.
  4. Introduce steam into the oven while baking, at least for the first 5 minutes.

Keeping this in mind, the original recipe changed into this:

Ingredients:

Make and bake 30 sausage rolls of 70 grams each (35 gr dough and 35 gr sausage).

Dough:

  • 650 gr flour
  • 12 gr salt
  • 24 gr sugar
  • 185 gr water (lukewarm)
  • 185 gr milk (lukewarm)
  • 12 gr fast-action yeast (or 35 gr fresh yeast)
  • 55 gr butter (softened)

Saugages:

  • 1000 gr mincemeat (traditionally a mix of beef and pork but I use 100% beef)
  • 1 large egg
  • 25 gr breadcrumb
  • 25 gr spice mix

Spice mix (together will be ~ 25 gr):

  • 1 tsp salt
  • 2 tsp nutmeg powder (freshly ground from the nut gives the best flavour)
  • 2 tsp white pepper
  • 1 tsp paprika powder
  • 1 tsp onion powder
  • 1 tsp ginger powder
  • 1 tsp coriander powder
  • 1 tsp garlic powder
  • 1 tsp mustard powder

Instructies:

  • Combine the water and the milk and heat until lukewarm. Heat the butter until it is soft but not yet molten.
  • Mix the flour with the water and the milk. Don’t knead yet, combining the ingredients into a shaggy mix is sufficient. Leave the mix alone for 30 minutes to allow the flour to incorporate the moisture. This process is called autolyse.
  • While you wait for the autolyse, proceed with the meat. Mix the breadcrumb, spices and egg through the mincemeat. Divide into 30 portions of 35 grams. Roll each portion into a sausage of appr. 10 centimeters long. Coat the sausages lightly with flour by rolling them through a bit of flour you’ve spread on your work surface. This will prevent them from sticking together. Stack the sausages on a plate, cover with clingfilm and place them in your fridge to cool while you continue with the dough.
  • After the autolyse, add the remaining ingredients for the dough to the mix of flour and water/milk. Avoid direct contact between the yeast and the salt before you start mixing the ingredients: salt inhibits the yeast.
  • Knead for at least 10 minutes to achieve a supple dough.
  • Cover a baking tray with clingfilm. Divide the dough into 30 pieces of 35 grams and roll each into a tight ball. Place the balls on the baking tray and allow for some distance between them because they will increase in volume during the proofing stage. Cover with clingfilm and place them in a warm moist place for 20-30 minutes. I use my oven for that: heat the oven on its lowest setting for just 2 minutes, turn the heat off, place a shallow tray containing hot water on the oven floor, place the baking tray into the oven and close the door.
  • Take the proofed dough balls out of the oven. Spread some flour on your work area. Using a small rolling pin, flatten the pieces of dough into oval shapes with their long sides being about the same size as the sausages’ length. The bit of flour that covers the ovals will prevent them sticking together when you stack them.
  • Remove the clingfilm from the backing tray and cover it with parchment paper instead.
  • Now we can create the bread roll by combining dough and meat.
    Take an oval dough piece. Place a sausage roll on top. Fold the short ends of the oval over the ends of the sausage by stretching the dough a little. Grab one of the long sides of the oval and move it over the sausage so that it meets the other long side. Take care not to stretch the dough to much. Pinch the seam with your fingers. Take care to keep your fingers clean: the fat of the meat will prevent the seam to close properly so keep a small bowl of clean water nearby (for your fingers of course). Check this or this video for visual instructions.
  • Roll the sausage roll under your two flattened hands to make the seam disappear and seal the meat into the dough completely. Place the bread roll on the parchment paper with the seam on the bottom. This will prevent the bread to split open at the seam when you bake it.
  • Create the remainder of the bread rolls the same way. Keep some distance between the rolls on the baking tray because they will increase in volume while resting.
  • Cover the rolls with clingfilm to prevent the dough from drying out. Give the rolls a second proofing of at least 60 minutes in a warm moist place. Start the proofing in the oven like I described before. You will then have to find another place 30 minutes before you want to start baking (on top of your oven will be OK).
  • Heat your oven to 230° Celsius. Place the baking tray with the bread rolls just below the middle of the oven. Introduce some steam into the oven by spraying water into the oven or pouring some water in a metal tray on the oven floor. Optionally let the steam escape after 5 to 10 minutes of baking, by briefly opening the oven door. Caution! The steam is hot!
  • If the bread rolls are coloring too fast, you can reduce the oven temperature with 20 degrees. Total baking time is 12-15 minutes, depending on the oven and the thickness of the rolls. The meat inside must cook sufficiently long. The top of the bread rolls must be colored light-brown.
    Bigger bread rolls (70 gr dough, 70 gr meat) must bake for 20 minutes.

Let the worstenbroodjes cool for 30 minutes before eating them. They will still taste fine when completely cold but you can heat them again in the oven, at 170° Celsius for 8 minutes.

Optionally they can be frozen if you can’t eat them all at once. Heat frozen worstenbroodjes up again in an oven at 170° Celsius for 13 minutes.

Build box: step 1, install Slackware

August 21, 2017 / / 25 Comments

The new computer with its Ryzen CPU created some issues for me. To start with… I had not considered the possibility that a Ryzen CPU would not have an embedded GPU and so I did not order a graphics card. Bad idea!
I ended up ripping a GPU from one of my other computers (the only PCI-express card I could find) and plugging that into the new computer. That gave me a working video instead of a monitor that kept falling asleep.

Next came Slackware. When I booted the Slackware 14.2 installer, it did not give me a network connection. The Slackware Live Edition (based on slackware-current) worked properly on the other hand. But the graphics card I plugged into the computer did not work too well with the nouveau driver – whenever I started Chromium, it was inevitable that the computer would lock up after some time. Initially I blamed this on the computer hardware and feared that I bought a dead duck, but once I stopped running Chromium in the graphical desktop of Slackware Live, the system would remain operational. Since it is not going to be used as a desktop system and I will access it only remotely, that buggy nouveau driver is not a big issue and I could still install the binary Nvidia blob if needed.

So, the question became: I want to run a stable Slackware release on my new build server, but how am I going to install it? I was facing two major issues:

  1. The installer of Slackware 14.2 does not support NVMe boot devices (the new type of SSD hard drives with a M.2 PCI-express interface)
  2. The Slackware 14.2 installer lacks network capability on this new hardware, so I would have to perform a local install

I could spend a USB stick, putting the Slackware 14.2 DVD ISO on it, but then I still would have to patch the installer and I would not have a network connection after reboot. Considering the fact that slackware-current’s kernel works much better and NVMe support was added to the -current installer recently, I decided on a different approach.

I used a slackware-current based liveslak to setup the computer with Slackware 14.2 and then added a 4.9 kernel using the configfile for this kernel as found in slackware-current.

Steps taken:

  • Obtain a recent ISO of the Slackware Live Edition which is based on slackware-current (for instance, the 2.7 GB bleeding edge version or else the 700 MB XFCE based edition)
  • Write the ISO to a USB stick and boot liveslak. Now you have a proper graphical environment where you can query Google/DuckDuckGo and download anything you need.
  • We can not use the “setup2hd” of liveslak because that will install slackware-current and I want 14.2. So, download the smallest installer we can get:  slackware64-current-mini-install.iso which contains just the kernel and the installer (no packages) and is slightly more than 100 MB in size:
    # wget http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackware/slackware64-current-iso/slackware64-current-mini-install.iso
  • Download my “extract_initramfs.sh” script which makes it easier to extract the initrd.gz file containing the installer:
    # wget http://www.slackware.com/~alien/tools/extract_initramfs.sh
  • Partition the SSD drive. The M.2 interface results in a character device /dev/nvme0 and a namespace block device /dev/nvme0n1. The first partition on this device will be called /dev/nvme0n1p1. The installer in Slackware 14.2 can not handle this new namespacing format. The one in -current can.
    This is a UEFI computer, and I want Slackware to use this. That requires a FAT partition which will be used as the EFI system partition. Slackware will mount this partition at /boot/efi. I created a 100 MB partition of type EF00 (EFI system) and formatted this with:
    # mkdosfs -F32 -s 2 -n “EFI” /dev/nvme0n1p1
    The remainder of the disk is partitioned with swap (yes even with 64 GB of RAM it is still a good idea to add some swap space), and additional partitions are created for /, /boot, /var, /tmp and /home .
  • Extract the installer from this mini ISO into a new directory “/root/initrd64-current“:
    # mount -o loop slackware64-current-mini-install.iso /mnt/tmp
    # sh extract_initramfs.sh /mnt/tmp/isolinux/initrd.img /root/initrd64-current
  • Get the installer running in the terminal while we are still in a liveslak graphical Desktop Environment:
    # mount -o bind /dev /root/initrd64-current/dev
    # mount -o bind /proc /root/initrd64-current/proc
    # mount -o bind /sys /root/initrd64-current/sys
    # chroot /root/initrd64-current
  • Inside this chroot-ed installer environment, run the ‘setup‘ command and proceed as usual with the installation of Slackware64 14.2 from a network server. The liveslak has already taken care of the network connectivity. I have NFS and HTTP servers at home, providing package trees but I pick NFS because that is much faster. I pointed the installer to a Slackware64-14.2 package source and did a full install (first time ever that I installed the Emacs package, go figure).
  • At the end of the installation, do note yet exit! Instead, run “chroot /mnt” to enter the freshly installed system. Configure slackpkg with a suitable mirror, then run:
    # slackpkg upgrade-all
    This will install all the latest patches including the latest kernel.
  • Finally, blacklist the kernel-generic and kernel-modules so that slackpkg will never replace our kernel accidentally.
  • Create an initrd (the /usr/share/mkinitrd/mkinitrd_command_generator.sh script will help you finding the correct parameters) and copy the generic kernel and this initrd to the EFI partition. This is the elilo.conf file I ended up with: 
    # cat /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/elilo.conf
chooser=simple
delay=50
timeout=50
default=slackware142
image=vmlinuz
    label=huge142
    read-only
    append="root=/dev/nvme0n1p7 vga=normal ro"
image=vmlinuz-generic-4.4.75
    label=slackware142
    initrd=initrd_4.4.75.gz
    read-only
    append="root=/dev/nvme0n1p7 vga=normal ro"
  • Now that the Slackware 14.2 installation is complete we have to ensure that we add a working kernel to it. I want to use the kernel as found in slackware-current because I know the 4.9.x series is good (liveslak proved that) and because slackware-current contains a kernel config that I can just re-use. Download the kernel source, and the kernel packaging scripts so that we can compile a kernel and its modules manually but still can wrap the results in package format and install those. Warning – when you try this at home, the actual kernel version may have moved beyond the “4.9.44” which I use in the example below. Just substitute the actual version instead:
    # CWD=$(pwd)
    # lftp -c “open http://slackware.osuosl.org/slackware64-current/source; mirror k”
    # cd k/
    # tar -C /usr/src -xf linux-4.9.44.tar.xz
    # cp config-x86_64/config-generic-4.9.44.x64 /usr/src/linux-4.9.44/.config
    Now we can compile that kernel (yes I compile kernels as root):
    # cd /usr/src/linux-4.9.44
    # make oldconfig
    # make -j 15 all
    # make install
    Now that the kernel is installed as /boot/bzimage and the modules as /lib/modules/4.9.44 we use the Slackware packaging scripts to create two packages:
    # cd $CWD/k/packaging-x86_64/kernel-generic
    # ./kernel-generic.SlackBuild
    # cd $CWD/k/packaging-x86_64/kernel-modules
    # ./kernel-modules.SlackBuild
    The two packages in /tmp can then be installed using “installpkg”. Do not use “upgradepkg” with your kernels – you will want to keep at least one previous kernel. The kernel-modules package will essentialy overwrite what’s in /lib/modules/4.9.44 but now with a package, we can control it through the package manager if needed. The kernel-generic package will have installed the new kernel as /boot/vmlinuz-generic-4.9.44. Copy that kernel to the EFI partition, and create a new initrd in the same location to match the kernel:
    # cp /boot/vmlinuz-generic-4.9.44 /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/
    #  $(/usr/share/mkinitrd/mkinitrd_command_generator.sh -k 4.9.44 -r -a “-o /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/initrd_4.9.44.gz”)
    Add a section for the new kernel to elilo.conf. You can just copy the existing section for “label=slackware142” and change the version numbers. Make sure that the “default” keyword has this new label as its value. We want the new kernel to boot by default.
  • Exit the installed system’s chroot:
    # exit
  • Then exit the installer’s chroot:
    # exit
  • We are almost done. Unfortunately the eliloconfig of Slackware 14.2 did not add a Slackware entry to the computer’s EFI boot menu. So now that we are back in liveslak we need to fix this omission using the eliloconfig of slackware-current which is part of our liveslak:
    # eliloconfig /setup2hd /dev/nvme0n1p7
    This assumes the installed system is mounted under /setup2hd and the root partition is /dev/nvme0n1p7 . Change the parameters to match your situation. This time you will see that the Slackware entry is being created.
  • Reboot the system.
  • Have fun!

If I have omitted anything or steps are unclear, let me know. Now that I have Slackware on it, I can start thinking of how to add a virtualization solution. Either use my old scripts that wrap qemu and are very convenient and versatile, or go for qemu with libvirt and manage my virtual machines with virt-manager. The possibilities are endless. But first I need to get on with virtualizing my current server’s OS… its LAN services must stay operational but then in a VM on the new hardware.

New server arrived in the post

August 16, 2017 / / 11 Comments

The hardware I ordered for the new build server arrived today – all components assembled and tested.

I am too tired to connect and boot the thing, so all I provide today is a pic of the package.

Then I have a lot of installation and configuration work to do the next couple of days… so I should hope that the downtime maintenance weekend at the office is going to be canceled.

New build server was ordered

August 1, 2017 / / 20 Comments

OK, so I got frustrated too many times when waiting for packages that were compiling. My current build machine with its AMD ‘Athlon II X4 640’ CPU and 8 GB of RAM, is now 5 years old and obviously no longer quite fit for the tasks I need it to perform. Compiling Chromium for 64bit Slackware in a virtual machine took more than 24 hours last week (yes, for a single package). Basically, that convinced me to empty my stash of donated funds (thanks to all of you Slackware supporters) and order the most powerful midi tower I could buy for that money. What else is that money for, after all. Well, beer perhaps 🙂
Because the computer’s location will be the attic of my own house, its components (Seasonic PSU, Scythe CPU cooler, and the ‘be quiet Silent Base’ case itself) are chosen to minimize noise – it’s actually going to be sitting next to a bedroom wall.
The CPU I chose with the help of a friend, and after some consultation of my hardware store, is an AMD Ryzen 1700 at 3,0 GHz, along with 64GB of Corsair RAM (DDR4 at 3,0 GHz) but I am going to slightly overclock both. I added a 500GB Samsung 960 EVO SSD (NVMe) as well as a 4 TB Western Digital Red SATA disk.

With that machine I will be able to parallellize my build efforts and that means, I can give you more updates and still spend more time with my family. The whole hardware order costs slightly more than 1700 Euros which sounds like a lot (Robby pointed me to Ebay discard servers for a couple of 100 dollar) … while rackmount servers are cheap, you can not put them in your home because of the noise.
But it’s going to be worth it. And I will still have money left in my donations account to keep paying the rent for the ‘bear‘ server for at least another year. And then it’s rock bottom.

I will give more information when I actually get the hardware, install Slackware on it and create a virtual machine environment. I am not yet sure if I will keep using my own custom scripts to create ‘on-demand’ virtual machines or that I will switch to using virt-manager.
And I can finally also consider another “TODO” project that has been on the horizon for a long time: using Jenkins CI for ‘continuous build’ of my own (and Slackware’s) packages.
I will try to document as much of it as I can. I am sure that more people consider using virtualization to fence off processes, or create predictable (Slackware) OS environments using VM snapshots, or produce predictable builds. It’ll probably take months to get that point though… I am not in a hurry.

Again, thanks for all the donations during the past years that enabled me to do this purchase. You will hopefully benefit from it. Return on investment so-to-speak.

Eric

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