Mashed Yuca

This was spectacular – I’ve been looking for a replacement for “mashed potatoes”, and tried mashed yuca root. You’ve got to peel it and, as I learned after making it the first time, there’s very fibrous bits at the ends and running down the middle. Chop the root into small chunks and boil in salted water for about 25 minutes.

Remove from the water and mash while they are warm. Mix in a little coconut oil, salt, and garlic.

Baked Tostones

I made braised shortribs and roasted parsnip today. I also made a baked version of tostones. Steam the plantains (cut the ends off, steam or microwave for ~3 minutes per plantain), cut them into rounds, then squish into a flat nugget. Lightly coat with salt and olive oil, then bake at 425. 10 minutes, flip, and ten more minutes. It could use some sort of sauce, but they are very similar to potato nuggets.

Expanding a qcow2-backed system disk (host + guest)

Expanding a qcow2-backed system disk (host + guest) — guest volume is lvm and xfs file system

HOST (resize qcow2)

  1. Optional backup:
    cp –reflink=auto /vms/fedora02.qcow2 /vms/fedora02.qcow2.bak
  2. Offline resize (VM stopped):
    qemu-img resize /vms/fedora02.qcow2 +5G
    # Start the VM after resizing.

GUEST (grow partition, PV, LV, filesystem)

  1. Confirm the disk shows the larger size:
    lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,TYPE,MOUNTPOINT
    #If needed:
    #partprobe /dev/sda
  2. Grow the LVM partition (sda2) to the end of the disk:
    dnf install -y cloud-utils-growpart
    growpart /dev/sda 2
    partprobe /dev/sda
  3. Resize the LVM PV and extend the root LV:
    pvresize /dev/sda2
    lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/fedora/root
  4. Grow the filesystem:
    xfs_growfs /
  5. Verify:
    lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,TYPE,MOUNTPOINT
    df -h /

Exchange SMTP – Sender Reputation DB

Our Exchange server was refusing mail

451 4.7.0 Temporary server error. Please try again later. PRX5

Attempts to send mail would connect, send data, and then hang for a few seconds before returning the tempfail error.

Looks like there’s “sender reputation” data stored at .\Exchange Server\V15\TransportRoles\data\SenderReputation that is used. Since I’m not actually doing filtering on the Exchange server, stopping the transport services, moving the files out of the folder, and then re-starting the services rebuilt the data and allowed mail to send again.

Cassava Gnocchi

About 1.5 cups of mashed cassava

1 cup cassava flour and 2 tsp salt

 

 

 

Mix together and add enough vegetable stock to make a dough — it rolled out very nicely, cut into nuggets and smooshed with a fork.

The gnocci was boiled for about three minutes in salted water then fried in olive oil to crisp up. They were really gelatinous after boiling. I think it would have been better to sit and dry before frying.

Python: Partition and RPartition

Found a neat pair of methods that were added in Python 2.5 — it’s like split/index except it handles breaking the string into two elements for you. A tuple is returned with the part before the separator, the separator, and the part after the separator. If the separator is not found, element 0 and 1 are empty strings.

 

C:\Users\lisa> python
Python 3.13.3
Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information.
>>> test = “This is a string | with pipe characters as | delimiters in the string”
>>> print(test.rpartition(“|”)[0])
This is a string | with pipe characters as
>>> print(test.partition(“|”)[0])
This is a string
>>>

Linux: Getting Drive Serial Number

[lisa@FVD01 /mnt/lisa/]# smartctl -i /dev/sdc
smartctl 7.5 2025-04-30 r5714 [x86_64-linux-6.15.7-200.fc42.x86_64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-25, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Western Digital Red (CMR)
Device Model: WDC WD40EFRX-68N32N0
Serial Number: WD-WCC7K4HY5TKD
LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 2b9a3d0c5
Firmware Version: 82.00A82
User Capacity: 4,000,787,030,016 bytes [4.00 TB]
Sector Sizes: 512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate: 5400 rpm
Form Factor: 3.5 inches
Device is: In smartctl database 7.5/5706
ATA Version is: ACS-3 T13/2161-D revision 5
SATA Version is: SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is: Tue Dec 2 17:24:27 2025 EST
SMART support is: Available – device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

2025-12-02 17:24:27 [root@FPP01 /mnt/MythAndZoneminder/]# smartctl -i /dev/sda
smartctl 7.5 2025-04-30 r5714 [x86_64-linux-6.15.7-200.fc42.x86_64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-25, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Western Digital Red (CMR)
Device Model: WDC WD40EFRX-68N32N0
Serial Number: WD-WCC7K7JZSZ0E
LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 264576d5e
Firmware Version: 82.00A82
User Capacity: 4,000,787,030,016 bytes [4.00 TB]
Sector Sizes: 512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate: 5400 rpm
Form Factor: 3.5 inches
Device is: In smartctl database 7.5/5706
ATA Version is: ACS-3 T13/2161-D revision 5
SATA Version is: SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is: Tue Dec 2 17:24:38 2025 EST
SMART support is: Available – device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled