Author: Lisa

Black Raspberry Coulis

To go with our smoked lamb, I made a coulis with maple syrup and black raspberries Anya picked and froze last year. Easy recipe — a pint of black raspberries (thawed) and about 1/3 cup of maple syrup (this would be a “to taste” kind of thing!). Boil for about ten minutes to break down the berries a bit, run it all through a blender, then use fine mesh cloth to strain out the seeds. It will set up as a jam once it cools, but it’s a nice sauce to drizzle over food whilst it is still hot.

Brisket

We smoked a brisket and lamb shoulder this weekend — basic salt & pepper rub, smoked with fruit wood, then brought inside to finish cooking. We’re going to order some butcher paper to see what that’s like because wrapping it always gets the bark soggy!

Hazelnuts – 2024

The hazelnuts are just starting to form — it looks like we’ve got nuts developing on the newer plants on the north side too. As far as propagating plants, I’ve pretty well established that dropping a woody cutting in willow water doesn’t work. Dropping a green cutting in water doesn’t work. Next, I’m going to try a green cutting in soil and air layering. I’ve found a few places online that say air layering worked … even if it looks a little odd having bundles of soil wrapped around the branches of your shrubbery.

OpenZFS On RedHat 8 (From Package)

This process presumes you have generated a signing key (/root/signing/MOK.priv and /root/signing/MOK.der) that has been registered for signing modules.

################################################################################
## Install from Repo and Sign Modules
################################################################################
yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm
yum install kernel-devel

# Install kmod version of ZS
yum install https://zfsonlinux.org/epel/zfs-release-2-3$(rpm --eval "%{dist}").noarch.rpm
dnf config-manager --disable zfs
dnf config-manager --enable zfs-kmod
yum install zfs

# And autoload
echo zfs >/etc/modules-load.d/zfs.conf

# Use rpm -ql to list out the kernel modules that this version of ZFS uses -- 2.1.x has quite a few of them, and they each need to be signed
# Sign zfs.ko and spl.ko in current kernel
/usr/src/kernels/$(uname -r)/scripts/sign-file sha256 /root/signing/MOK.priv /root/signing/MOK.der /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/weak-updates/zfs/zfs/zfs.ko
/usr/src/kernels/$(uname -r)/scripts/sign-file sha256 /root/signing/MOK.priv /root/signing/MOK.der /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/weak-updates/zfs/spl/spl.ko
# And sign the bunch of other ko files in the n-1 kernel rev (these are symlinked from the current kernel)
/usr/src/kernels/$(uname -r)/scripts/sign-file sha256 /root/signing/MOK.priv /root/signing/MOK.der /lib/modules/4.18.0-513.18.1.el8_9.x86_64/extra/zfs/avl/zavl.ko
/usr/src/kernels/$(uname -r)/scripts/sign-file sha256 /root/signing/MOK.priv /root/signing/MOK.der /lib/modules/4.18.0-513.18.1.el8_9.x86_64/extra/zfs/icp/icp.ko
/usr/src/kernels/$(uname -r)/scripts/sign-file sha256 /root/signing/MOK.priv /root/signing/MOK.der /lib/modules/4.18.0-513.18.1.el8_9.x86_64/extra/zfs/lua/zlua.ko
/usr/src/kernels/$(uname -r)/scripts/sign-file sha256 /root/signing/MOK.priv /root/signing/MOK.der /lib/modules/4.18.0-513.18.1.el8_9.x86_64/extra/zfs/nvpair/znvpair.ko
/usr/src/kernels/$(uname -r)/scripts/sign-file sha256 /root/signing/MOK.priv /root/signing/MOK.der /lib/modules/4.18.0-513.18.1.el8_9.x86_64/extra/zfs/unicode/zunicode.ko
/usr/src/kernels/$(uname -r)/scripts/sign-file sha256 /root/signing/MOK.priv /root/signing/MOK.der /lib/modules/4.18.0-513.18.1.el8_9.x86_64/extra/zfs/common/zcommon.ko
/usr/src/kernels/$(uname -r)/scripts/sign-file sha256 /root/signing/MOK.priv /root/signing/MOK.der /lib/modules/4.18.0-513.18.1.el8_9.x86_64/extra/zfs/zstd/zzstd.ko

# Verify they are signed now
modinfo -F signer /usr/lib/modules/$(uname -r)/weak-updates/zfs/zfs/zfs.ko
modinfo -F signer /usr/lib/modules/$(uname -r)/weak-updates/zfs/spl/spl.ko

modinfo -F signer /lib/modules/4.18.0-513.18.1.el8_9.x86_64/extra/zfs/avl/zavl.ko
modinfo -F signer /lib/modules/4.18.0-513.18.1.el8_9.x86_64/extra/zfs/icp/icp.ko
modinfo -F signer /lib/modules/4.18.0-513.18.1.el8_9.x86_64/extra/zfs/lua/zlua.ko
modinfo -F signer /lib/modules/4.18.0-513.18.1.el8_9.x86_64/extra/zfs/nvpair/znvpair.ko
modinfo -F signer /lib/modules/4.18.0-513.18.1.el8_9.x86_64/extra/zfs/unicode/zunicode.ko
modinfo -F signer /lib/modules/4.18.0-513.18.1.el8_9.x86_64/extra/zfs/zcommon/zcommon.ko
modinfo -F signer /lib/modules/4.18.0-513.18.1.el8_9.x86_64/extra/zfs/zstd/zzstd.ko

# Reboot
init 6

# And we've got ZFS, so create the pool
zpool create pgpool sdc
zfs create zpool/zdata
zfs set compression=lz4 zpool/zdata

zfs get compressratio zpool/zdata
zfs set mountpoint=/zpool/zdata zpool/zdata

What happens if you only sign zfs.ko? All sorts of errors that look like there’s some sort of other problem — zfs will not load. It will tell you the required key is not available

May 22 23:42:44 sandboxserver systemd-modules-load[492]: Failed to insert 'zfs': Required key not available

Using insmod to try to manually load it will tell you there are dozens of unknown symbols:

May 22 23:23:23 sandboxserver kernel: zfs: Unknown symbol ddi_strtoll (err 0)
May 22 23:23:23 sandboxserver kernel: zfs: Unknown symbol spl_vmem_alloc (err 0)
May 22 23:23:23 sandboxserver kernel: zfs: Unknown symbol taskq_empty_ent (err 0)
May 22 23:23:23 sandboxserver kernel: zfs: Unknown symbol zone_get_hostid (err 0)
May 22 23:23:23 sandboxserver kernel: zfs: Unknown symbol tsd_set (err 0)

But the real problem is that there are unsigned modules so … there are unknown symbols. But not because something is incompatible. Just because the module providing that symbol will not load.

OpenZFS on RedHat 8 – Build from Source

This process presumes you have generated a signing key (/root/signing/MOK.priv and /root/signing/MOK.der) that has been registered for signing modules.

# Install prerequisites
dnf install --skip-broken epel-release gcc make autoconf automake libtool rpm-build libtirpc-devel libblkid-devel libuuid-devel libudev-devel openssl-devel zlib-devel libaio-devel libattr-devel elfutils-libelf-devel kernel-devel-$(uname -r) python3 python3-devel python3-setuptools python3-cffi libffi-devel git ncompress libcurl-devel

dnf install --skip-broken --enablerepo=epel --enablerepo=powertools python3-packaging dkms

# Clone OpenZFS repo
git clone https://github.com/openzfs/zfs
cd zfs
# generally stay in the main branch, but if you want to use the latest then check out the staging branch
# git checkout zfs-2.2.5-staging
./autogen.sh
./configure
make 
make install

# Sign the kernel modules
/usr/src/kernels/$(uname -r)/scripts/sign-file sha256 /root/signing/MOK.priv /root/signing/MOK.der /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/extra/zfs.ko
/usr/src/kernels/$(uname -r)/scripts/sign-file sha256 /root/signing/MOK.priv /root/signing/MOK.der /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/extra/spl.ko

# And verify the modules are signed
modinfo -F signer /usr/lib/modules/$(uname -r)/extra/zfs.ko
modinfo -F signer /usr/lib/modules/$(uname -r)/extra/spl.ko

Signing Kernel Modules

The new servers being built at work use SecureBoot — something that you don’t even notice 99% of the time. But that 1% where you are doing something “strange” like trying to use OpenZFS … well, you’ve got to sign any kernel modules that you need to use. Just installing them doesn’t work — they won’t load.

To sign a kernel module, first you need to create a signing key and use mokutil to import it into the machine owner key store.

cd /root
mkdir signing
cd signing
openssl req -new -x509 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout MOK.priv -outform DER -out MOK.der -nodes -days 36500 -subj "/CN=Windstream/"

mokutil --import MOK.der

When you run mokutil, you will set a password. This password will be needed to complete importing the key to the machine.

Get access to the console — out of band management, vSphere manager, stand in front of the server. Reboot, and there will be a “press any key” screen for ten seconds that begins the import process. Press any key!

Select “Enroll MOK”

View the key and verify it is the right one, then use ‘Continue’ to import it

Enter the password used when you ran mokutil

Then reboot

To verify your key has been successfully enrolled:

mokutil --list-enrolled