sports

Manipulating the Mantic Minotaur

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Overnight temps here in Florida are dipping into the upper 60s which must mean it’s late October and fall is here! šŸ™‚ Let’s check in with my bi-annual sports and Linux updates!

  • After starting out the 2023 season red hot with a 13-game win streak (tying the record in the modern era), the Rays’ October baseball run only lasted until 10/4 when they were swept out of the AL Wild Card in 2 games by the Texas Rangers (who went on to win the ALCS and will be facing the Arizona Diamondbacks in the 2023 World Series). The Guardians finished a disappointing 3rd in the AL Central.
  • Just one season after leaving the Browns, Baker Mayfield ended up in Tampa so I’m getting to watch him play again. The Bucs are currently 3-3 and are in 2nd place in the NFC South after the Falcons beat them last Sunday with a game-ending field goal. The Browns continue to be an enigma: they have one of the best defenses in the league and the Deshaun Watson “experiment” seems to be a failure. Despite that, our new third-string-to-starter QB PJ Walker, adding another name to the list of 36 starting Browns QBs since 1999, has the Browns at 4-2 (better than the Bucs!) but 4th place in the ever-tough AFC North. Love the alternate white uniforms though!
  • The NBA season just starts today so the Cavs are tied with everyone else at 0-0. šŸ™‚
  • And finally the Lightning. After losing a bunch of good players in the off-season, it was announced, right before the season started, that goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy had back surgery in September and is expected to miss the first two months of the season! That means I won’t get to see him play when I go the Bolts/Kraken game next week here in Tampa, butĀ maybe he’ll be back when I’m in Seattle for the Kraken/Bolts game in December. Backup goalieĀ Jonas Johansson has taken the team on his shoulders though, and the Lightning sit at 7-3 with 8 points and 4th in the Atlantic division.

Let’s see … what else? Oh, right, a new version of Ubuntu, the Mantic Minotaur (23.10) was released earlier this month. After running my pre-upgrade backup scripts, the sudo do-release-upgrade -d command took about 20 minutes to download and install the new packages. Notice I had to use the -d parameter this time for some reason, otherwise it said there was no upgrade available.

The only problem I had this cycle was again due to a PHP upgrade. The process removed PHP 8.1 and upgraded to PHP 8.2 but for some inexplicable reason it removed the 8.1 packages for libapache-mod and mysql but didĀ notĀ install the corresponding 8.2 versions. This broke WordPress, my Piwigo photo gallery, etc. until I manually installed the two missing packages. At least I’m prepared for stuff like this now so it didn’t take long to troubleshoot and resolve the issue.

Until April then, when Noble Numbat (the next LTS release) comes out …

Landing on the Lunar Lobster

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Gazing up at the late-April night sky … look, it’s the Lunar Lobster! That’s right, it’s time for the annual spring sports update and Ubuntu upgrade!

  • the Rays started off red-hot, tying the 1987 Milwaukee Brewers and 1982 Atlanta Braves for the longest win streak to start a season with 13; they’ve also set records with 14 straight home game wins and 21 straight games with a home run. They’re currently (still) in first place, 3.5 games ahead of the Orioles. Go Rays!!
  • meanwhile, the Guardians are 2nd in the AL Central
  • the Cavs exited the first round of the NBA playoffs as former Dayton Flyer (my alma mater) Obi Toppin and the New York Knicks beat them in 5 games
  • the Lightning opened the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs against the Toronto Maple Leafs but currently trail in the series 3-2
  • the NFL Draft is underway, but I really haven’t been paying attention to what the Browns and Bucs are doing (it’s playoff hockey time after all!)

On to the upgrade …

After making my typical backups, do-release-upgrade took about 30 minutes to download and install all the updated packages. I didn’t really have any major issues this time, but that was probably due to the fact that I’ve moved most of the services (Calibre, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, PiHole, Plex, Tautulli, Unifi Controller, etc.) off of my Linux server into Docker containers on my NAS. The one problem I had was Adagios, the “prettier” front-end for Nagios I’ve been using since 2016 (and I’ve been using Nagios since 2006). Adagios has given me problems in the past and doesn’t really seem to be maintained anymore, so after trying to tinker with some older packages and not getting anywhere I decided to just drop it and go back to the native Nagios UI. I also took the opportunity to upgrade to Nagios 4.4.11.

That was about it, easy enough! Until October when I’ll face the Mantic Minotaur (and let’s hope for some October baseball)!

Spring Training 2023: Day 3

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Our Arizona trips always involve hiking, and with another nighttime baseball game we had all day for outdoor activities. We got up early Monday morning and had breakfast at the house before heading over the zoo/botanical gardens area where we were on Saturday afternoon to “hike” up Hole in the Rock. It’s a short trail with only a 200ft elevation gain but it has a pretty unique view. Rather than go over to nearby Camelback Mountain or Piestewa Peak, both of which we’ve hiked before, we drove south of Phoenix to the South Mountain Preserve.

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Spring Training 2023: Day 2

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We got up early (okay, 8:00am) after getting ready for the day we drove over to Goodyear and had breakfast at our traditional place: Black Bear Diner. Then we drove down the road to Goodyear Ballpark, the Spring Training home for the Cleveland Guardians and Cincinnati Reds. In years past we’ve watched the warm-ups and then shagged fly balls during batting practice. This year, however, none of that happened. We waited around for a while, along with a few other fans (but nothing like the crowds we usually experience). No one ever came to open the outer gate and all that really happened was a few of the pitchers came out to warm-up on one of the back fields. We could only guess that since it was Sunday morning and the last game at the park that maybe the players had the morning off.

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Spring Training 2023: Day 1

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After two years of no Spring Training baseball trips (2021 was cancelled due to COVID-19, and then 2022 was cancelled due to the MLB lockout), it’s finally time to get back out to the Cactus League! Last time we went out early at the beginning of the season but this year we’re going at the very end … and going to Opening Day in Seattle! Should be a blast …

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Seattle Sports Weekend

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When my daughter first went off to college in Ohio I told her we’d do a daddy/daughter hockey trip at some point and go see the Lightning play the Columbus Blue Jackets. Then the pandemic happened and the NHL schedule never seemed to align with travel plans. When the 2022-2023 schedule was released last summer it looked like an Ohio away game just wasn’t in the cards so we decided to go a little farther: Seattle. My sister is still a Kraken season ticket holder so she came here to Tampa to see the Kraken play the Lightnig back in December (we won 6-2), and then my daughter and I flew out to Seattle last weekend to catch the Bolts in the Emerald City.

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Keeping the Kinetic Kudu

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The calendar shows October which means it’s about that time for my fall sports update and an Ubuntu upgrade!

In their first season (after a late start due to the lockout) as the Guardians, my Cleveland baseball team (the youngest in the league) ended up winning 92 gamesĀ andĀ the Central Division. They then knocked out my Tampa Bay Rays in the wildcard round (sweeping them in two games in the new best-of-three format) and introduced the baseball world to SpongeBob (aka, rookie Oscar Gonzalez). Unfortunately, they lost to the New York Yankees in the ALDS, but it did take all five games (and then, thankfully, the Yankees were swept out of the ALCS by the Astros, so that was satisfying).

The Bucs (with Brady back for one more year?) and the Browns (despite the departure of Baker Mayfield and the Deshaun Watson controversy) both started out with promise of good seasons, but currently sit at 2-5 and 3-4 respectively (and yet even with a losing record, the Bucs are tied for first in the NFC South). Tom Brady may be regretting not retiring last year, both on the field and at home. Basketball and hockey are just ramping up with the Cavs at 2-1 and the Lightning off to a slow start at 3-4 like the Bucs.

On to Linux: Canonical released Ubuntu 22.10 (Kinetic Kudu) last week so it was time to upgrade. It took about 45 minutes for the do-release-upgrade to download and install all the updated packages, then I re-applied my customizations to some affected config files and rebooted.

The first problem I had was that I couldn’t SSH back into the server. Luckily I also have a monitor and keyboard hooked up to the NUC in the closet, so I was able to confirm the server was up and running. Doing my normal Google research, I found that a change in the openssh-server was now using socket-based activation. I had been overriding the default port in sshd_config and supposedly my changesĀ shouldĀ have been carried forward by the change, but it wasn’t. Once I figured that out I was able to SSH in on the default port of 22 (and then removed my customizations from the config file). The second issue was a lack of outbound internet connectivity which turned out to be related to systemd and resolv.conf. Once I added my Pi-Hole to the DNS line in /etc/systemd/resolved.conf, the server was able to resolve and connect to external sites. Finally, I had to re-upgrade to Calibre 6.7.1 since the Ubuntu “upgrade” actually downgraded it to 6.3. But hey, no PHP issues this time! šŸ˜‰

Seeya back here in April for spring sports (hopefully spring training!) and Ubuntu 23.04, the Lunar Lobster.

Jamming with the Jammy Jellyfish

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Tomorrow It’s “gonna be May” which means it’s time for my annual spring sports update and Ubuntu upgrade!

  • wrapping up their season, the Cavs exited the play-in tournament (losing to both the Nets and Hawks (who in turn were both eliminated in the next round))
  • the newly renamed Guardians have started their “inaugural” season 9-12 (delayed by the lock out, with no spring training trip for me, and even a few snow-cancelled games)
  • the Rays are the exact opposite, off to a 12-9 start and hoping to capture their third straight AL East championship
  • the Lightning clinched a playoff spot and on Monday will start their quest to a third straight Stanley Cup championship facing off against the Toronto Maple Leafs in the first round
  • after a retirement scare šŸ™‚ Brady will once again be back with the Bucs looking to take them back to their second Super Bowl in three years
  • finally, the Browns have no first-round draft picks but of course are as usual, a constant source of quarterback controversy

Now on to the latest Ubuntu release, 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish), which came out last week.

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Spring Training 2022 – no, actually a week in Seattle

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[ posting this late/out-of-order since I apparently started it and never finished ]

Mid-March would typically find me out in Arizona for my annual spring training trip to see my Cleveland Indians Guardians but the past two years have seen my trips cancelled (first for the pandemic, and now the MLB lockout). This year’s trip was also planned around a side-trip to Seattle to see the Lightning play the Kraken (my sister is a inaugural season ticket holder for the new NHL franchise). With our planned baseball games cancelled, I decided to just spend the entire week in Seattle with my sister.

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