Dogfoodin!

I’ve converted the pups over to a new dog food last week. Because a new Petco opened close to home, I’ve taken the opportunity to put the pups on a premium food. On the menu is Wellness Super5Mix White Fish & Sweet Potato. I’m hoping the fish formula will improve the pups’ coat condition. They’ve been scratching up a storm ever since the advent of spring and I was hoping it wasn’t a serious health issue at the root of the problem.

Turns out, after I told the man that a complete stranger had accosted us at the dog park and asked if Dandy was pregnant, he confessed that he had been tripling the dog food portions at meal times. Oy! And here I was worrying desperately that the pups didn’t have worms after looking so ROTUND for the past few months.  With Dandy’s history of back problems, weight gain could greatly exacerbate her condition. And all the overfeeding could explain their skin irritations (increased carb intake).

I’ve picked up Solid Gold Barking at the Moon, a completely grainless formula that nearly rivals the Innova Evo formula I fed the pups some years ago. At 42% protein content, it comes in second place to the Evo. Unfortunately I have to watch the pups’ intake very carefully because the fat content is also very high. I’ve begun to mix it in with the Super5Mix and the pups should hopefully be fully transition to Solid Gold next week.

So, on the agenda, more dog walks.

Lilies!

I’ve been testing the Droid 2 camera for the past few weeks (since I finally reacquired it from the man) to take some garden and pup pictures. However, due to some quirky resolution settings, the photos haven’t been resizing correctly. My preference is for 1024×768 sizing, but lately the aspect ratios of the Droid 2 pix are whacky. Anyway, as convenient as it is to have the phone with me whenever I’m out and about, I’ll fall back on my trusty ole Canon to do the grunt work.

I captured this lily scene sometime after 8:30am. The Red Alerts are in full bloom, the Lollipops on the way out. Only the Navona have yet to make a showing.

5/13/2011 Lilies!

Francee hosta and veggie/herb garden look

5/10/11 Francee Hosta shoot5/10/11 Herb Garden residents looking for a homeTurns out those 99 cent hosta bulbs the man picked up from Calloway’s a few weeks ago were viable. What I originally thought were calla lily shoots were actually the Francee hostas coming up in one of my planter boxes. It’s only been 3 weeks and they are leafing out like gang busters.

Now I’ve got to make room for all the herbs and veggies currently taking up potting residence in the bed. I have a few extra herbs to pass along to friends, but all the rest needs to be rehomed before the summer heat is upon us.

Pups in purple

I had an almost perfect shot…of Flash sitting serenely in the midst of the purple bed. But he wouldn’t sit in place long enough for me to capture it on film. So instead, I posed the dynamic duo to snap up a few wonderful spring pictures.

5/13/2011 Dandy & Doogie in the Purple Bed

Knocking out multiple fail2ban notifications to admin

Ever since I’ve been troubleshooting and tweaking Fail2ban, it seems the ban notifications sent to the server admin email address has steadily increased. For example, a ban event currently sends 5 identical emails to the server admin.

I thought it was my limited understanding of how Fail2ban worked. But I soon realized that the culprit had to be multiple instances of Fail2ban causing the behavior. I had to dig up some Linux/Centos knowledge on how to figure out where to pull up processes (similar to the Windows services and task manager).

To show a master list of processes and pids:
ps aux || less

To display a list of pids with the name “fail2ban”:
pgrep fail2ban

To kill all pids with the name “fail2ban”:
pkill fail2ban

However, this kills all but one server instance of the Fail2ban server. I still had to start the server, reload the configuration and verify the status to ensure that it worked.

Remember to save and reload iptables prior to and after the above operations.