Author: Lisa

55 Days of Grilling — 17 March

Tonight, I made a brisket with carrots and potatoes. Carrots and potatoes were placed in the bottom of a cast iron dutch oven and sprinkled with salt, paprika, chipotle pepper, black pepper, cayenne pepper, thyme, garlic. Brisket was rubbed with the same combination mixed with a little brown sugar. Very heavy lid added to cook. 

 

It was cooked at 200F for an hour. Since it didn’t seem to have cooked at all, I bumped the temp up to 250F and cooked for another hour — until the internal temp reached 205F.

Microsoft Teams Pinned Channels

“Pinned” channels are basically links to channels that get a listing at the top of your Teams list for quick access. The way they list the pinned teams is kind of backwards in my mind — the big text is the channel name and the small text is the team name. So I’ve got a channel named “IT Maintenance and Outage Notifications” in the “NBI/NDI” team.

If you don’t want them pinned to the top, hover your mouse over the listing and an ellipsis will appear to open more options.

Click on ‘unpin’, and the pinned link to the channel will go away.

 

Firefox Session Store Backups

Writing it down this time … so I don’t have to figure it out next time Scott’s Firefox sessions poof away — Firefox stores the session (importantly the tabs that you’ve got opened) at ~/.mozilla/firefox/<funky guid looking thing> default/sessionstore-backups

Socca Recipe

Writing this down because I have too many tabs opened.

 

Ingredients

  • 1 cup chickpea flour (4 1/2 ounces)
  • 1 cup water
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for the pan and drizzling
  • 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
  • 1 teaspoon za’atar (optional)

Instructions

  1. Prepare the chickpea batter. Whisk the chickpea flour, water, olive oil, and salt together in a medium bowl until smooth. Let rest for 30 minutes to give the flour time to absorb the water.

  2. Preheat the oven and then the pan. Arrange an oven rack 6 inches below the broiler element and heat to 450°F. About 5 minutes before the batter is done resting, place a 10-inch cast iron skillet in the oven and turn the oven to broil.

  3. Add the batter to the prepared pan. Carefully remove the hot skillet from the oven. Add about 1 teaspoon of oil, enough to coat the bottom of the pan when the pan is swirled. Pour the batter into the center of the pan. Tilt the pan so the batter coats the entire surface of the pan, if needed.

  4. Broil the socca for 5 to 8 minutes. Broil until you see the top of the socca begin to blister and brown, 5 to 8 minutes. The socca should be fairly flexible in the middle but crispy on the edges. If the top is browning too quickly before the batter is fully set, move the skillet to a lower oven rack until done.

  5. Slice and serve. Use a flat spatula to work your way under the socca and ease it from the pan onto a cutting board. Slice it into wedges or squares, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and drizzle with more olive oil and sprinkle with the za’atar if using.

Linux: Identifying Large Packages

The disk filled up on our primary server, and there wasn’t anything obvious like a decade worth of log files to clean up. I had to resort to uninstalling ‘stuff’ (it was, after all, installing ‘stuff’ that created the problem … tons of X11-related stuff for troubleshooting purposes). There is a way to list installed packages by size:

 

rpm -qia|awk '$1=="Name" { n=$3} $1=="Size" {s=$3} $1=="Description" {print s " " n }' |sort -n

MTU Probing

We’ve had a number of very strange network problems lately — Zoneminder cannot talk to cameras, clients veg out talking to Myth, Twonky is non-functional (even the web page — you get enough of the header to have a title, but the page just hangs, Scott cannot get to our Discourse site. And, more frustratingly, he cannot SSH to some of our hosts. Using “ssh -v” and throwing on a bunch of flags to not attempt key auth (-o PasswordAuthentication=yes -o PreferredAuthentications=keyboard-interactive,password -o PubkeyAuthentication=no) and his connection still hung. But, at least, I could see something. The last thing the SSH connection reported is:

debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_KEX_ECDH_REPLY

Which I’ve seen before … fortunately when I had a great Unix support guy working in the same office building that I did. Who let me stop over and bounce really oddball problems off of him. He told me to enable mtu probing.

echo 1 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_mtu_probing

And, if that doesn’t work, use “echo 2”. Which …. yeah, wouldn’t have been any of my first thirty guesses. Cloudflare published a good article on what exactly MTU path discovery is, and I can RTFM enough to figure out what I’ve set here. But no idea what’s got a smaller MTU than our computers.

 

tcp_mtu_probing - INTEGER
	Controls TCP Packetization-Layer Path MTU Discovery.  
	  0 - Disabled
	  1 - Disabled by default, enabled when an ICMP black hole detected
	  2 - Always enabled, use initial MSS of tcp_base_mss.

55 Days of Grilling: Day 12 – Breakfast

I made grilled french toast this morning — 4 eggs, 1 tsp cinnamon, 1/4 cup maple syrup, 1 tbsp vanilla, 1/4 tsp nutmeg, and 1/2 cup milk. Dipped the bread in the mix, heated in a pan until the egg solidified, then moved to the grill to toast. This crisped up the bread quite nicely, and we got a custard-like inner bread with a slight crunch on the outside.

Served with fresh maple syrup. Very tasty!

Google OAUTH Stuff

Reminder to self — when you set up a desktop app with OAUTH to use the Google APIs … you have to hit the authorization URL from the computer running the code. That means, for my calendar scraper, that I need to do X-redirection from the server & run the script. Firefox launches & the flow actually completes. Attempting to hit the URL from my computer yields a connection failure to the https://localhost:SomePort at the end of the workflow.

Move token.pickle to backup file, run getCalendarEvents.py with X-redirection so auth can be processed through web form.

55 Days of Grilling: Day 11

Tonight, we made cubano sandwiches using the pork roast from last night. Pork, ham, swiss cheese, and pickle on Cuban bread. Butter outsides of bread before … well, normally pressing in a panini press. But, in this case, before grilling for a few minutes to get the bread toast and melt the cheese.

Cuban bread uses a poolish — 1/4 cup flour, 1/4 cup water, and 1/2 tsp yeast. That sits overnight (12+ hours). Add 1 cup water, 1.5 tsp salt, 1.5 tsp sugar, 1 Tbsp oil (traditionally lard), 1.5 tsp yeast, and 3 cups flour. Mix and kneed — add up to an additional 1/2 cup flour to form a dough ball. Let sit in a warm place for 1-2 hrs to raise. Deflate the dough and let raise for another hour. Form into two logs and embed a metal skewer in the top. Cover with a clean towel and let raise for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, preheat oven to 400F. Bake for 25 minutes.

Remove skewers