It's been a while since I posted, but we bumped into something completely batshit crazy at work that I just had to share.

One of my colleagues was setting up a new computer, and was unable to RDP into the new build. He kept getting the error message "Your session ended because there was a data encryption error. If this keeps happening, ask your admin or tech support for help."

We'd never experienced this error before, and - although the internet knew about it - there were not very many helpful hits …

Yanno how I said it's hard to find American Crew aftershave? Well my better half went out yesterday and found a place in lil'old Te Awamutu that sells their shaving range: Team Seven, beside Viands. She bought me a bottle of my favourite "Post-Shave Cooling Lotion" (oh my god that name), but also got me a tube of their "Moisturising Shave Cream" to try. For shiggles.

Clearly, American Crew are better at chemical formulation than they are at coming up with names. But I digress.

Whelp I whipped out my …

Gather around, children, and I'll regale you with a tale of tonight's shaving.

My go-to razor setup at the moment is my Edwin Jagger DE89, with Derby Extra blades. But that's not new.

You might remember that my favourite aftershave is American Crew's "Post Shave Cooling Lotion". I've been using this almost exclusively for about 5 years now, and I love it. It's wonderfully soothing, and it's a fairly thin balm so it's easy to avoid overly-thick application. It's also not as thin as a milk (such as "The Standard …

This is part of my brief series on Wireguard. I'm pretty enamoured with Wireguard and the way it works, and I've been using it pretty seamlessly for over a year now. I've learned a couple things that weren't immediately obvious though, so I'm documenting them here.

Easy Provisioning

Samuel Holland mentioned an interesting trinket, in his post at https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2018-December/003703.html:

"[...] WireGuard will ignore a peer whose public key matches the interface's private key. So you can distribute a single list of peers everywhere …

I came home tonight to discover my wife had made probably the most amazing tomato soup I've ever tasted. She performed this feat with about ten minutes of effort (plus about an hour of simmering), so I decided I needed to note it down.

Ingredients

• 1 Tbsp oil
• 1 medium onion, sliced
• 1/2 head of garlic, peeled and chopped
• About 4 slices of bacon, diced
• 3 cans of chopped tomatoes
• 2 tsp of vegetable stock powder
• 2 tsp of sugar
• 1 cup of water
• Cream
• Parsley for garnish

Method …

I've knocked heads with AppArmor a few times now. To be quite honest with myself, I think it's primarily because I install it, enable all the plugins, and then forget it's there until there's a problem.

TL;DR:

On a fully-updated Zentyal 5.0 system running DHCP, the AppArmor profile in /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.dhcpd will prevent isc-dhcp-server from restarting itself after an upgrade.

More search-type words: Zentyal dhcp server doesn't start again after upgrade. isc-dhcp-server graceful shutdown, but no restart.

This frustration-laden, Google-friendly equivalent of speaking slowly …

This is going to be one of those posts where I just dump stuff. Power failures are shite, and if your server isn't talking with your UPS, it won't shut down gracefully. This is the story of my trying to get APC's PowerChute Network Shutdown working on a ProxmoxVE 5.1 environment.

Note I opted out of using either nut or apcupsd, because I had a nice fancy Network Management Card (NMC2 / Schneider AP9631) available. Also, I wanted to shut down more than a single server, so a USB or …

Back when I was getting this blog set up, I had a short whinge about the default way that the Flex theme created links to pages.

Specficially, creating a link to "Tuna Patties" (for example), Flex would append the link with an identical stub, such as https://www.ericlight.com/tuna-patties.html#tuna-patties

I thought this was silly, so I found a way to fix it, but never bothered submitting a Pull Request to Alexandre because I figured it was intentional.

Well, it turns out I wasn't the only one …

My personal laptop is an old Dell Latitude E6410. One of the things I actually love about it, is the fact that the keyboard has a backlight.

However, because Linux, sometimes that backlight just stops working. When this happens, you'll see error messages in dmesg, such as:

dell_wmi: Unknown key with type 0x0011 and code 0x01e2 pressed

If this happens to you, just run this command:

$ sudo echo 7 > /sys/devices/platform/dell-laptop/leds/dell\:\:kbd_backlight/brightness

You can echo a higher number if you want your keyboard brighter, but …

We recently got a Fornetto Basso - it's an 18" bullet smoker/barbecue, advertised with three tiers of deliciousness: two bbq racks, and a rail under the lid for hanging meats for smoking. It also has a large metal water bowl, which goes at the bottom. The water helps to keep the meat moist, and helps regulate the temperature.

However... The water bowl also turns out to be my new favourite bean-cooking vessel! It's quite huge (probably about 8 litres) and of course it doesn't consume any of the precious roasting …