I made Salmon Gravlax!

Posted on Sat 11 July 2020 in Food • Tagged with Recipes, Food, Whisky

I joined some friends last weekend for a belated World Whisky Day celebration. The entry fee was, of course, a bottle of whisky (this year the theme was different finishing casks)... but we also each bring some delicious morsel that piques our interest.

This year, as I was bringing Glenmorangie's The Lasanta (aged in Oloroso and Pedro Ximénez sherry casks), I decided my amuse-bouche would be sherry-based.

My treat was dried prunes, soaked in a dry sherry, then sprinkled with a pinch of salt, and eaten with a tamari-roasted almond …


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My mountain

Posted on Sat 06 June 2020 in Ramblings

Landscape photography of Mount Tongariro and Mount Ngauruhoe, covered in white snow

I got a tattoo a couple years ago, which is a sketch outline of Mount Tongariro and Mount Ngauruhoe, in the Central Plateau of New Zealand.

The photo that the tattoo, which the tattoo was based on, was just the result of a Google search. I've tried to find it many times since I actually got the tattoo - at very least just so I could give credit to the photographer. However, to no avail.

The other day I happily found a copy of the photo, and went to Google's Reverse …


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ZFS zpool vanishing after upgrading ProxmoxVE 5.4 to 6.2

Posted on Sat 23 May 2020 in Tech • Tagged with Tech, Linux

Performing a major version upgrade is never pleasant. I've been using ProxmoxVE for about ten years now though, and it's consistently done a fantastic job. Since it's based on Debian, all the upgrades are done with a simple apt update && apt upgrade, with a variety of steps in the middle to point to new repositories, etc. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing scary.

So I've got two servers - one is an old one, with only a couple testing VM's residing on it. I go ahead and work through the 5 …


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Why are all Split-Tunnel VPN diagrams so ugly?

Posted on Thu 21 May 2020 in Security • Tagged with Security, Tech

Right.

Today I needed to find a diagram of the traffic flow for a split-tunnel VPN. Nothing fancy, just a real simple user-facing diagram to form part of an article.

And friends, there was nothing. Nothing at all. I found proper technical ones from Cisco Meraki; fancy Office365 ones, depicting an ExpressRoute to O365 and tunnelling everything else through the VPN; and another Office365 tunnel with ExpressRoute and a split-tunnel for the rest of the traffic.

Pretty much the closest I came to my needs was this atrocity, via http …


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Roundcube not loading email contents

Posted on Mon 11 May 2020 in Tech • Tagged with Tech

Here's another quick one! I had a Roundcube instance, chugging along fine. Then one day it just stopped loading emails! Everything else was all fine - no problems with login etc, but trying to preview an email just game me a sadfaec. Chrome couldn't load the contents, and told me that the server had refused to connect.


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Renaming a computer object in Active Directory

Posted on Sat 09 May 2020 in Tech • Tagged with Tech

Quick post tonight.

You can't rename a computer object in Active Directory Users and Computers. Even if you change the hostname, the domain object will still have the original distinguishedName from the old device.

However... you can do it in ADSIEdit! Just open ADSIEdit, navigate to the AD container that holds your misnamed object, right click on it, and Rename.

I've just done it with a couple test computers on a domain and both worked completely smoothly. I don't know if this would be safe if the renamed computer were …


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WireGuard on Windows - Part 2

Posted on Fri 08 May 2020 in Tech • Tagged with Tech, WireGuard

A few days ago I spun up a Windows Dev VM to have a play with WireGuard for Windows.

I didn't really have a clear goal in mind when I started playing with this - part of it was in trying to create and launch a tunnel without using the GUI. Mostly I was just trying to learn more about a new implementation of a tool that I really like.

If you read my previous article, you'll recall that I started off trying to do this with just wireguard.exe. Here …


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Getting WireGuard on Windows - quietly

Posted on Mon 27 April 2020 in Tech • Tagged with Tech, WireGuard

So, I mentioned in my post yesterday that I'm trying to get a bit of a quiet installer for WireGuard on Windows. Not that the current one is noisy, but I have a really simple use-case that I want to meet.

I spent some time seeing if I could just extract WireGuard.exe and run that. Nope, of course - it requires WinTun to be installed to facilitate the Layer 3 tunneling.

Next I played with the idea of just deploying WinTun directly, without installing the WireGuard package itself. I can …


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A pork rub for when you've run out of garlic

Posted on Sun 26 April 2020 in Food • Tagged with Recipes, Food

I picked up a set of whole pork loins at Pak 'n Save the other day for like twelve bucks, and being on dinner duty tonight I thought it was time to fire up the smoker. But just last night we'd had a Chicken Tikka Masala which cleaned out our garlic stocks ... what to do?

After a bit of dithering, I made a simple low-garlic rub and it turned out good enough that I'm documenting it here!

Outta Garlic Pork Rub

  • 1 tbsp salt
  • 2 tbsp brown sugar
  • 1 tbsp …

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Setting up a Windows Dev VM under ProxmoxVE

Posted on Sun 26 April 2020 in Tech • Tagged with Tech

Righto, I've been using WireGuard for quite a long time now, but I just had my first foray into WireGuard on Windows. I'm trying to roll it into a low-touch VPN deployment sort of thing.

There will be a post about that soon, but this particular post is about setting up the environment for me to play with this stuff... I need a system where I can take snapshots and roll back the drive to a known state. (So I can be sure I'm not missing anything that the installer …


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