Skills

I love making different feasts. It pleases me to no end to come up with some new recipe based on something I saw in passing online. This recipe is based on something I saw on TikTok, and another recipe that I skimmed through on Facebook.

Ingredients:

• pork ribs (2 per person, roughly)
• barbecue sauce (your favorite)
• orange juice
• cranberries
• salt, pepper, paprika, thyme, oregano, red pepper flakes

Grease a large oven-safe pot or pan, deep enough to contain all the ribs plus the liquids. I use no-stick spray, but you could use any fat, really. Preheat your oven to 250F.

Place your ribs into the pan in whatever manner you like, but in a single layer. Don’t stack them on top of each other, or some will be delicious and the rest will be hard and yucky. While the oven preheats, whisk together the barbecue sauce and juice, then add in the spices until it’s right for you. You want enough to cover the top of your ribs, but not to drown them. They’ll make their own liquid as they cook, so you just need to coat the top.

Cover the top of the ribs with the sauce, using a brush to get all the nooks and crannies. Add in the whole, fresh cranberries or some dried ones (or dried cherries, or whatever floats your boat here). Cover the pan with a lid or tin foil, and place in the oven. Bake for 2 hours.

After 2 hours, check on the ribs. They should be partially cooked (pork ribs are fully cooked when they reach an internal temperature of 210F, but they also tend to fall apart when you try to take their temperature, so you can just judge it by that if you like) at this point. Move the ribs around if some of them are sticking out or looking dry, but otherwise, just check on them. Raise the temperature of your oven to 350F, and continue to bake, covered, until the pork is falling apart and ready. You’ll know it’s ready when it basically falls apart when you poke it with a fork.

Serve up hot, with delicata squash and fresh made spinach noodles.

Notes:

I spooned the liquid out of the pot over my noodles, and it was FANTASTIC. I made the noodles myself, although they were a bit soft. I didn’t add enough flour to the recipe. Still, they were tender and quite yummy. And green LOL!

Okay, today’s post is a bit of a cheat, but what can I say. I like to window shop, even when the window is Amazon. LOL!

There are a ton of items out there that would make excellent gifts for the Prepper in your life. I hope you find some of these to be of use.

• Weather Radio, USB Charger, combo with great ratings
• Flatpack solar lantern
• The P38 stocking stuffer special
• Power Bank/solar charger
• Zip ties, because if someone says they have enough, they’re lying
• A garden starter kit
• Thermal blankets, because they’re very useful
• SAM Splints, because you may need them some day

It’s just a little list. It’s one I think is worthwhile looking into. Create your own. If you have young ‘uns or teens, give them a Get Home bag for part of their stocking. Plan out your garden for next year and get all the seeds as stocking stuffers. Heck, get seeds you can start indoors now, and plant outside when it gets warmer.

There are some items that are “always buy” in my opinion, like the zip ties and thermal blankets. No matter how many you have, more is always a good thing. Also in that list would be paracord on the roll, small first aid kits, rain ponchos that fit in a purse… There are so many ideas.

Happy holidays, folks. No matter what you celebrate, this is a month full of holy days, and may each of you find something soul comforting over this month.

I adore sausage gravy and biscuits. They’re the ultimate comfort food. The biscuits are a wee bit sweet, and the sausage gravy is a bit spicy and savory and creamy, all at once. I always make mine with an egg, though you can do what you want with yours.

Ingredients for the sausage gravy:

• 1 lb ground sausage meat (Jones or Jimmy Dean work well)
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 to 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 tbsp all purpose flour
• 1 to 2 cups of milk (regular, cream, or non-dairy is fine)

In a large pan, brown your ground sausage meat over a medium heat. You want it to be thoroughly cooked, but not crispy or burned. Drain off the fat, and reserve it (pro tip: add a lining of tin foil to a bowl and strain your fat into it… after, use what you want by spooning it out, then discard the rest, wrapped up in the foil). Remove the sausage and set aside.

Add 2 tablespoons of the fat back into your pan and add in the onion. Saute over a medium heat until the onion until becomes soft and opaque. Add in the garlic and stir continuously for about 30 seconds to a minute. You want the garlic to be fragrant, but not brown or crisp. Add extra fat if necessary.

Sprinkle the onion mixture with the flour, and stir with a wooden spoon until it’s incorporated and clumpy. If it’s very loose and saucy, you may need a bit more flour. If it’s all white and not mixing into the onion, you may need a bit more fat. The idea is to make a roux.

Lower your heat to just below medium. Pour in your milk very slowly, about a quarter cup at a time, and stir gently and constantly with a wooden spoon. Work on getting rid of any lumps or bits of unincorporated flour to ensure your gravy comes out smooth. Continue to add your milk until the gravy is a good consistency for you. You want to end up with a smooth, fairly thick gravy that is easy to stir and has no lumps.

If your gravy “breaks,” meaning it separates into lumpy bits and oily liquid, you can fix it. Add warm water a tablespoon at a time and whisk vigorously in between. This should allow your gravy to emulsify again, and get creamy. The water must be warm, not hot or cold, for this to work.

Once your gravy is how you like it, add the sausage back in and stir to mix it well. Set aside until your biscuits are done!

Now it’s time to make the biscuits!

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My first fiber switch turned out to be a L3 managed “switch”. Way cool. But I purchased a cheap switch and found that it completely undocumented.

It has taken me a while to figure things out.

The configuration GUI is an What You See Is All You Get type. There is enough there that you can get the switch up and running, but not enough to fully configure the L3 Switch.

To accomplish that, you need to use the CLI. Not a problem, I like CLI’s.

Of course, there is no documentation but for tab completion and very limited help screens.

I get it mostly working.

After playing with the Free Range Routing Suite (FRR) for a while and getting OSPF working on all of my hosts and the primary router, I was feeling pretty confident.

It seems that FRR took their configuration model almost directly from Cisco’s CLI. The number of times I used a Cisco help page to determine how to configure an OSPF setting is remarkable.

The new L3 switch turns out to have a Cisco like configuration language. And what isn’t Cisco like, is FRR like. Neither Cisco nor FRR, but close.

Today I had a tremendous success, I moved a ceph host from the physical network to the OVN network.

This included moving that segment of the network to a new subnet. And everything sort of worked.

The issue turned out to be a routing issue.

The correct answer is to turn on OSPF within the new physical router. It does support it, after all.

Having played with the damn thing for a few hours, breaking my network multiple times, I was about to give up when I happened to notice a strange value for a setting.

That setting? MTU, of course.

Even though every interface shows an MTU of 9000. Even though jumbo frames are turned on and using a 9000 byte frame.

Even though an MTU of 9000 is very much supported, the MTU of the “VLAN” was set to 1500.

Now, Cisco VLANs are not the same as a tagged VLAN. A tagged VLAN acts like a separate physical network. They are where you place interface settings. These VLANs can then be assigned to a physical port.

The physical port’s MTU overrides the VLAN MTU. This means my jumbo packets from host to host work.

The problem is that the VLAN MTU is maxed out at 2000 bytes. This seems to only affect the OSPF traffic and not the physical interface. But I’m dead in the water or I need to figure out how to do this differently.

Still, I didn’t pay an arm plus a leg for this physical router. I’ll get it to work.

There are skills that our grandparents and great-grandparents had, that we (as a society, at least) are sadly lacking in today. The art of “making do” is one of those skills. It’s something we MUST learn to do, and quickly. Whether we have some type of country-wide emergency, an apocalyptic event, or a recession, the ability to “make do” is crucial.

So what is “making do,” you ask? It is actually an amalgamation of important skills. First and foremost, it is living within your means, no matter how uncomfortable. That means putting away the credit card and paying cash for things. If you can’t afford something, you don’t purchase it. Don’t live a filet mignon life when you have a hamburger budget.

It’s so much more than that, though. How many of you have mended a pair of socks or your jeans because they got a hole in them but still had a lot of life to them? Likely very few of you. Until the last ten years or so, I hadn’t done much of that myself. Even as someone who had a very low income, I could afford our frankly very cheap clothing. Today, even though I have access to considerably more money, I tend to spend less.

I do know how to darn a sock, mend a hole in a knitted sweater, and hem or patch clothing. I practice these skills on a regular basis. A good example of this is that I discovered my favorite holiday dress was eaten into (likely by a bunny, but we don’t know for sure). There are several jagged holes, and they’re near the hemline. I could patch the holes, but they would be very noticeable, and I don’t want that. I could darn them or put a decorative patch on them (which I’ve done with some of my jean skirts), but again, it wouldn’t look nice. It’s a nicer dress. Instead, I’ve decided to shorten the entire dress. I tend to wear it with tights or leggings anyhow, because it’s quite short and revealing, so taking off the 1.5 inches to remove the holes will not really be seen. As a bonus, it will give me a strip of the dress’s fabric that I can use for future patching, should it ever be necessary. My lovely holiday dress will live on, and I will enjoy wearing it despite a few mishaps.

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In 1983, CCITT and ISO merged their network definition to create The Basic Reference Model for Open Systems Interconnection.

This is the “famous” seven layer model. Which works for ISO standards but is a poor match for the Internet.

The three layers we are interested in are:

1. Physical layer
2. Data link layer
3. Network layer

1 Physical Layer

The physical layer defines the electrical, mechanical, and procedural interface to the transmission medium. WTF?

Ok, let’s look at this in terms of some real examples. If you have a computer that is more than a few years old, it will have a network connection in it or a port that a network connection can be attached to.

The most common mechanical connection, the socket and connector, is the RJ-45. This is the thing that looks like a big telephone connector. Oh yeah, many of the youngsters don’t remember every plugging a phone into the wall.

This connector consists of 8 connectors. The location and form of these connectors defines part of the mechanical system.

The other part is that those 8 connectors are attached to four pairs of wires. The pairs of wire are twisted and bundled into a single cable. Each of the 8 wires are numbered, and the mechanical definition of the RJ-45 defines which wires are attached to which connector, at both ends.

When I say “numbered”, the physical reality is that the wires are color coded.

The electrical definition defines which wires are used for transmitting and which are used for receiving. It defines if the signals are ground referenced or differences between two wires.

Everything about how to connect the physical devices and how to transmit a signal are specified at Layer 1, the physical layer.

2 Data Link Layer

This layer defines how data is transmitted over the L1 physical network. It defines what how to use the physical layer.

For example, Frame Relay is a data link protocol for connecting distant devices. Each Protocol Data Unit (PDU), consists of a flag field, an address field, an information field, and a frame check sequence, or checksum field.

The information field contains the actual data (information) that is being transmitted.

The Frame Relay standard states that the information field must be at least 262 octets (bytes) and recommends that it support at least 1600 octets.

It is important to note that a length of 262 cannot be (easily) expressed in a single byte. This means that the length field must be at least 2 bytes wide.

While Frame Relay is still in use, today, it is not as common as it used to be. There are better options.

A much more common L2 protocol is Ethernet. This is called a Frame. The Frame consists of a preamble, start frame delimiter, destination address, src address, tag (or zeros), type or length, payload, CRC and a gap.

As originally defined, an Ethernet packet had a maximum length of 1500 octets.

Packet Size

In networking, we talk about sending a packet. A packet is a more generic term for “frame”. We have packets at the data link layer and at the network layer.

Every packet contains enough information to identify the source and destination of the packet, the length of the packet, and the payload. There will often be a header to identify more about the type of the packet.

As a packet moves through a network, it might be “fragmented” as it passes through a network segment which has an MTU smaller than the packet size.

There must be enough information to reconstruct the packet, even when the packet has become fragmented.

Fragmenting is something we want to avoid, if possible.

To that end, a part of the connection process is to discover the MTU for each device.

Consider a simple network segment. A network segment is a piece of the network that is connected at L2.

We have devices A and B. Device A is using a fiber physical layer and device B is using a copper physical layer. B is attached to switch 2, switch 2 is connected to switch 1, and switch 1 is connected to device A.

If all four devices are using old style Ethernet frames, then the MTU will default to 1500. A simple database backup is 3.3 GB. This means we will have to transmit at least 2,305,845 packets.

This requires each device to handle 2.3 million interrupts.

On the other hand, if we were to use jumbo packets, then we reduce this to around 384,307 packets. This is a huge savings in load on the network segment.

The two switches, as L2 devices, are going to either be store and forward switches, or simple hubs. Nobody uses hubs anymore. So they must be switches.

Each switch receives the packet, storing it, then transmits that packet on a different port.

The switch must be able to store the complete packet/frame. If it can not, it will drop the packet.

When designing your network, you want to make sure that all the switches on the network support the largest MTU you might be using.

Devices A and B will discover what their MTUs are. The smaller will rule. The switches, on the other hand, are transparent. They do not get a say in the MTU discovery.

What this means, is that you can have devices on the network that respond to simple testing, such as sending pings, but which fail for larger packets.

Conclusion of Rant

I accidentally purchased a switch (L2) when I was intending to purchase a router (L3).

This should not have been an issue. I intended to use some switches, regardless.

The specifications look good. MTU is documented as 12000.

I plug everything together and start testing. My first network test is always “ping”. If ping isn’t working, nothing else will work well enough.

That worked perfectly.

Then I attempted to login to the remote site using SSH. This silently failed, before timing out with destination unreachable.

Ping works, SSH doesn’t?

This makes no sense.

Until I found it. SSH does a key exchange with my RSA public key. The key size is 1679 bytes. This is larger than the supported MTU of switch 2 at 1500.

The network fails, silently.

So I have email out to the manufacturer, hoping for a positive response.

If you’re like me, you currently have a turkey carcass somewhere in your fridge, freezer, or on your (very cold) porch. Thanksgiving was delicious, and you’ve mostly picked that carcass clean. What’s left are the bits no one generally eats (wings maybe, or the bottom of the bird, the backbone, and perhaps the neck and giblets). Don’t throw those away, folks. That right there is Winter Gold.

To make a hearty turkey broth is quite easy. You can do it in a crockpot, a Westinghouse (which is my method), or on your stove top. This can even be done over a fire, on a hearth, or on top of your wood stove, if you like. You simply need a heat source that will bring your liquid to a low simmer, but not a full boil.

Whatever method you’re using, the preparation is exactly the same. First, denude your bird. Pull off ALL the edible meat (yes, even from the legs). Leave behind tendons, bones, gristly bits, and parts no one eats. Store the meat in the fridge for later. Now take your hands, a large knife, or a good pair of kitchen sheers and cut the bird into pieces that will fit into whatever you’re making your broth in. You want all the bones and bits to be submerged, so depending on your size of pot, you may need to chop up the bird fairly small. It’s perfectly okay to put the carcass into your pot then use a large spoon or a wooden mallet to shove and break it until it fits. For our purposes, it does not matter if the bones are broken.

Once the bird is in the pot, you will begin to add your vegetables. If you want to be truly frugal, you should add in all the peelings and skins from Thanksgiving dinner. I didn’t save all mine (though I have in the past), so instead, I’m adding in the following:

• one whole onion, skin on, quartered
• one head of garlic, cut in half so all the cloves are halved, skin on
• 2 bay leaves
• leftover carrots (carrot tops and skins are fine here, too)
• celery tops (the leafy bits, rough chopped)
• whatever herbs you prefer (my garden yielded the last of the sage, thyme, and some parsley)
• whatever spices you prefer (at least the standards: salt, pepper, garlic)

Add all these to your pot, and then pour in enough water to cover everything, but not to boil over. Bring your broth to a boil, and then put the temperature down to low and let it simmer for several hours.

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The problem that people have been attempting to solve, for years, is the lack of space in the IPv4 addresses space.

There are currently more devices attached to the Internet or “the network” than there are addresses in the IPv4 space. This requires address overlap.

The smallest section of a network is the “subnet”. A subnet can hold anywhere from 2 to over a million devices.

Consider a small business network. They have three networks, a network that is connected to the Internet, labeled DMZ, a network for the security cameras, labeled CCTV, and the working network, labeled Internal.

They have a router between the Internal network and the DMZ. There is another router that takes traffic from the DMZ and transfers it to the Internet.

The CCTV network does not need to ever touch the DMZ network, nor does it really need to touch the Internal network. So they run a completely separate physical network so that CCTV traffic is never available on the Internal or DMZ networks.

This could become costly. Consider a situation where you need to connect multiple buildings. Maybe some of those buildings can be connected with fiber, but others are using radio links. Radio links are expensive.

The traffic is low enough that there is no justification for a second radio link. Besides, it is difficult to run two radio links side-by-side.

The solution that was implemented is the Virtual LAN, or VLAN.

When you define a VLAN, you set a tag in the Ethernet frame, identifying which VLAN this frame belongs to. Now, we can put all the CCTV traffic on a VLAN and use the same physical network as we use for the Internal network. All is good.

This isn’t a complete solution, it is possible to configure a network card to listen to a particular VLAN, even if that device isn’t supposed to be on the VLAN. It is also another configuration point which smaller devices might not support.

As an example, I’ve never found a method to put my cell phone on a particular VLAN. It is likely possible, I’ve just never found it.

Same with my CCTV cameras. They exist only on the default, untagged, network.

One of the very nice parts of using a VLAN, is that you can have overlapping address space. I can have 192.168.88.0/24 on the physical network and 192.168.89.0/22 on the same physical network but with a VLAN tag of 87. They are overlapping address spaces, but they do not interfere with each other.

The solution was to allow a L2 switch port to be tagged. Now, by device which only uses the untagged frame can be plugged into a tagged port. All traffic coming from that port will have a VLAN tag added to it. All traffic sent to that port will have the VLAN tag stripped from it.

This means that a CCTV device sends and receives on the default (no tag) network. It reaches the switch and the packet is now on a VLAN. Another device on the Internal network is also on the same VLAN. That device, a monitoring station, can now see the CCTV footage.

If a port receives a frame that is tagged, it drops the frame. This keeps VLANs from leaking from their approved segment.

If there is a need for a port to accept multiple VLANs, it is configured as a trunk.

Thursday, I attempted to move ceph to an OVN network. This would eliminate the need for a VLAN and would give me a single subnet across multiple physical subnets. It failed.

Friday, I attempted to put a new L2 switch into place. The good news was that I didn’t need to break my entire network to do the testing.

The test computer has two NIC’s. One is connected to the management physical network. The other to the back plane network. I was able to establish a connection to the management port.

Once there, I could establish that I had full bandwidth to other nodes on the physical network, using the physical subnet. I could even reach multiple subnets using that same interface.

Then I tried the VLAN. The VLAN failed. There was no network traffic passing through.

It also looks like they do not have a large enough MTU.

Conclusion

I’m still black boxing this thing. It has been a painful trip. I have more than a few more tests to run. It is just overly painful trying to get there.

Last week it was turkey. This week, I’m sharing my favorite side dishes that I use in a perfect Thanksgiving Feast!

Mashies

Mashed potatoes are a definite requirement at any Thanksgiving feast. The easiest way to make delicious mashed potatoes is to cut them into about inch square cubes, and boil them until they’re soft but not yet falling apart. Mash with whatever masher you have on hand, adding in a minimum of a tablespoon of butter per potato in the mix and drizzling in milk or cream (or in my case, oatmilk) as needed to bring them to the right consistency for you. I like my potatoes a little lumpy, but everyone else likes them creamy, so I tend to whip them very fine. Serve them with a slight well in the top, filled with a pad of butter and a sprinkle of salt and pepper. They don’t need anything else!

Bread Stuffing

Stuffing is a constant battle in my household. We have several recipes we like, but I’m going to share my Hungarian grandmother’s recipe, because it’s my favorite. This was named “Song Stuffing” by one of my kids, because it contains parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme… but we adults call it “Heart Attack Stuffing” because of all the yummy fatty goodness inside it. It’s also a great way to get liver into your kids, because they’ll never know it’s there until they’ve fallen in love with it. It’s how my Nagymama got me to eat liver!

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Sunday was supposed to be the day I migrated a couple of machines. I have a new physical device which is described as a Level 2 switch with SFP+ ports.

The idea is to replace my small mixed routers, 2 SFP+ ports plus some RJ45 ports with either a L2 SFP+ only switch or an L3 SFP+ only routers. This allows me to move some servers around and to increase the bandwidth from nodes to the backbone.

The switch arrived with a nice little instruction manual which claims I can find a web interface at 192.168.2.1 while the website claims there is no management interface.

Plugging it into an Ethernet port with an Ethernet SFP module gives me nothing on 192.168.2.1 and nothing on 192.168.2.x/24 but for my machine. It looks like it is unmanaged.

This means, it should be a simple plug in replacement for my tiny switch, giving an upgraded data path to the backbone.

It didn’t work.

So now I have to do some more testing. I’ll figure this out, one way or another, but it is another bottleneck in my path to full conversion to fiber from copper.