After experiencing the Gingerbread cookies at Disneyland I started a quest to come up with a gingerbread cookie that was almost as good. The following is a combination of multiple Disneyland recipes I found online and a few rounds of trial and error to tweak the final recipe.
Enjoy!
Gingerbread Ingredients:
- 1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter
- 3/4 cup brown sugar
- 2/3 cup “fancy” dark molasses *make sure it doesn’t say cooking, blackstrap, unsulphured, or lite
- 1 egg
- 3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/2 tsp. baking soda
- 1 tsp. ground cloves
- 3 tsp. ground cinnamon
- 3 tsp. ground ginger
- 3/4 tsp. salt
- 1/4 tsp. ground cardamom
- 1 tsp. vanilla extract
- 1/2 cup of water
Gingerbread Instructions:
- In a large mixing bowl, cream butter and brown sugar.
- Add dark molasses and mix until completely blended.
- Mix in the egg
- Sift the dry ingredients together and add to butter mixture, 1/3 at a time.
- Blend well.
- Add water until dough comes together.
- Wrap dough in plastic wrap and chill in refrigerator at least 1 hour, or up to a few days.
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease cookie sheets or line with parchment paper.
- Use a floured rolling pin to roll out dough on a floured surface, about 1/8th inch thick. (Don’t be afraid to use plenty of flour.)
- Cut into desired shapes.
Bake at 350 degrees for 8-10 minutes. Cool on wire racks.
Optional: Decorate with Royal Icing or a light glaze when completely cooled.
I recently had a friend tell me, "I went to your website looking for a wireless router recommendation and couldn't find one," and I felt sad I had let them down. So I thought it may be to later for my friend but I do have a couple of thoughts about wireless in your home.
Wireless has evolved quite a bit since 802.11b days, and much of the technology that has been developed for an enterprise has moved to your home in the way of mesh wifi. Mesh wifi uses multiple access points to provide a more consistent and reliable network throughout your house. Traditional wireless routers needed to be powerful because there was only one wireless router that would need to penetrate multiple walls windows and the like. Where mesh only needs to provide wireless to a smaller area it can use different radios or wired connections to backhaul the traffic back to your router or modem.
If you live in a small to a medium home built with sheetrock walls you can get away with one router. But where mesh wifi truly excels is in older homes with plaster walls, larger homes, and multiple story homes. In those situations, the mesh router design is going to prove invaluable. I also have friends that live in condos or larger apartments where there is so much wifi pollution they can not find a clear wireless channel in the 2.4Ghz spectrum. Setting up mesh wifi and utilizing more of the 5Ghz spectrum will definitely provide a superior consistent and reliable wifi experience.
Luckily the price of Mesh router is dropping to the point where it is competitive with mid to high end standalone wireless routers. In any scenario, I can't think of a reason why you wouldn't want to go mesh wifi. In addition to the excellent coverage, many of the more popular wireless mesh providers are also very aggressive about software updates and automatic over the air updates almost eliminating the need for an individual to randomly check for updates, truly set it and forget it.
Not to promote any one brand, but I have the eero and really love it, I get coverage from my driveway to my pool and it has been a true set it and forget it setup. I have friends that have the Linksys VELOP and they also love mesh wireless since they put it.
I hope this helped if you were in the middle of a wireless decision.
Fun F5 Troubleshooting
Test your HTTP keep alive from the F5 CLI:
Using curl:
curl -vvv -H "Host: domain.com" -H "Connection: Close" -H "User-Agent:" -H "Accept:" serverip:port/uripath.html
telnet serverip port
Then copy the first half of your keep alive
GET /uripath.html
From the above listed commands you should see exactly what the F5 is receiving when it sends a keep alive. From the returned http request you can determine the best data to use for a receive string.
So F5 license has always been kind of funky. I am not saying it's bad but I've just always wondered why the auto license update didn't work. Then recently we licensed ASM and again had to perform the manual license process, it went all well as it always had but we were not getting ASM signature updates?
So it was time to dive into the F5 and start troubleshooting. The first thing was to confirm that the F5 could resolve the DNS name for the service updates... Check!
Next, you need to check the routing, there are two routing tables the LTM table and the sys management routing table. The LTM routing table had a default route that was not able to access the internet. This was by design since the interface it was attempting to use was in a secure DMZ. This may not affect you if you allow your F5 to the internet directly but we did not have the luxury.
So this is where we were a little confused. One would think the License update and ASM Signature updates would be part of the sys-management routing table, unfortunately, that isn't the case. We discovered that the F5 attempts to reach out were following the LTM default route and not the defined sys management-route default.
One the issue was identified it was easily resolved by adding a route to the F5 services int he sys-management routing table, outlined in italic.
10.0.0.1 Is the internal gateway or next hop in this scenario.
104.219.104.0/21 Is the IP space for F5 services.
The rest should be self-explanatory.
sys management-route F5_Service_Route {
gateway 10.0.0.1
network 104.219.104.0/21
sysadmin@(f5-guest-01)(cfg-sync Changes Pending)(/S1-green-P::Active)(/Common)(tmos)# create sys management-route F5_Service_Route network 104.219.104.0/21 gateway 10.0.0.1
sysadmin@(f5-guest-01)(cfg-sync Changes Pending)(/S1-green-P::Active)(/Common)(tmos)#
sysadmin@(f5-guest-01)(cfg-sync Changes Pending)(/S1-green-P::Active)(/Common)(tmos)# list sys management-route
sys management-route F5_Service_Route {
gateway 10.0.0.1
network 104.219.104.0/21
}
sys management-route tacacs2 {
gateway 10.0.0.1
network10.0.0.10/32
}
sys management-route tacacs1 {
gateway 10.0.0.1
network 10.1.1.10/32
}
sys management-route default {
gateway 10.0.0.1
network default
}
Lastley this article has alot of good info about setting ASM and attack signitures.
https://api-u.f5.com/support/kb-articles/K8217?pdf
After we added the sys management route were able to perform auto license retrievals and get our ASM signatures update. I hope this helps anyone also stumped with the same issue.
Enjoy!