Monthly Archives: November 2013

Fun

Pork Scratchings

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Pork ScratchingsWhile the United States celebrates Thanksgiving today (I do miss my brother’s Buffalo Fried Turkey) I picked up a couple bags of Pork Scratchings from the Saint Nicholas Fayre going on in York.  What are pork scratchings?  They are the UK equivalent of pork rinds in the US.  But while most of the pork rind products I’ve had in the US have been the equivalent of pork flavored puffs, the pork rinds from this particular vendor are MUCH better.

First, they are sold in paper bags.  The scratchings quickly soak through the bag turning it slightly translucent.   All fatty products should be sold this way, as putting them into plastic or mylar defeats the purpose.  Next a bite.  Hard and crunchy on the outside (some of the big ones can be almost teeth damaging), but rich and fatty on the inside.  The salty flavor isn’t over powering and almost has a slight season salt taste as well, just makes this pork scratching perfection.

Thankfully, for my health at least, the vendor is only in York on special market days, but it is the new tradition to pick up a bag (or three) when they are in town.

So while we aren’t celebrating Thanksgiving today in the UK I’m trying to keep up the tradition of over indulgence.   Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Work

Slow TFTP Transfers to Cisco 3850 Switch

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I recently upgraded a couple of Cisco 3850 switches and noticed that the TFTP transfer rate to get the Cisco IOS files to the switch were horrible (approximately 200Kbps) which took a LONG time to transfer the 250MB file required for these switches.  After trying a couple different TFTP clients, and finding nothing that worked, I dug into the settings on my preferred TFTPD32 software and found that changing the TFTP setting for “Use anticipation window of” to 4092 gave me about a 4x to 5x improvement in transfer speed.  Still slower than I would have liked but definitely tolerable now.

TFTPD32 Settings showing "Use Anticipation Window"

Work

Sending Email from WordPress Hosted by GoDaddy

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If you have just signed up for a newer GoDaddy hosting account (using either cPanel (Linux) or Plesk (Windows)) for a domain that hosts email externally from GoDaddy account you may have problems sending email.

I noticed this problem when trying to send email to new WordPress users (installed via GoDaddy) that I just created and they never got the introductory email from the server.

Mail sent from your web hosting account will be blackholed and never sent out to the external account.  You can confirm this problem by going into cPanel (sorry I don’t know what this looks like in Plesk) and use the Email Trace feature.  Just click Run Report (you don’t need any email address in the list) and look for recently sent email.  The message will show up as “Message Accepted”

GoDaddy Email Trace with Message Accepted

But click on the magnifying glass and the Delivery Event Details will show that this message is delivered to the :blackhole: address.GoDaddy Delivery Event Details showing "Delivered To: :blackhole:"

After an almost two hour phone call with GoDaddy support, their support person was able to contact a back end engineer who “changed something” on our account so that GoDaddy was no longer authoritative for email for our hosting domain and mail correctly started to flow out to the Internet.  I wasn’t able to get GoDaddy Support to clarify exactly what was changed on the back end but it is apparently a new “feature” of the newer hosting platform that hasn’t been reported previously.  There is currently no way to change this through the existing cPanel interface.

So please give your GoDaddy Support a call if you are running into this problem and push for them to escalate to the back end support as soon as possible.

Fun

From Rag & Bone to Boney M

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As I’m continuing my British education (and hopefully yours too) after my previous posting about Rag & Bone Men, I only just found out about the musical group Boney M., a huge disco hit from the 1970’s and onwards, but apparently not a big hit in the United States.  Go ahead and click play below on the Rasputin song and read on…..

I originally heard a song from them while listening to BBC York during my workday.  When my wife came home that evening I asked if she had ever heard of Boney M. and couldn’t believe I had never heard of them.  Even my mother-in-law knew the name and remembered the band and music.

I spent most of the day listening to the various Boney M offerings on YouTube, so catch up on your 1970’s Euro disco music and get educated.