Soup: Split Pea with Turkey

Thanksgiving took place under my roof, so naturally I took custody of the turkey carcass - with an eye toward soup, of course! On the other hand, I've had a hankering for split pea soup, but preferring to avoid all the sodium that ham is full of.

Enter this recipe. I used turkey broth instead of chicken. And instead of ham, I used the turkey that boiled off the bones during the broth-making. And I left out the salt (and forgot about the pepper).

It's really good!

There's still plenty of broth left over, some of which will turn into Sherry Noodle Soup. But I also plan to make a batch (or half batch) of split pea with a cup of water swapped out for sherry. UPDATE: I swapped 1/2 cup water for sherry, which really helps when you cook without salt. It was a great addition!

Apache Reverse Proxy for Microservice Subdomain

You've got Apache 2 running. What more does a plain-old simple HTML site need, after all?

Now you want to add a microservice, but you don't want to add more hosting. Can you add it to this existing host? Yes you can!

Here's how to add a subdomain - tictactoe.example.com - that will send requests to your microservice that's listening on port 8888.

Put the following in /etc/apache2/sites-available/tictactoe.com.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName tictactoe.example.com

    ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html

    ProxyPass "/"  "http://example.com:8888/"
    ProxyPassReverse "/"  "http://example.com:8888/"

    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Then add your site:

sudo a2ensite tictactoe.com

The best part is your Go code (or Rust, Ruby, Python, whatever) can just handle HTTP. You can use Let's Encrypt/certbot to add the HTTPS virtual host that will proxy secure traffic to your microservice as well.

UPDATE: Nothing like getting an invalid command error trying to do this on an Apache without proxy enabled. So...

sudo a2enmod proxy_http

All kinds of Ubuntu troubles (fixed)

All three kinds of Ubuntu troubles (all of them fixed)

1. Can't get Ubuntu to start up without using recovery mode? Try making this change in /etc/defaults/grub

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nomodeset" 

But then don't forget to

$ sudo update-grub

I've lost track of all the sites I looked at that steered me in the right direction, but I was still having trouble because I'd forgotten the update-grub step!

---

2a. Trouble getting VNC to install and start up? Look no further than Ubuntu's own Screen Sharing feature!

2b. Once I got that working, I discovered that I could not connect using:

• the RealVNC viewer (error: "Unable to connect to VNC Server using your chosen security setting. Either upgrade VNC Server to a more recent version from RealVNC, or select a weaker level of encryption.")
• MacOS Screen Sharing (error: "The software on the remote computer appears to be incompatible with this version of Screen Sharing.")

Fortunately I found a video explaining the solution. Install and launch dconf Editor. Then navigate to org > gnome > desktop > remote-access and turn off the require-encryption option. Once I did this, I was able to use all of my VNC clients!

Git won't Pull

Problem: cannot connect to remote

$ git pull
nc: getaddrinfo: nodename nor servname provided, or not known
ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host

fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

$ git remote -v
origin git@github.com:blah/blah (fetch)

origin git@github.com:blah/blah (push)

$ cat .git/config
...
sshCommand = ssh -o 'ProxyCommand=nc -X connect -x blah:80 %h %p'
...

Aha!

Possible solution: remove sshCommand line from .git/config unless you are ALWAYS connecting through the proxy server.