Tea Tasting Notes:  Yesheng gushu hongcha from w2t

Liking this quite a lot - about 6-7G 120ml at 200F.  Sweet, “stone fruit” as I saw in a review - wet leaves at first smelled like freaking peach or plum.

Will try 212 and see what happens.  Kinda crazy how the slightly higher temp changes the tea.  It’s not intense, but now it’s more bitter and closer to “black tea” tasting.  Will go back to 200 - prefer that by a long shot.

W2t sells this stuff in cakes.  Depending on how future sessions go sticking to 200F, it might be worth getting one.

Tea Tasting Notes: 2018 Spring Raw from white2tea

This is a 100G cake from w2t’s puer basics sampler pack, which, when I bought it, I didn’t realize was all raw puer (I was a serious newbie back then - all of about a year ago).  Not a big fan of any of those teas, and I’ve read less-than-flattering comments about the pack on reddit.

https://white2tea.com/collections/tea-sample-sets/products/basics-puer-tea-sample-set

First try shortly after receiving it about 9 months ago:  Similar to the 2018 Huangpian cake - astringent, not enjoyable.  [Betting I brewed that at full boiling back then]

Second try: Well, my guess is that I was brewing this at full-on boiling the first time.  Brewing per raw puer - 200F, 7G leaf in 120ml pot (might be a little heavy on the leaf, but we’ll see)

• 1st: Not astringent or bitter, a bit of a bite (I don’t really know what the fancy term is for that); dark golden liquor; not a dominating flavor - it’s OK at best
• Got about 7-8 infusions before it ran out of flavor, well, really before I decided I was done with it.  Not exactly my favorite flavor profile.  Maybe it’s got some camphor/menthol working, that isn’t quite my “cup of tea” (pardon that….).  If so, I may not be in for a treat when I eventually try my minis of w2t Camphornaught.

Tea Tasting Notes  2023 Spring Old Arbor Raw Puer w2t

Got a 50 gram cake of this in a recent White2Tea tea club shipment.

Smells like fresh cut grass, etc. Looking forward to trying this! The aroma dissipates quickly after it’s out of the wrapper, nowhere near as strong in the pot for the dry leaves, or for the brewed ones; steeped at 200F like typical for raw. It’s a raw all right, not super strong flavor-wise; it’s good. It’s ever-so-slightly got that raw bite, but is largely oolong-like floral (just subtle, not in-your-face like some oolongs) and “sweet”. I’m getting to like raw more than before…..maybe because I’ve tried some decent ones lately?

Second try 2023-08-22: 200F, 6G in 120ml pot: golden/yellow color with a tinge of green/brown; again, slight raw puer bite, a bit grassy/herbal, still reminds me a bit of an oolong, but only slightly so; it’s enjoyable; will probably let is sit for a few months and try it again to see how it’s changed, if at all. Started at 10 seconds and added 5 seconds with each new infusion, but accidentally added 10 seconds at the 4th;

• 1st, 2nd infusions: Gives a little bit of a rush - not familiar with the fancy term I’ve seen used, not a “relaxing” tea
• 3rd: Very floral flavor like an oolong, green tea grassy, vegetal smell to the leaves; that “rush” is gone
• 4th: went 212F, brings out more of that floralness and something else I can’t place, again reminds me of oolong; a tiny bit of astringency and bitterness - very tiny
• 5th: 200F, will go back to 212F for the next one, not as intense flavor, but zero astringency/bitterness
• 6th: didn’t make any notes
• 7th: It’s losing oomph, flavor is lighter, a floral hint; liquor is still yellow golden, just not as deep color as before. 45 seconds
• 8th: Still try 90 seconds this time to see what happens
• 9th: 90 seconds brought back most of the floral/oolong flavor with no astringency or bitterness; feels more “dry” in my mouth than previously
• 10th: Will go 180 seconds and see what happens…..a tiny bit roasty, tiny bit of astringency; not much of a reason to go further

Tea Tasting Notes: 2022 Five Pile Chatou from White2Tea

Brewed as shou puer (212F, 7 grams tea in 100ml teapot)

https://white2tea.com/products/five-pile-laochatou

Kind of a grab bag, it's super compressed, so it’ll probably take a ton of steepings. 

Deep reddish brown liquor.  Taste is very mildly earthy with a little sweetness.  It's

enjoyable. I've read others saying it has a quite strong taste, so will have to see how

later infusions go.

Update: 20230-08-24: I ended up liking this one quite a lot. I bought 250G of it during

the W2T "back to school" sale (free shipping for orders $39 or more).

Javelina family with a VERY energetic youngster

How to Fix: Unable to Join Windows Domain from a Laptop Connected over Wifi

I'll get to the solution first for this issue right off the bat.  To join a Windows domain, you have to be able to connect to a domain controller using host name resolution.  The simplest way to test that is working is to ping your domain name (e.g., companyname.int):

ping companyname.int

If you get a response from one of your domain controllers, you should be able to join the domain.  If not, you won't be able to join the domain.

In our instance, we had a laptop connected over our wifi that was failing to join the domain.  We'd been able to join laptops to the domain over wifi previously, so after some help from Google, we discovered the "ping your domain" test.  That was not working.  ipconfig/all showed that the first DNS server in the list of DNS servers was 8.8.8.8.  Huh, well, internal name resolution isn't going to work using that DNS server!  We manually removed 8.8.8.8 from the list of DNS servers on the laptop and it was able to join the domain.

It turns out that our network admin configured 8.8.8.8 as the first DNS server on the DHCP server running on our office's main router several months back when we had some internal DNS server issues.  At that time, Internet access stopped working for the office, since DNS was no longer working, and adding the 8.8.8.8 DNS server fixed that.  Probably would be best to added it to the end of the DNS servers list instead.

Enabling Multicast on Ubuntu

Enabling Multicast on Ubuntu

For some unknown reason, Ubuntu doesn’t install allowing access to multicast from the shell, apps, etc.  You have to enable it by editing the /etc/sysctl.conf file:

sudo vi /etc/sysctl.conf

And add these parameters:

net.ipv4.conf.default.rp_filter = 0

net.ipv4.conf.all.rp_filter = 0

net.ipv4.icmp_echo_ignore_broadcasts = 0

HOWEVER - it looks like .default and .all don’t necessarily do the trick.  On some servers we’ve had to explicitly set it for specific NICs, e.g., .eth1. Instead of .default and .all

I had to set the rp_filter for eth1 explicitly:

sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.conf.eth1.rp_filter=0

now it works

Then load the params to the running systems (or reboot):

sudo sysctl -p