 Welcome to the homelab show episode 70 another question and answer episode. How you doing Jay? I'm doing well. How are you? great, you know Jay was Visited my studio and helped me set up the home assistant to make it better I had been dragging my feet on it So thank you Jay for that and it only encouraged me that at some point in time We should probably do more home assistant stuff because man doesn't have a happy place in the homelab. Oh my gosh And the capabilities, I mean you just keep finding more the more you look at it more things that it can do that You didn't know it could do so it's like this It's like the gift that keeps on giving because it keeps on providing you with fun things to try out And I have yet to run into a wall than anywhere. So it's great Yeah, it's really interesting because I've now integrated, you know everything from thermostat to more devices and One-click button that turns on my whole studio all the relays and lights for my studio And then on top of that I don't figure out and I just haven't dug into it very far I did figure out that it will connect to Synology Specifically Synology Surveillance Station and I'm still working on what can be triggered from what happens in Synology Surveillance Station But either way now I have like one page where I can see everything. It's just really neat They just keep adding more and more stuff to it. It's all runs on a Raspberry Pi. It's like so You know low energy Relatively low cost. I know depending on when you're listening to this Raspberry Pis are well in short supply Therefore at a higher cost, but you know, they'll come back to normal I hope at some point when as the supply chain catches up until that time, let's Think a sponsor of this episode and that is Linode it is a great place to run many of the projects we talk about here in a home lab and We're gonna be talking about Linode a little bit today because one of the questions is about Linode and services and things we talk about on the show and Our recommendation from Linode isn't just because they are paying us as we say they are a sponsor show But because we actually like the product and we're gonna talk a little bit about that of just good companies to You know use services because well as much as this is a home lab show that we do have some external reliance on things and the Occasional external need for things which is why we have Linode as a sponsor We have an offer code if you'd like to get started with them down in the links below So Linode slash things the home lab show click the link down in In the description for that and thank you for being a sponsor of Linode Absolutely, and I just want to mention like Linode is if nothing else I mean it's many things that's great But it's also the best DMZ like just put your public-facing stuff in Linode and Your infrastructure just keep it away from the public But the things that need to be in reach of the public just put it out there in their data center So your data center is completely separate. Yep All right, I guess I could jump on this first one and it's about the Intel NUC and a single drive running Proxmox, but should they set up ZFS on it and My general answer is going to be no, right? I mean a single ZFS right great ZFS is awesome But the awesomeness of ZFS really comes into play when you have more than one drive But yes, you can install ZFS on a single drive. Yes, it will work and it's probably not it's not any terrible idea I don't see anything really bad coming from it But is it gonna really offer you any resiliency and redundancy? Well, those features like bit rot rely on having multiple copies and across multiple drives So those best features those big advantages you get of ZFS are limited when you do it But to the right other side to play devil's advocate ZFS replication still works in single drive mode So absolutely there are some things that you still can take advantage of some, you know I don't I don't usually go out of my way to set up ZFS on single drives But I mean you can comes down the personal opinion on it. You still have ZFS caching on there So you're gonna sacrifice Some amount of RAM which can be used to cash things on the drive So it's not there's there's another advantage you have towards it. I guess it just comes down to personal preference on there I've never really had the personal preference when I'm setting up a single drive Even though it's becoming more available in Linux to build it all on ZFS generally I do it for you know your rate or a installations But if you want to go there you want to do it have at it go ahead It's it's not like you're Going to have a failing file system. It does functionally work on single drive You just lose all those multi-drive advantages you get from it and I want to add to Something proxmox specific because I've obviously everything you said about ZFS is true Which is why you know before the show I'm like I think you might want to take this one because I know ZFS pretty well But I mean, you know it better. That's just the way it is but Proxmox in ZFS has been very Problematic for me now. I want everyone to take everything I'm about to say with a grain of salt because the problem might be fixed It might not exist and maybe everything I'm saying right now is false But it was true as of the time I last tried ZFS on Proxmox. I had a horrendous experience and I What would I use that I couldn't wait to get it off the system? I mean around the same time as my Proxmox series came out however long ago that was Which was at least a version ago if not, too The issue for me was that it would tell me that I'm out of memory now. I have I Want to say if I remember correctly now 256 gigs of RAM or at least at the time I had 128 gigs of RAM on each of those it was ZFS Proxmox would report That I have the majority of my memories free like 80% 75% But then I go to start a VM and it says out of memory, but it shows I have a bunch of memory How can I be out of memory if it says that I have memory and then what I found out is that it's not Reporting accurately how much memory you have because it wasn't at least at that time Taking into consideration how much memory ZFS is using so what I was getting as far as the free memory amount was completely untrue And it was wasting memory Left and right. I don't run a lot of VMs I might have maybe at most five or six running on there at the time about Maybe at most four gigs of RAM on one of them and mostly one gig and I'm like really I didn't even get the chance to use this yet And it's already out of memory now. It could be completely fixed by now. I do plan on testing ZFS and Proxmox again just to see what the current state is but Take that the great assault you might run into issues But if you have a great experience with ZFS and Proxmox then absolutely let us know that too because I want to know if you're having a good experience or if you're also just having the same problems that I alluded to let us know in the feedback but just Getting back to your point Tom. Yeah, I mean you are losing some of the functionality even if Proxmox is fantastic with ZFS and At that point the more features you lose you have to ask yourself. Is it still worth doing? Yeah, so that's um comes on to whether or not you haven't that experience and I'm not really Using Proxmox and Jay's using Proxmox, but not with ZFS. So we can't really answer some of the other details Now the next question we debated about answering because someone was complaining and I said no I want to double down on this particular answer and These someone starts out says hey, I've been listening your podcast for a while while I encourage you to keep a producing great content I always learned something new. Thank you my list you guys. I have a couple complaints to make This is in regards to recommendations recently listened to an episode about owning your domains as it turned out you were wrong to recommend hover Now that's the person's opinion In fact, this is not a matter of personal opinion, but actual facts In their actual facts are that hover's not the cheapest place to buy a domain There are other domain providers that they make a list of that they say yeah, these places are cheaper But I'm kind of going Okay, I you know, I think we looked up a domain. It was $14 on $14.99 and hover and I grabbed Namecheap I just grabbed one out of the air that I'd heard advertised before somewhere and Namecheap was like $10 $9.99 I think so yes Factually there's a $4 price difference, but that doesn't mean I'm steering you in the wrong direction I'm steering you towards and me and Jay both agree on this a company We've had a good overall customer experience with that we've had good interactions We find their dashboard easy to use and we find the extra $4 a year that dip price difference in those domain prices to be worth the better customer experience Now we're just saying hover's a good place based on that not based on because we did not qualify it with the cheapest place To buy a domain is that would be a different thing because if I said the cheapest place to buy a domain is Going to be hover I would then in fact be wrong and the person would be correct We just said a good place and what makes a good place versus a cheap place Well McDonald's is cheap, but there are places that are good So there's a lot of variation to it and once again, this was not sponsored or Even that particular old older video older podcast episode about buying and owning your own domain No, that was sponsored by hover. We just shared our personal experience with them. I can tell you I have it Definitely had a horrible customer experience with go daddy. They're an easy example of bad customer experience I haven't really dealt with too many other registrars Network solutions is obviously the one I've dealt with because I've been on the internet long enough through where they used to be The only one you could tell it and it took them forever to get to FA properly set up They were always a pain about that for it seemed like a really long time But I don't know anything bad to say about the registrars that cost less But from a cost standpoint four dollars over a year is not a substantial cost point for somewhere I'll pay four hundred dollars for a better customer experience now I'm not saying there's a bad customer experience that you know in certain names like namecheap, but I don't know I haven't used him. So I have no point of reference. So when we steer you towards things If we are saying it's the cheapest We will probably offer some qualifying answers for that, but it's rarely that me and Jay are saying the cheapest It's usually us just saying like hey, we've had a good experience with this Hopefully you'll have a good experience as well and hover's integration and customer service has always been good And I think that matters for a domain company if you're doing Oh, I don't know setting up some glue records and you need someone to talk to to help Hey hover's been great because we have a few times where we had to set up glue records Which had to be set up by your registrar or through their system And maybe you don't know what glue records are and it's a whole nother episode to dive into DNS record types and how the whole naming system works that might be a fun episode But that was our basis for it second part of this email is claiming that AWS and Azure costs less than Linode and I don't really find that to be All that qualifying me and Jay of both, you know from the business side There may be deals free tears free tears that they offer and certain things that come and go but from an overall cost standpoint Azure and AWS are not in nor do they claim to be the cheapest bottom of the barrel out there I think Linode's reasonably priced and it's also confusing how they worded it because it sounds like they were claiming That your hosted zones, which I'm assuming they mean some type of domains Costs money and they don't that's actually a free service of Linode and not just a little many companies do this So let's you do your DNS management in there not as an upsell But as a package with it so Linode offers free DNS management with the accounts So I was just throwing that out there your DNS management not domain management So they kind of conflated you but I wanted to address the whole question. Yeah, and I'll add some things too I want to also Like really emphasize your point like we well, I'm sure you haven't ever I'm pretty sure. I know I've never been sponsored by hover I've never had a conversation with them ever outside of you know calling support and asking for help on something But I've never like talked to their Managers or no one's even contacted me at any point and asked me, you know, can we sponsor you? So the very fact that we're recommending something and we get nothing out of it We get no kickback no affiliate links no money We get literally zero from hover and we still recommend them says a lot now Yes to your point and to our listeners point it is the case that hover is not the cheapest but I like to think of content creation as the Kobayashi Maru and Star Trek fans know exactly what I'm talking about you're going to lose you can only lose You just have to lose in the best way possible So here's the scenario from a content creators mindset if we recommend the cheapest solution will probably get complaints that Customer service can't help them and believe me people will absolutely Message you on Twitter, you know that company that you recommended they I called customer service and they were not equipped to help me and it was a horrible experience And that absolutely happens So the extra money and we're talking like a four dollar difference here in exchange for customer service That is actually good and I've called many of these providers and I've never had a good experience Hover's the only one the more I did so that's why I Feel it's better to recommend something that people get a good experience from Rather than the cheapest solution and let's be honest here I mean you can't even buy lunch for four dollars nowadays US dollars and The other side of the coin is if you are running a home lab Then four dollars is not a concern for you period. I'm not going to hear I'll be not the place you're spending the most money right because you're increasing your energy costs Which is going to cost way more than the four dollars you're even if you buy a lot of secondhand used equipment You're still spending a lot of money. There could be a license for some proprietary software You might be running if you run anything proprietary that you probably had no problem paying four dollars is not your problem So I feel like if it was like Fifty dollars for a domain. Yeah, I'm not recommending that because at that point they're Gouging everyone but I think four dollars extra in exchange for better customer service is reasonable But then the second part of the question about AWS and Azure There is no scenario where Linode is more expensive. I'm certified in AWS I've had many years experience working with it and On the you know at first it might seem that way because maybe the base VM cost could be cheaper They do have a free tier but it runs out. I think well in one year if I remember correctly So then you don't even have that and then they're gonna nickel and dime you to death for every little thing that they can And when you get that bill, I mean you could literally just forget to delete some Backup images one time and your bill goes crazy But the other side of it is that comparing Linode to AWS and Azure I often do it in my ads because that's what most people understand but Actually, AWS and Linode are two completely different tiers. AWS or Amazon has their light sale service Which is their digital ocean slash Linode equivalent So that would be a more fair comparison but comparing Linode's pricing to AWS. It's like Comparing Proxmox license cost to buying VMware or something. I mean, yeah, they do the same thing But they're really not the same. So I just wanted to find that out. So Yeah, that's not that part of it's not true is hover more expensive. Yes But four dollars extra a year a year or a customer service. I'll pay that. Yeah And the person mentioned specifically a calm domain That's why I brought up calm right and there's more than just calm out there. There's all kinds of different Tlds that you can go from now. So yeah, there's a lot of options there The next one I'll just I'll mention it briefly Someone just thanked us for the learning they did because we suggested scripting a couple things and it It's almost things like I like hearing this feedback from people that said, hey, I thought it was really hard You said just run a script to do this thing and this was back from epic episode 62 which I don't have the title for that in the top my head but it's one of the ice like hearing feedback this person didn't have a question it's let us know that they got it all working and That's actually something that we really love hearing me and J both do when people say hey I learned from your channel. I followed a couple of the tutorials in which we reference a lot of other YouTube tutorials In these podcast episodes, but yeah, that's ultimately what we want is to see that you learn something I like getting tagged on Twitter Tom you really helped me understand this concept or hey I couldn't figure out these firewall rules now I haven't figured out or in this person's case scripting it seemed like a really impossible task and I realized oh Wow, this is really easy after a small amount of time spent learning it So always big always great to hear from people under success stories. Yeah, I I often still to this day I mean people might think oh, yeah, you have everything all figured out you're an expert You're on phase by anything None of that's true what I draw on and what you draw on is from experience a long time of experience working with these things and fumbling our way through it and then finding out why it worked and then Reproducing it to make sure we're right over and over again over however many years But I still get frustrated I still look at a project that I might have like oh, that's very complicated and I might even get anxious still to this day, but then after I Call myself down and give it a shot then I feel really good once I get it working So that doesn't really change the feeling that you get when you get something working is awesome But then the feeling we get when we teach people things is even better And let's be honest I mean, there's so many different things that we could do if we wanted to be super wealthy There's some you know ways to I mean I could I could have like five Teslas if I wanted to do You know a line of work that I'm not interested in doing But I'm with it, you know, I'm not complaining. It's fun. What would I do what we do is fun We do it for helping people out it feels really great to know that we're making that difference and When we hear that from people it may not always read it, but we always appreciate that because that just Justifies everything right our entire existence is now justified because we help somebody out and that's a very special thing For sure The next one's a quick question. I have an answer to could you cover self-hosted p aas platform as a service like I think you pronounce it Daku and cap rover. I don't see this really is a homelab topic Maybe I'm wrong and maybe some can explain it to me But I can imagine setting up platform as a service because you want to start a hosting company or something like that and offer Services developers but in homelab your the developer you're the client so building a platform a self-service type of platform for platform as a Service so you can self-serve it yourself didn't click as much as a homelab topic for me Maybe I'm wrong if someone wants to send us some feedback to explain it better Because it just it didn't seem like it has a real strong fit in the homelab unless you're Learning in your lab to start a hosting type company I don't know kind of a kind of an odd fit and me and Jay don't really use either those tools So we're also not experts in it. So we could possibly have a misunderstanding of it because it's not part of our Daily regimen of things we use is setting up platform as a service. So leave us some more feedback on that so we can add some context Yeah, absolutely and and to your point I mean, I'm I think a big part of Homelab is what your employer is asking you to learn because I know that definitely bleeds into it Maybe your employer read a white paper and yeah, we have to do server lists or whatever Yeah, I mean, that's fine. I get it because that makes sense. You take that into your homelab practice with it It's in on your hardware. It's more convenient But the at the end of the day, I would say the majority of the audience for homelab We run things ourselves and when we we have a solution that takes servers out of the equation that is an abstraction That does bleed into homelab But generally speaking the people that like to self host their own things are also not the same people that are trying to Have a serverless environment. They're having servers installed. I know there's other use cases for it too So like Tom said, just let us know if there's An easier like obvious use case for this in homelab because I feel like there's going to be a few people that are very strongly In favor of us talking about this but also keep in mind We if only like five or six people or even just a hundred people like it in the majority doesn't then honestly Most people just won't be into it and it might not get a lot of traction in the audience So there's also that yep. It's kind of a niche thing. Also serverless isn't Just like the cloud is actually someone else's data center that you hope is duct taped together better than yours And serverless isn't serverless Serverless, what's it running on a potato? It's running a potato. It's a video server I Looks like you have um Was it show 63 troubleshooting? Yep. Take that one Jay. Sure. Um, so there's a couple things listed here about some suggestions on things We should probably cover among them and mom. Excuse me and man Can't even talk to they apparently lsof and tcp dump and absolutely those things are within the scope of what we talk about But also keep in mind that I do borrow ideas from this same list of feedback for my own youtube channel. So How to say i'm doing a video on lsof without saying i'm doing a video on lsof um, and maybe the others too, so um I took the feedback just to mention. Yeah, I I think those topics will at least be a great idea for The youtube channel would they make an episode in and of themselves probably not but we could also put them in with other Uh utilities if we want to cover additional ones then we could probably add these to the list. So, um, yeah The feedback has been received and we may even do something about it Yeah, there's so many great utilities and different ways to implement them and there's not a single True answer because well, it just seems like this is the nature of open source and Linux world where someone had a utility that did the thing and we covered a bunch of those in your utilities episode In troubleshooting, but then there's also Someone else who goes you know what I it doesn't do the one thing I need So let me build an almost similar tool that has most of the functionality But also does that extra thing that you know fits the use case And there's no right or wrong answer It kind of comes to how you want to come to the conclusion or How you're piping that output into something else to feed, you know a different script a different project you have going on So it offers me and jay of a lot of opportunity cover a lot of different ways to Accomplish things And sometimes, you know, I'll just plug a few things since I think it naturally goes in there like I can get a A recommendation to cover something And then, you know, maybe it'll happen right away Maybe it's not a fit. I don't cover it or maybe it does happen and it takes years to get to it but I always get to everything eventually and So I'll just make the announcement I'm going to be I'm actually in the final stages of creating an eGPU external GPU Primer on the channel and the video is literally 90 something percent done And it might even show up this week even as soon as tomorrow or next week at the latest That'll tell you everything you wanted to know about external GPUs I'm pretty sure that came in as a recommendation at one point Probably a youtube comment, but you know, I get to it eventually so be on the lookout for that So and that was a probably most likely suggestion that came in from someone and it was going to turn into a video So it happens All right Let's see I love your I loved your recent episode on tail scale at one point. Do you recommend how tail scale gateway could be created? So all nodes on the land could access the nodes on the other side of the tail scale. We'd love to see a walkthrough I'm not really clear on What they're asking because I have several video tutorials already on tail scale But tail scale already does that Where all the nodes talk to each other that's the the default nature of tail scales as you add nodes It bridges the connectivity to each of the other nodes Also, if you don't create any acl rules, it allows all connectivity You have to restrict them if you need to With acl rules like if you want to limit the way the devices talk to each other Maybe they're referring to an exit node, but that's also just a Allow I I covered this in pf sense because I thought pf sense makes an easy obvious answer for building an exit node You just check the box and when you check the box and I cover this in my pf sense tail scale video That can become your exit node. So your remote devices can then channel data out of that particular exit node It's all there's not much you have to do. There's a check the box which adds the Parameter saying yes, I would like to allow traffic to exit from this node And then within the tail scale menu it says hey, this is wanting to be an exit node And you can just say yes exit node that one. So it's pretty Really simple overall doing it with just the tail scale interface and with the pf sense to go a step further I did cover the head scale video, which is a self-hosted control plane for tail scale And you have a couple different parameters, but I actually cover them in that video With head scale of how to add those extra parameters to set an exit node You have to just put it to the command line as a command line option to allow an exit node And I believe it was a setting in head scale both those are covered in my head scale video if you wanted to do it manually like that so Both those have been covered And I think that should cover that Tail scale and all the fun things you can do with it in those videos if i'm wrong or if there's a misunderstanding You know send out a question back to the homeland We'll try to explain it further or hit me up in the forums or comment on the video And I'll do my best to answer the question for you Yep All right next one um I i'm gonna bring this up because I haven't completely solved this so if if there's a podcast expert I would like to figure this out. I don't know if you're aware But I can only view the last 10 episodes in apple podcasts There are some bugs with apple podcasts with not just ours I know this happens to a lot of the other podcasts I listen to Apple has this weird restriction thing where they keep only wanting to pull the last 10 and I'm really it has something to do with how many kilobytes you're uh According to the couple people I've talked to but everyone thinks apple's kind of a black box Matter of fact to register apple podcasts because I don't own an apple device Even though I have an apple account that I've used for other things You can only register and I had to have jdux an apple device from a logged in apple device to actually register That you can list your stuff with apple podcasts. I don't know why apple's the outlier on making it difficult It's easy with all the other services that we registered with like spotify and everything else So I'll just throw it out there if someone knows the workaround. I would like to let us know. I'm all ears I'm uh at my wit's end with dealing with apple But if someone knows that secret because you're just a you're a podcast engineer and you're like time You're just missing this checkbox somewhere awesome. Let me know where that checkbox is So that's you know, I love that question in here Oh, yeah, I think that to me that question just really underscores the fact that we need volunteers because You know being in front of the camera Obviously means like I I can't you know I can't multitask even though I don't really feel there is a such a thing as multitasking When it comes to people we just fake that the impress hr But I mean especially can't do that if you're in front of the camera and you're recording and then there's these little things Like this it's not a little thing I know it's a big problem, but Then it's like yeah, but we have to like stop recording and editing and go tackle that it becomes kind of hard But I when I was at scale I caught up with some people from tux digital who you know, they do some podcasts I think a pretty big portion of our audience is probably going to know exactly who i'm talking about And when I was there talking to them they offered to you know help and you know collaborate and and maybe Give me some pointers because I was asking about their setup So chances are there's people in our same community that's already tackled these problems If tux digital can reach out to us and I'll probably reach out to them Or anyone else for that matter that does this because honestly when we produce a podcast It's like let's do the thing and then we find problems we fix problems We find more problems we fix those problems And we realize one network isn't getting anything so we figure out why that network isn't getting it Why is the podcast not ending up over here? Let's go tackle that In podcast distribution really honestly becomes a pain because every place you can you know Put your podcast on as different requirements. Yes, and it's a lot to keep up on so And this is just one example of that. We probably just need someone to help us out with it. So Yeah, that's it is It is maddening it's youtube makes it a lot easier because it's one place As much as I don't like some one single tech company being the single place the other side it is From a content creators perspective, it's easy to have one place I post things to and I have my content easily discovered easily accessed Um podcast it you know and we standardize do use an rss feed and we do that and allow complete mp3 downloads directly from our site hosted with the node Um because that way you can just pull our rss feed and download things directly Which of course some people go but that's less convenient. Um There's tools out there for doing rss aggregation with it. So you can like I said pull these yourself But uh, we do our best to try to be all the places that people want to hear us Too reasonable of how much time we'll spend messing with each one of these. So yes Sometimes like we have an hour. Let's see how many we can get um in one hour And then we have to stop and then we maybe donate another hour later on It's kind of like uh, who wants to be the uh podcast distribution expert for an hour Yeah, that kind of thing now the next was it one two three questions. Um Yeah, four the next four questions We're gonna sum up into one right jay because it's all the it's a varied way of asking the same thing I think so. Are you referring to the nfs samba question? Um, or wait, did I miss the samba one? No, it's in the same question Actually with nfs slash smb So, um, I just want to take a moment and just yes make sure people know that I Really am not impressed by the quality of file sharing technologies in linux as of today I mean already ssh fs, which of course has a performance penalty Last I checked which was about a month ago The maintainer quit and I literally had to pull that entire section out of the book that I just wrote Because I don't want to recommend something that has been abandoned and I think you know, maybe another maintainer will jump on and then you have uh, you have samba, which is uh, you know started as a reverse engineered implementation of the smb protocol And you know, that gives you access to windows shares mixed environments But you know, you might not get the best performance permissions are not going to Map exactly the same With nfs it will map exactly the same But then on windows systems you're going to need to install that plug in to get that to work and even if you do you're going to have issues with File lock issues and stale mounts and everything there isn't a solution in linux. That's good for this We just kind of take what exists and we just try to make it work as best we can So I say that to say this you're always going to have issues with shares That that you're never going to be a hundred percent problem free with that But you can get close enough to that now to answer the actual question when it comes to auto mounting um I don't really like the fstab method Of in a video. I just recorded I created a video and i'm giving all the spoilers away about what's coming on my channel um in the next few months, but I did a whole video about um Setting up an nfs server mounting the share on an nfs client and then auto mounting it At the end, so I felt like that this question is very timely because i'm editing that video Auto mounting I like better When I say auto mounting i'm not referring to the fstab method. Yes, that is a way to auto mount I mean more like dynamic mounting is my preferred approach and i'll give you an example of this my Plex server Is a is a vm and it has maybe I don't know two or four cores I can't remember what I gave it and the disc is 16 gigabytes and I said gigabytes. I wasn't like joking It's literally gigabytes not terabytes gigabytes 16 gigabytes because that vm only has the os and plex installed on it But it mounts an nfs share on true nas that has all of my movies on it How does it do that? Well, the way it does it is it uses auto fs which is a method for for dynamically mounting The way that works and and the other solution. I'll tell you about also works the same way It's not mounted until something goes to look for it. So if I have like mnt slash plex where all my movies are That's an empty directory. There's nothing in there But as soon as plex looks at the at that folder and stats it in any kind of way It's immediately mounted and it's mounted so quickly that plex never knows that folder was ever empty To plex. It's always there. The data is there. It doesn't have to reindex So I have a disposable vm that mounts plex So if something happens, I don't care delete the vm restore it from a backup because all my movies are somewhere else Anyway, so there's no stateful data. I used auto fs for that So that's exactly what auto fs does it allows you to get a samba or an fs mount You don't have to put it in fs tab you can but you don't have to And it'll just make sure that it's mounted anytime something goes to look for it And the beauty of this is that you're less likely going to run into file locking issues. You still could but um, the person mentioned like five minutes for shutdown or something which is the classic uh system d Waiting on whatever to finish. Well, it's you know shutting down that everybody hates Um, which you can adjust that time out by the way to fix the problem that way within system d But I also kind of feel like auto fs will be a good fit The alternative to auto fs is using system d auto mount Which is built in you don't have to install anything with auto fs You have to install it with a system d auto mount you have to have two service files for every one mount You have a service file that identifies the mount and then you have another service file that handles the auto mounting Of that mount in the end results the same as the solution with auto fs It'll be mounted when you go to look for it And I feel like that's the the best way to do it, especially for homelab at least until Somebody and I really hope somebody out there like comes up with another Solution to compete with nfs and samba that doesn't like completely suck. That's actually good Because we come out with so many amazing things. It's shocking to me That in my entire career No one has come up with an answer an alternative to these popular file sharing You know protocols And considering all the great things that the community has come out with I'm very shocked that no one has done this I know it's not an easy thing to do But then again, um building tail scale wasn't easy either that wasn't done in a week Someone decided to do that was zero tier same thing someone built that networking situation there proxmox didn't Come into existence overnight either these solutions take a while But I really encourage anybody out there if you want to tackle this problem get some people together And you know just make this happen We need it so bad and even if it's just like a new version of nfs or a completely different solution Please somebody develop that we need it Yeah, I think it's because there's a um In the linux world there's not any option to productize it So zero tier and tail scale both have a productized You know methodology to recoup all the money and development that went into them Um, there's not much of a productized option when it comes to that. So I don't think there's enough drive to Um, what are we now? I know we're over just over 1 of the desktop market is linux now. So Well, it's getting higher now. Um, because that number I don't agree with because the the steam the steam, um If you if you run steam you might see this thing come up That asks you like to give them information about your system or whatever And if that comes up people could just say no so then they're not counted And I just started seeing that Come up in steam for the first time like a couple of weeks ago like in a video I just put out here the linux desktop. I mentioned I've never actually seen it come up before So I'm not counted in that 1 and none of my systems are But right after I put out that video strangely I start seeing that come up in steam like I think three or four times in the last several days But though that number is really hard to rationalize Especially considering a lot of linux people. We really don't like Other companies to know about us. We kind of want to just say okay companies. We don't really want to be measured We don't want to be a part of that. We're on our own island. Leave us alone So there's a huge subset of linux desktops that are not being counted, but but you are right It is a smaller percentage and these are server related things and to correct myself. There is an alternative to nfs kind of aws has a solution that they've come up with but it's in aws It's it's as far as I know not a public domain So you can have that solution if you use aws In my understanding is they work through those issues that nfs has but I don't know of something that exists easily for You know that could be used on anything and I think that's kind of what we need That being said Considering that servers have the majority of market share linux servers do I feel like someone developing this Technology would be huge for cloud Absolutely huge for cloud Well, I'm also the clouds using a lot of object storage So they kind of eliminate it because it's not using a shared Sort of the same way that we address it. It's usually going to be You know s3 compatible some type of object storage on there. So that's what I think there's but then again, maybe you know We look at more maybe there's an opportunity for more object based storage In some way to make that work inside of linux. So That could be interesting too because there are s3 options in linux You know, you can use s3 connectors and then if you just connect them to different object based storage, but I don't Yeah, now we're going down a different rabbit hole It's that rabbit hole goes down very deep because it's never going to be exactly the same thing since those are like storage Solutions they generally like the one-to-one relationship even if s3 style can be accessed by many things absolutely, but Um, it's more of a one-to-one thing and it's not quite a file system layer So applications that require a file system we could trick it into thinking it is one But some apps are smarter than others and someone asks, you know, nfs and samba work fine Um, so it's a problem and that's the thing for some people. They just don't have a problem because um, you know, either they They don't notice something or they're not using a certain feature But samba the permissions don't match one-to-one. You could do directory masks and file masks that helps out a lot But it's still not a one-to-one fit and there's a performance penalty with it anyway with nfs It's everything's fine until it's not right everyone that doesn't have a problem They continue to not have a problem and nobody But if that nfs connection gets disrupted at any point, um Go look at your vms. There's going to be like a bunch of things in the logs It doesn't handle that very well It doesn't recover very well file locking issues stale mounts can completely hose a server and and kill its performance And again, you don't have a problem until you do But then when you do you'll see what i'm talking about and that and maybe you'll join some kind of effort to maybe fix this Yeah, so nonetheless, it's kind of a long winter rant on there. Um the next question is Going to be about all and this is where I said they're all the same question over and over Everyone wanting us to do a ham radio episode I get that there's a lot of crossover between the linux world and ham radio I don't know because neither me Or j and I I have actually probably a little bit more experience with jakes I have a few friends that are ham radio operators. I've actually been to Some of the ham meetups that are in the area but I wouldn't Not at all and it's been so long since I've been to any of those type of events call myself a Uh even barely a ham enthusiast I was enthusiastic about ham, but I never bothered to get my license So if we find someone who wants to come on the show and be an expert on it might be a fun episode Because I know there is definitely the crossover of linux people and different software defined radio systems That would probably be an interesting topic, but me and j know nothing about it. We don't use this We don't do it as a hobby So we're not qualified to do that as an episode. So while we think it's cool We just have to find someone who's um a ham radio operator that is A good speaker that would like to come on the show and do an episode with us. I don't know I I don't know anyone off the top of my head Because me and j actually made the comment that the people we do know that our ham radio operators are Not much for public speaking um and would not want to be on a podcast or a youtube video or anything So uh not not their forte. Yeah, so Yeah, and i'm very interested in this on a personal level too. I I talked to an individual named tim shout out if you're listening um at scale And he was there with arden. I he was in a video. I did um the amateur radio emergency data network It's a mouthful Which is just another example of some problems that ham radio people solve because they do some pretty cool things um What i've noticed is that there is the overlap. I think it's 50 50 I think every talk i've ever done there's always a handful of ham radio people within the audience So it's it's definitely there. It's a 50 50 fit But what I think is 100 percent of a fit for everybody Even if you don't care about ham radio Is how ham radio people solve their problems because the way that they solve their problems A lot of times can be used for non ham radio things for example Um when I was talking to that same individual he let me know that he was running proxmox on a raspberry pi And I'm like what you must have misspoken. You didn't say raspberry. No, I said raspberry pi. I'm like How do you have a proxmox cluster running on raspberry pi? It's not supported Proxmox wants nothing to do with this because it's a you know a project but that they don't really maintain But yeah, someone in the ham either someone in the ham radio space got that working They made a public domain or they noticed that it was there and they you know used it for that But that's something that could benefit other people too. So You know proxmox is used heavily. There's a lot of uh linux related technologies. There's such a large amount of overlap But to tom's point we have to know what we're talking about to talk about it. And unless somebody tutors me on Ham radio, then that's probably not going to happen on my end. So we'll just need someone to come on I don't know if tim will or if it's just someone else all together, but it's like You know Someone else will have to be the person because it can't be me because I don't know no No, all right I seen a couple questions that I don't mind answering that came up in the uh live chat here and one of them is going to be Can you support secure network i.e Your work network and you're not for work network settings with a single 10 gig lan on true nas Uh, this isn't that big of a deal because yes, you can create multiple shares And you can have different permissions on those shares For example, I can create a share that's uh tom's work stuff and make a user called tom work And then only apply the share permissions to tom work Then I create another one uh tom's silly stuff and then I have another user which Has a different login and that user only hands work Has access to tom's silly stuff both those shares can exist Bound to the same network interface Authenticating to one share does not give you permission to the other because the user you authenticate with will determine where that goes Any thoughts and set up for plex photos and confidential files and it's kind of just the extended Uh question that yeah, you can completely set that up You can set up on your system a login profile that logs into your work stuff Then you log out or maybe it's a two separate computers to keep clear separation And the other computer you log in with the credentials that allow you to access those secure things And they both can be bound and be on the same network Uh the way samba works in true nas or even windows for that matter the way file sharing works is You get the permissions based on the username and password you send So if you send the username and password and then you've got those user permissions and acl's applied in true nas Appropriately, then you will only get access to the things that you have permission to so yes, that can absolutely work Um, let's see Look into um Talk about Surprise people are being surprised that someone would like to talk on ham radio But doesn't like to talk in person. You clearly have not been to a ham radio meetup They they seem camera shy to me, but they're not necessarily shy about speaking. It's just I mean if we I feel like some of them would say yeah, can I have the camera off? I that's a generalization I'm sorry, but um, I've also spoken to people who are not camera shy But I also get it because I'm also camera shy, but I do it all the time Well, how does that make sense right but some people can push themselves and other people can't so yeah Yeah Um, someone also mentioned I'll throw it. I haven't used it, but I've heard a few people mention it Maybe sometimes I have the time I'll dig into it A net maker is an open source self-hosted tail scale zero tear alternative It's a little different than that of how net maker works, but it's a cool project It's not one I've go into but I've heard a few people mention and talk about it I didn't know anything bad about it. Don't know anything good other what commenters have said about it So it looks pretty neat. If you want to check that one out Um zen armor is a option. I believe it's made by sunny valley networks if I'm not mistaken Zen arbor is an option for pfSense to add some Filtering I've looked at it. I don't really feel and I don't like modifying my pfSense from You know by adding third-party packages into it Until they've gone through some rigorous testing and so I don't really have an interest in testing that I think you can use it with open sense. So if you wanted to test out how well that plugin worked I'm pretty sure they have an option for open sense. I don't know what you get for the free tier But I think they have a free and paid tier of that. So Um, it's something neat to to play around with And what was the other there's one more question rolling up on there I think that was that was most of them there. So um Looks that way that we discussed harvester versus rancher I don't think we've deep dove into those but and I seen someone else ask about kubernetes Techno tim has a great channel dedicated to those topics with a lot of focus and a lot of tutorials on them. So that's um Definitely a good channel to dive into on there. Yeah, and not only that I mean, yeah, I I also second that because that channel is freaking awesome But in addition to that I am also editing a kubernetes video where Proxmox is going to be what I what I set up the cluster on so it's literally going to be Another proxmox video proxmox kubernetes. I don't know what I'm going to call it yet. That's in the editing queue as well So anyone's interested that's not going to help you with the rancher thing. Um, sometimes I feel like I do things manually to a fault Um, and there's nothing wrong with that because you learn more but sometimes People might want to use something like that and and that's something I should probably cover as well But in the meantime, check out a techno tim's channel for sure and The content that he has which will uh, keep you going until I have something on my own and and his is probably going to be better Anyway, who knows but um either way the community has your back. We have content. So uh, we will uh continue to make content. So Uh continue to digest it and yeah Yeah, I think there was someone in post that I said before there before there were hackers There were hams. Yes the hame radio people are definitely of the same culture I love their passion too. I mean they just really love what they do and they make a difference and you know, we were talking Wasn't it yesterday about how they help the community and they get involved when uh, they're needed this like I've been training for this and then Working with law enforcement and everything. It's just so fun Yeah, there's some really, you know, I have some friends that are into it. They um, definitely, you know, but one of my first introductions And some of the ham stuff was a uh, one of my friends in the 90s that had is I believe it's called slow scan tv license It was a ability to do broadcast tv over ham radio. So really really cool. Um Someone says curious of our perspective uh harvester And because me and jay don't use harvester arranger as we said doing things manually Um, just like jay said doing things manually is where we Dive the most on learning. So because we're not using a lot of these automation tools We don't have a lot of opinions on them Yeah, not only that what's really challenging is that um, the best way to produce content that I've found is you start at the beginner level And then when you do an advanced video, maybe covering, you know, one of those solutions You could always say, you know, I have another way of doing it or a um entry level video to check out first I it's allows me to skip repeating the things But then it's like, you know, there's no limit to how many things at the beginner level you can cover Um, you know, it is time for me to go after this proxmox kubernetes videos kubernetes video is done to go back around and then Talk about the more advanced ways and the alternative ways You know separate from kubernetes to kind of make that come full circle. Um, and sometimes I have to remind myself like Yeah, if I keep doing videos on beginner stuff, um And and that's why lately I've been doing a lot more deep dive videos like the e gp one for example So I think that's going to happen on the channel. I just don't know when I know I'll cover it at least I don't know about you, but but uh, I just can't tell you when it's going to be but it's on the radar for sure Yeah, and like you said at the beginning, there's probably some opportunities for us to cover some more of the iot and sensor devices as you know, I'm slowly learning more about them and jay has a few of them out there Uh, there's a lot like right now in front of me is one of these air gradient, uh devices and It's I want to get one of those for sure Yeah, it's it's uh, if you look up jeff kirling's son of video on it and a big di y of how to even import the data He has a whole github on how to get the data from air gradient to grafana and it's kind of a di y kit where you put some sensors together and Pretty simple arduino setup. Uh, you program it get it set up on your network Over wi-fi and it will measure things like how many parts permit particles per million it will measure co2 levels Um, and then you can track that over time. So if you type in like jeff gierling air quality He's got a whole breakdown video from a year ago on it And I've got one now because I'm doing some testing with it myself So there's there's a lot of fun things that I think are really aligned with the homelab Um, and this one's aligned both with homelab and quality of life Um when I started the podcast because of the door behind me and I closed it The co2 levels were hovering right around 500 Right now an hour into the podcast are now at 800. So by closing off The doors I've now increased um the amount of co2 in this room because it's The air conditioning hasn't kicked out of my house because there's not a reason to it's pretty cool outside So there's no extra circulation going on. So these are you know things that might be interesting to people jeff covers that well in his topic talking about the co2 levels reaching Not dangerous, but certainly higher levels in his studio where he records So I think it's going to be a fun topic that me and j will wander into because it directly relates to homelab And of course can be expanded out to uh, if you run places where industrial sensors are they work a lot of on the same principles Yeah, I want to check that out another thing on my radar too is um implementing Power monitoring which I've already done, but there's one thing I haven't implemented that on and and that's the actual You know box the actual um, why am I blanking on the name of that that box? Anyway, the the circuits So there's a way to hook into that and and and see monitor, you know monitor power usage by circuit as well Which I also want to do Jeff's coverage is at jeff gearling.com slash tags slash co2. Um as of the time we're recording. It's um, the oh, yeah You know most recent video On that but you know If it comes out with another one it might with the same tag it might change But it there's just so many really cool things you could do with homelab And and these are things that you might not really think about it otherwise, but these are important things Yep, absolutely. All right. Well, I think we ran through all the questions If you go to the homelab dot show slash feedback, that's where you can fill out question Excuse me fill out questions that goes to our forum So we love hearing from you and if it's just a hey, I got something working suggestions for shows Questions we can answer on these q and a episodes that we do about once a month right now depending on how many questions come in and We love like said love hearing all the feedback one way or another a good bad or telling us that four dollars More means hovers a bad surface. Hey, you know, we're willing to address them. We're not trying to hide from anyone But four dollars fewer in your pocket also means four dollars fewer for like a crummy fast food restaurant That's just going to give you indigestion. Anyway, so we might even be doing you a favor Yeah, absolutely. So um always we don't mind being called on our stuff if we're wrong about something Let us know that's always a fun feedback thing Until then until next time. Thank you everyone for joining awesome hearing from all of you and looking forward to the next episode, which Teaser, I'm pretty sure the next one might be a retro Uh one we're trying to get that together We need to pull off that'll be next week because we're going to have some fun diving into retro homelabs when we're talking Commodores and tiara's 80s and all kind and in all kinds of fun stuff I cannot wait for this one. I know I'm not gonna be able to join that one. We're gonna have a special guest for it So that's what's in the works to give you guys what's going on next So thanks everyone for joining and see you next time. See you later