 Oh, I better turn it down. It's going to echo. There we go. Got rid of the echo. Potato quality. It starts out like that. That's the problem. Welcome to, what is the episode number here? So many things going on. We are ill-prepared because technical difficulties, you know, computers, they're hard. Go into the live stream here. There we go. 268. That's for rap. Look at all this. Look at all these comments. You can follow up with them. Afternoon there, Cody. Got people starting in here. Friday. Maybe. Is it Friday? I think it's Thursday. I'm going to go with, I guess it depends where you live. Yeah, that's a valid answer. It's Friday somewhere. Oh, let's see. I'll agree. Time is fake. Just a look. Time is just one of those shared fictions among humans. This was actually a fun discussion to me and a few people had about humans being the only animals that believe in shared fictions. And we use our language to communicate those shared fictions. Any other animals that do communicate use it to relate their now reality. And there's the end of being being a philosopher. Sorry about that. You know, hello from Germany. Hello from Bulgaria. Looking to get away from QuickBooks and seeing the title remind me of Invoice Engine. But what about payroll and check printing? They have features, or how would you handle that? That's a good question. I like that question. And we're going to start out by talking about that. So, well, not specifically payroll as much. The Invoice Engine V5. We'll start right there, because I did title it. And I just want to get it out of the way for people that, because I'm not going to time index this. If someone ever wants to volunteer to time index these, hey, if you put it all together, I'll put it in the description. But as of right now, I'm not going to. So when I put something that people I know are interested in, I will try to make sure I do it at the beginning. So you don't have to watch this whole video. But I've been wanting to move to Invoice Engine V5 for a little while. And we'll actually pull up the site, because, you know, why not? Since I found my mouse. And we'll pull up Invoice Ninja. So we all know what we're talking about. And I've done videos on it before. It's a great, I mean, I really like them as a, oh, I should probably fix my video. And I got more than one camera. I got to turn this one on now. Now, nonetheless, Invoice Ninja, and actually over here, and we'll pull this comment down, hi current comment, we'll talk about it for a minute. But Invoice Ninja is an open source, open source invoicing platform that is something we've been using for a long time. And they have a big client base, 200,000 people. And this guy right here, trust Invoice Ninja is how we do our invoicing things. It does have invoicing payments, online payments, quotes and credits, streamlined workflows, time tracking and projects, things we don't use right now. And it's just because the nature of my business is a little different. They have a cool expense and vendor system. They've added more features to it in V5. But that's still not something I'm ready to use right now, because we just track it differently. Now, someone, the first question was, can you use it for rating checks? No, that's not what it's for. And that's not what we use it for. We just write checks manually, and we write so few checks, it's not a big deal. We literally put them in a spreadsheet. And that's it. I use KMI money for my ledger. Ledger and business accounting is different than invoicing and quotes. Invoice Ninja here is our invoicing quotes. Now, part of the reason that we have not used this for, Invoice Ninja V5 came out a little while ago, and it's taken us a little bit of time to start using it. And it has a lot more to do with just the fact that we have a lot of invoices. And there's some challenges. They did a really good job. They did something very few coders will do. They took the time to refactor the code. Everyone talks about it. Nobody actually wants to take the time to do it. So V4 to V5 is a substantial change in the architecture of the product. Now, they kept the interface mostly the same. They enhanced it. It's nicer. But they did not make just minor changes at the back end. They rewrote it. This rewriting brought some challenges. We currently have over 7,000 customers in 27, 28,000 invoices right around there. We're over 27,000. Because of this, it creates different challenges for the way the application loads. And because we have this many invoices in there, there's some challenges with when it pauses and loads and things like that. They basically have to reset up and they're working on this. This is actually a future release coming pretty soon here, a more progressive loading system. Now, I went ahead and set it all up. We're still in demo mode on V5. We're running both systems and testing things out and stuff like that. You do a migration from your V4 to your V5 platform. I will probably do it once I get it installed. And we have it in place with the latest version. I will be doing some updated videos. People ask me why I'm not doing video. And I said, I didn't want to do any more videos on V4. If you're starting out, start with V5. Because why not? And especially if you're starting out, you probably didn't bring 27,000 invoices with you. Maybe you did. You can import from a lot of different platforms. But that being said, it's overall a really nice system. It's how we're managing my business. And we have recurring billing in there. We have automatic payments. We have it set up to Stripe for ACH. So it has all those common business functions. This is how we do our managed services billing. We set up the managed services. We put the number quantity of units that we're going to be charging you for in the managed services. We set up the recurring billing in there so people can then set up an ACH and an auto pay and we have full automation with it. Whenever we have to update or change things, we do. And it's been a solid system for this. We use it for the task and hourly management to bill or put credits in for people who buy blocks of hours, track those hours, and reduce them against invoices sent and tasks and projects that reduce those number of hours. So it's a real thorough management system. And I guess people ask me why I'm not using some of the more common MSP tools. And it's because we like invoicing just so much. The workflow is really simple. When we've hired new staff, even they go, oh, this was kind of easy to get a hang of and they started using it. So I'm really happy with it. I wanted to bring up that it's still an active project, very active, actually. They keep getting bigger as a company, them being invoice ninja. They're still open source. They haven't stopped giving away all the source code. They still allow you to self host it. And that's a big factor for me. I mean, if you don't have the skill set to self host it, please let someone else host it. But they're big on data liberation. You can download all of your data back out of it into a JSON file and XML and XLS. They have lots of ways of exporting the data. And for me, I like to be the holder of all of my data at any given time. This is just one of those concerns I have. There was a recent, I can't remember the name of the tool. There was one of the MSP tools that I think it's called. I didn't use it as some type of password management. My something, the name of lose me, someone will probably have in the comments down here. But one of the problems is, if you don't own the data, you don't own a product. It bothers me a little bit. Sometimes I have to surrender the fact that I can't own the product and I get it. But if there's an opportunity for me not to surrender for my well made product, I'm not losing a major feature here. I think invoice ninja is a really solid, I mean, we aren't using it arbitrarily. We're using it for the invoicing we do for my business that does all of the, you know, income for all the people that need to get paid that work for me. So it's not like I take lightly what we use for invoicing, or I'm just trying to not pay for some product. I always hate that perspective. Because a matter of fact, because this is such an actively supported product, and you can engage with the team, they have support forums and things like that, that matters. They're developing it. It's not like I'm trying to get away for something for free. I want something where I can retain the data. I can customize and control things and do the things the way I want. And of course, I need something that's efficient, easy for people to pay their bill. And that's something even clients can engage with, wow, your billing system is really easy to, from the other side of it, people receiving the invoices going, oh, this is easy. We have multiple payment options from ACH to credit card to even we let people pay us a PayPal. Why not? And a lot of people do. I don't really, I'm not going to judge you. However you want to pay me, as long as I get paid is the important part. And as long as it's easy for the client and it consolidates it, automarks the invoices paid, life is good. And same thing with quotes, the history of quotes we do with it. And by the way, look through my previous videos on invoice engine, how we do from quote to sale, I've broke that process down. It's not any different for v5. Well, it looks a little different, but functionally, it's the same. So I just wanted to give a shout out. We are looking at it for those of you wondering when we're getting back to videos on invoice engine. I've just been waiting for it. I'm still not going to do the videos until they come up with one more. They're, you know, I just was talking to the developers this morning, one more version up because they're going to do like a progressive loading. So it doesn't have to load all as much into the browser at once. That's the only challenge we're facing with it right now. But it's really, it's still workable. They also have a desktop application that works in Linux, works in Windows and a phone application. So you got different ways to engage with it. All right. There's my little talk about there. Any experience with something like key cloak or off authentic? No, I have not used those. Looking any thoughts and voices to use this week? Yeah. That's, I like I said, we're years into using it. I think we switched to it in 2017. So as I put us five years in 2017, yeah, 2017, I think as we move to it, 2017 or 2018, right around, I'm trying to remember the, look at my videos, look at the oldest videos I did and right around there. Oh, you didn't like the visual design in there. Huh. Yeah, I like the new design, but that's going to be an opinion thing there. I think my biggest question is this, for using a physical card reader, compatible stripe, or do you have a different solution? We don't do retail. So if you use physical card readers with something like this, it doesn't, I don't know of a way to integrate it. It's not, it's not ideal for retail sales, like over the counter there. I mean, we actually have a PayPal card reader at our office on that one off chance. Someone wants to come in and actually pay in person because we're doing B2B. Most of the time, we just tell people pay online and we send them invoice. Matter of fact, a lot of times, like we, when people do stop by our office, they're like, Hey, I'm just here to grab this part or whatever. We just throw it on their account. We'll even have them prepay for it. We can quickly invoice them, send them the invoice while they're at the office and it'll come, somebody will come by and pick it up and it's already paid. So no, I don't think it has great integration for that. Yes, we still use Papa OS. Well, I still use Papa OS. It's my, my favorite Linux distributions. Yes, that's what's behind me. And, and behind me off to the side of me. Yes, all that stuff. Hey, another person, you moved your business there. So yes, you moved over to there and it works. So whoops. Wrong. There we go. I moved my, moved my business to Ninja as well. We love it. Their support is good too. Yeah. They're, the team is great. They're very responsive in the forums and things like that. So I'm definitely, definitely say it's a good thing. Oh, for people outside the US and Great Britain, ACH means automatic clearinghouse, kind of electronic money transfer. Yes, bank transfers and things like that. Absolutely. Hey, Tom and everyone streaming from Uganda, East Africa. I need help designing the network for a client in Congo, happy to share more info over email. We have forums. If you want to hire us, then definitely you can contact us to hire us, but we have forums where we do any of the free support. I like to ask about the new unified controller v seven when using default unified network and pair it with the main PF centers knows that seven, seven IPs are reserved. How should I configure it? I don't understand that question. If you have seven IPs reserved and set them reserved, I, I'm not sure what you're asking. You can do reservations inside of PF cents. Do you have any videos setting up GRE or VXLan? Right now I do not. It's not my to do list to do. I've tested it a while back. Um, there was some weirdness with the certificates. You can read about it in the forums, not my forums, their forums, XCPNG.org slash forums, the XCPNG forums. There's discussion about it. There's some nuances to setting it up. Um, I can remember if you look for my username, I think I'm going to brought up some of the topics on how GRE tunnels work on it, but I don't have any guides on how to set it up. They have documentation on how to set it up though. How do you control the products you buy or reseller or allocate to your clients? We researched them and, uh, frequently that research ends up on YouTube by me. So, uh, I'm very open about the products we use. I always am looking at other products, but for example, um, yeah, I'll say the word and you should get a bunch of comments on this. I just don't have a use case for the firewall. And I don't know why people seem to really want me to use that. That's, that's been a weird product that, um, I don't understand why maybe it's just a cheap firewall with some control features that makes it super popular. But like there's some products that people mentioned to me that I, you know, someone also asked me why I'm not spending more time reviewing open WRT router. Someone tagged me on Twitter today on that. And I'm like, I just don't use them. Uh, so it, it's not like there's a easy answer, but there's some general guides for choosing products. Does the product have support? Does the use case for the product fit the client's needs? Is it, you know, reasonably priced? Do they go through security audits? These are not like the only questions, but these are solid questions to start with when you look at a product, you know, the security one being, um, you know, just because I, you know, I lean towards open source projects, but if those open source projects haven't gone through levels of security, then they're off the table until they do. I even mentioned this years ago with Bitwarden prior to their security audit, people say, when are you gonna start using Bitwarden? It's this awesome open source password manager. When they first came out, I'm like, well, they haven't gone through an audit. I mean, when they first came out, I said, but I'm watching a project. I think it's awesome. And now I'm a huge fan of Bitwarden. They have not only kept everything open source, they've gone through those, uh, product cycles. They've gone through more than one now since I've been using them, uh, security tests. And this is an important factor, uh, to make me like a product. So just some general rules for things like that. No, I did not get my hands on the new neck gate 4100. Alls I could do was tweet a video by the folks over at neck gate. So yeah, uh, from the clients, you have what is the most common technology networks that have been employee curious as to what customers are asking for? Customers don't ask as much about networks. That's the customers want things to work. Everything. It's, it's, it's the silliness I see in people saying, arguing about like what desktop OS to use. The average person doesn't even think about what desktop OS they're using. It's just not relevant to them. Uh, most clients aren't from a business solutions perspective. They want the thing they do to work. You are a cog in the wheel as a technologist. You are someone who maintains some level of equipment to do whatever their core business function is. Now, from a consulting standpoint, when people are asking about things, I mean, we obviously, it's no secret that Cisco is probably one of the biggest in the marketplace, HP, Aruba, all those big name companies. But we're more niched in to doing a lot of Unify support. So Unify is absolutely, for people think that Unify is not a big company. I mean, look at the size of their company volumes sold. And of course, look at their stock. It's not just some made up number. I've had people try to claim that a couple of times. Oh, it's just, you know, it's all fluff and things like that. I have myself installed thousands of these devices. They're very popular. They work really well that we do a lot of consulting and Unify. So HAProxy with screen to catch, but the IP address and the audit log shows HAProxy. Do you know a way to make the clients IP show? Not really. Um, there's, well, yes, it's tricky. There's look at how to, there's an option to forward the IP. There's a good write up in the net gate forums about it. Why both Lawrence systems and Lawrence technology services? Because Lawrence systems is easier to say. There's really no other answer. I, legally, I am Lawrence technology services. Verbally, Lawrence systems is way easier to say. Willie, how we will, me and Willie will do a video. It'll be Tom and Willie do hair tips. Because Willie's got the beard going, man. He's not as great as I am either. So who, who wants to watch me and Willie talk about hair instead of networking? Leave a comment for that video. Oh, let's see what else we have in here. Uh, I don't know if you can do a whitelist range in, in blocking Reddit slash R slash PF blockers a better place for that question. Have you had any experience with hotel installs with 200 places or unified as bad at auto channels with that many APs? We find it to work. Your experience may vary. We, we've definitely consulted on a lot of hotels and done a lot of installs. I have a video about installing like 300, roughly 300 access points. It works. So Unify is overhyped apple for network yuppies. That's I like, I like the comment. I'm not going to lie. You're making me laugh here. That's fine. I don't, there's always people that hate it. I'm perfectly fine with that. Not going to change my opinion. Even as a software engineer and tinker myself, I don't care much about OS specifically service, what dev tools are available. All the moment happens on ephemeral servers. Anyways, yeah. All right. Willie's definitely down for the Tom and Willie do hair tips video. What do you think of the new neck gate firewalls? I like them. I'd like to test them, but they're, it's take, it takes a long time to get them right now. I think supply chain back problem stuck. Well, you ever do set up a unified door access? So we don't use it as part of the problem because we don't use it. I don't know if we're going to do a video on it. If we change our mind and start using it, I haven't ruled it out as a product, but it definitely felt a little buggy when I did it before. So it comes down to product maturity. I think Willie has some opinions on that. I think Willie has shared some thoughts he's had on the door access system before. Do you think TrueNAS is publicly saying that scale and core will continue to both be developed at the same rate? Seems like scale is the only feature. Well, seeing as they have a roadmap and version 13 out of TrueNAS, I can't find any truth in what you're saying. They're literally developing version 13 right now. It's in beta, or is it in release candidate? I think it might even be in release candidate already. So I don't know where you get this information. It's really weird. I guess if a company releases, and this is exactly what happened several years ago, NetGate released Tensor, TNSR. And the number of people, if you go find old Reddit posts and things like that, the number of people that said, that's the end of PFSense, there'll never be another version. And here we are. I think there's been three major versions and lots of point releases since they released that. So it seems like if a company releases another product, they just assume if there's any overlap with an existing product, they will just destroy all existing product. Yes, there are certain levels of overlap, but there are different use cases. So what does it look like 10 years from now? I don't know. What does it look like at least in the next five years? Oh, pretty solid. We got plenty of TrueNAS support, TrueNAS core, just so I'm clear. Unify for a lot of clients, we deal with this more cost-effective price usually wins over the SMBs, the license requirements for Meraki are often a non-starter for small clients. Non-starter and not worth it. We've dealt with a lot of bigger clients who said, this is expensive and we don't see the value in it. So it's, yeah. Hey, thanks for all your videos. Now we have three clients, Restaurant It Uses, Guest Network, and I was using a Pi 4s Unified and Outchanging a Cloud Key Gen 2s. Yes, I think the Gen 2s are going to be better than a Cloud Key in the long term. Just post a comment on your new video, guess I could ask here directly, what is the, is there a way to point UDMP back to a domain controller to get proper host naming? I don't think so. I mean, you just don't let it handle DHCP. If you're using a domain controller, Active Directory, you want Active Directory in the domain controller to handle the DNS and DHCP. So I don't think there's any way to really integrate that. I think we have at least one or two clients using it. They seem to like it. I haven't done extensive testing with Unified Door Access. I did one video on the topic and I haven't done another one. I'm interested in a Plex server. What is your dream? You know, actually I switched to MB. So I like the MB server quite a bit. Speaking of supply chains, finally got my hands on other Synology 820. I will tell you, you know, someone said something and I mean, it's heard almost not to laugh. They said, oh, I'm engaged with it like months ago and they're like, oh, I'm really in a hurry to get this project done and we're like, yeah, by the way, none of these things that we coded you are available. So some people are replying to quotes and we're like, things that were in stock even two months ago are out of stock now. So we're running to more inventory crunches. So yeah, good luck. If you get your hands on something awesome, it's like no hesitation. We're even starting, we're gonna have to start changing our policies. Like you have 24 hours. No, no, no, you have 12 hours. No, no, you have right now to approve this quote, because if you don't, I don't know if this product will be available in 12 more hours because we're lucky enough to find a unit available. I don't know how bad it's gonna get. But you know, all joking aside, obviously with the supply chain, it's getting really tough to plan out a job because you don't know if the unless it's prepaid for so we can get it. If someone's, you know, kind of waffling around now, you know, I'll think about it. I'm like, well, these are what's available today. I don't know if this is going to be available next week, next month. So oh, let's see. I have great luck with the unified door access system. Well, good. I'm glad no one's saying I'm locked out. So that's it. But of course, if they were locked out and couldn't get in, they couldn't comment on a video, right? All right. No, I'm joking. I like the industrial design of the new neck gates, the 4100. The latest one has this too. They have the big heavy heat sink at the bottom. Great for dissipating heat. Definitely a lot of fun. Basic two door system, a million major issues. Each controller is only for one door, even though it can handle multiple sensors. Yeah. Someone asked me if it handle multiple doors and I said, I didn't see a way to do it. So you're kind of confirming what my understanding of how the product works is you need one for each door. Interesting. I'm ready to unify. We'll kill the door access stuff. Leave you people having. Yeah, that's a concern. Killing product lifecycle. I mean, Google's a joke about this. Like there's constant, like killed by Google. There's websites dedicated to how fast Google does it. It's a careful thing. You have to be very aware of as a product maker of whether that product's a software, a service or physical hardware of what is the perception you put on the market of whether or not these are things that you are going to support over the long term. And a door access system is one of those things that is not expected to be a short, even five year lifecycle like normal networking hardware. You're expecting to have it at least I would say 10 or more years. You know, a lot of these door access systems that we deal with with clients and we're not an installer from just like we we've had to engage with interfaces and things like that. They are frequently old and because no one I was like, well, it isn't broke and it controls like one of them we were working on today controls door access across like four huge buildings. So yeah, building Plex servers. What is your dream hardware build? I don't really have a dream hardware build. I think very little about hardware. Whatever hardware is affordable is usually the best answer. And I have gone to using MB, it just works better. And I run it on my Synology NAS. I don't know why I kept having consistent problems with Plex. And I just they were weird problems that I myself could not figure out or find anyone in a forums with exactly the same problem I was having. The stream would work and just come to a halt when you used it from your phone or when you use it from the Google, I have the Google Chromecast with the app. It just kept doing that. And then, you know, the usual system, oh, you have a network bottleneck or this or that and the other. And I'm like, no, I don't because I loaded MB on the system. MB absolutely plays it fine. The same videos, they're pointing at the same folder. So MB works, Plex just streams sometimes for 10 minutes, sometimes for five minutes and just stops sending any data. There's no error message. There's no nothing. And I waited a couple more updates of Plex and it still did it. I said, well, I don't really know what's wrong. I loaded MB works fine. So yeah, that happens sometimes. Well, let's see how you do with supply chain shortages and not being able to deliver delivery reasonable time. You tell people, it's not like it's a secret, like we're the only ones facing this issue in tech. We work in Detroit, we work in the automotive space a lot, you know, with manufacturers, they're sitting on more stuff than us that can't be delivered. So you just be honest. There's not a reason there's not an excuse to make. If there's no supply to get the thing done, there's no supply to get the thing done. There's not any, you know, we don't give any wrong answers on this. We don't make anything up. We just tell them very honestly, supply chain, the supply chain cannot provide the parts. Ray network equipment, never heard of it. Do the sound expansion units use the same connection for the desktops? I'd hate to go with the desktop style expansion. I don't, we've only ever bought the rack mounted ones. So I've never looked at the connectors on the desktop ones. 8 to 10 unifying door, trying to find fire panels to work. Well, yeah, jumped when you seen 820 because it listed retail, all their parts like 10 gig card were also retail. You definitely got lucky for sure. Any session, what unify AP would use for an indoor mesh network about building a similar one, a hotel, limited keyboards, don't do mesh. That's my answer. It just always is where you end up with headaches because when you start meshing them together to do the backhaul, it's just a less ideal situation. We always set them up with hard line to each one. When selling a house, what network here you likely lead behind for future reverse or move replace? I took all mine out when I sold my last house, so I don't leave anything for them. I don't think that's part of the house experience. Oh, my son has wandered in. Yes. You're just like the headless person. You always, you never looked out the camera. Just got hint from a spider swish laser being pushed to 2023 with a crazy world. Yes. Let's see. Jellyfin is the way to go over MB. Okay. I don't know. I have MB and it works. It works really well and it works around there. So what dock on the default one? That's just the default dock that's in POPOS that's built into POPOS 20. Synology desktop units do not have a built in weight amount. I'm sorry, Robert, but I don't think it's pizza time. It's not pizza time. It's too early. It's too early for pizza time. It'll be pizza time later or something? I don't know. What are you in later? I'm stealing that remote. Oh, I assume it's out. Yeah. I'm stealing this controller. Why? It's nice. It's nicer. It's, why did you mess up the other one? No, the one that I had has been messed up. The joystick is like melted. Oh, because of you. No, I did. I never used that controller. We're arguing over... It was like that when Steve got it. So I'm stealing this one. I got a wireless game controller because I wanted to play a game and he wandered off of it right upstairs. Yeah, it's nice. Yeah, my only complaint with it is that it's hard to hit these buttons. Hard to hit those buttons? Yeah. Okay. Is that why you were yelling up there? No, I was yelling. Oh, because I was yelling. All right. What's the game you're playing? Valorant. No, the other one. Elden Ring? He plays Elden Ring. I guess that means something to people who play games. It's so much fun. All right. What screen are you rocking over there? This is a... Thick. Yes. It's thick. It's AOC wide screen. I can't remember the part number on it. It's like the only AOC 49-inch one they make. I'll be back. How's the Reverie PyCama doing on your Sumtrain? I don't have that anymore because I moved houses. So I saw... It's in a box now. I bought a new house, built a new house. So, yes. Use Plex, have no issues. Yeah, I didn't have any issues for years with Plex. I mean, I was a longtime Plex user. Never had a problem. Then problem. So, definitely an issue. Path of Exile. So, Jellyfin... What's that? Path of Exile. I'm not a big fan of that. It's okay. I got my controller back. All right. Cool. I hate this story. Why? Hard to get open. You need better muscle. No, not bad. Just get stuck. All right. Have fun. Yeah. I think if I scream, everyone can hear me. Don't do that. All right. Remindling me of home, which gives me a chance to run Ethernet cable. 25 hours to go home. Should I run Cat6 or Cat6? Honestly, I don't... So, here's the problem. And there's always a lot of people with strong opinions on this. And the problem with Cat6, A, it's more expensive. And it's just not that necessary. Someone's going to be mad about this. Because you can go 30 meters on Cat6, double-check me. I'm saying this off the top of my head without looking. I always look at it to make sure I'm right. If I'm not mistaken, it's 30 meters on Cat6, and you can still do 10 gig no problem. That's the spec. Now, I've talked before on this channel about being out of spec. So, we know it'll go further than that. But that's like the spec allows for it. So, do you have runs greater than 30 meters? Well, then why would you use Cat6A if you don't? If you need 10 gig over them. Is this something you need in your house? That's really what it comes down to. Is it something you need? As a matter of fact, cameras so frequently operate at 100. So, with cameras operating only at 100, do you need it? Even a 4K, 8K camera. The biggest thing is just make sure you have some wiring installed. I mean, if you're going, obviously, Cat6 seems pretty easy. Cat6A, the extra expense. I don't know if it's really worth it. Now, there's going to be someone with an opinion, go Cat8. I can't believe you're not running Cat8. And when people tell me things like, oh, we're running Cat8 in everyone's house now. I'm like, no, you're not. That's not realistic. It's just much harder to work with. You got to go jump to the beginning. We're done with invoice ninja now. I'm not rehashing it. Hit Rewind. I did the first part of the video with about invoice ninja. Cat11. Yes. See people who, this is someone who uses Cat6. Cat6A is harder to terminate. Yes. The bigger cables are harder. You know who's doing the cabling versus the opinions. You know, not an offense to the pizza who, who say run Cat6, but yes. And if they're not going to be long enough to make a difference. Yep. If I want 10 gig, just run fiber over longer distances. Oh, that's my son before I came down here. My daughter, who's not here, but still posting. They like to join dad's live stream. I always, I always tease him. I like it in my cool now because I'm a YouTuber. The kids just nod their head. Then I usually have some dad jokes. Cat8 everywhere. Cat5 works for my one gig stuff. Yeah. Yes. If you have an opportunity in some areas that are hard to get to, you could run conduit there. That way it makes it so you can slide the cable in and out if you ever had to replace the cable. Honestly, I don't know where the future is going. Whether or not you're going to need on your cameras and things like that, to go far beyond Cat6. I mean, you think about how long Cat6 has been around. And there's not been, there's not been a ton of change. And the big reason why is not so much about future proofing. There's a point of diminishing return where going faster wouldn't make that much of a difference. We have enough data that we can get across that it doesn't need more. So the progress on that particular technology will slow down because the consumers and the cameras and the different IoT devices that you may connect via ethernet just don't have a data need that's so great. So it's not as much, that's why I don't think there's not, there's not as much driving it because what needs that data rate. Now, different answer if you're talking about data interconnectivity between devices in a data center where 100 gig isn't fast enough for them. You know what I mean? We need faster. That's different. That's a different use case. But for the use case of, you know, I'm going to connect some IoT, Wi-Fi and cameras, the data rates aren't as big of a deal. What do you call a fish wearing a bow tie? Oh, so fisticated. My children have the dad jokes today. Yeah, the, I regret not having conduit put in when my home was built. Yeah, that's, that's definitely, I mean, it's really convenient to do it. Why don't you go conduit? So why do Norwegian ships have barcodes so they can scan the Navy in? Yes. All in all, for me, I just want to be able to transfer large files to a couple of NAS computers lightning quick, which is why I have 10 gig in my office. And in there's like in my office, we have a lot of 10 gig connections and my office here, well, it's all in Iraq has 10 gig connections because I do my video editing as a 10 gig mount to my true NAS core system. So I mean, it really comes down to use case. Does the average person, even in an average office, when they're not moving files, like my wife, she works in finance, none of those people are, they're fine with Wi-Fi. They're like, they don't even bother plugging in. They just use the Wi-Fi to open up their laptop, open up the websites and do the things they do. Get the fastest cable you can afford. I've got cat six sir, put a mine. I'll probably never be able to utilize the speeds. The next thing I will mention, because why not, we're sitting here. And I like jumping topics. And I have this, I didn't mention this in the video, but this is something else I have because I wanted to talk about. So whoops, look at the, there we go. We, I have these right here. And first, I'll hold it up to the camera so people, what I'm talking about. And this is the, the trust key. Now the trust key is an alternative FIDO device to the UB key. This is, actually, hold on, I don't like where my head's at. Let me fix it this way. There we go. I want to be, I might be on the bottom there. Anyways, I'm doing some more reviews and I'm breaking down some FIDO stuff. Jay is also working on some UB key updated videos, but I want to do one specifically on FIDO and how the FIDO auth system works. Yes, you can use a UB key for it, but you can also use other companies who have, and these are certified trust keys, and they're inexpensive FIDO keys. So affordable, like $16 here for the one I'm holding. Inexpensive, drop that on the floor. Now, I don't know if it's, this is not an easy thing to tell when you first get something. It feels well made. It feels like the UB key. The UB key is actually a little bit tighter feeling. This has kind of got a more bubble-ish feel, if you will, like a little bit thicker plastic. But overall, one of the things about the way FIDO works is FIDO is its own, FIDO U2 auth is its own protocol. I did a video on how to use it with SSH, but I want to make sure I'm clear on these videos is it doesn't require a UB key. UB key may have popularized this category of authentication, but you don't need a UB key in order to do good, secure FIDO U2 auth. And I want to break down the differences between FIDO and such as the UB key protocol. So that's an upcoming video I got, because I do see a lot of confusion around that topic. I also want to do everything I can to preach my love of FIDO because I really think the protocol is great. And I think more companies should be using it. And my bigger question is, why aren't more companies using FIDO? So, nonetheless, that's one of the topics I have up and coming in. Because someone said, too, make sure you test alternative keys if you talk about it. I'm like, well, of course, I'm going to order them. They're cheap. So maybe I'll give some away or something like that, too. When you purchase Unify for a medium or large deployment to you, we have a sales rep you call or supplier you deal with. It depends. Sometimes they have stuff. Sometimes they don't. The margins are super low on Unify. You don't make money on the product. You make money on the service and installation. That's where our money comes from. So, yeah, sometimes we'll try to deal with streak wave. There's one more vendor we deal with, double radius. But you're knocking a few dollars off, but it's not night and day. You're not saving 20%. The margins are just so low on the product. As a matter of fact, that's why a lot of people who are tied up in reseller agreements, they're used to making a better margin on their product. Therefore, they hate Unify just because they can't make the margin. I've seen a lot of IT people complain about that. I don't like selling this product because I can't make margin on it. But my answer first is, is it a right product for the client? And if the answer is yes, it's a right product, then are you only concerned about your margin or are you still concerned about doing what's right for the customer? And we have, and I've mentioned this many times on my channel, we've let the client buy all the hardware because I care about the labor I make installing it. That's where I can sell my value, engineering the project and the labor to install the project. Those are places we make money because it's a race to zero margin when it comes to product you don't control the supply line for. So I can only sell it, you know, if the client has a reseller agreement or product has a reseller agreement for MSRP, I can only go as low as MSRP. And then you got to figure out ways to cut your throat. So to speak on who's going to bid the lowest on this. Well, that's why we avoid any bids that involve the hardware from like school districts and things like that. We're like, we're not even interested if it's just for hardware. We want to sell our services, but that's it. Most systems will not see a speed increase from 40g over 1g since common use cases are more latency limited bandwidth limited. Yeah, that's probably true. UB is your main and cheaper as a backup. Yeah, I've thought about that too, especially if there's a durability question with these trust keys, like if maybe they don't last as long, but I mean, why not have it as a backup? As long as you're using Fido, this could be your second Fido key. There's like I said, I want to do some videos on the Fido stuff because I think it's really cool. It's also not as supported as I'd like it to be. I understand why there's a lot of support for the UB key stuff because it's um, it was just easier to deploy. So that's that. Let's see what else we got here. Holy crap, we got 186 people here and we got 176 people, 186. I don't know which one of these is right. Concurrent viewers or concurrent viewers, which is the right answer. Either way, go ahead and smash that like button. That would be wonderful and much appreciated. We definitely, um, it helps that YouTube algorithm that drives our life. It's a chat frozen. Oh, let's see. What else we got here? Trust key, Unify. Yeah, the Unify stuff, um, what else was I going to talk about with Unify? Oh, this, that's a good question. Do you deal with Unifies where it just started my own MSP after watching you and I am looking at doing three state deployment company and want to know how your experience has been? I, from my understanding, never have I talked to Unify support with the exception of getting something RMA when there's a bad product, which is fine. Uh, the only, the only support engagement we've ever had in the last seven, eight years has been a couple of products that we returned. I kind of joke in Riley is doing this as well that we do Unify support. We know from the crowd of people is Unify support sucks. That's not a question. There's, there's a challenge here. You can make a product and you're always building in the cost of support in that product or you're not. And if the product needs support and your building model says, well, I'm selling this device for X dollars and you're like, well, this other company sells it for almost double the double the price. Well, yeah. And they have great support, but I'd rather have the cheaper one that doesn't have great support. Well, somewhere you're just paying for the support. They rolled it into the price of the product. Unify keeps your prices low by not having support people standing by to answer all of your questions and offer a lot of help. I have filled that gap and MSPs make the biggest part of our clients when it comes to consulting. We do so much consulting with MSPs who go, you know what, I just need help setting this up. So they call us and we set it up. Riley from Hostify. He does some Unify consulting as well. He's recently jumped in there. So does Chris from CostTalk Solutions. So does, I think Cody from MacTelcom Networks does it too. There's a, there's a few different people that do it, but there's no secret, you know, and I'm not afraid to name my competitors because there's so many people that need support. We're very busy. We're booked all the time. Don't say we have room for more, but hey, if you want to book us for support, that's what we do. Now, as far as the support from Unify, good luck. I don't think no, no one ever says it's great. So hey, Tom, stop on the say hello. Anna Howdy. So yeah, Unify, like I said, it's there a big gap in the market is just offering support, kind of non-existent. Cheap, it's just a term depends on where one is in this thing called earth. Yeah. The reason I'm considering Unify is supposedly tight integration with the VoIP and security system they offer. If you have experienced those products, could you comment? We don't use our VoIP system. I don't know if I trust their VoIP system for long term. So I have no experience in their VoIP system. The, we talked earlier this time about the door system. We don't use it, but it's kind of neat. Yes, there's some integration with their security system. And of course, more recently, they released their UID program, which I'm going to do some testing on. So yeah. Hey, Tom, how's the new office working out? I like the new office. Definitely good. 3CX is a great VoIP solution, easy for Ms. P's to integrate. I'll go one further. We use OIT VoIP. We fully outsource all of our VoIP now to OIT because it works for friends of mine. We're resellers of it. We are on a partner program with them big shout out to my friend Ray. He's been on a channel before. If you look up Ray Orsini, he's a personal friend. So I know he doesn't have time to watch this, but if you say hi to Ray, tell him Tom said hi. So I actually talked to him all the time, but if you want to reach out to OIT VoIP, it comes down to, we were doing people ask you like, well, why don't you more free PBX? I'm like, I don't have time to support it. That's, I can't find enough people to support it. So I just decided not to deal with that side of the phones. It's just easier to outsource that particular thing. Now, where are you going to make the most margin? Well, the most margin is doing 100% yourself, but you have to decide what your time's worth to decide your margin. You make less margin when you outsource it, but you don't have to deal with anything. And that's actually a pretty good thing sometimes. When you're so busy dealing with everything else, so you can go, Hey, my margin's less, but my margin's there. And it's very hands off. So there's no management time. You really have to think about how you scale things from a management time perspective. Don't get their VoIP phones, having test screen multiple times dials of pain. Any ideas starting with these lots of ubiquity, pedicure, but where there's only DSL, it's a tight margin business. It's not, it's not a business easy to make money at. Not saying you can't, I'm just saying it's not easy. I don't, I don't do much in that market. We've done consulting from a network engineering standpoint, but not a business standpoint on it. The Westside is expensive to put the towers up, expensive to deal with it. And you're selling to home users who have a support need that everything ever goes wrong with their computer is the fault of the ISP. Ask anyone at Comcast or any of the other companies. As much as we know Comcast themselves is a truly awful company. The other side of it, if you talk to technicians, every problem is a problem with Comcast, even when it's their laptop won't turn on. It must be because the internet's out. So the, what kills some of these people is the end user support that comes with a Wisp. It's, it's something you really have to think about. What is your opinion on Russia creates its own TLS certificate? I've seen the headline. I'm not worried about it. No one rational is going to trust this. So I don't even see it as a way to get sign things over to the things we would use. So I, I, there's nothing to think about. We're going to marketing customer acquisition plan, but I was wondering if you started your business with existing clients, or did you build customer base from nothing? Well, I had an one existing client, a client that split to two clients. But then one of those clients went away and then I was back to one client, smiling and dialing, knocking on doors, chambers of commerce, visiting places, talking to people, networking with people, all the above is how you get customers. So ubiquity, microtik, mimosa and cambium. Cambium makes some nice stuff. Chris from crosstalks talked about it a few times. They make some nice equipment. Margin doesn't matter if you need to spend so much time on it. Yeah, that's, you know, at some point, this is where people miscalculate or don't calculate. It's just how much time they spend on things. My time is very valuable. I have a hourly rate attached to my time. And if you think of that in the beginning, that you put an hourly rate on your time and you go, wait, does what I'm doing from the business perspective, you know, is the ROI there? If I pay myself X per hour, and I'm talking about your, not your internal pay rate, but your external consulting rate, think about your time under that perspective all the time, and you're better off for it. So you understand how to value yourself. This is huge. I really recommend you think about this because I watch people spend so much time trying to save a buck. And I'm like, is your time valueless? Like you, that's the question you got to stop and ask. Someone's like, oh, I saved, I saved $100 or $200. You spent eight hours on it. Was it worth it? And then your support cost, you're like, yeah, I'm like, well, I guess if you value yourself at some very low rate, okay, but it's hard to get out of that rut. So just something to consider. Hey, no problem, glad to help. You know, this is something I think a lot of people don't put enough thought into. There's too many people that try to lock all this knowledge or whatever and experience behind a closed door. And I'm the opposite. I'm like, just tell people it gets you better engagement. It gets you talking to people. Why not? And unless you're not confident in your own processes, you know, some people are so bad. I even met another MSP. I didn't like the guy that much very quickly. I knew he was using at the time the same products we were using. And I started asking about him. We switched. It was his answer. What did you switch to? And he goes, another product. Okay, what other products are you using? Just not the one we were using. He was super evasive about everything. And it's really weird when people are like that. I'm like, really? I thought we were having a friendly discussion. Like that's weird to behave that way. But some people are that way. So what's your opinion on NVIDIA sign drivers with mailware after their hack? That it's crazy. I don't have a straw. I mean, it sucks. I think I tweeted about it. The poll certificate revocation. I don't know. There's nothing good about this. I'm the worst at coming up over the rate for myself. Yeah. It's not easy. I don't remember where I heard my fear of T code is it's 150 an hour and $10 to push the button 140 know what button to push. Yes. That is always the case. Your it's it's law. Lawyers are easier to explain this because it's an older industry. But you know, when you have a lawyer even write you some legal letter about something most of it has to do with not the time it took them to write the letter but the years of experience it took them. You know, we had this friend he needed a legal letter written and he didn't actually have to take legal action. What he did was he knew a very high profile lawyer. He knew one but still the guy charged him just to sign his name to a letter was a thousand dollars just to sign his name to this letter. It's all it was a really simple cease and desist letter. It was a template, by the way, a cease and desist change a couple words to say this person take it down. But because he wanted this lawyer's name on it, write another one the fee was a grand to have this guy sign it. And he's kind of laughed like, you know, that's still a good deal because the immediate they see that lawyer you're like the threat of action from a lawyer of stature, so to speak stops it. So it's really what you're paying for is the brand you build the knowledge you build and everything else. I mean, yeah, granted, a lot of times like reboot, they're like, well, how'd you know what reboot would fix it and not break it? I'm like, well, that's what I charged for not pressing the reboot button. Yes, it's commonly a used phrase in engineering as well. I used to be out of my time. I'm still bad about it. But I used to be also. Oh, what's that guy's name? He did those jokes too. He's used to an opening joke. He says, I used to do a lot of drugs. I still do a lot of drugs, but I used to do a lot of drugs too. It's a great comedian. He passed away. But yes, heard it in a marine sense. I think for every industry, we've heard that same thing. Thank you for your XP and G XP and G tutorials. Now I'm using a hypervisor in my home server lab. I only have two complaints thick provisioning went in ice guzzy and having to install Zen tools on a Windows and Linux server. Well, Linux supports it with apt-get install and Windows supports it if you just do the Windows update. So let's go ahead and talk about that real quick. I'll show you how we do it or not. Did things go down again? It's my VPN down. That was bad. Hmm. Some's not working. And I don't know what. So I can't show you. Huh. Yeah, I don't know. My internet's up, but my VPN's down. So that's a problem. It says it's up. Let me check. So I was going to pull up my Zen or not. I'm going to go with not. So, all right. Well, anyways, if you go to Zen server, you can just go and check the little box on the advanced tab of the VM and it says Windows update. Mitch Hedberg. Yes, I have a couple of people, Mitch Hedberg. Boy, he's got, if you haven't heard of Mitch Hedberg, just go look some highlight reels up on YouTube. You'll enjoy it. Yes, I did. I do have my UID. I set it up today. A live demo of Tom working. You would be so bored watching me work. I just sit there at the keyboard typing a whole lot and then searching and typing, searching and typing, searching and typing. So, yeah, there's a lot of that. Okay. I can now show it on. Why is it not? I don't know why it's not on for this one, but hold on, let me find one it's on for. I'll switch screens in a second. There we go. Should be on on this one. Don't know why it's not on. But anyways, right here's what I was talking about. Windows update tools. If you turn this on, it will then allow Windows update to load the drivers automatically for the server. Simple as that. And then it works great. It's how we keep these systems up to date. Here's another one. It's probably on in this one. Yep. We have, there's our PFSense lab, Pheronics testing we're doing on the TrueNAS here. We use NFS. That's why the thin provisioning stuff doesn't bother me and figure out which camera I'm looking at sometimes. That's why the thin provisioning doesn't really bother me. But yeah, I'm going to do some more lab videos because I want to do a full in-depth tutorial on XCPNG. We use it all the time. Matter of fact, I'm going to talk about this. This is our new favorite one. It's our Ryzen server. People always ask, does it do Ryzen? Yes, it does. Then, oh yeah, does it do 25 gigs? Yes, it does. We have 25 gigs attached to this. We've got lots of VLANs attached to it. Lots of things we've been working on with inside of this. We can put more memory in this system. Our main system has 128 gigs of storage and our backup system has 64 gigs. But it's enough to run all the things that we need to run. Fits our use case. The escalator is broken. It is now temporarily steers. Yes. Have used oracles always cloud-free? I have no opinions on oracle other than they're not a great company. Oracles, a company built by lawyers. In Zenarkshire, how do you adjust the console screen resolution using the scroll bar to only change you? Like anything else, you go in and we'll find, see if there's a Windows one in here. So this is, I'm not going to break this because one of my staff is using this right now, but you right-click and go to display settings and change the resolution. Like this. That's how you change it. So I see Kyle is controlling this. Kyle may have questions of why Tom's messing with his system. So we'll stop messing with Kyle. He doesn't watch my live stream. I'm using Z-Wave with my home assistant. I don't mind the idea of needing to spend a day or two getting a new tool working, saving a buck as long as I can learn to support it. It becomes faster and everything comes. Well, there's a different concept to when you take the time to learn something. I mean, yeah, it takes time to learn it, but sometimes you just got to learn something. So I don't necessarily count that as my time in the same way. I think of that as a little bit different. I mean, learning, there's books I read and things like that. That's just something part of being an IT is the continuous learning that goes with it. Can you use a different model CPU next to you in a host cluster as long as you use the same brand? The problem is it downgrades to the lowest value in there. You can mix and match in the same pool, but I don't think the live migration works if you mix and match processors. But if you put them in a pool together, the problem becomes it can only support the highest feature set of the lowest processor. So if there's a feature set beyond, so you have two processors, one higher than the other in terms of feature sets, the pool will downgrade to the lowest feature set. Now, how old are your processors? What's the difference in them? Is there even a feature set difference between them? They can be mismatched processors, but is there a feature set difference? That's really what it comes down to. We have mismatched processors and ours back over to Zen. Again, the R720 is a, what processors in this? So here, this is a Xeon XE520 or XE2670, I'm sorry, E52670. And then this one here is going to be, I forgot which, I don't remember what processors in these. E52680B3, so ones of E2, ones of E3. So, and I can do live systems between these. Let's see, what's this on right now? Oh, that's not going to work. Where's my Debian or a bunch of other things? So, this one's on to lab. That one's on Ryzen. Lab server disk. That one's on Ryzen 2. Lab server template. Yeah, whichever was this one. There we go. We can fire up this. Where's it going to start? It's in the pool and it will start on one or the other and I'll show you how you can move a VM to the other side. So, while we wait for that to only take a second I'm just going to catch up the questions real quick. Have you used WASU before open source vulnerability? Yes. It's one click line out install and it's not the install that gets you. It's all the setup work and management around it. It was pretty cool. It's just a, it's easy to get the basic setup. The tuning of it gets a lot harder and a lot more work. It's cool product though. I think it's a great thing. I think WASU is really neat. I haven't tried it in a little while. So, does Zen not support auto resize console? Probably not. I don't, you can resize it in the bar there. Yeah, VMware can be motion live VMs between Intel CPUs but cannot do it from Intel to AMD. I think there's a bug, not really a bug. It's a problem with the processor mismatch. How much storage in your largest true dancer? Mine is four terabytes running Plex. Our biggest, our main true NAS server has about 245 terabytes free still. So, we got a little bit of storage left on this one. Also, so this one here. So, this is running, doing a thing. I just kicked off H top on it. We'll get rid of this comment. So, go back over to here. But right now, it's on this server here, the 630. Let's migrate it to the 720. And we're just going to hit OK. Turns yellow, but it keeps running. It's migrating right now. And here's, you can watch it, 44, 23, 19, 1. Oh, it's done. It's now on the other server. It's going to turn green here to let me know it's on the other server. And there we go. So, live migrations happen really, they're really smooth and Zen server. I really not had a problem with it. I really like how it works. It does do this funny thing with stats. Hey, look, I had negative memory just for a blip. The stats always go negative for the network and the memory and I on the disk just for a moment when you do the migration. I never really thought about why. I just know it's the thing that happens. So, but that's all you got to do. And if we want to move it back, we can just go migrate and hit OK. And it's going to migrate right back over and we'll see another negative blip go through. And there we go. Now it's moved over. So now it's back on this one. Live migrations are, and this is between two different generations or processor, by the way. No issues there. Do you know if they're accepting bits to wire the train station downtown? Ford has a wiring company they use for everything. And it's not us. And to my knowledge, they're not changing vendors. I prefer to run PF Sense not as a VM. I always prefer to run it in bare metal. But far as I know, you can run it fine in that. So, are you using SSD or HDD for your main shoe NAS? I do not have 244 terabytes of SSDs. That is still spinning rust in that particular server. My server that does my video editing is all solid state. Oh, you know, a lot of these that make for good videos, but I can guarantee one thing, we wouldn't be able to film it. The enterprise work we do, we do a work with a lot of companies, companies you've heard of, companies in the automotive space, you cannot take pictures, talk about them, mention that to your client. Yeah, not specifically. I can generally say we do work because we're in Detroit with that space, but you can't post those things and they won't let you. So, those never get filmed. That's the problem with all the wiring stuff. We can't film any of the commercial work we do. They're very restrictive on the rules. And rightfully so. There's a lot of proprietary information there. I mean, some of them go as far as you don't even pull your phone out of your pocket while you're there. They're concerned if you do. I mean, I took a picture of something. They wanted me, and this is a building adjacent to my client. My client's building was empty. The building adjacent to it I was in, we took a picture of a wiring rack that had to go in that building. My client owns both buildings. They sublease one of them. The person walked up to me and wanted me to delete the photos I had and wanted to see it. That was really cool with them. I wasn't there to start anything. So, right away, I said, no, no, I'm only taking pictures of this. And he was fine once he seen what I was doing. He was just nervous. He says, we can't have pictures of what's in this warehouse. I said, that's fine. It's just, you know, client rules and things like that. As a matter of fact, all employees surrender their phones when they get there because they don't want any pictures from employees. And I had a Siamese cable to PoE to convert and never tried it. I'm aware that cable exists, but it's not something I've used. I'm sure you say where those adapters exist, but not something I use. There we go. Yes, operational security. And just clients are just careful about not wanting the insides of their buildings out there on the internet. I don't blame them. I don't argue about it. You know, nature of things. What else we have here? True. We talked about TrueNAS. We talked about we got this TrueNAS server. We'll log into another one. I don't know exactly what you would consider my main TrueNAS server, but my video editing TrueNAS server that I'm using right now is this one here. I am working on, this is a video we can talk about. Is it six? No, no, no. 192. It's in our lab. We set up 3.64. There we go. This is another video I'm working on right now with, we have, if you didn't notice, we have a lot of TrueNAS systems because we also have, and would it be this one here? And this still isn't all of them, by the way. I could just keep going and logging into TrueNAS after TrueNAS after TrueNAS we have set up. We do a lot of testing in our lab in case you didn't know. This is our scale system that we're working on. So there's a scale system, this system, this system, and there was one more that is closed the window for. Anyways, on topic though, storage, pools, Zen test, we're going to show how to, and we can do, we're going to do this on the fly. Wait, where'd it go? Huh. So, oh, it's already installed. I bet, yep, my employees were playing with this. They already turned it on. We're going to talk about log versus cache. This is so confusing to a lot of people because it is a complicated topic. It's not, I don't blame people for being confusing on this, but the log drive, we're going to actually just purge it right now. Yes, watch, without rebooting or anything, or even stopping my RAID Z1 pool, I can actually drop a log right out. I can also add it back. This is going to be one of those video topics. We talk about what you should or shouldn't do with these, how you add a cache, how you add a log. Here's the log VDev, here's the cache VDev. And if you want to add them, you can do these dynamically. So, if we check this box here, here, add VDev, confirm. Hey, look, we just threw a cache drive in this system. But will that make it faster is what really you want to know. How does that work? How does a write cache, but there's not really a write cache in ZFS, how does a read cache work? Well, do you need the read cache, or would it just be better to use it as a write cache? And should I get a bigger one? Won't that make it faster? And actually the answer to that is already no. I need to help demystify that question because it's a question that comes up all the time. And I want to have a video just to throw at people when I ask the question to kind of break it down about the use cases for these devices. That's why this particular system is set up with an extra MVME drive just for that explainer video I plan on doing. So that's another thing you can look forward to if you're diving into it. Get with the program, set up a true NAS server. Yes. If it's a bond XPG, one of the next gets bad. How do we remove Nick from the bottom without stringing the bond itself? I don't know. I think you have to destroy the bond. I don't think there's a way around that. So in Nick's rarely go bad. That's a pretty unusual. I'm not saying never, but it's just not common. Have you be careful with the Covenants? No, we have concrete and steel buildings. Use wires to carry electricity but they are in charge to do as they like. Nice shirt. You like that? 45 drives. I need another shirt from these people. So they make nice shirts. Anyways, if a network card goes bad, I don't think destroying the bond is really the problem because if a network card goes bad, you got to physically remove it from the network, from the device anyways to replace it. So you're shutting it down. I'm doing a live stream, Brett. Yeah, I'm doing a live stream right now. Can I call you back when I'm done? Brett says hi. Yeah, just telling you fibers all testing consistent so far. Sorry, I forgot about the vlog. Oh, no problem. So you're on site testing the fiber and it's testing consistent. Yes. Awesome. I'll call you back shortly because I'm curious about this. All right, Mike. We are on site testing fiber right now. Well, I'm not. My team is. And Brett is part of my team so therefore he's testing fiber at a project. This is why there was a picture of me on Twitter that I'll share. There's me and Brett standing there. I was freezing. I was not prepared for how cold it was outside. I brought my heavy jacket but it was inadequate and I was cold but we had to get out here and test a bunch of stuff. So yeah, that's the thing. Actually, and this is what we're testing is these are the breakout boxes. This is a project video I'll be doing a video on really soon. This is a breakout box. These are fiber connectors over here. This is all for SDI single mode fiber SDI video feeds for camera trucks. So yeah, that's some upcoming project. So that's going to be kind of fun. And I was so cold. I was freezing that day, man. It was not here like we can be walking around following all these feeds. Yeah, and we have a series of XLRs. We got fiber. This is some of those one-off projects. This is not a normal project for us. This is a one-off thing we were doing. It's for a client we did other networking for but it's another low voltage cabling. There is no quick answer for True NAS versus Synology. I'm going to say Synology is probably more easier to use than True NAS. True NAS is more performance oriented and definitely a bigger open source project. I have a video comparing True NAS and Synology. We're going to move the business videos to a new channel starting in about a week. We're probably still a week or two out from launching a different channel for the business videos. How do you test fiber? I don't know. Well, the fiber tester. I'm not testing it. I have a team that has fiber testing stuff and they go out there and test the fiber. That's how. I don't have this. We have a contractor that I believe, if I'm not mistaken, they probably have a contractor out there testing the fiber. We will run it. We rarely need to test it. If we do, we'll work with a contractor who has a fiber tester and whatnot. How do you, great question, what do you use to terminate fiber runs? Contractors. That's how. We actually had these fiber were pre-made and pulled by us. So it's with the contractors pre-determined. Did the testing matter of fact, it came with a whole certification test. When we're done, we installed it. And then once we installed it, we tested again to make sure everything works. Yes, with a light meter. No, I do not run any VMs on my True NAS scale. I don't really run any virtualization. It's never something we run in production either. The fiber treasure runs shoot it in the back. The only thing I know with fiber is don't use a laser and stare at fiber with your one good eye you have left. Heard that from an engineer. Pre-terminated is the way to go. No doubt. Yes. I mean, it's way better to try and terminate things on site, measure the run, have a service loop, have a company pre-make it, test it, snap ends on it, put it all together and then install it. Life is good. Less work, but a bit more cost. Time is money. So having someone do it in a lab who does it all the time, absolutely. Absolutely a better idea. What time is it? By the way, speaking of time, five o'clock. So nonetheless, we'll wind it down. A few more questions. Do people have more questions here? More stuff to talk about? What other things do you want to throw at me before we wind this down? 12 p.m. It's 5 p.m. here. I'm in Eastern Standard Time. I just had this discussion over in another Slack channel. So Aruba Instantan, two years after I reviewed, it looks the same. They reached out to me, you want me to do a new review, but there's nothing new about their product. It looks the same. They haven't done anything new. They haven't taken anything away. It works the same as it did. It's functional. It's not amazing, but it's not bad either. For a lot of basic use cases, I think it's pretty good. I think it's also expensive, but I used it for a long time here at my house just to try it. I never had a problem with it. I have a friend whose MSP uses it all the time. They like it just because it works consistently. They agree with me. Their cloud web interface is so basic and features are coming soon, whatever that is. Yep, I just walk upstairs because I'm, yeah, oh, let's see. Oh, they have cloud stacking. This is the thing. This is where it gets a little confusing. It's not web only. It's web or not and CLI. So if you want some of the advanced configuration stuff, you have to take it out of their web interface to start doing it. That seems counterintuitive to me. It seems like I understand at least the monitoring should stay in there. Maybe they've changed it so you don't have to take it out, but that was a confusing part when I was setting it up of how you had to take it out of the web interface and go to the local interface or command line. Actually, I believe it has command line. I just did it through the web interface. The web interface on the switch itself has lots of features that aren't accessible in the web interface online. So if you have like more advanced things you want to do at the switch, you can do them, but you have to take it away from the web controller. I thought that was just like, I don't know. For as big as they are, I just don't think they're putting the effort into the product to make a more robust feature set in the web interface. Do you still take the tuning out of NFS or do you so need to tuning like a normal Linux servers? With core, I just use it at default. The only thing I change in the NFS shares is going to be, switch it over to here, when you're setting up an, this is the scale one, we want this one here, services, NFS, specify how many servers to create, increase NFS client, respond slow, keep this less than or equal to the number of CPUs reported by sys control can limit CPU context switching. So I usually up this if there's a few extra cores in a system, if it's needed, if there's multiple connections on it. It's not, not always in the necessary thing, but it's there. There's not much other tuning I do to, with core to get it out of there. So I don't know about how it is on scale, scale so far, the performance isn't there, but we got more testing we're going to be doing on it. Um, my thoughts on ruckus. So the problem with ruckus is, well, this is the first problem, when you're trying to find them, ruckus networks is a brand of wireless network support equipment. Okay, is comm scope ruckus? Okay, case studies releases, when you're last time I was here, it was hard to go through and figure out some of their access points. Looks like the website got updated some, but this was some of the problems how to buy and being, Oh, you got to buy from a channel partner. Oh, so it's harder to buy. And not that I think it's bad this should be a channel partner. Who's my channel partner here? Apparently somebody up here. Spartan synergy. Oh, synergy broadband, RF connect. So now I got to contact a third party. I don't know. And my understanding all the feet anytime I've looked at them, I've not found the best documentation and I've also not found the best support information on them. So it seems to be kind of a mix. Some people say they really like them. Their product line is my understanding pretty expensive too. So I don't know. I use NFS over ice because he, but you use what makes you happy. Ruckus is expensive. My old employer had a few of them and didn't like to use them. It's confusing of which ones don't have licensing. The licensing models for them are not clear. Maybe I'm just having a hard time finding it because you have to be a channel partner to get this information. But I keep hearing conflicting things. So our, we've, we have a problem where someone that likes us to use us for the labor to do installs, wanted us to install this arrow hive stuff. We said, we prefer to install unified stuff. They want us to solve this arrow hive stuff because they're a reseller and things like that. So we went and installed it. And then where the conflict came in is the units were bad out of the box and the install got delayed. And it took support like two weeks to get another unit out there to the client. And it was a lot of aggravation. And it was like plug it in. It only blinked. I think it was blinking red. That's the only thing this device would do is like blink red or blink orange. It had some blink code that they kept trying this, trying to hold the reset button. We're like, why isn't this pre-programmed? And finally, they declared it must be bad after lots of back and forth. And then we had to charge for a second trip because it's a 45 minute drive to the location. And the customer's like, well, this is costing me a lot. And I'm like, I don't know, test your stuff beforehand. I don't know. That's my only experience with it. I also found their web interface convoluted and confusing. It wasn't awful. It was way more features than you have with the Ruba, but it wasn't like blew me away with its easy views. I actually thought the Maraki had a better experience from web interface. So all right, I'm going to wind this down because I got a few things I want to get done. I actually want to leave the house today for a walk because that's one of the things I wanted to do today. Because it reached almost like 40-something degrees outside. So it's warm enough to go for a walk. And I'm going to call Brett back to see what's going on over there. See how all that fun's doing. So thanks everyone for joining. Awesome hearing from everyone. As always, the forums are open. I'm trying to be more participatory in my Discord channel. That's still hit and miss. I do have a Discord. I'm in there from time to time. But hit me up on the Twitter. Post questions in my forums. It's the best place if you're likely to get a response out of me. But yes, thank you everyone for joining. It was awesome seeing all of you. Oh, same thing, having to get the aero hives through a reseller and things like that. Like I said, I wasn't super impressed with my one experience I had. The other stupid problem was they sent us the wrong brackets. And the confusion of getting brackets from them that mount to their devices was stupid. I don't know if it was a problem because we didn't talk to the aero high. We talked to the reseller. We don't know if he was confused or the reseller agreement was confusing. We just kept saying we need a bracket to mount this thing. And they couldn't understand why and it didn't ship with brackets, which was also one of the first problems when a device rising, we said really simple, standard office drop ceiling. And they had no way to mount it because I don't know they shipped it with no bracket at all. They're like, Oh, what type of bracket? And they sent us a link. Here's all the different types of brackets. And I'm like, I just it's an office drop ceiling folks. Oh, okay, they have a bracket that mounts a little rail in between. All right, cool. So, like I said, my experience and it could have been shaded or jaded by that one person. I don't know. All these social media can suck away your time. Yeah, it happens. Let's see. Oh, still less people watching and likes. Yeah. Smash the like button and all that. All right. Well, thank you, everyone. Here we'll roll out with the smashing the like button stuff. Actually, we move myself. Hold on. Why isn't it doing that? There we go. Move myself here. Oh, let's see. Oh, yeah, I've seen lots of people do things for arbitrary reasons like the other people were using it. Let's just do this. Yeah. That's a thing. All right. Thank you, everyone. Take care and smash like button. See you on the forum. See you online and I'm out of here. There's the end button. Oh, there it is.