 And we are live welcome to the homelab show episode 12 Public cloud alternatives with special guest Wendell because you know, he knows a little bit about some cloud alternatives He may have talked about him on his channel once or a few times maybe So I'm here also with Jay from learn Linux TV who's being anonymous right now if you didn't know Jay You don't have your camera on but Okay Something he's he's here though. He is definitely here. I promise I am here Yeah, and that infills you they've listened to some podcast form Jay was just absent for a moment, but not a big deal Anyways, this episode is brought to you literally by Linode because if you downloaded this podcast It was downloaded off a website that is hosted in low the homeland dot show that's where we have it hosted and Jay's gonna tell you a little bit more robotics. He's a even longer Linode user than me Yeah, I think for at least few years however long ago. It was we went to Pengo con I think Wendell you were there that same year if I'm not mistaken and Linode was there, you know Presenting and giving out cards and I decided to check them out. So I've been using them for a while They're the official cloud sponsor or excuse me cloud Supporter or cloud platform can't talk today for learn Linux TV All of my sites are on Linode and it's working great and like Tom mentioned this one is on there, too So if you didn't think you were using Linode you were you're using Linode if you've ever checked out this podcast Anything but live you're using Linode and I really like the stack scripts Basically, there's a marketplace as well. You can go there and there's pre-built instances For example a light speed WordPress installation with which is great if you want to set up a blog It's super fast highly recommended all kinds of things from a Minecraft server are one click available and They have things like you know domain management, of course the Linodes themselves, which are really great cloud servers You can get them all the way from five dollars a month on up depending to your needs are and with our offer with our URL It's going to give you a hundred dollars in free credit. That is good for three months for a new account So that'll be more than enough to get you started Yeah, and we have the offer code down below. It is Linode.com slash home lab show so we have that offer code and it's kind of important because a few things We're going to be mentioning today because I know this is what this topic will come up when we're talking about you know Replacing the public cloud is why I need somewhere to host some of these things or I want to host these in my house But I'm behind carrier grade Nat one of the solutions around that's going to be spin up something like a Linode server to proxy this and We'll get into that. It's gonna be one of the topics we cover as it's definitely a solution So it just because you don't have a public IP doesn't mean you can't still have some stuff publicly accessible So we'll be covering that in today's show and some of my my servers are not publicly accessible And they're in Linode it but you can't get to them at all because they're only available to me because I just Want to utilize their service for some things I think that's the most important thing when it comes to home lab is having control It doesn't mean you have to have everything internal But as the owner of your home lab you can decide what it is that you want to handle internally And what is it that you're going to push out to a cloud and you have that control? For sure. So what's the first thing we should talk about? Where should we start with all this? Well, I think in my opinion some random kind of Shorter best practices because we've gone over best practices before but maybe just a few notes about some general things Just in case someone's kind of new that was spending too much time on that like for example not making things publicly available unless You want them to be I see a lot of people getting started with home lab They make they want to make everything externally available because they want to show all their friends and their co-workers Hey, look at this thing that I have a bill I can get get to it from a phone my computer It will guess what other people around the world can get to it as well So the first, you know quick best practice is don't make it externally available Unless there's a reason why you should do that. I mean Wendell. Have you seen anyone accidentally create a botnet? Yes. Yes, I you know I try to warn people all the time and they're like let me put my IOT devices because I love them on the internet and it's like no It's like I want to be able to check the status of the hot tub from anywhere in the world And it's like no no why oh, it's already mining Bitcoin. This isn't great Yeah, you see this a lot with like the cheaper home security cameras like you get you know Just the cheapest thing on eBay and the firmware is insanely out of date and people don't know like they plug it in and they're like All right, I've forwarded some ports on my firewall or it's got an IPv6 address because a lot of ISP even carrier grade Matt ones are Allowing publicly accessible IPv6 and you get to crap shoot if that if the firewalls actually locked down ISPs are only just learning Oh, wait, maybe we should actually turn that off by default And so you have a lot of botnet traffic even on IPv6 addresses and then all of a sudden it's like why am I locked out of my own cameras? Yeah under your control right and it's one of those things it's exciting to say cool I set this server up at my house or got these cameras and I'll just port forward something or Perhaps even your firewall has that built in for you and the UP and P Activated and opened up in secure ports It's one of those things we try to make people very conscious of because on the other side Those botnet to get created by the home users is almost I'm gonna say less a threat to the home users But part of the basis of threat for the enterprise users because they take all those bots and point them at whatever service They want to die with service Yeah, and it's just you can you can you can have something as convenient as get to it anywhere from your phone But you know use a VPN use something like a linoad proxy take some steps You gotta you gotta understand what the risks are and then you can put your horribly insecure internet of things devices on the internet Because from their point of view, they're not really on the internet you're sort of remoting into the kiddie pool with them and You know, you're all just sort of existing pretty happily in the kiddie pool and nothing nothing bad will happen that way and What are the simple solutions and there's more than one and both of them are right just depends on which one you want to do is Putting a proxy and then choosing which proxy whether you want to go engine x or h a proxy I'm kind of a fan of h a proxy done several videos on it And it becomes kind of a choke point h a proxy itself is a popular solid project with a lot of eyes on it So if you put a proxy in front of your horribly insecure camera system that maybe is Lesser looked at but adding these proxies kind of create a choke point of authentication and vetting of things coming in It has to match certain Parameters, you know, when you build the proxy rules before it hands off to whatever thing that you want behind The firewalls so these are kind of ways to mitigate I think and window can certainly speak more to the engine x I believe you had a tutorial you did on that recently. Yeah. Yeah In h a proxy is great because it's built into pf sense And so if you've got pf sense definitely just go with that because the GUI is great and the it's pretty flexible Some of the terminology in the GUI is a little obtuse if you don't know what you're doing So definitely check out those tutorials on the engine x side It's it's pretty much the same kind of a thing. There's a there's a guy that wrote a an open source Or not an open source like a it's like $5 or something like that GUI for managing the engine x configuration But there's a guy in the level one form for setting it up and you can run the engine x proxy on the node or on your you know your router firewall gateway or Somewhere else and you can basically consolidate a whole bunch of different services into a single open port and a single IP address And you can also do authentication there So like one of the great features or accidental features of HTTP is the HTTP the protocol and HTTPS It's actually support authentication So like whatever like when you go to a website and you've got like a form that you fill out and it's like all pretty and gooey and blah blah that's authentication at the app level But there's actually also authentication at for lack of a better way to describe it the protocol level with HTTP so you can require that the server authenticate with the client even with certificates if you want to get really fancy you can Do it with certificates, but let's not do that. Yeah, not for newbies But you can have a user and password there that will then let you in to you know you know next cloud or something like that and that's a pretty good solution in terms of Making it hard for the botnets to find you and that also helps with the application logs So like if you're watching your next cloud logs, and it's like, why am I getting constant logins? You know for Bob they've got that first password And so that's something you should pay attention to whereas by default There's so much background noise of just being on the internet that you can't really separate the real threats from the hacked toasters in Estonia Yeah, the other advantages adds is an easy way to have multiple different websites So to speak your multiple different URLs Tied to a single port so you don't need a bunch of IPs you can have just your one IP provided by your ISP and Bring everything in there and the way the rule sets work in proxies is they look at that Name that came in and that redirects them to the server that they wanted to land on so the different You know fully qualified domain name will then match the server So once again, they don't even know necessarily they as in the random bots They'll be pinging at the door as you open up something they may not know what a service was reavailable They to see a proxy and whatever it may serve up by default and do we want to talk about a show danda? Because you can search for yourself on there and be like wait those are my cameras. Why are my cameras on this search? To do that I Use an nginx container that you know is able to provide external access to things and Ever since the pandemic started I actually disabled the firewall rule that routes the traffic because I'm always home So now no one can get to it from the outside because I never leave anymore So at this point it's like why even have it externally available. I just disabled the rule but then What I like about the HTTP proxy idea is in my case since it's on a Linux container I could put fail-to-ban on there looking for those HTTP auth requests coming in and Failing a certain number of times to get them on the blacklist. So that's another thing you can easily hook into that Yeah, yeah, and then you know it's like when you start getting when you start getting fancy like that You can also you know aggregate your logs and do lots of fun interesting stuff And I love adding the stuff to fail-to-ban, but then also flagging things and it's like oh Russian Federation China Oh Department of Defense IP addresses what? You're your attention What's going on with that? Epic server that you had that got their attention It's just it's fun because you never know where all of that stuff You know when you really look at it and you can like separate it and aggregate it and do a little bit of you know Grafana data analysis on it. It is very interesting, but it's also a really great way to level up your skills Yeah, it's the background radiation I think is what Steve Gibson always calls it on the internet and it's what it is It's just anything's open. You just go wow look at all these You know, I've done a lot of videos on Seracada and it scares people because they feel I'm under attack No, no the internet's under attack. You're just you just turned it on and noticed I freaked out the first time I ever saw that early in my career. I'm like, oh my god Why are these all these people trying to get into this server like what's going on here? What it didn't take me long to figure it out, but yeah, what was the what was the there was a warmable a Warmable problem in like before service pack one of Windows 7 and I can't remember what that was called Yeah, yeah or something like that Yeah, if it wasn't nimda was another instance of that if it wasn't the one that I'm thinking of but whichever one it was If you plug a fresh Windows 7 machine into the internet the time Delta before it's infected It's still about five minutes, which honestly is very impressive for an obsolete operating system Yeah, it's still that it's still out there floating around for reasons Well, it's because there's a closet somewhere running this old server that's been breached and no one's ever gonna turn it off Strips that these hackers are sitting up around a five-minute cron It might be taking 10 seconds actually, who knows Now I guess after all this then one of the other questions I'm shocked hasn't come up in the chat yet is well How about hosting my own mail server because that's probably something everyone starts out thinking they want to do but let's All three of us have spent time in in years of hosting mail servers And there's a reason all three of us don't despite being very well versed in this subject I Did it for a year actually I and I had I could be grumpy sometimes So I I forgot who my email provider was at the time. It wasn't Gmail or anything like that I was actually paying for it and I put in a ticket. I didn't get a response the same day I'm like, okay that does it I'm just gonna do it myself and then my stubborn arrogance took over and I Fussed around with the mail server got it running ran it for a year and then after a year I decided mental health is important and I decided not to do that anymore it's it's sort of nuts because You know, you think email is just open up a port and dump some text into it But like the last time that I DIYed like what you went through It was I need to set up a really robust solution for receiving the email And I need gray listing and spam filtering and blah, blah, blah And these are not things that you get from a single package You end up putting a whole stack of like 10 or 15 packages together that have their own care and feeding and updates and workflows And then there's also things like, you know, SPF queries Do we want to query that and add stuff about that to the header like is does the domain match? Is there, you know DNS that we needed to deal with blah, blah So it does turn into this hugely complicated ordeal for the receiving side and then storage is a question Are you storing it on the mail server or are you just providing a simple client? IMAP is an option But an IMAP is a fantastically in my opinion completely outdated protocol It doesn't do a lot of things and so there are services that you can provide for like web mail It will give you like an API, but then if you go down that rabbit hole It's like you need a postgresql back in and you need to index all the incoming mail for search and blah, blah, blah And then so now you've got a whole other six or seven programs that require care and feeding and And then that HTTP protocol is not exactly standard So it's like how are you gonna sync devices and do other kind of stuff? You usually like a lot of the programs out there now will emulate the exchange protocols because those aren't actually brain-dead protocols Yeah, and that's insane to me But you know, I was rocking Zimbra way back in the day because it was like oh this will be really good And they're going this direction. It was like is all this insanity really necessary and it turns out yes The answer is that or you can pay somebody five bucks a month and I have seven people on staff to deal with that Yep, yeah, it's been the easier solution I mean I started out with send mail and writing proc mail recipes to figure out how to mitigate spam and Oddly I didn't know this the hero. We didn't know we needed which is a story I hope he shares one day publicly it was Michael Lucas. He used to do work for big company handing out IP addresses for spammers and There's used to help block list some of that so actually interactive of them indirectly before as books, but But the it's just a lot of work trying to manage that all the time And I know it's something that everyone gets excited about because they're like Like it Wendell says it starts out so simple sounding But then it turns into you need all those are services and it's better to pay the few dollars a month to one of those services instead if you don't like the big guys like Gmail or Your office 365 there is like proton mail and there's a there's alternatives out there that are you know reasonable services where you can still host your mail Personally not necessarily good as good. They do offer some business services, but I don't I don't know how good they are I like hover as well for for that. They're a good one for email. I haven't used proton myself so many people like that one a lot so That's a very popular one. There's another one. I like I can't remember the name of it though Maybe I'll remember it by the end of the show, but yeah, pay somebody for it. It's better It really is kind of a paradox because on the one hand, you know what I'm talking about like Postgres QL and the the email see thing and like the You know Bayonetian filtering and blah blah blah Those are all like best in class technologies And so somebody that really knew what they're doing looked at the technology stack and they're like, yes I'm gonna use all this stuff. I'm not gonna reinvent the wheel for the database server I'm not gonna reinvent the wheel for this that and the other but at the end of the day what what we would actually ask for in a You know so ho email system is probably a single source like a single program That's handling the inbound and handling all of that stuff and handling the protocol and handling the storage and handling the database indexing written in like go or rust but the paradox is that That is inherently going to be worse than The solution that is built from all of the best in class other products, but infinitely more maintainable So that's kind of a long-winded answer, but I'll be referencing this show About the email like this is three people not just me that says this The other one someone mentioned in the chat fast mail That's the other one that I was thinking of and I have used that one. I really do like that one So we have fast mail proton mail hover are three really good solutions in my opinion for that Um So now we can get off the email topic and file management like next cloud maybe Yeah, I like it. I I think that's been a project. It's been around You know, it's a split from the original own cloud or some history there But use next cloud because people say what about the other one and next clouds been around for a while now It's a mature project. It's got so many features and plugins It's I would say getting very enterprise ready. It's it's a pretty powerful tool you can have in your home lab There's been a lot of plugins to like we'll talk more about ebook management actually probably in this section but one one thing is that You know next cloud allows you to do that too may not be the best solution for Viewing ebooks in a browser. It's fine. It's not the greatest thing, but it works But there's a lot of other plugins on there as well You know, he has all the usual stuff like calendar contacts file synchronization pictures and whatnot There's like almost like an entire app store Equivalent in next cloud so you could just add whatever features that you want and I highly recommend it I run a next cloud server and I have for quite a long time. I don't use the file sync We will be talking about file sync in a moment, but um Nothing against next cloud because I did use the file sync and I didn't have any problems with it I just went a different direction for a reason that wasn't against next cloud actually so I do highly recommend it Your next cloud user Wendell. Yeah, I like next cloud a lot. I like putting the HTTP off in front of it I've definitely experienced Noobs, I guess Getting in with next cloud and then it's like they're not immediately updating or they're installing every sketchy plug-in that they can find It's like, well, there's kind of security implications So we need to think about this and they're just like, ah, it'll be fine And then you know a couple of instances of ransomware later. They're like, maybe you were right Yeah, one one thing I warn people is obviously I'm a big fan of the true nasty platform But the hang-up that comes a lot is the fact that the plug-in version of next cloud is a little bit behind That being behind is also where the security problems can come in So if there was a problem found today It may not be this week before they get that plug-in updated But it really should be this week if you have it publicly exposed But you know reference back early like we said put a proxy in front of it So you have mitigated some of that exposure and you know kind of Quarantined off some of your risk, especially if you're getting excited going hey Look at all these cool plugins people wrote that may not be vetted Yeah, it's really awesome But the video on learn Linux TV if anyone wants a walkthrough of setting it up on a Linux server I have a walkthrough for that. So maybe we'll put that in the show notes Yeah, if you wanted the most up-to-date version spinning it yourself is Gonna gonna be the way to go on that. It's I'm sorry I love you I love you folks at TrueNAS if you're listening, but the plugins are sometimes a little lagging behind Yeah, that's true. I like the idea of The containers and automation stuff Jay, I noticed I think you were doing or doing or planning some some content on like ansible I think is that right? I have a whole series already done actually as a matter of fact I'm thinking about refreshing it like within it within the next six months for ansible the newer version But the current version the video works just fine. I can't remember how many episodes I want to say it's 15 or 16 episodes long and then I did some stand-alones after that one Is for ansible pull and then another's for ansible vault that people can watch after that series I am literally Ansible obsessed. I don't know why like I answer all the things and I mean everything like I literally have the Deploy down or a provision down to one command. I have this It's kind of a hacky solution, but it works. It's an internally available Apache server that serves a bash script So normally I don't like telling people to do like curl, you know Pipe the pseudo bash, but it's in my my network and you can't get to it from the outside So on my laptop, I run literally curl deploy slash bootstrap Pipe to bash done walk away and then that's it And just to give you an idea like it can take a boon to minimal For example, which is just command line up to a fully installed gnome environment with wallpaper GTK themes All my apps flat packs like literally google google chrome set it to true you get google chrome set Steam to true you get steam. That's the level that I go with this I have a host of ours file with like 30 different variables on there I could customize it with whatever apps I want And all I got to do is run that one command because it's in version control and my servers are In the same spec because I have a workstation role And a server's role is intelligent enough to know which one to provide and then I have the base role Which is like everybody gets that I don't care if you're a Laptop desktop server base roles for everyone and then it splits into server and workstation stuff after that so I've been kind of building that for like five years and I I did put that code It's an earlier version. It's kind of old. I have a I actually have that on the github page which was kind of like a clone of my Ansible code, but sanitized but in some of the stuff has been deleted like password hashes and whatnot But um, yeah, definitely check out the channel. I'll be doing more, but I I have The first series up. So if anyone wants to learn ansible, you definitely can do that Yeah, great for getting all those deployments done automatically automatically that's um, that's definitely true But one thing I think we might want to consider talking about even if it's just quick is sync thing Since we're on the topic of file management um now next cloud does I mean it does synchronization And I switched to sync thing only because I wanted like a You know, kind of like the unix way do one thing and do one thing well I wanted a sync solution that was just the sync solution that was kind of outside of everything and didn't depend on Um out of date plugins and true nas or anything But then again, I still kind of ran into that problem because the sync thing plugin is currently out of date in true nas But we won't talk about that Sync thing is my personal favorite for syncing files. Um, bundle. Do you have a tried and true solution for that rsync? ZFS send an rsync, uh, you know, I don't know. No, I've used to sync thing a lot I don't I don't think I have any current instances of sync thing because when I was monitoring it I saw kind of a lot of traffic not a lot like it was transferring data But I saw kind of a lot of traffic to the internet and it was like this is it's something that I've misconfigured I need to look more into this and I've since learned that that was some kind of like discovery protocol that it has So yeah, I just able all those because of that same reason They have in in the realm of we try to be as helpful as possible by default You can use those qr codes that it generates and the id they have their own relay servers And they certainly will flag ids systems flag them because they're kind of scattered around the internet to a couple different places And they look suspicious, but um, I usually Turn all that off on anything we run in production But it's hard to say to do that in a video because it helps people so much from a discovery standpoint because You've got two people at two locations And it can do this without any port forwarding by just saying just share your id's and say accept and really servers will Figure it out. I believe it uses ud UDP hole punching to kind of bridge the connections between them That's how they can maintain a server's low cost So it's it's got that as a problem But on the upside and I just did a video on this the other day it was If you do lock it down So speaking just uncheck the boxes In the settings or not even anything you have to do from the command line Then go to the untrusted node option and that's kind of a cool feature I think they added so you can actually build an untrusted node in the cloud somewhere that's encrypted But then have you and all your friends sharing files that bridge across this one node You set up and the node is blind to anything more than IP address even when as far as they scramble the date and time of the file and the File gets chunked in the little pieces. So you can't even extrapolate the size of single files It's just all it's kind of cool the level of detail They went through breaking this apart, but it's a great real-time synchronization tool You don't consider it look at it like, you know how one drive well I can't say one drive. It doesn't sink as good as dropbox is more like dropbox I should say what one drive in the ideal world of when it sinks everything properly But it's not a selective sink. He pointed at a directory. It sinks. What's in that directory? It doesn't have the granular controls You're going to get with some of the enterprise products But for some people and I always got a kick out of jay's use case of keeping all of his save game states and his emulators My retro pies. Yeah, I have a retro pie on every tv I'm gonna also have some handheld ones too, and they're all on sink thing and and The reason why I bring up this topic even though it's like a gaming topic But I think the reason why I bring this up is because it illustrates that If you're if you have a creative mindset or you apply a creativity to a solution like sink thing You could use it outside of its intended You know use case. It's like it's not an advertised feature. This will help you sink your save games It sinks whatever you want it to sink So I literally can just be playing, you know, final fantasy six on one tv And you know put it down and then go to another tv like maybe the bedroom or you know in the office or something like that I'm not supposed to be playing final fantasy six when I'm working So we'll pretend I didn't say that but I'll I'll pick up the game and I'll have my save file right where I left off And the roms themselves will sink too. So I add it to my master sink thing and it just sends the rom and I even have like the Metadata for the games on a on an automatic get pull. So one retro pi updates the The the metadata for a game. They all even have that too Um, but as an aside how I use sink thing in general is probably not the way that most people use it because I think You correct me if I'm wrong tom don't most people like sink everything to everything kind of like a mesh kind of thing um sometimes like we even use this commercially we we combined it with zero tier for A company that had dispersed data That they had on these little small devices So we tied it to zero tier tied to sink thing and just synchronize all the little files that went scattered around I make do a video on how we solve that solution for them because it's kind of a clever way to do it But a lot of the use case we see is mostly you know, even like how we use it We use it for specific documents here at the office We have a common folder that's sink between me and the other management team So we just drop a file in there and all of us can instantly see it It seems to be faster and easier sometimes than doing things then with You know things like google drive or next cloud also because it works so well in linux But if I go to a client site, I have it tunneled over a vpn I'll update a network scan and all that data is as soon as I close the laptop I'm going to open it again It was vpn back to my office It was sink thing the net folder has you know the output from the results of whatever I was scanning at their office And it's available to all my staff in real time So, you know, we've used it for a lot of more focused use cases like that But obviously just simple use cases of I just need to synchronize all these files because I randomly save things I don't want to think about backing it up on a schedule. That would be hard The way that I use it is I have I use I think the best equivalent of this mindset is the star topology where you have You know something in the middle then you have things connecting to it, but they don't connect to each other So my laptop for example, I save a file on my laptop It sinks to true nas and then my desktop also sinks to true nas So the file first gets to true nas and then from true nas it goes to the desktop So everything is through the central node But then on the true nas I have a data store for every sink thing folder I don't use the the default folder. That's just called sink I have a documents folder a projects folder and so on. I think I have like five different ones And each of my computers will sink those five different folders and they all sink to the true nas and because they're on individual data stores per sink thing share I can selectively roll back one particular shared folder Or access the contents of one particular shared folder to do file recovery I think I have like four months of Differentials and yeah true nas so I guess the I should probably close this part I or at least my part part of this I just saying um in summarizing with be creative because you can apply solutions like this in You know pretty interesting ways to yeah And I think the next you know popular topic that we have to address So it's gonna be in the realm of plex. Am I right about that? The media it's all the media yes You know it was I Netflix ended piracy like I could bury subscription and piracy suddenly became not worth it And then everyone charges 1299 1399 1499 a month and now we're back to I guess we have to have our own media Libraries again. I think that's where the it's heading especially I see an amazon bought mgm Which means all the cool things that mgm ever put out are now going to be probably only on amazon and pulled from uh there So there's no doubt I mean you can legitimately buy the media and put it back in your servers because that's what you're supposed to do It and so we all of us are doing it Watch golem flex my biggest pet peeve with uh things like netflix is you get to this um Model where you need to watch every single episode of this series by friday because it's going away Crap. I'm only on season one. I'll never make it That that that not owning and you don't own it. So you don't know you don't know how long it's going to be there Yeah, it's it's definitely one of the Challenges I think that even some of the younger generations It's a different concept to them because they're used to not owning the media and I'm old enough to go No, I remember buying things on dvd And I would possess the media that I could watch it any moment not. Oh, I guess it's gone and not available anymore. So um And you know, this even probably applies to we'll get to the topic of books too But uh on the topic of just general media plex has been a you know, I bought it when there was a sale a long time ago They had like some perpetual lifetimes one time subscription Uh, I think I feel like it was a black friday sale, but it's been so long I can't remember but either way I've been using for a long time And it's just a great way to serve up all your media and I don't just mean movies I mean even like a good way to index and organize just personal videos. I've done and Photos I have of things I like and it's you can put it all together and one nice thing And it's kind of supported by things like chromecast and lots of other media playing devices So once you have the server in your house, you can serve up all that media and it makes it generally easy to share Uh with other people to share your plex server libraries I I use it for training videos too. I want to learn something new and I buy training videos sometimes through Pack because you can download them and then I just throw the files up on plex so I can watch them on my tv I'll have them forever It's how we can torture when family comes over we can do the family photo thing and look I can play it on my tv Let's learn all about active directory family Uh, yes, but it's uh, it's definitely a great program What are some alternatives to plex? Uh, just to keep it complete because I just use plex. I never check out the other things there's there's a a lot of um up and comers that have There's imbi, but it's not called imbi anymore. It's like jelly fin. I think and um Uh, a whole bunch of other ones depending on what sort of media that you want and you know, uh plex has Cody that's another one And plex is added support for books but also, um Like the caliber book server But if you if you want to take it to the nth degree you can build a bot that will scour the internet Looking for media and it's usually pretty effective and then magically things just show up on your hard drive And it's like oh, is that the latest HBO series? That's weird. How did that get there? So, yeah, yeah, don't know. We can't ever do a how-to on that Yeah, there are topics you should probably avoid if you're a youtuber There may be some forum posts where you'll find this information But um, yeah, I don't the media companies are very very against owned media and it's just You know owned media was like, you know the land of vhs that was carved out by the supreme court And they just keep whittling away the little island until there's just you know I feel like we're standing on a toothpick at this point. Yeah, it's like, you know They need to get with the program. I remember at one point. This is quite a while ago when you know Ripping audio CDs was a really big thing. Well, I mean it kind of still is but it was kind of like not new but it was you know still current And um, someone I think asked the recording industry or some representative like, okay, so if I have a CD Why can't I just or why shouldn't I be able to rip that? Well, you then they said well, you should If you want a digital copy you should buy the CD and then go and buy a digital copy and and I'm thinking why Like it doesn't even make sense. I have the CD And I want to enjoy it on my devices and if you're not going to facilitate that then I'm going to facilitate that That seems like the community in general's mentality It's like if the companies aren't going to solve this problem We are going to solve it and then the companies get mad that we solved it My favorite example of this and I'll never forget this is so funny like I'm not personally a fan of Celine Dion, but she's got a killer voice, but she had this this album out and I think Sony put like some you know millions of dollars into Making it so you can't actually play that CD or have it be recognized in a computer But it would be recognized in an audio CD player They put a lot of money into this and someone defeated it with a sharpie They looked at the bottom of the CD They they they knew where the track of junk data was because it's painfully obvious I think it might have been a different color and they literally just traced the track With a sharpie And let it dry of course put it in there a computer and it was perfectly fine So somebody defeated like million dollar copy protection with a sharpie Um, and it was just this back and forth battle and then they perpetuated into movies obviously That led to sony appropriating your computer with rootkits. Uh, you know Yeah, the infamous root kid from sony Yeah, and it's just like we'll we'll just take over your computer and prevent you from doing that And it's like and that was like some real, you know state sponsored malware levels of root kid Yeah, that was that was quite thin since I you know it It's all those things it's crazy the power and it's why we refer to in the u.s Here the copyright laws they've been making mouse law because the movie companies are They're the powerhouses when it comes to being of uh lobbying for control or a lot of these things They're so paranoid about losing control That they successfully lobbied the industry to have encryption between your monitor and your video card How insane is that? Yeah, it's like we don't trust you the user To you know peel away the digital bits in this cable So we're gonna come up with this really overly elaborate complex encryption system between your display and Your graphics card and that's actually been really problematic for things like display stream compression Like you know when we're talking about like 8k It's actually lower latency to compress the signal send it and decompress it on the far side than to send an uncompressed signal And uh because we just don't have the signaling rate to keep up with like 8k the high definition blah blah blah and uh All of this is hamstrung by idiotic Ancient hollywood policies and I keep hoping that enough people that aren't from you know 1903 Make their way into You know uh politics so they could just be like no, this is stupid. We're not going to do that But it hasn't happened yet. Yeah one of the longevity is a problem people are living too long That's a solution Yeah, well one of the things that I I hate the or I guess one of my pet peeves about that other than that itself Is the mindset that they have where they'll say things like If you're not trying to copy stuff Then this doesn't affect you in any way, which is totally false and I'll I'll give you an example like it's like every week My son will come to me and be like because he's on youtube and he's doing like the the game streaming thing and He's like, uh, yeah, my screen recorder doesn't work anymore And I go to his computer and it's got I think it's colored red because uh copy protection was triggered and now the Screen recorder is designed to like stop recording because it has to respect that But I can't figure out what on his computer is causing it. It's like a false positive that keeps happening And the game itself doesn't isn't known to stop that and eventually I mean it just keeps disrupting his recording that he's doing for fun with his leisure time All of a sudden it stops recording and we have to go and reset the stupid things. So it it um, we it's just It's horrible. It's just super annoying and it's just a bad idea all around I've uh, I've noticed in the resident evil 8 every time you use its camera tool to take a screenshot It plasters a really nice copyright capcom 2021 at the bottom of it and it's like You know Just I mean, okay the game assets are in artwork are copyright capcom But there was some creative work here that I did in arranging the camera and moving things around and blah blah blah And you can't just appropriate my creative input to this that's that's stealing That's the thing that you're accusing us of There has to be a happy medium and putting giant copyright capcom blah blah blah in a game screenshot Is uh, it's you know, it's peak plutocracy How about giving these kids like an affiliate link instead of a copyright thing in their stream? Any publicity from this? Yeah Um We can kind of talk all day about these laws, but one thing we're all passionate about that part We'll just we'll just say that that's how we got off this topic. We get it No, yeah, we get annoyed by it easily but um, I wanted to give a shout out to plex amp in this category of multimedia because um plex has allowed you to um have your music be a part of your library for quite a long time now And they put out plex amp is a phone app that basically is almost like your own spotify You just it could just hook into your plex server that you may already have And if you have music in there in your library, it'll allow you to listen to your music collection when you're on the go um, and I used to set up dedicated apps for this I think um I started with media tomb on the ps3 back in the day And then there's like um, was it is it mad sonic? I want to say something like that That people were self hosting for music and now we have plex amp and I I think it's kind of cool because the Being able to host your own music matters Especially if you are a nerd who happens to like certain nerdcore rappers and you're like I like that obscure song that is not going to be found on google play or any of the popular services And you know, you can throw them sometimes I'll give you the downloads for free sometimes they say hey, you know the buy me a coffee donation Patreon whatever and I'll give you some of the mp3s Which is great and then I need a place to play them and put them so you can you know, listen to them at your leisure Um, because don't upload them to youtube and try and listen to them That will only cause some type of oh boy They cut a track that mixed in something from somewhere that someone has a claim to so, you know Being able to host that again. It's pretty big. I mean if you're a music fan at all and it's it There's that that goes back a little bit not to get us off topic But to the same problem where a lot of artists have kind of fought the same thing where people will make a lot of claims against Their media, you know I just want their media to be enjoyed and this is an easier way to enjoy it than trying to subscribe to one of the corporate services That may or may not figure out a good way to uh to monetize their type of uh content Yeah, there was there's a story every day about like a music teacher that's like performing like Out of copyright music like here's Beethoven. It's like oh, warrenchappel has claimed that It's like what what? No, it's somebody playing classical music It's just you should own your own media to protect against that kind of idiocy Yeah Because it's only a matter of time before well like uh, there was an itunes update Um, so I know somebody that has a really extensive heavily curated library in itunes and itunes has the mix mp3 and something else and whatever and about six months ago there was an update to itunes And anything that it couldn't find In the apple app store just disappeared and it was just gone So he was like yeah, he was freaking out And apple support was like oh, yeah. No, this is a new feature. We do this thing blah blah blah And it didn't delete the data But it did everything that it possibly could to make it be like this is just not available anymore It's not a thing and we were able to like roll back and like copy the mp3's and then like re-import them But if he was doing uh, it was well, he was doing uh Uh an apple like the apple migration thing and on the new machine. It didn't migrate any of the data either So it was just like no, you don't you don't need that like those aren't those are probably like Copyright protected mp3's we can't copy those and it didn't it didn't warn him. It just wasn't there one day and uh, fortunately, there was a copy there was still a copy on another machine or something And it was we were able to copy it from there and and got it back But but uh, it was like, you know now it's like I don't trust itunes. What do I need to do? It's like, well, let's get a nas. Let's get zfs. Let's get snapshots going And snapshots are the way that you protect against oops I'm going to delete that now because I'm the copyright police if that's what was happening So what I do if anyone's curious and this is what I recommend if this is something you agree with, um I buy cd still and I will continue to do to do that as long as they're still produced And I use an app called asunder on linux to do the ripping I rip into 499 kilobit aug which I find is like the best quality you can get without it being like a wave or a black file um, that's what I do So I just literally buy cds and I just I have a like an external cd drive that I plug in I just use asunder to rip the cd or rip the music off of it And I just throw it on the on the file server from there So if anyone is curious about a ripping app nowadays, that's the one I use there's probably other ones Um, but that works for me So that could be an option Yeah, there's there's a lot of valid to that. Um, I helped a friend a number of years ago now He was worried about cd players becoming obsolete and uh, he used to be part of the road crew to set up large bands That included like metallica and those and because he worked on them He had access to all kinds of garage band day stuff He would get them they would give them different cds from back then So he's got all that stuff in in collections and he's you know, once you convert it all Uh, it's great and it's kind of cool because somewhere I'm you know, one time I'm actually gonna copy it because I don't know what he's doing that I'm holding on to it all like he's he's not a tech person at all But it's it's kind of cool because that would be lost There's a lot of cool things and uh stuff that got recorded from way back when that It's not easily found or even really available. It's kind of like how people Uh, some of the bootleg stuff That was around for a while or the different tapes used to get and how those have been carried forward I think it's still important to preserve a lot of that because it's not easy to find a place to put it Dateline 2025 that's illegal The disney corporation would like to know your location. Yeah Yeah, I oh gosh, that scares me so much. Um speaking of um, well, I should say something that doesn't scare me is um browser sync now because I'm trying out flock is if I'm pronouncing that right FL OCC us and If you want to take control of uh, basically browser sync like bookmark sync And I know there's probably other solutions for that as well Flock is can hook into next cloud for example, which is great. It can also hook into google uh google drive Which I don't know how I feel about that But um, at least if you have next cloud, there's an option there There's a plugin for the browser if you want to do um browser sync without using like one of the You know services like google google service for that same thing. So there's an option as well Yeah, so you don't have to tie into the google to sync things and stuff like that. That's that's always been kind of uh Sometimes a challenge because we have to rely on one of these browsers Whether it is chrome or firefox and getting them synchronized without having a third party public cloud provider involved is uh Kind of important. I mean most of us have more than one place We access the internet not just one computer. So keeping that in sync is definitely um He's I've not tried that particular product, but I may well check it out It's it really for like the windows users they haven't experienced the joys of Having everything in your home directory and how basically everything in your home directory is kind of more or less a file sync And with the browser, it's annoying because you never close the browser. So okay Yeah, you need some you need something more than just file sync for the browser. That's fine But you know like changing a genome preference or something And just having stuff synced from your home folder and then having that preference reflected on other machines that you're syncing That's a huge deal and like on windows. It's like You know windows doesn't respect anything. It's like i'm going to change my wallpaper and then it's like, oh, it's time to upgrade I'm going to get the second half whatever and it's like, no, let's reset that It's like i'm going to change my application preferences. No, you really want to use bing That's that's not good, but um Someone brought up something in the chat that i think it's worth mentioning though and I I agree download podcast, absolutely. Um That's something that can happen with companies and there are plate, you know, because of the way they own the content Um, if they sell their podcasts and Joe Rogan was using an example that you were right You will not find his content somewhere else now because that he sold the right stall of it So they'll pull it off other platforms or put it behind a paywall Which wouldn't surprise me at some point if certain shows end up behind a paywall because you know it's popular And they're like hey reference Joe Rogan episode whatever and people like oh, yeah By the way, it's gonna pay well now. Um, so yeah, it's valid that one podcast are available It was we provide this podcast As a file you can download right from the website Do as you please with it to download it if you want to reference this 10 years from now I can't guarantee that I will keep this up for 10 years I will try but things happen if uh, I got a hundred million dollar offer from Spotify to take it down I love you guys, but uh That's a nice offer There's there's so many there's so many things that are related to media not just with podcasts But also just media and like the possibilities like the upscaling ai's now are incredible and I would love For years I wanted to do a how-to on take an old crappy atx case that has like 17 Five and a quarter inch bays throw in a bunch of five dollar dvd drives that you got at the swap meet And let's build the ultimate like media ripping thing where you're ripping owned media Because I've got all kinds of stuff that's hard to get in streaming. Like I like, you know, like the old tv show monk I don't know why it's just I can I can identify with It's like, oh, it's a gift. It's a curse. I can identify with that. He's such a great actor And it's like, oh, I just want to you know Put the disc in and close and then just have everything happen for me and everything It really is you know just happens and the old battle star galactica and deep space nine and blah, blah, blah But now the ai upscaled deep space nine is incredible And so it's like I want to rip my dvds and then ai upscaled them and that's you know I feel like that should be permitted under the law with you know, I'm Ripping it but then I'm also enhancing the quality and like transforming it and doing stuff And I'm not distributing it. This is for my own internal personal use But the media companies are like no, let's you know, saw I'll hear you're an even thinner toothpick That's like no, you must not format shift. Yeah I glanced up because there's a poster from the I was at the screening For the opening of what they left behind the documentary on ds. I got a sign poster, so I want to watch deep space nine things I know we I mean me in a way for you watch that series again, you know, thank you 2020 for that We had time to do it It was nowhere else to go. So we watched all of it. That's a long series But I mean the the mentality from a lot of the media companies is someone somewhere is enjoying our media We're entitled to royalties for that Yeah, even if they paid for it once they would love you to pay for it again You bought it once but you like a more enhanced version of an upscaled Yeah, but I already bought it but we can charge you again for the upscaled version, right? Yeah, I bought I bought the deep space nine seasons when you were trickling them out one season at a time I didn't even wait for the full box that was on discount sale at kmart. I got the expensive ones. I should be entitled to do this Then I mean it's it's like do do we one day just put a blu-ray In it in it our player watch it then put the same blu-ray disc in our bedroom blu-ray player And it says this blu-ray is locked to your downstairs tv. You have that's what they want That's probably what they would do and then I was watching tv the other day And I'm sure this is wrong But it kind of scares me to think about it, but I'm watching fx now I'm watching a film on there and then there's a commercial break great So I hit the mute button because I don't want to hear that same commercial like Over and over again, and I'm wondering like when are they going to like disable the mute button when the Stop ads come in. I mean they probably will at least try to do that someday. I'm sure they can't I hope they can't but it's just kind of scary. They just overreach with all these You know rules and trying to gouge us to death Don't forget that uh Visio has the thing in the firmware that fingerprints your content and even if you're playing from a media stick They got caught sending the file names and crap like that back to Somewhere and it's like look you do your home lab thing correctly. You follow us That is never going to be a problem because that tv wasn't on your network to begin with good Good luck phoning home when you don't know where home is Yeah Could you just do like a a firewall rule in plex because it's on its own vlan And you don't even let it out to the internet at all, but that allows your home assistant to talk to it Yeah, I'm just thinking about like, you know the stay-at-home mom from Saskatchewan And it's like now. All right. What we're gonna do is configure your vlan and she's just like What do I know? No, this is just basic hygiene. We have to do this. This is like, you know internal plumbing You're not drinking toilet water. This is the equivalent of drinking toilet water in the digital realm We're you got to not do that. You got to understand some things here Ah, absolutely. Um Now the last thing I think we should really talk about though Related media is books and what's a good book server? I know when they'll start to talk about this before the show and i'm like save it for the show This is exciting caliber the caliber server the caliber is incredible So like if you if you have books an extensive book collection You live in the books and so you need to be able to keep track of where you are and annotations And be able to find stuff and make notes and blah blah blah and A caliber is really really good for that but synchronization with caliber sort of becomes the problem But there's a docker container that has this fairly elaborate setup That's essentially like almost like a vnc client in the browser And you get to keep all the annotation and notes and blah blah blah and you can sync that So you can have a backup and and and all of that kind of stuff So your books can be with you your whole book collection can be with you on your phone and and everywhere else And it's really crazy because a few years ago I went all in on like the amazon thing because they were like oh no We're gonna do notation We're gonna do this and we're gonna sync all your devices and blah blah blah on We're talking like a five to ten year timescale that is all lies When they are like we're gonna update our platform and everything's gonna change You can bring over your stuff for a limited time I could get to my annotations and my notes But then after that they were gone Like I would have had to go through and move everything from a to b because they decided Oh, this doesn't work for us anymore. We're gonna do this a different way And there have been instances where they would like go in and delete books from your library And not everything's available in their format and you can kind of bring some stuff over But that's when it was like this is this is another one of those situations where you simply cannot trust the company providing a Service to not change its mind. You're gonna have to DIY it Yeah, and uh, you know a person who's always been my hero is uh, Cory Doctorow And I've you know, read a lot of his books are really good and he purposely avoids places like Amazon Because he'll only publish his books on places because he gives them way for free that you know support open formats And uh, that was you know years ago when I started getting into that. I was like, okay And I found that same server. I never went as extensive as Wendell set it up like that I just used the desktop application version. Um, but it was wow This is a great way to handle and synchronize matter of fact One of the first e-readers I had done was I took the nook and hacked it So I could run all my own books because they had restrictions You couldn't use some of the open formats on a nook and you know moved it over But I I think that's an important aspect because books one you can get a massive amount of density now On a small tablet you can have so many books in a small area And uh, take it from three people who are youtube creators when probably we all get this question Hey, how did you learn this? I'm like, I actually read a book a lot of times before I do the video like I didn't watch a video to make the video I either rtfm or frequently read the book on the topic So I there are an available resource and maybe you start with some of the youtube videos But if you want to great gain a really in-depth knowledge, I mentioned michael lucas earlier His books are great ones to having your possession You know ssh mastery and things like that if you want to deep dive into these topics to gain some strong understandings of it I see window reaching. Yes. Yes arms length within arms length Yes, they should always be within reach digitally or physically I have I have those books too actually We need to just have a michael lucas on we do it's like, you know The michael lucas fan club. It's like go buy his books go buy his books because You know in addition to like The goodness of the books, you know, he gets it with like the whole publishing industry and like how it works and blah And if you look at like how he's doing his Authorship career it really is a model for us and people in the audience For how you can conduct yourself make a reasonable living Provide a valuable service to humanity because his books are going to be around You know long after he's gone. I'm sure for like the zfs thing But it's like it's a very positive contribution to the state of the art and society. It's very well written It's not, you know dry as paper And you you learn something and you you you Read the material in a way that you absorb it Which is you know, you can't I can't I can't even say that for like some like the anti-tenant bomb books Or even some of the the nuth books But those are also very good authors And um being able to have that, you know Always it's like I remember that I don't remember exactly. Let me look click and I've got an annotation for that having that It increases the size of your brain without any work, which is always what we want to do Yep Yeah books allow you to like Borrow a little piece of someone's brain that they've had when they did that and it's why you know You make those notes you reference back to it Like this is how I understand this concept better because they understood it and they articulated in a way like that And by the way, I do have a Interview on my channel I did with Michael Lucas because he's local here to Detroit and it's a lot of fun because you can learn that his first Dive into publication. He used to write an article in a bsd magazine called big scary daemons, which I just love the name So we dive into his history and publishing and uh, he is we staged props everywhere for the interview because we just had a Stack of books. Sorry for the audio quality. It's when I was first learning how to put things on youtube But it's it's completely intelligible. And of course, Michael Lucas is a riot. So he's a great guy I I love talking to him any time I get a chance to he's he's just great And I love his publication style. Um, I'm kind of Envious in a way because I have an actual publishing company and I think his way is better My part his way is definitely better. I with my add brain It's like having a publishing company cracking the whip at me Like you got to get this done got to get this done kind of helps me But um, you know, not an excuse um self publishing, you know, that's definitely better It's there's also like I think it's in all of us too But there's there's something that when you're standing so close to the void It kind of marks you in a way and and it's like the level of you know Suffering and horribleness that we've endured at the hands of technology in our career It's just you're kind of marked in some way and and he has that but he's sort of parlayed that into Uh, a happiness that I probably never know and so that's really exciting. It's sort of fun to live vicariously You're you're right about that um mentality because I kind of feel like working in the field hardened you because it's like um, someone in my family complains that a website took a long time to load and My response is like you should be lucky that it even loaded at all. Do you have any idea how? Like complicated that delivery system is yeah, like the tcpip protocol It's like do you even know like how many like retranslations and packets must have happened Because instead of just fixing it we just made it retransmit because it's easier And if you knew just how convoluted all of that was in the back end You would have no faith in its ability to work at all by the time I get done explaining it So I don't because I don't want to ruin it for anyone It's a stack of leaky abstractions Yep Well, I think we covered all the major topics here is anything else we need to add I'll throw I'll throw some links down in the show notes uh to some of the things Wendell's got the reference to nginx I got the ha proxy we brought up jay's ansible and of course this is this episode here stacks upon All the episodes from the beginning for all the different tools because you know, we mentioned a lot about hosting media Of course, you know a place to do it. We've talked about storage servers and specifically another episode about chunas So plenty of other stuff to reference uh, Wendell from level one text. Thank you for joining us Of course, of course Wendell has a wealth of resources over at level one text their forums are great. I I'm there so Lots of good But I'm trying to they're trying to do lots of writing so it might be it's useful Yeah, I really love his channel so much. Um, but I have to ask like do you still feel like you don't want to live on This planet anymore? Oh, yeah, absolutely Uh, it's fine though. I mean, you know, you can't it's you gotta take sort of You know, everybody's got to take at least a little bit of a nihilistic approach to it because it's like Twig on the stream I can't go backwards, but I can at least maybe wiggle side to side and maybe it's okay Yeah By the way that uh, that uh, might be a good one to just just like not even Mainly related or maybe it kind of is but it's just um, you know Getting a large scale epic server and what in the storage and what you can do with it So I like big data processing and I cannot lie. Yes You know, I and that's what b and g we we brought the topic for those of you They haven't seen it go check out windows video with the title of I don't want to live this planet anymore And uh, it was exciting because I like seeing all that in use for something cool Um, not just because you know the the number of people that have requested that I helped them with chia miners in the last few weeks is No, we're gonna look for planets. We're not gonna mind chia. We're gonna look for planets Yeah, yeah, I should at some point maybe I'll tweet because I mean my friends at iac systems We had some back and forth on how much we uh, maybe don't like it as much about the chia How kind of silly it is basically what we love when we see use cases that are actually May literally lead to us, uh, learning more about the solar system or some other scientific good It scratches the nerd itch and a lot of us. So, uh, uh, definitely exciting about that But anyways, sorry before we babble on for another hour. Thank you everyone for joining us Uh, this show is uh brought to you by lino like we said at the beginning and uh, all the other show links will be down below Thanks. Thanks. Thank you