 Little drop in everybody. And we're live. This is the homelab show episode 115. Jay wasn't around but there's another Jason here. How you doing Jason Slagle? I'm good. This is a topic that has been brought up several times. And it's all about the Cisco, Maraki and some of the other old equipment that's good for your homelab. Jason's way more of an expert at it than I am. So he's our special guest today, subject matter expert on all this fun stuff. Yeah, it's been something I've done for a long time. I mean, my background originally was networking, right? I worked for an ISP for many, many years. I've done my CCIE lab a couple times and unfortunately did not pass. It's very hard. I think these days I probably could pass if I was willing to put in the time to study. But I'm not. It's simple. There's no benefit to me to doing it. It's kind of fun in the, you know, just to prove you know it, but at some point it kind of gets like, yeah. Yeah, let all my Cisco certs expire. I had my CCMP route switch, my CCDP route switch. And I had the CCIE written. I've actually passed the CCIE written twice. But I didn't go any further than that. I mean, I lab the CCIE three times. And again, each time I missed by like a point or two and I, and it was dumb stuff. It's, those things are like time management problems are not actually, I call it stupid router tricks because if you did the things they make you do in production, you'd get fired. You know, that's, that's my minimal pursuit I did in the 90s to the first versions of the Microsoft security, not Microsoft security, Microsoft administrator stuff. The, what was that called? MCS? I'm CSA. Yeah. I'm CSA stuff in the early eight. And yeah, some of it was really aggravating because it's like, wait, because I remember there was a question I got wrong about you, could you change support for RDP? The answer is supposed to be no. I'm like, yeah, he's gone registering changes. And they're like, no, that's the wrong answer. I'm like, no, it's the right answer. I had to do it the other day. It's the correct answer. It's not the answer they want. It's not the answer they want. I said, well, let's test the stupid. I'm not taking it again. And I never did. Yeah. When you, when you went and did the IE route switch when I did it the first time, I mean, it's still had, this is, I'm really going to make myself old here. It's still had DLSW plus and IPX on it, which are two protocols. DLSW plus is one that probably no one's ever heard of. If they don't work in banking, IPX was pretty common back in the novella days. Yeah. Yeah. The IPX stuff. But that's why we're bringing it up though is there are people who definitely are pursuing and it's availed still today to get a Cisco certification because it will show people that you do know the Cisco stuff and then general networking. Even if you're not getting hired for that job, if someone has that cert, you go, okay, they understand networking. They're going to get the, they understand, they know what a subnet is. I mean CCNA, CCENT, I think is a low end one now, but CCNA, right? Like it showed, you have to at least know the USI model to get through it, right? And that's so much of it. Although I know plenty of people with their CCNA that still screw up VLANs because they don't quite understand the difference between layer two and layer three. They think they do, but they're like, oh yeah, every switch needs an interface on every, no, you don't want that. Yeah. Right. And so let's talk about some of the older Cisco gear, what some of the pros and cons of the Cisco, the biggest one, there's a plethora of it on eBay and places. It's cheap, right? Like you can pick up, I mean, if you're, if you're not looking at 10 gig, right? If you're, if you're homelab and I'll caveat and we can have a whole discussion a little bit about what your goals are, right? But if you just need it to work and you're, and you're stuck with like, and you're okay with one gig port speeds or maybe one gig with a handful of 10 gig, you can pick up like 3750s. Like I'm looking at one right now, a 48 port 3750 PoE for, you know, 35 bucks on, on eBay, right? And 3750 is a workhorse. It works fine. You're right. Here's a 3750X, right? This sounds probably got, it doesn't have a network module in it. So it's only 48 port, 10, 100 gig, right? But it's again, this one's not PoE, but 50 bucks, right? And those things, they're workhorses, they will work forever. And they will not, like they, I've, in my entire career, I've had maybe two fail, right? Like the ports in them fail, but they just go forever. Now sometimes we'll wear the flash out in them. Yeah. Yeah. So I should make sure you save that running config enough times. Yeah. Actually, Auvik on the small business stuff, Auvik has killed a bunch of the small business stuff we had because it writes config a lot. And just where's the NVRM out? I think the important thing is a lot of people won't realize how infrequently they need 10 gig. My friend Jeff from Craft Computing just had his whole video of his lab and he talked about some of the futility and why he's got so many things still on one gig because cool, you want to run Pyhole in your home lab and Plex people, I've seen a lot of people tell me, Oh, don't I need like 10 gig for Plex? I'm like, look, Netflix comes into your house at less than 10 gig to several TVs. You can also provide as you have enough speed to run the Plex server. If you're transcoding, which I'm not usually doing now, I'm just trying to run it native. You can have quite a few of them running over one gig connections. Well, I mean, what is a 4k, right? A 4k stream is what 30 to 60 megabits. So are you running more than 10 of them? Right. Right. Your Plex box is going to fall over long before your giggy networking falls over. Yeah. Gig networking is way more relevant than people think it is. The only connection I have that's 10 gig is my video editing. The rest of my network is combination of Wi-Fi, which is less than one gig speed or one gig connections to random devices that I have. I have. So I have a catalyst 9200 at home that has eight, no, 16 M gig ports in it, right? So it has 16 ports that'll do 10 hundred or all the way up to 10 gig copper. And it'll do for 10 gig SFP plus, right? And so I have like my one XCPNG box is 10 gig and one of my storage boxes is 10 gig, right? And that is probably the use case for it. If your storage is sufficiently fast, then it is great to do 10 gig do it. If you're if you are moving a ton of data that you will obviously see a benefit, right? But like the reality of it is, is that even at one gig, you're looking at what 125 megabytes a second theoretical max and you're probably like most homelab storage equipment is going to struggle to write more than a hat. Yeah. Yeah. Something worth noting too, when we say Cisco, Cisco has a weird dividing line. If you don't want that, what I guess is a vet was used to be Linksys as another line of that stuff. That's not great. Yeah. The CBS stuff, I mean, it works, right? But it's probably honestly wouldn't be my first choice. Like I had a SG 350 at home forever and it works, right? But like a bunch of the pros, like I had a whole list, I have a whole list here, like the pros, right? If you're studying, right? I saw somebody in the comment section talked about CCNA, right? If you're studying for your CCNA and you're studying for Cisco search or you wanted to do networking in the enterprise, like you still generally can't go wrong with Cisco, you'll find plenty of people that are running Cisco in the core, right? And they've got a good feature set and they're good and cheap. And now with like modern Ansible, you can even configure them via Ansible. So if you want to learn how to do some of the networking stuff there, they're great for that, right? But they come with some negatives too. The negatives are like they're expensive if you want current stuff. They're licensed locked if you want current stuff. It can be hard to get iOS if you don't get creative and I'm not going to like it. People know how to get creative. Yeah, yeah, right. Like the file names are predictable. Yeah, that's all I have to say, right? Like you figure out what the file name is or the version you want and you can probably find it. The optics can be expensive if you're not willing to do service unsupported transceiver. I don't know why you wouldn't just do that, right? And then the biggest thing is they have security issues if you don't patch them. But a lot of those are feature locked and you're probably not going to use the features that actually have security issues. But none of that applies to the small business stuff, right? Like the small business stuff, it's not iOS, right? It's not an XOS. It's not iOS XE or XR, right? It's like its own kind of Cisco-like language that's different enough that it will drive you insane. Yes, I hate it. It's because the comments are so close. This is not iOS and the version that you understand because it's missing so many features. Yeah, it made several of my Cisco friends angry because when I was trying to review it, I had just run into commands that wouldn't work. But everyone's like, oh, no, they should work time. You just don't know what you're doing. I said, come on over. Let's SSH into this. I mean, the big iron, right? The Cisco, somebody pointed out, I think this guy here, I mean, I don't think I'm going to do it anyway. This here points out that like the, you know, the newer stuff runs and XSR runs on XOS, right? And they have ACI, which is all really cool technology, right? But it might be overkill for HomeLab unless you're studying for particular certifications that require it. As far as the CCNA goes, right? Like generally, until fairly recently, you could get away with like the 3750, 3850 series stuff. There may be some newer stuff. They're constantly updating the curriculum on there, right? So you can probably get 80 to 90% of the way done studying, using the older stuff, and then go find like INE or one of the other people that will let you do a rack rental, right? They get like the little bit of time you need with the newer stuff if you can't find another way to do it, right? That's a very good way to do that if you're trying to, if your, if your goal is to learn the Cisco stuff. When I was studying for my CCIE, I had a, my networking stack at home looked way different. I had a bunch of Cisco routers in it and I had a bunch of Cisco switches in it. And as a matter of fact, I had an ISDN simulator. Remember that? I could do PRI and BRI. But, you know, I, I think it's important though, you mentioned, you know, the older Cisco stuff. Like you said, it's really cheap on eBay. I know someone, I've seen the comment fly by where if you want an airplane in your house, yes, they have a certain level of noise they produce. So this is not going to, this is not quiet mode Cisco. This is the old stuff. They didn't think about noise levels with them. I think it's important to know though, once you kind of get the hang of iOS and start learning it, the other routers we'll talk about in a minute here are similar in ways. The command line structure, I think Cisco is pretty much like they set the standard and there's some variations. They may do things a little different, but overall, there's a lot of similarities as you go down the list. Yeah. And again, like the biggest point there is like, don't, Cisco's not going to like it for HomeLab. Do not buy the small business stuff. There are so many, like there's no pros, right? It's like there are way cheaper options. You're not going to use it if your goal is to move data, right? Like you're not going to use it to study for anything useful. And if your goal is to move data, there are way cheaper ways to do it. Yeah. There's a few of them that were okay priced on their POE, but I said okay priced because they were on sale on Amazon, not because you could get them for an incredible deal. And yeah. I think I still have a 6513 in production somewhere. So yeah, that's a 13U rack mount. That's a 9U, the 6509. Those things are workhorses. They work forever. Yeah. Well, that's what makes them available so easily on eBay is because they may be out of support for the enterprise, but they're still a great learning opportunity for you. And they're fun to play with, mess around with all the old Cisco stuff. Yeah, it's fun. I mean, but again, like this comes down to what your goal is, right? And I can't stress that enough. If your goal is not to learn networking stuff, and it doesn't terribly matter what you end up using here, right? Like I was, we were talking about it before. Like one of the, how I learned about serve of the home, right? Like is they had where they first got big is there were some, I forget who made them, somebody made a bunch of switches that you could reflash and put the brocade OS on them. And you could get cheap, like 24 port 10 gig switches. And that's how it kind of became known to me and a bunch of other people is that like, Hey, just go buy these cheap switches on eBay, flash them with the brocade firmware and you could do that. And if your goal was to move data, they moved data just fine, right? Like there's some considerations there. If you want to run ice guzzy, right? Maybe you want jumbo frames. Most of the Cisco stuff we're talking about here, like unless you get down to like the 2960 level, all of it will support jumbo frames. You probably need to learn your networking pretty well. If you want to run ice guzzy, the number of people I've seen totally grenade their lives because they don't understand how ice guzzy works and they screw it up is really high. Yes. So there's a certain percentage of consulting we do to unravel messed up these setups. I mean, I've seen the worst case I've ever seen is we had a customer in production that they ran out of space on their Synology backed, right? Like this was they're running a VM. I think it was it was on a sand they ran out of space in it. So they just ice guzzied a note over from their from their Synology box and then used Windows storage spaces to just like stripe onto it. And that disappeared in a ball of flames and it took it took Humpty Dumpty. It took me three weeks to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, but I did. Yeah, it can be done. Yeah, you got to be careful testing a lot of that. What are some of the cons besides the sounding like an airplane of some of the old Cisco equipment? What are some caveats and pit balls? I mean, optics can be expensive, right? Like the Cisco optics are typically very expensive. They're again, they're insecure, right? Like, but it may not matter again, right? Like these are home labs and in real the reality is, you know, you and I were kind of talking about it in an unrelated thing earlier. No one's burning their Ode to get into your home lab, right? Like it's not it's not a huge deal. Like as long as you understand the caveats of that and it's not a production environment, it is just a learning lab environment, then those security issues are probably not that big of a deal. Just firewall control plane, firewall of the control plane, put them on a separate one. And I've had people say, Hey, what about signing it to a specific port? And I only plug that port in when I want to manage it. Perfect. You've you've mitigated the problem. You're solving it. We've locked it down so other people can't get to that management plane. So now you if something wanders into your or your friends come over with, you know, with someone remotely controlling things looking for some flaw, they're not likely to find it. Yeah, I mean, some this guy here asks about directly about licensing licensing can be an issue. If the older stuff, it tends to not be anything older than like a 3850. I think you tend to not have licensing issues because they didn't switch to the you can at least run the non universal licensing on it. If it is universal licensing, it's only feature unlocked, right? Like they're the switch isn't going to stop working unless it's Meraki, in which case you have to have a license on it. But the Cisco stuff, it'll pass data. You just may like you may have IP base versus land light versus IP base versus land base, right? Like there's three or four different service levels, right? So it's worth paying attention when you buy these on eBay with what they come with, especially if they're newer because you you can't just go randomly download an iOS. And suddenly it used to be I could just load the like IP services image on all of them, not that I ever did this when I was studying for my CCIE, but you know, you would just buy a router and then you would just find. Yeah, you essentially would find another CCIE because one of the things you get once you get your CCIE is you get access to all of the iOS images. So you just find another CCIE to just grab you the image you need and you just load it on and suddenly you were the IP services and you could do all of the things. But they've changed that now so they are licensed locked, right? So you may not be able to upgrade. And this matters a lot with the models that have L in the name, right? So like 2960L or 9200L, you can't typically upgrade those to like a layer of three image they have. They're on land base, so they are somewhat feature limited. But for homelab use, they have 90% and they actually probably 100% of the features you need for homelab, probably not 100% if you're studying for one of the certification tests. No, I've always learned on real hardware and I've seen a couple of people in the comments here ask about GNS3. Did you ever use that? It works great for that, right? It's another thing you can do to run iOS. You can configure it up. IU made pretty, for the CCNA level, Cisco makes something, if they still make it, I think it's called Packet Tracer. Yeah, I think that still exists too. I mean, it works perfectly fine for the CCNA level stuff. They had one above it. And let me see if this one is still around, called Viral, VIRL. It is, it's still around. And it's like 100 bucks a year and it lets you do fancier things like it'll actually run full switch software. You can do ASAV, you can do iOS, XR and XE stuff. You can do up to 20 nodes. Yeah, you can do a personal edition with 20 nodes in it. And it runs real images, right? So that's another good, cheap way to do that. I used that quite a bit. Oh, it's okay. Yeah, CML was the big commercial version of Viral. I don't know. They may have gotten rid of it. But that's another option alternative to GNS 3. And the nice thing about that is you can configure up a bunch of virtual stuff. But again, like you have to be, if your home lab is networking focused, right, then this all makes sense. And I think it's, I've always liked the real hardware myself because it's where I started long before these tools existed. Just like you did early in my career. It's cool they have these now. And I think they are pretty good when you can't get your hands on a lot of hardware. I just have less experience using them to, I just like their hands on watching the plugs laid up. Yeah, I mean, they're for, if your goal is to just study for like the CCN. Again, I think packet tracer is probably enough. Somebody directly asked, I think packet tracer is probably enough for CCNA these days. Unless they've somehow made it smarter, harder CCNA is one. It's probably been, I think I last took it like five years ago. And I don't think I studied. I think I just wanted to took it. It's mostly theory. There is some where they put you on the CLI. So you have to know how to do it, but you're not really doing anything super fancy. I'd have to look over the blueprint these days to see if it's it to see what the actual features there that you would need real hardware there. But even for CCNP, I think something like viral, right, like or CML, if you can get a light versus CML or GNS3, right, like at that point, you start needing bigger hardware, right? Like so you're going to need something that does BGP, you're going to need something that can do in this case, probably ISIS because they're probably starting to bring some of their shortest path bridging stuff into into some of those more advanced topics. You're going to need to be able to do DMVPN and all that other stuff. And it's just too much hardware to buy, right? Like the CCIE lab these days is all virtual, right? It's all run on CML. But back when it was physical hardware, it was like 12 routers plus 12 routers that you could configure. And then they had a handful that you had to talk to on the outside, right? So no one's got that amount of hardware running around. It becomes very expensive to get there, right? So you end up using something like Viral to do that. Yeah, they're all valid, especially, and I think we already can tell by the comments, a lot of people are into diving deep into the networking. There's a demand for people to know that. There's never enough network. 100%. And I think it's a good base, right? Like we, again, like the biggest thing we struggle with here with that people when they get into networking is they don't quite understand the differences between layer two and layer three. And we may have, we may have had to go on site for a loop created just the other day. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's probably a spanning tree. That's another thing. Spanning tree is just a whole lot of nonsense that people don't understand well. And when you, it's one of those things that you don't have to understand it until you break it. And then you're, and then you never figure out what's wrong with it until you understand it. Don't mess with the weights since you know what you're doing. Yeah. So let's talk about microtik. Yeah, microtik or microtik. I think it's actually microtik. There's a good, there's a wonderful debate about that. Apparently, if you're from Latvia, you're supposed to say it microtik. But if you're not from Latvia, this is actually from someone from Latvia that I talked to that told me this, which I thought was great. I, that stuff, like it while it's not the absolute cheapest you can get, it is the cheapest I think I've seen that isn't random alibaba purchases. Yeah, I, you know, it's amazing how much they cram into those little devices. It's a boatload. I love when they came out with their little four port 10 gig, I still have it. And that little box, man, it was the cheapest way you could get four ports and 10 gig for years before anyone ever caught up with thinking anything in the same price range. Yeah, I have the CRS 316, I think it is. It's a 16 port, like 10 gig, all SFP plus one. And I mean, the first thing that when I pulled it out of the box, I mean, it's like six at five, it was like four, five, 600 bucks. I can't, it was cheap, super cheap for 16 10 gig ports. Still, it's pretty cheap for 16 10 gig ports. I pulled it out of the box. I'm like, is this thing full of helium? It is so light. There's nothing to it at all. But like I, the pros there, I mean, that is the pro, right? The two pros are it's dirt cheap, and it's reasonably performant. If you not really aren't doing much on it. To me, the cons are I absolutely loathe router OS to configure a switch in switch OS or SWS seems half baked to me, like it's missing a ton of features. And the configuration is it was just pointing out the configuration is ridiculously wonky. It's not just a little bit wonky, it's very, very, very wonky. And I pay with your time with me. Yes, what you saved, what you saved out of the box for it. I found switch OS for the most basic of VLAN setups. Fine. Yeah, beyond that, although there may be a lot of features written in there for what it can do. Good luck getting it to do it in a sane way. Someone in my forums, I love their comment. They said, make your tick is a device I love, but there's always some secret incantation you'll find in our forums that you're not sure why it works, but some reason you copy and paste it in and it starts doing the thing you thought it should do in the first place. Yeah. So there's that. And then the other thing is, is that like it's got all these features, right? So I have this like CRS 316, and it's got 16, and it's like, it does layer three. And then you start reading the fine print. And it's like, yeah, it does layer three, like a gig, because as soon as you start, right, all of these things in the end, the micro taken a lot of those super, super cheap layer three switches, they don't, they're, they're using off the shelf reference hardware from like Broadcom or one of the vendors. And so it's a switch module that like it has the 16 ports in it, right? And all of the cam and all the Mac forwarding all the, all of the layer two stuff happens in the hardware of that chip. But as soon as you need to go to layer three and cross those layer two boundaries, it goes back to the CPUs. And the CPU is woefully under performant and almost all of those boxes, right? So like the micro tick is really, really bad about that, that it's like every one of their boxes supports all of the features, but it supports all of them at like one one hundredth of the performance of not using them. Yeah, that's I don't think as many people, you're usually when I see people asking me about layer three, like they really think they have a demand for, especially if it's a homelab user, I'm like, why are you routing your storage? Let's get to that topic. I mean, I have a dedicated video about storage design because I've solved so many problems. Like why are you trying to route your store? I wanted to VLAN off my storage and then put a route. I'm like, no, you don't. That is not what you want to do. You want to VLAN off your storage and have only your storage and the thing's talking to the storage on that network, right? If I get away on it, that's probably what you want to do, right? Like you there's no, I used to use for a long time. Nice. There's still some downstairs. I used dedicated hardware for I had some Cisco 2960Gs I bought and that they were when I was using one of those the ecologics, right? Because they had four one gig ports for the iSCSI and it was just its own network. It wasn't routed. It wasn't uplinked to anything other than its management interface was connected to the other switch stack, but there was literally no way to reach the iSCSI network not on the iSCSI network. There's no reason to. Right. They need to be separate and that's just good storage design. When you put that all separate, you don't want them part of it. Especially if you want your patch management cycles to be really fast for all your normal switches, but you have to be very careful. You don't patch a iSCSI switch during the hours. If you run VMware, you get that dreaded all paths down message, which is the bane of your existence. You don't want that. If you're running storage over IP and production, you really need to consider your network design as far as resiliency goes. What is your patching plan to patch that system? What is your patching plan to patch? This is one of the big problems I have with the TrueNest stuff when you're running your production. What's my plan to patch that TrueNest box? Because I got to reboot it to do it and it's down for eight minutes and VMs don't like not having storage for eight minutes. They get kind of cranky. You need outside of a home lab in a home lab environment, that's fine. Just shut everything down and patch it. That's fine. In a production environment, it's less so. The micro tech to me, I see two use cases for it. It's great for a home lab. It's great for cheap storage that just move bits around where you don't really need the features. If somebody pointed out somewhere in these comments, you don't really change your switching configuration that often. I can't remember the last time I made a VLAN change at home on any of my boards. It just works. You just set it up and you kind of forget it. If that's all you need and you're not focused on networking and you want to focus on other things instead, then by all means, it works fine. It's cheap. It works. I think something else to make note of. It's called RouterOS. I've seen people say, do you want to contribute to the micro tech botnet? Unfortunately, micro tech, like any company, they've had some security flaws, but a little bit worse than that was they had a default configuration that left the WAN open to management. Of course, the tyranny of the default is no one changes the default settings. There are a absolutely large sum of micro techs contributing to the world of botnets because people do things at the fault. It was the cheapest device. They didn't have experience to understand how to set it up properly. I'm glad they do not have that as a default anymore because it was just very unfortunate. They should have known it's one of those things. I partly blame them. People like to blame the users, but I'm like, no, no, no. It's not. Guardrails around people. It wasn't the users at all. In almost all cases, if you actually dig into that, it's crappy wireless ISPs because the micro tech devices are the favorite CPEs of most wireless ISPs or at least were for many, many years because they were dirt cheap. They were disposable. You could replace them. They had enough features for the wireless ISP need eat them and you could ship them to a client and just say, hey, plug this into the radio and plug it in your network and you're good to go. It became the crappy cable modem of wireless ISPs. Most of them, it was a backdoor account in Winbox. It wasn't the admin pass where there was also a backdoor account that for years, years, years shipped. I think a lot of it by default had the management ports all exposed, which is just not how anything should be configured by default. Yep. It was a combination of those couple of things. People having a good password, well, we can ask them to, but they won't. Others. Yeah. Enterprise. What about Juniper Arista and Aruba? What's your thoughts on some of those? I mean, they're great. I love Arista switches. They're probably the most configurable if you're doing leaf spine or anything super crazy like that, right? But I question their use in the home lab unless you're specifically trying to go and learn that direction, right? Like, yeah, by all means, right? Like if you're a Juniper ruled for a long time, the core networking space of the internet, right? Like again, my background is all back when like the MX480, I think it was the big, huge Juniper boxes that ran the core of the internet. I think Arista has recently overtaken a lot of that stuff, especially in the data center space because it's super configurable. Once you get into that space though, like right, if you're running Arista and you're looking at like full leaf spine and all the other cool things that come with that, like you really want to be using something like Ansible to configure that, right? And so maybe you have two goals now. Maybe you need some networking hardware to configure, but you probably also need a more traditional home lab to start playing with Ansible to start learning some of that stuff too. Yeah. They're kind of a niche in the home lab. I don't know that there's as much availability on eBay for those, not like there is for Cisco. Yeah. And I'm not as up to date on how the licensing would work once it's removed from the Deanison area. The problem is, and this is going to be a big problem, I think going forward for home labbers is almost all of these companies are trying to figure out how they can go to the recurring revenue model, right? And so Cisco, like the writings, I saw somebody earlier in the comments talking about DNA and DNA center and all the other like crappy UIs that Cisco Catalyst Center, yep, or DNA, they're, those are terrible. I hate them. I absolutely hate them. The only successful GUI dashboard that Cisco has ever released, in my opinion, they bought from Meraki. Yeah. And you're actually starting to see support for like, you can put Catalyst 92 and 93 hundreds, some of their switches that run containers on them, you can actually manage in the Meraki portal now. We should talk about the other cheap one. Have you used the FS.com ones? Yeah, that client, the VMware client, they use some of them. I mean, they're like, they, it's the same sort of like Fisher price interface that a lot of those really crappy web interface ones use, like it is good enough to see a lion. It was really wonky. Not as wonky as Ford in it, but kind of wonky. The they work again, if your goal is to move data, right? Like if your goal is to move data, then by all means buy one or one of the other 16,000 Alibaba reference platform switches you can buy on Alibaba, right? Like they work just fine. Yeah, I think there's always security concerns with them, but don't give they don't need internet access, by the way. I know they're a switch, but they themselves don't need to go out on the internet for things and they probably don't have an update method. I'm not just sure. I've debated about trying the FS.com and thought about buying one and kind of dive deeper into it, but I think Patrick from serve the home has done some videos on those. So back before Dell bottom, I used a good amount of like force 10 stuff, right? They work that stuff again, right? It's like everyone's all like, oh, I need my new shiny switch stuff. Like again, switches are one of those things that like I set them up and I forget them and occasionally maybe I have to make the line changes. Like, you know what I'm not doing? I'm not in poking with spanning tree. Like, you know, it's I'm really not like, you know, maybe I want to play with PV lands. Maybe I want to, you know, can play with some of those things like 802.1 X or I want to play with some of the port guards and some of those features like that. But like, I just don't log into switches. Like you just they just work. I log into them to upgrade them. And that's it. Yep. Yeah. I mean, unifies give you this cool UI to make things easy to use. That's why they're so popular and things like that. But even myself, my homelab stuff or my, you know, I once I set up my cameras, I've never touched them. They just work. They just move data. You log in from monitoring, right? It's like, oh, why is my network slow? Let me figure out what port is using all the bandwidth or you want to look at those little ants move in the new like ubiquity UI, you're not logging in making v-line changes regularly at all. Like you just don't do it. Yeah. You know, and to touch a little bit on it as well, kind of back on the router topic, because it's I skipped over this a little bit, but one of the other things about understanding the web UI and some of the bad web UIs versus a good web UI is how accessible it is for someone to configure. Reason we don't all just code everything in assemblies because there's not there's a lot of learning you have to do to do assembly. It's a lot. I've watched people who are really good at it and scratch my head at how they're so damn good at it. But that's obviously not for the masses. Same thing with having a good web UI on some of these. This is where having some of these systems out there that have good web UIs that make it easier for the average person, they're more likely to set it up securely if it's easier to set up. Yeah. I'm a big fan of secure by default. All these things should come relatively secure out of the box and we're starting to see movements in that way. The biggest thing that I think the web UI screw up a lot is I wish we could agree upon a defined way to configure VLANs. It's the Cisco way where you have a native VLAN and everything else is trunked and you can prove the ones you don't want or allow the ones you do want. Some of the weird things where it's like, I'm going to give you a VLAN and then it's going to have a U or a T depending on if it's tagged or untagged. If it doesn't have a letter at all, it's neither of them. It's like, I don't know. Not only that, Unify has changed the definition a couple of times now in their Unify platform, but they use the U and the T in their Edge platform. It's all the U's and T's and they got a little thing that stacks as it goes down. Yeah. I don't know why people just don't copy because there's not copyright on that if you just did it with Cisco. There's not like Cisco is coming after people because some companies do copy the ways it's going. Yeah. The HP way is okay too. That's probably my second favorite way where it's like to find a VLAN and then like in the VLAN config, you can just do tagged and then a list of ports, then untagged and a list of ports. That's probably my second most favorite way. But like sometimes I want to look at a VLAN and see what ports it's on, both tagged and untagged. Sometimes I want to look at a port and see what VLANs are on it. Like I need the ability to do both of those in the same way in some of the switches, web interfaces, just and I'm looking at use Cisco Small Business because it is literally the worst. Make it really hard to do that in the same way. I see someone said this. I don't recall this. Someone said Cisco sued. Cisco owns a copyright on some amount of that configuration language. However, Cisco stole that from somebody else. So I'm not sure how successful they are and actually defending some of those lawsuits like or moving forward with some of them. Yeah. I have to dig around. There's always a little bit more to the story about probably what was taken there. That might be an interesting history dive, but yeah. You know, the edge switches by Unify or Ubiquiti specifically, because Unify is their product line. Ubiquiti is a company. I don't want to complicate that. But their edge switch line, it was based on the before BIOS forked. I can't remember what it used to be called before BIOS. Someone will type that down in the comments. But they forked it prior to that. It used to be the original Unify line. You could actually SSH into it and then you could tell that local host and get into the command line UI. It used to be in the early versions of all the Unify switches. It's a shame they stripped it out later. But it was pretty solid. But unfortunately, I'm not seeing much in the way of updates. But I don't know how many updates the edge system really needs. They don't have much excitement around that product, but it does exist. Any of the ones we installed, they seem to run forever. But a lot of switches do. Viada, that's the one I was looking for. Viada was original before BIOS. BIOS is a fork of Viada. And Edge took a copy of Viada and Ubiquiti kind of customized it for their own purposes. I mean, somebody pointed out that NXOS is laying space these days. Almost all of these switches are almost all of them are Linux based these days. A lot of them used to be VXOS, I think is the name of the real-time operating system they used to run that predates Linux for a lot of this stuff. Most of those have moved to Linux. Some amount of them, like a lot of the big Juniper iron, I think is still free BSD based. Although I think more recent Juniper iron is going to Linux. Same thing, F5 load balancers used to be free or net BSD based, I believe. And now Linux based these days too. So it's like, in the end, all of these things are Linux under the hood. A lot of them are going to more containerized. The management plane's a container. Everything's a container. But the real difference you get is that the more expensive Cisco Enterprise, Arista, those Enterprise companies, they're all making their own A6. So a lot of this stuff gets punted to hardware that on your commodity hardware ends up getting pulled down to the CPU. Yeah, and because there's a more available availability, I would say, for Linux kernel developers. So when they build some custom hardware to want a couple extra custom modules loading the kernel, support their offloading chips, Linux is going to be the OS. Because if I were to put a job hunt out for someone who knows Linux or BSD, I'm going to get way more people saying, oh, Linux, okay, I've heard it in terms of developers. Yeah. And it used to be, I think a lot of them used to use FreeBSD. I think Juniper went that way because it was really easy to build a slim down. Like there was very good native support for building like a very small FreeBSD box, right? Like you could get it down to fit on a floppy for many, many years. That's what MonoWall did, the first one. Which MonoWall is the predecessor to the PF Sense. Oh, I forgot about that. I remember MonoWall. So the wireless ISP that a guy named Matt that I know used to run, they used MonoWall and Mikrotik. Like the CPU is Mikrotik and then they ran MonoWall at the head end to do all the rate limiting. Yeah. It's one of the things I always joked about just the whole BSD world. I always think BSD was like first for a lot of things. But Linux did it better in terms of like commoditizing it and making it to the mass market. Because you know, we even had jails in the BSD world long jails were around forever before Docker and all the other containerization came around for Linux. Yeah. Jails are like, I mean, if we want to get really pendantic, we could go back to Slayer's Zones and say that they kind of copied some. Yes. Yeah. We can probably take you even back further than that. Because I bet you there's some IBM hardware that like OS 360 level stuff that also did some, well, Vax, I mean, Vax did a similar sort of thing for sure. You definitely had some sort of thing there. And if you didn't know, Jason's background is very much in BSD and public, not just networking. We're here for the networking. Maybe we'll, we'll, we should do some history talks on some of the old stuff. Yeah. We're a couple of graybeards now. We got some of this knowledge. I mean, I own a Vax, so we still need to make that work. Yeah. Okay. I think we covered all of these out here. I think we beat the end of my, my little prose cons list here. We hit the end of it. Yeah. No, this is, this was fun. We'll have you back on. There's definitely some more fun topics to cover on there. We can do Puppet one day if you want. And you said that it was a potential topic. If there's, we've talked a lot about Ansible. I know Puppet is still popular. Yeah. It is something we actively manage and support at CNWR. So it is, it is indeed in use at companies you would know the names of. Yeah. 100%. Like we, so we were for a handful of years, actually probably for four or five years, we were a service delivery provider for Puppet. So we were doing Puppet consulting in Puppet's name. And there are some very large companies using it. I think these days, a lot of them moved over to, it moved over to Ansible. But yeah, I think that's one that'd be fun to get Jay on for too. Yeah. And I definitely, I think Jay's actually done some work with Puppet as well. So he used to work at a few places doing large scale enterprise automation just like you. So fun topics all for next time. So thanks everyone for joining us on the Home Lab show and see you all next time. See you later.