 Welcome to the homelab show episode 30 and it's time for another Q&A and Boy, it's like 30 episodes. That's why I said I stared at that said I I typed 20 and then corrected it So some of you may have seen the tweet that says 20 It feels like it's 20 feels like 20. We can believe we've done 30 episodes. So welcome. I'm Tom Lawrence and this is Yeah, we are Excited this is a Q&A episode, but we will start with one question and one answer right off the bat And that's where should you host your stuff Jay? That would be Linode Yeah, we're gonna think the sponsor of the show right at the beginning here So we can jump right into the Q&A and let some of your questions build up for those of you joining a live stream But yes, we do have a list of questions from there But Linode and Linode just got Well a little faster for us because J upgraded some memory. That was actually what happened there So if you're listening to this show, it's literally been downloaded from Linode We host the homelab show on Linode and what what were you doing on the server there at J's morning? Yeah So I got an alert from Nagios that it was starting to swap So it's like, okay. It's time to upgrade this thing to a better plan because it was like the You know the lower priced one. I'm like, yeah I mean it up that so that's a good problem to have because that means that the podcast and the audience is growing The server is getting more busy. So it's time to upgrade it to have more memory in another core Yeah, so in Linode makes it pretty easy the dashboard is easy to use They have lots of pre-built pre-defined templates you can use to get things started We've talked about a few different projects. You can run on Linode on the show and someone reached out to me Just the other day that is running their wire guard VPN because they're unfortunately behind a CG NAT system But that's another thing you can easily do in Linode and that's actually one of the questions people have is about dealing with you know Dynamic IP addresses and it can fall into things like CG NAT But you know having even a small instance in Linode to kind of bridge that gap So people can come to that IP address to get to yours or you can use that to get out Hey, definitely an awesome easy thing you can do. Well relatively easy We've given you a lot of tutorials between me and Jay You can run through our tutorials and figure out how to get that set up Either way, if you want to get started, we'll know there is an offer code down below That gets you started with the hundred dollars and get you go and get that thing started and hosted And thanks for load for sponsoring the show. We appreciate it All right. What is the first question in our q&a? Well speaking of wire guard. I mean also VPN because it's in the same category. Well, not quite but kind of The first question that we received was what's the best way to VPN into a home lab with a dynamic IP address? So We did cover this but it was kind of sandwiched inside of like a much bigger Subject or a much bigger talk So I think it's great to answer this question by itself because a lot of people want to know that so The problem is of course if you have a dynamic IP address That's always changing Then how do you VPN into that so first of all dynamic dns is a given because that's exactly what what it's for A lot of residential routers They actually have dynamic dns built in if if it doesn't you can go with a third party service But then the problem becomes your domain for VPN or your dynamic dns domain is User 5 7 8 or whatever whatever is a long thing that you can't possibly remember So My solution for that is to actually buy a domain And then use a C name so you could use VPN dot my domain com and have that be a C name to your dynamic dns domain name So that way it's much easier to remember and anytime, you know, if you change dynamic dns providers All you have to do is just change what that C name points to and it's easy to remember and you can put that in your config Um, I think that'll probably be the best way to do it if you can't get a static IP Yeah, and we we dove into the whole topic and we kind of sandwiched it in with the whole buying Why you should own your own domain and buying domains. Oh, that was two episodes ago. So it's been episode 28 Um, and you know, it's it's a fair question But setting up the c name means it can always be my home dot your domain dot com or home dot your domain dot com Whatever you want it to be and you just create that alias there with whatever dynamic dns service This also becomes very convenient from a programmatic standpoint if you build services on that So let's say you want to do some type of mapping for different services when you have your domain You can always switch out because something happens with a dynamic dns You don't have to run around remembering every piece of code that had that reference in there You always reference things yourself that way and you know, you can just uh, Yeah That's you know easy enough Yeah, yeah, totally. I think that's probably the best maybe the only way to solve it I know there's there's other solutions that chain together, you know zero tier and A linode or something like that if you really want to go crazy But I think the easiest way is probably the dynamic ip or the c name idea Yeah, you know i'll bring up too. Uh, we have true charts and they are They provide a lot of the extra docker services and things that you can tie into true nascale So great to see them here live in the chat and yes What we did recommend hosting with linode obviously a lot of people like to host a lot of their own things Hey, like I said, if you do linode with a Wireguard vpn to get around cgnat or just to have a public ip space But when it comes to hosting volumes of data true nasc is definitely a great way to go true nascale being in beta right now But hey, I know a lot of enthusiasts are on it a true nasc charts does provide some cool things I mentioned them when I did my true nascale videos and cool to see them live in here But you still want to host your data somewhere Maybe at least have a copy of all your data and I think true nasc is still a good destination for that And for those of you feeling adventurous true nasc scale beta is still a fun destination for that Me and me and jay are definitely working on some upcoming videos That was our talk just before this was uh, some of the challenges of dealing with legacy Zfs and moving things to the new zfs. So Yeah, maybe we'll get that collaboration done Yes, yeah, we are going to work on a collaboration on that. There's all kinds. Oh, actually, this is good news Uh true nasc rc1 in six days Wow It's moving fast the development's moving fast on it and it's because of the enthusiast market out there I didn't cover the second beta which has been released since me and jay did a video On it and uh, but obviously with rc6 coming or rc1 coming in six days. That's awesome. Mm-hmm It's almost time lots of excitement there So more reason for me and jay to get that get her get the progress done the art first moving all your data around Yeah with that legacy encryption. That's always a pain Yeah, I think we'll have a mention in a video upcoming on that when we're done because I'm dealing with it too So we both have a lot of thoughts on this and a lot of aggravation stemmed from it Yeah, a lot of knowledge comes from aggravation Yeah, it's sorting it out and sometimes I'm like I backed everything up I'm just blowing away things and that was my solution But there's reasons why and I'll break that all down because rebuilding it right there's a value right now all right On to the next question This question comes from tom's tweet where he shows structure cabling of a rack time lapse Cable's coming from the wall to the tray to the patch panel a single short patch cable to the switch I always find this approach Nice and tight together however coming from Yeah We're wrapped and didn't we're wrapped here coming from industrial nation I was wondering Interrupting a high frequency signal this many times let rg45 could create troubles over time Can for example thinking oxidation environments where humidity is not super controlled and so on now Now it's on different handle in industrial automation versus where we are We're mostly putting these in the example exactly from the tweet where I showed a time lapse of a rack being built Completely a office environment. Well, it is a kind of a it's their furnish room But it's not actually outside of it has a vent in it. So it's not outside of the environmental controls It's not going to see high humidity The fault tolerance is actually rather high the spec for ethernet allows for Um, a little bit of shenanigans and still working. It's part of it. I've talked about this with I have a couple interviews I did with the Dan Brera who's part of the standards association ief and ISO But you can you actually have a lot of tolerance and the way the signaling works on ethernet You can get away with a lot. I don't know what the signaling fault tolerance is on industrial automation systems It may not be as wide of a tolerance supported. So obviously those are concerns. Also, you probably Notice we've done a lot of outdoor camera installs. You can get away with I'm not going to say rust or corrosion But a little moisture in there doesn't usually destroy the contacts on these you do your best to seal them really well Obviously, you're not talking about direct exposure to weather but the In a normal controlled environment, it's not an issue if you're doing this and we have done marinas For example when we do those we make sure we put we want to obviously as few breaks as possible And when we do have any breaks, we make sure we weather seal them There's even a special boxes that we've gotten and they're all weather sealed and basically anytime there's a junction Where two wires got to come together or come to a switch or come to a patch panel You do want to make sure that particular Connection is as weather sealed as possible. So it's not that big of a deal Um, it one gig is one gig 10 gig is 10 gig It's rare that the provided you you use quality parts throughout even when you're punching down something like cat 6a those little extra steps of adding a patch cord versus running directly into the switch are Almost never ever where the problem is But the manageability that creates of putting a bunch of short patch cords in so I can slide out one switch When I have to service a switch Oh, that makes it worth it completely worth it to have all the patch panels lined up like that You just pop them all out slide the switch out replace the switch When everything's bundled and going directly into the switch with no patch panels You did eliminate the thing but switches fail way more often than wires So having to get all the wires out of the way to try to get a switch out way harder to do way more work So I definitely recommend Um, the way you see a lot of them and stuff we posted where everything's run into a patch panel and run around I also have my diy home lab rack video where I break down how to how things can go into a patch panel It just makes your life in a big picture easier Especially if you watch how I break things out in some of my videos is quick to pop a cord out put it in something else real quick There's a lot of there's more advantages than disadvantages to doing it that way So I still recommend doing it that way and it's really not much of an issue Hopefully that clears up that on when you're wiring things of whether or not it's much of a problem cool Yeah, the g would g will tell you from we were discussing this when we put in the raspberry pi video Setting up all that rack it it gets tedious because we were Thinking about flipping the pies around and things like that that maybe a future that happens Because there's already some inconvenience on getting all the cords to look nice Yeah, I think I actually managed to get most of that set. Um, actually, um after you left so it looks a lot better now Yeah, it takes it takes time and planning and cable management. There I I have seen there's a couple people There's a couple popular youtubers that will tell you there's no time in life for cable management and uh You know, I still think eposvox has great videos But he has said that a few times and he's definitely not person who uh goes through tedious levels of cable management But hey teach your own I still like Yeah, I would say honestly that if you add up all the time that you spend Trying to figure out where your cables are going over the course of a year I'll bet you it's probably longer than it would take to recable it Yeah, the um, we're we're actually got to do a tour of our rack to steve One of my staff members went all out on putting a lot of labels on every wire Every wire has these little 3d printed things on it. You they just went a little It's really nice It's something more so than we would probably do for a client stuff But we did it specifically because it's our lab rack. So that's going to be an upcoming video of how we wired our lab rack and um Why we labeled things in it basically when you go to the back It's a it's a full height rack and when you go to the back of it We've got these little on each wire Tiny little clipped and zip tides that are tight labels that label what port each thing goes to That way what i'm in the back. There's multiple wires. I can grab from and each one I know what port it corresponds to that way as I plug devices which change quite a bit in outrack We've had so many things in and out of it already That it's very handy to know. Okay. It's going to go to this port or this port and it's almost done I'm not going to do too visual but within my reach. There are a bunch of the short patch tables that people ask about So that video will be up and coming that I have had them for those of you that may have seen them Or me posting and tweet about stuff Yeah All right. What's the next question we have So for the next one, um, how do you balance having to learn everything versus getting things done in a home lab? I'll give you a short answer a very short answer and then a longer answer and the short answer is you don't You don't learn everything. Um You know, I think that's a realization people make over time because I mean, it's one thing if you're doing a certification You kind of have to learn everything that's on the list of the topics for that certification If you have any chance of passing the test, but if you're not taking a certification exam I think a mistake a lot of people make is they'll try to go through an entire book like if they're Um wanting to get better at networking. They're going to read a networking book But when you get more into this it's kind of like you read what you need at the time so for example If you're reading a book that goes over all this stuff and then it um has a section about nfs As another section about samba if you have no intention of using samba don't read that section But when you you can always come back to it if you want to use samba in the future But you're kind of just slowing yourself down. So you think about the components that Go into your home lab or what how you want it to to look like and if you're going to do vlands Learn vlands if you aren't doing vlands then don't So if you just stick to the things that you need to know Um in the moment, um, you'll find yourself going through the content faster You always go back you can always go back and learn the things like I mentioned so I think it's just a matter of just learning what you need in the moment and You know, your needs will change over time and because your needs change over time Then what you learn also changes over time if you have a job requirement to learn something Obviously, that's different too. So you kind of got to know what you got to know there But um, you know, you can get so lost in this rabbit hole of trying to like memorize everything and you'll never memorize anything I mean, I don't remember everything like I have had times where I've consulted my own books because it's been so long since I wrote a chapter on something And I haven't done it in a long time That I have to go back to my own book to read it in that and I I even create sheet sheets for myself That I maintain so if I'm going to learn a linux command I'm going to write notes about it if I've never used it before But I'm not going to remember every single flag every single option Because that's just insanity But I am going to remember the things that I'm going to use on a regular basis So my cheat sheets are just going to have the things on there that are um, you know, interesting to me are relevant to what I'm doing So I think that's way more effective. I consider books to be more like reference material It's not like you're reading Lord of the Rings and you want to memorize like every single scene and what the characters are doing Which is which is great in and of itself But these are textbooks here and you only have like so much brain power. So yeah, um save yourself the insanity and just Learn the the high level summary of all the things for example You can learn what a vlan is By definition and memorize that before you actually memorize how to set one up because Then you'll know whether or not you have a use case for vlan because you know what it is um I mean that could take you five minutes just to read the Definition of that, you don't have to like memorize every single detail of that But then one day if you do want to implement vlan's and you can go back to your book and read it So I think that's what I would say is don't try to remember everything sanity is very important And one of the things I didn't do a great job early on enough because they were scattered And I'm trying to do a better job now I'm still You got to think about this from a platform agnostic and I will admit I use google keep for a lot of this out of the sheer convenience of it being everywhere. I am But I can completely export things out of there if I need to but what I'm getting at is keep notes So when I do things like configure lux encryption I did a video on that But one of the things I don't remember because lux has a couple weird things if I remember right There's a couple commands that the certain letters have to be capitalized in which is odd for a one set Lux open is one. Yeah. Yeah, lux open is one So if I didn't have in my notes when I do lux encryption I always pull them up and look at I'm like, oh, that's right. You have to capitalize lux open Which is weird and I can't think of it off the top I had another command that needs it but one of the important things So as you do any type of setup make sure you go through the notes It also gets you more comfortable with Rebuilding things Like the reason I'm able to tear down and rebuild a server or Trash the entire old shuna assistant that we have and just rebuild it is because I've documented how I set things up I know the commands and by the way, one of the things that's really helpful is the repeated process Whenever I build a server I tear it back down and build it again before I put something in production I want to make sure is that a repeatable process for me. It also helps me Make sure my notes are correct. And so I'll rebuild or just build a new vm again Sometimes I do a lot of stuff in virtual machines and go through it again and again It's good helpful learning and it's it's always this push full of you're happy with everything working But then when do I start the next project? Like Jay said, there's not a there's not an easy answer to it But documenting goes a long way Um, because you like it's just impossible to well, it's maybe for some person There's a cement out there that is memorized everything and knows every linux command. That's not me Um, Jay's pretty close, but he's still So what's summon books? I'll also understand too. I mean, I'm kind of a special case because Like linux is a hyper focus for me and I think um, and that's an adhd term if you for anyone that didn't know So I give unfair focus to all linux things But also I've been reading about linux every single day at least every weekday since 2003 So that's a lot of you know reading over the years So that to get to where I am with what I have memorized it, you know, that's what it took at the same time I also have to keep looking things up like in timux I'll literally have a pain in timux that has notes that I've written so Especially with my sequel. I don't really hyper focus on that I'm not that great at it to be honest But I have all the commands there for how to do anything my sequel related that I might want to do So I'll have that pulled up in timux and then on the on the right hand side on the left hand side I'll have my actual command prompt so I could do the thing And that's how I do it. So, um Believe me it's hard for it was the hardest for me to admit that I won't learn everything because I wanted to so bad and I was Hell bent on memorizing everything under the sun And you know, I realized that is just not very practical even with the amount of time I put into it It's just a really high bar to set for yourself and I just wouldn't recommend setting that bar Yeah, it's Trust me me and j both have notes plus what you see in our videos is the edited versions of how we did things So don't think we did that in one take. That's why we complain so much about editing So never never use us as the bar like watch. Oh, man. They just seem to know it really well No, no all the mistakes all the typos have been taken out That's I want to you bring that up because if you watch one of my videos And um, you know, I'm showing my desktop or whatever I'm recording the screen and you look at the clock at the top Yeah, that's how you'll know if you if I never jump it's like 10 or 20 minutes It could mean one of two things either one I got a phone call or I had to run to an appointment or something or I screwed up something and I had to You know redo a certain part and delete something So, um, it's a pretty good indicator when you see the clock jump and sometimes I'll do something later that I should have done earlier. So you'll see the time go down In a scene then go back up in another one. So that's pretty much the easiest way to tell when I've edited something Yep, we don't hide it. We're we're very open about it There's no point in leaving our mistakes in the video because it would make the tutorial less concise Books don't have a whole series of wrong commands in the series of right commands in them So I I always like to give that perspective to people because I I know when you start in the home lab A lot of people feel like oh, this is overwhelming. How did you get this good or how'd you get that? You know, even when I train staff and things like that You're like this seems really hard and you know a couple years later They're you same staff are working here going. Oh, I'm doing this and doing this I'm going to take on this uh multi site vpn project with uh dynamic routing. I'm like, yeah, no problem You know, they're doing this when they didn't even know what pfSense was two years ago so and I get up I get annoyed because um, my biggest fear Actually, it's not my biggest fear, but what one of them is that I'll accidentally leave an fbomb in one of my videos and forget You know, like I get so frustrated like I rehearse something like two or three times for a video And I I destroy something rebuild it destroy it rebuild it to the point where I can repeat the process But for some reason when I hit the record button Something's not behaving why the heck won't this work? And then, you know, a big chunk of time gets taken out You could probably imagine some you know expletives that might have been mentioned during the time that I didn't upload in the video, so Yeah, we're human too. Believe it or not Yeah Such as that All right, now this is not This is something I don't know how to address easily because we I don't know how much jay's got this on his channel in general But I've seen it on this particular Our homeland show but it's people saying hey quit deleting my comments and so youtube As a as someone um who's been creating a lot of content and I get a lot of comments And I think jay's seen this too. There are an absolute crazy amount of spam that comes at you as well and I used to have to delete a lot of it then magic happened youtube's deleting it for me I don't even get a choice in this manner by the way youtube seems to block people from posting links To anything and there's some big youtubers that got millions of subscribers who've kind of ranted about the system Actually one of them He made a he made a joke comment and youtube took it as spam and threatened to threaten this channel on accident He had to get that cleared up did a video about it. But that was graham stevensson But back to the point here youtube moderation We aren't I mean I rarely have to delete anything because youtube does it for me But I don't get a say in that and this is someone who was complaining saying quit deleting my comments And this is not the first person to message us this or message me I've got someone who filled out the contact form on our on our site just to let me know that i'm deleting their comments I'm like look i'm not censoring you i'm not trying to do this You're probably posting links or you're posting something that the youtube spam system flags um It's a challenge It's not especially one of the hard ones was all the people that complained about when I talked about banwith.com being under attack You can't say ban with you got to spell the word ban with space D o t space com So I know who you're talking about because anyone who put banwith.com It's seen so many people typing that in the comments they all got deleted I guess because someone messaged me on that one too Yeah, I do see this actually um From time to time I I had someone actually say something to that effect like uh, you know my comments don't show up I need you to fix it and I don't really get any control over that and now the thing that the fact of the matter is I try my hardest to go through the comments and answer as many as I can but I can't get to all of them so um There's going to be some that sneak in that I do delete like I'll put out a video and I'll see like There's no comment. It's just a link and it's just some shady thing or whatever It's just a bot and I'll delete those so a lot of them still sneak in But I'm actually kind of thankful that youtube is deleting some of these I don't want youtube to delete anything from an actual fan of the channel But if it's just a bot then it's just less work for me to do and I can't do this work by myself until I get To the point where I can hire, you know helpers to kind of weed some of these out So unfortunately the truth of the matter is youtube's algorithm I don't think anybody's going to accuse the algorithm there of being good or even great or even partially good Even bland would be like a compliment at this point, but it is what it is And we're on the platform. We don't control the platform But um, I try to approve every comment that I can The only time I ever delete something is if someone Just says something really horrible to somebody and the comment doesn't actually offer any value like you're an idiot You can't figure this out delete. Um, that's just not going to happen. So Um, so those things I delete but honestly I probably only have I only do that maybe once every four or five months Because people generally are actually pretty decent. So I don't really have that problem But I do have a bot problem for sure. So and I did have someone Say hey, you need to stop Doing that I even had someone bring up the fact that one of my videos had uh Korean subtitles And I don't know how the heck that happened because I didn't turn that on so I I fixed that but you know It is what it is. So there's all kinds of inconsistencies on youtube Yeah, um, I will also just mention this is one of the reasons me and jay both have forums is Because you you know forums are way easier Uh for things like that. So yes, that's definitely um one of the reasons we do it I've said that one of the things I leave within my videos If you want to have a more in-depth discussion head over to our forums because you you can't post um Like a good write-up and sometimes people do they post a write-up like hey Here's the things I'm trying to do They post maybe a graphic of a layout for what they're trying to do or some code snippets And that's where we can go back and forth because I also can't reply with hey Here's the code you type in because youtube may flag me if I typed in a bunch of URLs as well Of or resources and the comments is yeah, it doesn't allow me to reply as feature richer in depth um You know, let's uh segue real quick j i did see someone Nathan asked us a question in live stream here Is the reason to separate your router and firewall in a homelab setup or it's a good practice Uh to separate the firewall into and router functions into two boxes I would say right now here in 2021 you want to you generally want to keep them the same I It's it's I mean once you get into the enterprise environments There are you know data center level routers that don't need you firewall There's directing public IP space around and um that's definitely a thing When it comes to your homelab, I mean outside unless your goal is to specifically learn that type of functionality and bgp and really cool enterprise stuff Um for most part when you go with the firewalls, we've talked about such as pf sense or open sense or any others My preference for pf sense for those wondering. Um, yeah, it's firewall and routing all built into one So i'm gonna say that yeah Same same on that one there. So I think the the big thing here is that when you When you understand like an enterprise is doing a thing like they're they're segregating something Then you might think well, I should probably do that too because there's a there's probably a really good reason that they did that But you have to keep in mind that in an enterprise or a company there's thousands of users, right? You probably don't have thousands of users in your house So the same reason why they separated something may not be a good reason for you to do it Just like you can make the argument very easily that It's overkill on my end to have vlands in my network because there's only a small handful of people living here in this house. So um Is there really a traffic or bandwidth need for this? No But I do it because I have different roles for different family members So so kids might be locked down a little bit differently than adults and then the iot devices I want to segregate those so they're not actually talking to anything So I had a use case for that but then again, you can make that argument I mean Is it going to be better to have them separate? Maybe but you're not going to notice the difference It might be so minuscule of a difference that you won't notice it And then you had to buy another device. So now your home lab is more expensive But for what right? Um, if you're trying to be like the sisco guru and pass all the exams I mean that might be something but then again I've always told people if you're studying for sisco just buy some old sisco gear off ebay Put it in a separate rack learn it and then when you're done put it away Because some of those could just eat up a lot of electricity for no good reason And you could always power it on again when you want to brush up your skills So I would yeah, I agree completely just leave it in one box. Yep and uh if someone asked about the I think it was gypsy asked about the Benefits of using like a unify dream machine or unify usg I've done a video recently about all the cons of using those Basically, they're great for basic routing anything above basic routing they become difficult to manage in a headache But for your basic routing functionality like better they're better than what you get from the Your isp or something like that, but they're certainly not great if you want more dynamic features more in-depth VPN functionality you got to go with something like pf sense to get a lot more functionality I mean there's more than just pf sense But that's my example because that's uh one of them I like a lot there's untangle as well and others we've talked about Yep Totally agree. All right uh All right. Next one j is the personally finding it quite difficult to navigate any home server build some suggestions for the right processor Motherboard proper ram. Oh, this is a fun one build it or buy it. I think is where the question should probably begin Yeah, that that's one aspect of it too. Um, I have other aspects We've got a okay. So what order order do we tackle this in so build it or buy it? um My opinion is to build it if you can but the problem is it's going to be more expensive and money You know, we don't have infinite money. So that's out of reach for I would venture a guess the majority of people that are doing this um I was lucky enough to have the extra funds to build my own servers but um, honestly the servers you get off of ebay the off lease servers are Plenty great actually and they're often orders of magnitude cheaper In fact, I even have there's a store in selvania, ohio that I sometimes go to haven't been there in a while Where they just sell servers like a bunch of servers and I think for Yeah, I think for like 300 dollars I had like three servers from there three really good servers that I took home for like 300 dollars and that you can't beat that I mean, that's really hard to beat Yeah, the I I'm a big fan of you know, especially when it comes to a lot of people ask about the jbods They want to get for a true nas build That is something that is so inexpensive to buy a u-server versus you'll start racking up some cost If you try to really build yourself with a lot of drives Um, so it comes time comes on what server you're building We have and I something I haven't had a chance to do a video on it, but we built like a really nice brand new amd Here's a thread ripper horizon system that we're going to be doing some videos with it's part of our lab some lab stuff We're going to do We want to do one where we built it ourselves and then just kind of talk about that Like this is a fun way to do this downside of a lot of the ones unless you go with the more expensive motherboards Which now shoots your budget way up the consumer boards or gaming boards that are going to be popular for a build Like that don't have ipmi We me and jave talked about the tiny pilot and other you know Uh solutions that can help get around that but it also when you get a lot of these enterprise servers You can get them for relatively good price They pretty much whether it's dell or super micro come with and you know check beware before you buy Do look into it to see what version they have but they come with the ipmi remote management on there So you don't need to plug monitors in them They give you a lot of fancy monitoring of the power and details And I've always been a big fan of um the dell servers because they're there's plentiful You can find them for relatively cheap on ebay. You can find the spare parts for them on ebay for relatively good prices as well And there's a lot of good documentation if you have trouble setting them up But I will admit like jeff from craft computing has talked about the good and bad of dealing with hp servers So, you know, I've always was confused about the licensing with hp and jeff dove into that topic of boy It's confusing of hp went round and round So yeah, if you just type in like craft computing hp servers, you can get a year full of the good and bad of buying hp And he does buy some of them, but they're Uh specific. He's also reviewed a couple of the other oddball servers. You can buy um to build things So it is a tough choice. I'm I'm all of the buy use equipment The downside of the use equipment is is People always just call out it is i'm like i'm sorry They didn't think of this as you were going to physically have it in your home So it's not going to be quiet the nice thing when you go to self build route. Oh, it's silent You can build a really quiet system, you know, you're going to be because you're building on commodity hard grade You can build as quiet as your any desktop. So Hopefully hopefully it gives you more options. I don't know if I give you a concise answer to the question there So i'm going to add a few more things to that. Um, so my personal recommendation is going to be dell or super micro not hp Now that doesn't mean that hp is bad. I want to get that out of the way I don't know as much about hp and with the fact that power edge servers and dell servers in general are so much more plentiful And there's less kind of um confusion with those. That's why I go that direction You could absolutely find an hp server. That's amazing. Um, and it's perfect in every way for you But um generally speaking dell is easier to get um when it comes to the um idrac remote management Um, depending on the generation you're going to have a requirement for java on an older one Or you'll have an html 5 version going forward I think at some point you are not able to upgrade the java version to the html 5 version in firmware I don't remember where that's cut off Now I haven't used it yet, but I was made aware of a docker container. It was a couple of years ago I don't know why it wouldn't exist now that is for the older idrac that um has java built into the container So that way you don't have to install java on your computer They there's this docker container you could download that'll get you into the idrac Without having to mess with because I I gave up literally trying to get that to work like I tried so hard I'm like, okay. I don't have time for this, but then someone just makes the container makes this super easy So depending on what generation you have Um, you could still get the older generation if you could use that docker container look into that um, the other thing I think a lot of people don't think about is um electric use like power usage If you can find a power edge server with an l series xeon l is for low power get that one because that's going to use less power Also, keep in mind regardless of what cpu you go with I can almost promise you the bio settings are not set up for noise or power usage efficiency at all so It's almost guaranteed when you power that server on it's going to be super loud and eat a bunch of electricity Check the bio settings. You'd actually be surprised You have several different options in there for how the cpu is going to be used You definitely want to make sure you adjust that. I believe there's fan settings if i'm not mistaken But tom's right. They don't make these things for being in your office, but you can get a quiet one Generally speaking I find the to you to be quieter than the one you Because there's more room in the case that isn't always true But that's often the case and the other thing to consider too is the um The precision work stations by del they're very much server like they have xeon processors in them and they're quieter And they're way quieter too Like I've I've I've seen someone like get a 64 gigabyte precision server or a work station for like 150 or 200 dollars with like a bunch of cores of 64 gigs ram plus And that's perfect for this kind of thing and the nvidia gpu They often come with is overkill because they're you're not good enough for gaming anymore nowadays And they're just wasting power but still use less power than a lot of power in servers So I would definitely look into the precision work stations because you'd be surprised which you can get now Unfortunately, covet is dry up driven up the prices a little bit. So when I you know, it's awesome when get one for like 150 or so Um, maybe it's 250 now. I don't know but just keep your eye on the prices And then you should probably find one of those. I think they're probably the best bet Yeah There's definitely some deals still there's still deals be had out there You just got to keep an eye out and sometimes this is the More difficult one is checking places like facebook marketplace or craigslist You'll randomly find places that are just cleaning out and dumping stuff for really changing that's hit and miss Yeah, it's a gold mine. We've you know, it's funny. It was even years ago That's where we got some of the racks that we have someone just wanted to get rid of them We've paid 100 dollars for full height racks. They just wanted you to come pick them up They're like 100 bucks each come pick them up. Yeah, it's like they don't even want the money really they just wanted out of their Yeah, they don't I've seen people get more for free, but they they know that too many people show up from free So if they put some price tag on it Um, we missed we missed out. We had a couple we wanted to go buy and they sold out really quick They had a brand new some punk company said we bought the building these were here in the box They were all brand new full height racks and we couldn't get out there fast stuff before someone snatched them up They were nice. Yeah, they were nice trip light ones. They were still wrapped in the plastic They're like these are here. We have no intention of ever using them There was like four of them and they were in a warehouse and you're like 100 bucks each come get them called or like Ah, someone already someone ran up there and snagged them I think the only real solution here is to write a python script That's some kind of a scraper for these things that could give you an email notification when a new post in your area Yeah, the word like server or you know power edge or you know Close out or something and just make sure you're right on that you can do things on a budget like that And even face it. I know people are gonna say but you're mentioning using facebook Whatever use it for something functional here Uh, if you put you can put watches on facebook marketplace to look for things and have it notify you downside is you have to use facebook One thing I did very early in my career like pretty much before my career started when I was in college way back when Like I literally i'm not saying anyone should do this but you know, it's an option I put up an ad on craigslist just saying i'll you know recycle old servers if you have anything And I kid you not in one day my car was full of stuff from the bottom of the trunk all the way to the top Like you could even see out the back window I had so many things by the end of the ad to take the ad down because too many people were telling me to You know, obviously by recycle. I mean, I'm going to be using it. I was very clear about that But um, you know, the fact is sometimes people want this stuff out of there and and oh this person's looking for stuff I have stuff Yeah, get lucky Be before before the days of hip of compliance and all that forever ago I used to do that too. Um, because people just give you stuff like here. We erase it I'll like sure, you know, I mean this is like 15 20 years ago. We never thought much about it We we were erasing we weren't there to do anything nefarious But it was shocking how much stuff people give you like can you erase these tapes and just like give us a box of them Like someone threw away a computer that at the time was really good. It didn't work because of um, I can't remember what part was bad. I think it was the power supply Which I had, you know from another person throwing stuff away. I had a power supply. So it was easy I just got it up and running. I think one of the memory modules might be bad That's fine. I grabbed a memory module from another one put it in there It was compatible as luck may have it had a really good desktop for free. So you get lucky Yeah, um, all right. What do we have next? Not too many. We're down to the bottom here I think we there's a couple near the top that I think we might want to answer One of which was testing backups. Oh, yeah Yeah, that's a really good question, but it's really hard to answer because it depends on the context. So Um, that's why there's no one answer to this So usually what I like to do when you can is restore like for like So if you have a backup of a virtual machine Then the best way to test that backup is to spin off a new virtual machine from that backup And then you could just make sure everything is fine That's easy to do pretty much with every hypervisor out there But where it starts to get a little harder is if you have a you know physical hardware Because then like for like isn't so easy anymore because if you take an image of your power edge 720 or 720 Um, you're going to have to restore that image on something and you have to have a hard drive That's at least as big as the backup is and then you also have the power bill going up because now you're running another server Now one easy aside is you could have the server off unless you're testing backups But then you're literally spending money on a server just for Testing out your backups. So if you can set up a virtual machine that can handle the data to check it That's one way to do it at the very least Make sure you could read the data mount the image if you can and make sure everything's readable I don't consider that a full test, but you can do it Like for like is usually the the best way to do it Um where it starts to also get tricky is if you know, you back up your pfSense, right as you should be doing Well, okay, you only have one pfSense box I bet and it's really hard to like steer your network to another pfSense box that you restore At least you could even set up a virtual machine for pfSense and restore the backup Which you got to make then the tricky part of that is you have to make sure they have the same network cards on there So that that becomes a tricky challenge right there Um, so there's no one answer as much as you can restore like for like if it's a file level backup That's pretty easy because you can mount the backup and you can just make sure you can read the files But at the end of the day you also have a problem with you know, if you have 10 000 pictures And you want to test your picture backup Are you going to be able to look at 10 000 pictures to test it? And how often are you going to be able to do that probably not very often? So you have to find this balance of difficulty and prioritize the things that are the most important you like If this server goes down, it's going to cause you the most work. It's going to cause you days to restore it It's going to be a big pain. That's the one that you're going to focus on the most Any data that you can't get back that's priceless definitely that too Again like for like as much as you can but it really depends on the context Which is I think the only reason why we can't really give you like a You know just one answer on this kind of thing. It also depends on what you're running Yeah, and so giving an example and we'll start with pf sense like here at our office or how we do it for clients But pf sense all you need is the xml file. I don't even need an image of the system at all All I need is that xml file that for that system that means for any firewall that we're using we've always had two of them So right now we have an sg 5100. We have a spare 5100 we have an identical one doing nothing every now and then I turn it on make sure it comes on and I load it with the Same xml file, but they're not in sick I don't keep it on live all the time because we're able to swap them out for our clients that need really critical things Yeah, we set up an ha system for pf sense So you always have two systems running for all the other things here Everything that's critical to me is on a virtual machine So I'm backing those up and then I spot check them. I take the time Every month and I grab vm's restore them make sure the restore process works I actually sometimes do it way more frequently than monthly, but at the minimum monthly I should say I restore them. I go through the process make sure that they're good make sure that I can restore them And uh, yeah, it's sometimes as simple as that do a backup shut down a vm restore the backup Then sometimes the back one just becomes the live one. I'm like it's it's one and the same It doesn't matter. So now this one's the live when it works And you can't tell the difference So these are um, they're real simple ones, but it is hard now How do you do this at scale when you start managing lots of servers for clients? Some of the backup tools actually support this this is where it gets expensive as people ask about the tooling we use And yeah from the enterprise standpoint We actually take images of all the machines and then part of the backup process And this is supported by different backup software data supports as I believe We're using the enable software which supports this it actually can spin up a network isolated instance And then grab a screenshot of the login screen So it actually after does the backup it then boots the backup up in a virtual environment grabs the screenshot and attaches it To show you one we backed up this entire machine two We booted the machine in a vm even though it came from physical hardware or maybe a vm depending on how you're backing it up We showed you that it booted and now we have not only verified the backup We've got gave you confirmation that this system will boot again if needed and The if needed may come up because once you've got it in the virtual Place like that being able to do all these there's a lot of things you can do like that That gets very complex, but these are all ways you mitigate that type of backup and and have it. So yes Yeah, and there's another question that's somewhat similar but also not about um backups for this one It was posed as industrial automation equipment. Basically you Most companies have a um, you know that computer that's running that program that was never updated And isn't compatible on any new version of an operating system What do you do about that now? Obviously people are like what this is a home lab show Why are we talking about this? Well? I've actually seen this in home lab too where um someone and this is You know a lot more common than you might think they have this piece of software For a server app or even maybe like a midi keyboard or something that hasn't been updated And it's still perfectly usable But why buy a whole new system just because you know, it doesn't support the operating system And they'll keep it running for that reason um I actually had a funny story off I often tell the story because it's so hilarious, but um, you know people might have heard this I don't remember I mentioned on the podcast, but back when I used to Work at this one company. I I show up for work I I come up to the door and everybody that works with a company is standing outside Nobody's inside the building. I'm like what's going on here and they're like, oh, yeah the Computers down we can't get into the system because they scan their back Get access to the door and they can't get in nobody in the company can get in the building And then the janitor had is the only one the key comes in and unlocks the door for us And of course it's my job to find out what's going on because I'm the it guy So I go in there and um, you know, naturally the windows 98 laptop that controls the door unlock system Way past the end of life of windows 98 The hard drive was starting to die So we couldn't update it because it was only for that system, but that laptop was super old I mean it was an ancient at that point it belonged in the museum So what I did was I and this is this is getting to my answer you can use clone zilla to um Take an image of the hard drive And that'll help you like if anything happens to it you can restore that image you at least need that and that's exactly what I did I want to step further and I um after I fixed the hard drive Temporarily because I don't trust hard drives after something like this happens I don't know if I remember I don't use check disk or spin right Anyway, after I got the machine booting again I took the image of it and I actually restored it onto a virtual machine In that situation I was surprised that it actually worked I was actually able to get that to work most of the time and like the question alludes to They they need direct access to hardware these old systems So a virtual machine may not fit the bill But the very least what I would do is take a clone zilla image of it and try to source on ebay The hard drives for that old system because most of the time it's going to be an older ide standard That's really hard to get and hard drives have a you know limited shelf life Anyway, so I would also buy a few of those extra hard drives to keep it running later I think at some point you're going to reach a situation where you're just not able to keep it going But you could get some more years out of something by just Taking an image of it virtualize it if you can if you can't then you know just get have a few extra hard drives Yeah, the um It's it's so many different strategies for all that it's testing testing testing and matter of fact You get bigger than this is where you table talk disaster recovery planning Not just your backups, but you know How what would it look like if you didn't have access or these servers went up in smoke the magic smoke All came out of the servers How quickly can you replace them? How are you going to source this where are you going to restore your backups to because The magic smoke popped out of two of them the two critical ones now What's the plan just thinking through those and and having those exercises is uh Is definitely important Yep All right, is any more questions in here? Do we reach the end of them all? We have two more Okay um So actually three more but but some of them are super quick the next one that I see here is about the yuba key I'm going to keep this quick. Uh the person Um mentions they they were curious about the resident ssh key feature Um, I just ordered a bunch of yuba keys because I want to refresh the video that I've done You can watch the video. It's probably still relevant, but I like to kind of update these every now and then Um, so I haven't had a chance to look into the resident ssh key feature yet But it might be something we'll talk about later on Maybe we'll even do a video about it or um, I mean I will do a video about it But maybe an episode I don't know at the very least I'll do it It'll probably take me about a month to get to it, but I have the yuba keys I'm I'm going to be scripting the video pretty soon So it's definitely going to be happening and there'll be an updated guide on the yuba key on my channel So you guys will definitely get that we'll we'll have to come back to this one because I haven't tried that But and I I have one on my hand and it may I think yuba key is worthy episode Which can can't use it for I think this is But not until both of us have probably done some yuba key videos and things that it worked with We have a few of them here at the office. We've been using for different things I just haven't gotten around myself the same thing I need to do kind of an updated video and I haven't done any videos on it yet, but it's on my to-do list Yep And the next one I see is about ups Uninterruptible power supplies How to choose which one you should go with and how to connect it so that you can ensure proper shutdown So I think when we talked you had a more of a solution for this I'm a little too old school. I mean, I'm always home Especially since the pandemic but I work from home So I don't really have as much of a need as especially as people that leave the house on a regular basis Um, on my end I have a laptop with me if there's a power outage. I have mine connected to PF sense which has the apc plug-in And it emails me and alerts me when the power's out and if I don't get the alert telling me that power is restored I just use vpn and I just start shutting things down myself I don't have very many power outages here So I've only had to do it maybe once in the two years that I've been in this house So I'm lucky in that regard, but you were going to talk about I think Not but the last I'm gonna say about this though because they also asked which brand to go with I've always been using apc. I'm not saying it's the best But it's always worked for me. It's always been Linux compatible So since it's working, I've had no reason to go any other different direction I think some people have been have used cyber power. I can't speak to that But apc is usually what I go with Yeah, I think um, is it techno tim Um Did a video on Yes, he did He did a video on network ups tool or nut the ultimate guide. Now, I will limit I have not watched this video, but it seems to be well reviewed But their nut is the tool that is even built on a pf sense And you can set up a server that talks to the ups Whatever that server may be and then it distributes Based on triggering that you set the shutdown command everywhere. It needs to be shut down and so that's There's ways to get that done. He's covered that in a video. You can read the documentation on it I have not done anything on it just yet, but I might uh, it's on my to-do list. It's not on my done list It's one of those, you know me and j both we have so many things like we want to get to on those things And uh, yeah, that it's probably worth doing a video on there, but it's one of those Nuts the tool to do it. It can send shutdown commands. There's different monitoring tools You can set up on different systems to monitor this And so you also the point, of course, is just to get the server shut down in a timely fashion. So yep And then the last one that came up Is is more of a suggestion than a question And we were already kind of thinking about this making me think I might have mentioned this I don't remember but I think it'd be really cool to have people Send us on twitter pictures of their home lab and this is a podcast. Let's keep that in mind We're not going to have a pictorial guide to everyone's home lab as an episode But if there is one that really kind of like Peaks our curiosity or it's just really unique. We might Paint a visual picture and talk about it. We're not going to do it every time But I think it might be something that Would be fun if nothing else if you follow us on twitter You'll also see those home lab photos there too. So You'll still get to to see them and if anything really stands out You know, definitely tell us as much about it as you can And maybe we'll mention it it might be something that might be fun I think because a lot of people are really proud of their home lab if you're a Server or network admin at your company. Please don't send us pictures of your company's data center Because you may not as proud of you as proud as you are I'm sure of what you do for the company your company might not appreciate their You know their server rack being shown to the world. So make sure it's your actual home lab We are the home lab show after all so let's keep it legal here But if it is noteworthy in some really cool way or you've done something that you're proud of go ahead and tweet it at us And um, we might mention it if nothing else we see it on twitter. So I think that'll be fun Yep, um, I will mention as I seen someone asked this question It is a common question as should you virtualize or have pf sense on hardware or your firewall in general I always go for firewall for my main firewall and for my business clients always on hardware With limited exceptions very limited for the most part. It's just easier to manage on hardware. It's more reliable It's way less troubleshooting because the you know, you're adding extra complexity now for my lab stuff Oh, yeah, we build I build pf sense inside of xcp and g you can build it in proxmox You can use whatever you want because that's a really great way to learn pf sense and dive into it without breaking your main internet Because the problem is when you virtualize it It's the problem that we've run into when I've helped people who have virtualized systems They need to make a change to the virtualization stack And that change means they got to take down the internet to make the change to the virtualization server to load an update And now their internet's down Run ps hardware is cheap to run pf sense on getting a used hardware Tecteli even the neck gate hardware the sg 2100 is not a super expensive device And you put one of those in and then now your internet's up while your lab is down or you're doing something with your Virtualization stack. I mean run whatever makes you happy, of course, but that's my guidance from it. I don't see if you want to do it Go ahead But my recommendation from helping and troubleshooting with people Matter of fact, we've had a ton of people who've had weird quirky problems that once we got it out of the virtualization stack And even though it was supported, I don't know worked fine worked fine on hardware So One more problem you can run into I think when I first started I was running it I don't know if it wasn't a virtual machine, but I think everything was in one box So it was same difference really and it was a pain and I remember telling myself never again So many things would just come up I would say the main reason why I think this comic comes up is because A lot of people are on a very tight budget with this and they can only afford one server and What they want to do is just have everything on that one server and I totally get it If you are currently doing that that I understand you don't have the money for another device Totally get it But at some point in the future whether you have like a jar and you're just putting coins in there at some point You're going to want to move it to another box. Absolutely. Just make that a temporary thing not a final thing It's okay for now, but you're going to run into problems And I don't even remember all the problems I ran into but just try to get yourself something even if you Get a used device like a netgate device on ebay. I have seen them there Try that you could get like the protect telly or however you pronounce that devices They could be a little bit more expensive, but they're so powerful I think mine was like 300 dollars or something and it has an i7 And to this day, I don't think I've ever been able to push the cpu beyond 2% like as much as I do uploading 4k video I cannot get that cpu to even go beyond 2%. It's it's crazily overpowered Yeah, but you don't need to do that if you could find something for cheap on ebay Off lease or use thing just do that. It's so much better. Just make sure you have enough network ports. Make sure they're gigabit Make sure it supports encryption. I I think yes, and I they went they went back on that, but I I mean they could go that direction again well As and I and um those those extensions are still needed for vpn to work. Well, so right so I would say just make sure that that's the case and Yeah, you'd be surprised how cheap you can get this stuff for I think it's overall the probably the best bet Yeah, honestly, and like someone just said in there pfSense runs great on old pc You can literally take one of these old i5 computers from You know 2012 pop a couple network cards in there and you you got something that can route gigabit So it's still probably 10 times more powerful than a router you would buy at walmart honestly for way more money so Because those i5 and i7 cpus are are overkill for most of the stuff because a lot of the commercial Things they they don't they don't even have a cpu that powerful because they don't need to because of routing traffic It's not like you're gaming right that you just need to route traffic So it's cheaper usually to get a cpu that'll handle it. So yeah All right, I think we've covered it um Yeah, I see I see people repeating open source sand that's going to be a while don't expect it this year, right? Um, I mean it's probably going to be it may get centered around true nasty scale I'll at least see that because one um true nasty scale But I think what people are going to learn is open source sand is a word Uh a phrase series of words, but not easily affordable thing to build it at performance So that's where they're going to learn we start diving into how luster or stuff and some of those Other tools work to integrate all these things together and what you actually need to put it together. It's not right It's not unattainable. It's just like oh Yeah, I've seen people try to build it on lesser hardware and you need you have some reasonable hardware I mean, of course, it's a good learning experience to play with it at lesser hardware You don't get the performance, but at least you can understand the concept to how it works So yeah the determination of of these of every one of our fans is amazing I mean I've even seen some people not saying you should do this but running linux on a dreamcast So I mean where there's a will there's a way, right? I mean just just depends on how dedicated you are you could do some pretty crazy cool things If you do something cool, let us know by the way, but like we did earlier And then you feel free to tag, you know show us your home lab tag me and jay on twitter and things like that So that's easy places to reach us and uh, yeah Hopefully that hopefully uh, please These are questions that came from some of you in the live audience here And some of you uh that filled out the form online or you know, you can always hit us up Like I said on twitter, uh, we like doing these q&a episodes You like getting all the questions out of the way We don't always have time to answer during the series when we're recording But I love hearing back from all of you and reach me and jay have forums and places you can post and All that fun stuff We have lots of tutorials and uh go through for ideas and Things like that and let us know man. We like hearing from you Sure do All right Well, thank you again and thank you linux for sponsoring it and thank you all of you We had 108 people join us uh hit that like button if you're Listen to this live. All right. Thanks Thank you