 Right. According to this, it says I'm live, but I like to pull the YouTube thing up at the same time. And I got distracted before I sat down. So give me a second to pull this up. So I'm on all the places at once. So welcome to vlog. There's a number 229. It just seems like incrementally, you keep doing more and more. Next thing you know, you're at 229 of these episodes, which it seems wild to me. But hey, why not? Let's close all these things I have open because there's too many of them. And this can get pinned here. I got all those windows. You got to consolidate all the windows to all the things I was doing into a window. So let's share. I know people like the chat being on the screen. So we'll go ahead and share the chat. Share screen Chrome tab. That would be this one, I think. Hey, look at that. Cool. Do we like it bigger like I do when I'm doing a home lab show? Make it about there we go. That seems readable and everything else. First one is a long time ago and we're all getting old. Yes, for sure. So much going on here. Anyways, let's get started with the thing that people may have seen in the title, which is a Cisco giveaway. And it's the same in the link down below. Of course, it's the same thing. Post on the forum. And that's it. Let me know what pick was on random. We picked a winner for the tiny pilot and it is on its way to it's it's in the process of getting there to tracking number cent we picked someone what someone was picked at random. And the same thing will happen again. We'll pick some random. Now, I'm not going to do this every vlog Thursday. So don't get too excited. I'm not asking for people to watch this live show because I give something away. But I do plan to give away a few more things randomly at different vlog Thursdays as we go through stuff. But my bigger goal is going to be once I'm done reviewing it have it announced because that way it doesn't sit around as long. And, you know, once we're done, there's kind of a process we go through. At first, we review a device that maybe we test the device longer, maybe we follow up again with another review. But the goal ultimately is if it's not something that we need to keep one of here for testing reasons, we do keep a lot of different equipment here for testing reason or in some cases, maybe we can get the company sending me if it's sent to me for review and the Cisco was not sent to me by the way, I purchased this with my own money. And I'm just giving it away because I was sitting around that's and sometimes that's what happens to things if we're not using them. We don't I don't want them here. I don't like it bothers me greatly thinking that there's technology hanging out and sitting around doing nothing, just just getting older and it could be useful to someone. So that's one of the reasons why I wanted to, you know, give this particular thing away and any other thing that we have to give away to. Now, I don't know what to do with it. But I don't know that this is not part of this at all. Part of the Cisco giveaway. But we do have that stupid thing from Unify that is the power distribution thing that the failover power supply thing. I don't know what we're gonna do with that. I don't know if anyone wants it, but we're some point we're going to, you know, deal with getting rid of some of the one off things that get sent. So that's a that's a different topic. We were just laughing about that because that's sitting on the sitting on a table right now. So but no special terms and conditions posting in the forums is all you have to do. It's just randomly selected person on the forum post based on the link down below. And by next time I will, you know, will announce that there'll be you'll be contacted. I actually had first DMed the person that one and I realized after 24 hours that the DMs are confusing even to me inside of my forums. I don't like DMs of my forums. I specifically tell people never to DM me. But I just sent an email to them and they replied right away, which was awesome. So they my staff could get that sent out to them. So definitely, like I said, something we'll be doing in the future. And that's as much as I will say to it. If anyone asks about it jumping in late, I'll just say, hey, go back to the beginning of the show when we talked about it. So get that part out of the way. What else was in I have a few things on my list here. So let me pull that up. Where is it pin this over here? Cisco switch giveaway captive portal. That's the other thing I wanted to play with. And matter of fact, can probably play with it over on this screen here. No one looks reasonable. The captive portal system is something I wanted to the captive portal system is a love hate relationship. I'm not a big fan of captive portal. But because it's been one of those things that enough people just keep asking about and keep insisting on it, I will probably do an updated video on it within PF sense. And it's like I said, love hate would be the best way I've described captive portal. I don't know how all of you feel about it. But man, is it just one of those? It's it's just a protocol that just has a lot of because it's not it's not well adopted as way should say. So its implementation has always been super annoying. I just don't know. I don't know. There's more reasons like I avoid some of the videos on it. But I think we've done enough for these that I'm like, I guess we probably should do a video on it. So the captive portal video is coming. And I thought let's see. Is it this one domain VPN? I'm looking through my virtual machines we have pulled up to see if I have one of them that would be easy to this one should probably work. We're also doing some speed tests on this. That's a that's a whole nother thing is why you're working on this. Let me actually share the screen. So we're all looking at the same thing. So let me move this over here. Move this over here. Close that close that. And then we got to share a different screen to make this work. So let me read some of the comments make sure I'm keeping up with everybody in here. Let's see. Oh, thank you. Favorite you should hide from Switzerland. All right. Can you ship to different countries? No, we are only shipping to the USA. I probably just said that right away. Can you ship to that to the country systems of batteries or hardest ship across borders? Well, there's there's no batteries in the Cisco that I'm aware of. So shipping that's not going to be a problem in terms of batteries. But sorry, this is USA only because customs forms are a pain and I don't want to deal with them. I like giving things away. I think I have enough of audio. I don't get me wrong. I love you guys international audience. It's just getting things out of here and into there can be a challenge. So yeah, we're just going to leave it as not how we're going to be able to do it. So all right. North Dakota, that's a that's a like another country out there won't lie. But we can ship to North Dakota. So hello from North Dakota. Yes. Cry is it cries in European. Yes, I'm sorry. It does. It's in your forum post. Let's see. Crying in Germany. Yeah. We got people from all over the place. I'm going to work with some of the vendors because if we if we get something that we review and it's available on Amazon and we can do it as an Amazon giveaway, that's kind of an easy way around it where we can just get an offer code on Amazon and give it to someone. So they actually order it through the Amazon system. And that way all of that's taken care of through that. So that's might be easier. So Brocade versus Cisco. I don't know. I don't know the decibels on each one of them. So I can't tell you which one's quieter. Not not a question. In most of the time when, you know, if we see a lot of these and they're in a server room, we don't know the individual sound of each of them because usually lots of other things in there. Also, a decibel meter isn't something that technicians usually carry with them. So we don't always. Yeah. This is a good question. I may. Are you going to attend the 2021 2021 low voltage nation meetup? That's what I'm assuming. Yeah, I read it. I read it right. You typed it wrong. Low voltage nation LVN meetup. I got to look up the date and actually why don't I do that while I've got something in front of me. So LVN 2021 meetup. When's the date? Low it's not finding it. Let's see if they have it posted. I know it's going to be down south. It's not far. I don't know. I'll message. I'm friends with Blake. I'll find out from Blake to confirm it. He needs to do a better job because if I did, if I Google it and can't find it, come on, man, you're not doing a good job. So alright. But yeah, I may go to that. Let's see. Yes, when you're in server room, I get surrounded by all my fans. Absolutely. I like that. Actually, what was it? There was some Wi-Fi names you were laughing at. I posted them on Twitter. Someone had one that was a tremor. It was the one of my hand heard of. I mean, I posted panic at the Cisco, but someone else had another one better after that. Oh, it's not officially yet. It's going to be in Georgia. Okay. Then I can't tell you if I'm going to be there because if I don't know when it is, I may have something else booked. So that's an important aspect. And thank you very much, William, for the donation. It's greatly appreciated. Oh, yes. Well, I do post a lot of puns on my personal Facebook. I don't post as many puns on Twitter. I should maybe post more puns on Twitter. Maybe, I don't know, is that where the puns go? I know that at least the puns are really good on Facebook. They seem to get a decent amount of attention. So they're usually, though, they're not tech related. I really try to keep my Twitter focused to being tech related. So that's probably the biggest difference with Twitter is that more tech related nature of it. So I don't know. Maybe I should do more personal stuff on there. Not really sure. You know, instead of the captive portal, we can actually show what I was working on just before I was over here. Let's get back to that. Hey, cool. My staff got it going. And I'll get it going over here. So there are multiple, there's multiple steps to this. First is sharing the proper screen. So stop, share, share screen, share, middle screen. That one looks like the right one. Chrome tab. There we go. There we go. You share this. As a matter of fact, we can do it like this. No, stop. Make that just the right size. There we go. Make sure you see this is a virtual machine running with wire guard attached to an untangled machine. And we were doing some testing here between OpenVPN on the same system. See if this works. This is speed testing with wire guard versus speed testing with OpenVPN. And this is some of the stuff we do in our lab. And I thought about maybe I'll do an updated video on how we have the lab configured. And this particular piece of it was a little bit confusing, where sometimes you run into weird edge cases, and we're not sure why we're only getting 300 in the lab. And let me explain why I'm saying only getting 300. Because on my system here, let me see if it's still connected. So yep, let me stop the sharing here and move it over to the other screen. Chrome tab. It's going to be what is this one called? Libre speed. Which one is it? I got too many open. You know, I'll just share the whole screen. Easier to share a whole screen that way. Share. There we go. So this is a speed test we're running internally on this one. So that system and this system are connected exactly the same one's running Windows, of course, but it's not a slower computer. And this is mine. Now here's where it gets interesting. I can get two gigs on mine, download, but only 600 upload. So it's kind of strange how it works. But one of the things I even broke down a lot is how some of our lab is set up. And that's one of the things I want to do is probably some updated videos on how we manage all these virtual machines that we create with all these different systems. So like right now, this is 20.1. This is routed through a VPN. This is routed at so we'll go ahead and start. This is what it is when it's coming directly through my computer. It's at five gigs. So you can see that we're pretty good here with WireGuard except for upload. But then this is the raw speed when you're just going through NAT. It's also kind of strange why the upload and there's probably some buffer bloat issues that I'm running into. But either way, it's kind of cool playing with all this. Like I said, one of my goals is I need to update how our lab works. And what that helps is people get an understanding of how to set this up. One of the things that's really important is that when you're learning tech, or even like us, we're doing this for a living and doing a lot of consulting on it. The questions come up about things all the time. And sometimes it's nice to be able to have different, you know, systems set up an XCPNG that we can quickly spin up and move and say like, all right, here, let's go ahead and just build this system out real quick and run this system and this server in this configuration and boom, away we go. Matter of fact, this particular system, if we go here to the dashboard, this is one of our lab systems. We got this Ubuntu server running cockpit. We got the Windows 10 lab base, Windows 10 base with the VPN demo and then how we create all the snapshots of it before joining a domain because we had a question about setting up things in a domain. So we just build this out really quickly, but you can fork these and build another snapshot. As a matter of fact, all I do is create another VM from the snapshot and instantly we have like a handful of computers set up very quickly in order to do this. It's just one of those things that, you know, trying to make sure people understand how to do this that once you build all this out, it's a lot of work to build it, but once you have it built this one system we'll go back over to this one here. This system right now, if we go to the command line, and we can see where what IP address it's on. But if we want to put it on a different network, we can just click this and move it to a different network so we can build out all of these different systems and really quickly move them to any network, any VLAN or any different network on our network and even create all the virtualized firewalls. So when I go into the virtualized firewall system, where this is running on Tangle right here, this is where those different networks come into play. We have actually two instances and we have them all playing nice with each other through a series of VLANs. At least it's been a little bit of a time since I've really dove deep into the how all this works and how all this functions, but that's something I want to do. Because, you know, we've been doing the homelab video and it's been kind of getting me a little bit excited to put this all together. And I'm like, you know what I haven't done an in-depth video exactly what it looks like in the end, so to speak, what our lab looks like built out and how we're able to do all the testing. Because this, one of the things we can do in our lab that's kind of cool is outside of all of this is also the ability to take this Studio 100 and Studio 200, which is the internal adapters of any of the virtualized firewalls and go over to our Unify system. Actually, I got to stop sharing before I said, I don't know what screen it'll be on. So let's remove, log in to Unify. Whoops. Actually, put the chat back up. Share the chat again. There we go. Share screen, Chrome tab. Where's the chat at? Put you guys back on there. There you go. While I log into more things, I should log into all the things before I start to log Thursday. I was logged into my house. It didn't really matter. There we go. Devices and there we go. Just pull one up in the Studio Lab. Share this. There we go. The ability that we have for this is to be able to put these and move them over and pull up all the different VLANs and put them in here. Actually, that's interesting. It doesn't show the VLANs. It's shared on my screen, but not shared through the screen sharing app. Interesting. Well, speaking of that, let's actually eat someone said and don't expect more meek or tick for me. It's not, you're going to get very, very little meek or tick for me. I just don't feel like learning the platform. So that's that's the real, that's the real thing is like everyone wants it because the documentation is so bad. The problem is the documentation is bad. So it makes it harder and harder to do meek or tick videos. You know, we talked about this on the Home Lab show of how much time I spent reading books and things like that. And that's one of the things if there's not great documentation to start with, it makes it that much harder in the long term to do any type of videos on it. Because if the documentation is poor, it takes a long time to learn it because you learn it by just poking at it and becoming the creator of the documentation. That's the problem. I think they're really meek or tick faces. So that's yeah. So don't expect a whole lot of your tick videos because, you know, yeah, the UI and CLI are bad. And I think someone said it best about maker tick, they're like, they're like, you'll find answers in the forums. It's always copy and paste these obscure commands that no one documented what they do, but they make the thing work. And that's something I don't like. And I great that the maker tick engineers are engaging with it, that they say, oh, just type this. But a lot of people want to know why this works. Because when you don't know something like you don't know why it worked, it just works when you type this obscure command. That's not really helping any. It's, I don't know. And I looked at the wind box, I looked at the UI, I'm like, this is awful, like the whole setting things up in it is overly complicated for what it is. So not, not real likely something we're going to be doing. All right, back over to here and here. So we can move this, minimize all this, actually deactivate. There we go. But let's do captive portal. We said we'd at least talk about it. So let me make sure it's enabled. That's first step. Then we'll switch back to the proper screen for it. Got a login to PF sense, make sure it's turned on. Hey, a maker tick is cryptic. I think that's then it's I'm not hating on the product. I just if the product can't do what you want it to do or makes it difficult to do, it's like, cool, I saved on hardware, and now I got to spend hours of my time sorting out a software problem. That's where that's where it gets aggravating captive portal. It's alphabetical and I'm staring at it. Anyways. All right, make sure all these are set up terms, conditions, portal cool. That's all configured. We just got to put the system on there. That that make sure it gets an IP address and make sure it's not authenticated. There we go. Unauthenticated six and that's six 10. So we clear that. Yes. Disconnect all users. All right. Our test portal is configured. It doesn't here. And here's the thing. Um, budget MPLS doesn't make or take support MPLS. I make or take claims a lot of things and that's part of the problem. Does it do it or does it do it? Well, I don't know. Is it documented that you can figure out how to do it? Well, those are all the factors that you're going to have trying to sort that out. And I don't know. I mean, I get why people use it. All right, cool. That worked. All right. So captive portals turn on and now we're going to share the right screen for captive portal. So shares screen actually would it be share a window? This window? Or is it a Chrome tab? Yeah, I better do it as a window. Because I think if I do it as a window, yes, I can switch between them. Cool. All right. Um, this machine is behind this captive portal. And actually we'll start. This is the captive portal config for the PF sense we're running PF sense plus latest version, but this works the same in PF sense or CE or plus either way. It's really simple for the most part to the basics of captive portal are really easy. You enable captive portal, give it a name, maximum concurrent connections. You can leave a blank idle time out. You can leave a blank hard time out leave a blank traffic quotas. These are where you start getting all kinds of cool little features in here. And this is a good reason to use it. One of the things you can do a lot with captive portal is set up all these different rules to where you can say and actually make this bigger so I know people on read it. And this is not a full tutorial on it. I'll do that as a separate video. You can go through here. Do you want multiple concurrent logins, pass through Mac automation, disable Mac filtering. There's a lot of different things even like per user bandwidth. This is a great way when you want to have a guest network. And like I said, there are valid uses for it, even though I'm not a big fan of captive portal unless you absolutely have to have it. Set your download and upload defaults that we each user on your guest network can only have that much bandwidth. So you can go through and figure this. We did use a custom uploaded logo. We uploaded our logo custom there. We have some ridiculous terms and conditions that no one really reads. But that's what goes here. So we can agree to them. Authentication methods, you can use radius or Mac authentication. So there is the ability to use different, you know, external authentication on there. And of course, this is the big one. What about doing everything as HTTPS? Well, yes, portal.laurancesystems.com by the way, this is an internal address. And because I have a wildcard set up with my certificates, I can do anything I want.lauranceystems.com including internal addresses. So the internal address is part of the wildcard Lawrence system as you see right here at the bottom. And what this allows us to do is have a fully HTTPS without error. So if you open this up here, try to go somewhere, we get this. And if we use Microsoft Edge, for some reason, and we try to go to Google, or I think Microsoft wants us to go to Bing.com, you have to agree to the terms and conditions which are some ridiculous terms and conditions that go here. Agree, login, and away you go. And we actually have it set to redirect you to our website. But the whole thing was done with HTTPS, including the portal itself. You can see that it's on there. I think it's probably worth doing a video on this. So at some point, I'll dive deeper into it, but then we'll go back over here and refresh. Hey, look, there's our user. There's the IP address that this system has now. And it's authenticated. And, you know, we can even say show last activity when the last session start. So it's pretty easy to get it working. And they've done a nice job with combining this all, including a feature that didn't that will we had modified the system to allow it to work. We had a client that is using this at scale. But one of the problems was they wanted it to survive reboots. You can actually do that in 2.4. There was a way you could pull the information in to save all the sessions. Now, natively in 2.5 and pf sense 21, pf sense plus 21, they both have support for that feature, which I think is really cool, which is survive reboots. So let's say you have in the client word were set this up for had like several thousand people that authenticated against your captive portal. The way that worked was they didn't want them to have to re authenticate again, if there was an update and have to reboot because well, phone calls and that the all the people caught complaining about it. So this does survive even the reboots. And what gets even more detailed in here in beyond what I'm going to cover in this time right here, but I'll cover this in a video is they have an entire voucher system. And you can use even automated systems to do this where it creates a voucher. And this is a way you can actually build out captive portal and allow for the system to have like a ticket where you predefined a bunch of randomly generated vouchers. And when you give people these vouchers is a tear off, let's say a coffee shop, it would authenticate their session for as long as you have the vouchers configured, let's say it expires after two hours. This can be a way to kind of meter the internet. And unfortunately, this gets to be a pain to a lot of people because some places take it too far. And it's why captive portals get a bad name. I've seen a lot of places are like they're constantly trying to do it to charge money and everything else. I'm like, please just give internet as a upsell to being your facility. And if you don't do it, it just ends up ends up being kind of a problem because if you everyone just starts using their phones for instead, like why why would I connect to your crappy network when you know, I have my own here. And matter of fact, I'm going to switch on my phone real quick here. So I'm going to change networks and cool connected. Let me go back over here and show you what happens. As soon as I try to sign into the Wi-Fi, which I make myself full screen here, as soon as I sign into Wi-Fi, my phone right away and it won't focus on that. Yeah, I think you get the idea. It came to the captive portal on here as soon as you sign in to the IoT network on our system, where this is where that's happened to be set up. It instantly just the phone goes, Hey, this network requires authentication and prompts you for it. And then you have to hit agree. And then my phone will work on that network. So I agree that in terms of conditions, hit login and then my phone will redirect me over to where it wants me to go, which happened to be my website. Simple as that, it works on phones, works on tablets, works on all the different devices. So it's pretty straightforward how it works in PF sense. Well, you know, it's not one that we get a ton of requests for, but there's sometimes confusion in setting it up. That's probably where some of the problems do come in with it is how do I get this thing to work? And yeah, that definitely is part of it. Back to casting a tab of comments. So that's, like I said, they've done a nice job of greatly improving it compared to the way it used to work inside of PF sense. So I'm happy about that. But yeah, it's a, it's a love hate relationship I have because I feel like a lot of people try to try to charge for everything through captive portal. It's just kind of annoying. So let's see. Someone said we such a small venue from make or take to TP link configuration time went from hours to minutes. So I'll have to set up a proper firewall. Yeah, there's definitely some I mean, Unify is one of those companies in obviously TP link copied off them as I've made plenty of jokes about they disrupted the market by making it a whole lot easier to do configurations. And this is something like Cisco just doesn't care about. Cisco's like, we're not going to make it easier. We're going to keep it complex and then charge you for training and everything else and make it more complicated. Yeah, captive portal is not a security measure, not really a security measure. No, I would not call it that it's more like a agree to these terms and conditions for these rules. And sometimes it's a quick way for your guest network to put parameters on your guest network. For whatever reasons, I wouldn't call it a security thing. Well, it's a legal security thing because sometimes in some jurisdictions, you may have to not provide internet without people agreeing to terms and conditions. There's there's that's come up a few times where I know people have very specific uses because of the jurisdictions and rules that they become responsible as opposed to most of the US is protected under common carrier. But you want it that can get convoluted really quickly. Common carrier means I'm just a carrier. I'm not responsible what people do on my public Wi Fi. Some places don't see it that way. So it can be a legal security measure. Let's see. Thank you very much. Appreciate the compliment there. You need to overclock your Raspberry Pi. If you decided to overclock your Raspberry Pi, please make sure you put good cooling on it. That's obviously a critical maybe a fan or some active cooling. What are my thoughts on FS switches and routers? I haven't used them and I'm not completely familiar with what they're using as an operating system. So I think they seem to make some cool stuff. But without being familiar with the OS running on them, it becomes a little bit more convoluted of how good they are. It's not really I, you know, you see people would always kind of separate hardware software like oh, a hardware router is better years ago. But honestly, everything is in some way driven by the software. And the software now matters almost more than the hardware. So it's yes, you really have to ask that question when you're doing anything. It's like, what is the software it runs? Is it easy to use? Is it manageable? Mikrotik kills it when it comes to price. Mikrotik has some of the best prices. I like that Mikrotik at least realizes that they have a complex system. So they offer switch OS switch OS is a great system because it allows you to use Mikrotik without the complexities of everything else in Mikrotik. So yeah. Um, any videos on free switch free PBX on the future? Not really. I don't want to become the free PBX guy as much as Chris is from crosstalk because I don't know it as well. And it's not my day to day support thing. So we in when we get support requests for it, we just forward them on the Chris. We don't really do a lot of free PBX support. It's not our mainstay. So I don't do that many videos on it. Two fans on your Raspberry Pi. There you go. Even better, better than one fan is two fans. We are working on and I had poked around and I could probably pull this up on photos. Maybe yes, this thing. We're definitely I drag it over here. How does this work? Sometimes I like I like using this, but it's also sometimes confusing when I'm still figuring out what to share. So we're going to stop sharing, share a screen Chrome tab. I guess I hope it's this one. Yeah. So I have this and this is a Raspberry Pi holder for Project me and Jay from LearnLinux TV are going to work on. So this is kind of a cool thing where Jay's built. He's building out a larger scale project, I think with Kubernetes and Raspberry Pi, but it's kind of a fun lab project. And so this is going to be a rack mounted. We didn't we just got printed last two years for it. But that's what this is going to be a whole rack mounted Raspberry Pi that holds I don't know how many are here. I think it's going to be 12 all together. So so definitely that's going to be a fun upcoming video when we get around to building that. Now they have all these windows open. I know which one's which. There we go. Cool. This is one thing about I've heard more than one person mentioned to me is TP link doesn't have a long support. It's confusing with TP link sometimes or end of life because their end of life ends up being when they stop supporting it, but don't tell you they stop supporting it. And yeah, that's yeah, that's a problem. Have we checked out DSM seven kind of I have a DSM seven running, but DSM seven is not officially out. So it's still in beta if I'm not mistaken, unless it came to release. It's not in release yet, is it? If it is released, awesome, I should start upgrading things, but I at least have one system that was running the beta that few of my staff are looking at it looks pretty good. I wonder if I can log into it. I wonder if I can remember the IP address of it. I'm guessing right now. I found it. We'll share it in a second here. It's probably an update for it. Anyways, let's get rid of this, this move this over. Stop. Share screen. This is what the new DSM looks like. It's got a nice look to it. Packages are out of date. Yeah, you can tell we haven't been playing with this because it's got updates it needs. It's it's a few version behind will download it while we're doing this. So you get the latest versions on it. But I really like this analogy platform. I think they're doing a nice job on this pulling some of these new things over. I don't know what's on this surveillance station. Some of the packages. Definitely. Definitely pretty cool. Oh, that's too it doesn't show. Let me switch real quick. If we switch tabs, share screen Chrome tab, I didn't realize that those weren't sure over there. So the super stickers, they apparently show up. So very thanks. Thank you very much for the donation. It's much appreciated. So I like that you can do the stickers on there. I wish they shown though. Hey, we got Cody in here from Max kelp Mac telecom networks. He has a great YouTube channel. If you haven't checked it out, if you've looked for any unified stuff, you'll probably find his channel too. We definitely do some unified things on there. This thing updating update now. I love doing updates while we're live. Go back to sharing that screen. I understand whatever I'm, did anyone read these terms and conditions? Oh, 10 to 20 minutes. Wow. Okay. That will take a minute. We'll let this thing go. It can't be worse than Windows update right? What a what a dumpster fire that's been. Windows update has been not great lately and very problematic. They've had just so many things going with Windows. It's just been it's been less than wonderful. We'll just say that. What are you going to do? You two Lucy on this. Oh, perfect podcast. I'm all over the place on my live shows are me and Cody want to clear we'll make this happen right now. Hey, Cody, you want to collaborate on a video? There we go. He can answer it that way. I have no problem. I like collaborating with people. It's the tricky part sometimes is just finding a what do you call it? The right video to collaborate on. You know, it's not that we don't want to it's just trying to find a match made for that. I've never had any problems with Windows 10 update as of Windows 10. Yeah, once you run an IT company and you manage many, many computers, you see many, many problems with those systems. Bleeping computer has been pretty on top of it because it's been a bleeping mess. But yeah, this every time there's patch to say there's an I was the I'm trying to remember they had a whole bunch of them. There was I don't know. I didn't even go I tweeted them. I don't care to sit down and talk about Windows problems. It's just there's been a lot. Windows 10 has not been. It's just it is what it is. I don't think they're doing enough QC. I don't think they care to because they know they have a monopoly on the market and I think Microsoft is just kind of like they want everyone to use whatever they have in the cloud. I don't care how you get there. Use whatever tools you want to get there. Use whatever external systems you want. Microsoft's goal is that their goal is not to keep building Windows or making it better. So it's kind of a it's just it's a mixed bag with with Microsoft and all their shenanigans. Well, while that's counting down, we'll switch to a different screen. So it's boring to watch a countdown to a screen to put the chat back up. There we go. I don't need to be big for this. Yeah, Microsoft cloud is a different animal to itself. It's yeah. What are you going to do? Close all the windows, for sure. Oh, this is so true. The QC is really who complained about what? Let's put push it in production, see who complains and fix it later like next patch Tuesday. This is, I mean, I shouldn't complain because if Windows worked perfectly and didn't have all the problems, I would have a lot less to do or I should say I would have a lot less to bill for from our, you know, our managed services operations that we do here. I mean, honestly, Windows breaking something and randomly breaking all the printers. What was it? All the Kioser printers and a few other commercial printers broke. It's what are you going to do? There was a fix for it who had to load it manually and whatever we that or we could write a script and manage it with our tools. But nonetheless, that required our management time to fix what Microsoft broke. This is a common scenario that happens. So what are meant to use we use solar winds. We've been using solar winds for a long time. Well, Enable now, by the way, they're not called solar winds anymore. They're called Enable. Conica Minolta printers. Oh, yes. Yeah, those are the ones I think that were broke was it it wasn't Kios here was I thought maybe it was Kios here and Conica either way. There's a long list of course it was. And here's the thing. The home users usually went going, what Windows 10 printing problem? The commercial industry is like, it's on fire. Everything's on fire. None of the printers print. It's a very different problem. Because they seem the breakage focus well affected, I should say, it's not like they focused it that way on purpose. It's just that's what it broke. So yeah, is what it is. Here, Windows 10 will be deleted soon. I keep one in a virtual machine. But yeah, I mean, I don't I even I got Windows seven in the before the service packs. That's how long ago I got rid of using Windows as my main operating system. So I mean, I service Windows, we fix Windows systems, we manage Windows systems. This is how we make money here at Lawrence systems, or at least one of the ways we make money. You know, network engineering consulting, we do a lot of different things here. But the managed services part is specifically managing all these Windows computers and people's computers. So that's why we're so familiar with it and deal with it at scale because the problems happen at scale. Oh, let's see. Hey cool. The NASA's back. That's neat. Let's go ahead and sign into it. Hey, now I have the latest version of the DSM will only spend a few more minutes. I have to be out of here at five p.m. Eastern time, which is 15 minutes or now. So that's how much longer we have for this particular show. Sorry if people are hoping I was going to go longer on here. Share screen Chrome tab. So here's the latest DSM now that I updated it to the latest one. Doesn't look nice. Here's the package center. Ooh, ah, as far as I know, it's still in beta though. Is there an about DSM 702 release notes? As far as I know, it's still beta. Yeah, release candidate. Let's do this. Stop. Share share window. There we go. It is a release candidate still, according to the details here. But that's great. That's we're getting there. I know I'm I've heard from a few of them. July is there full over when they want to get a release. So that's that's exciting. We're getting there. It looks nice. Like I said, I like the system. We're we're big Synology fans. I kind of we started doing a little testing with Synology and just said, wow, this platform really works. This is a solid solution. And I need to do so I realize a few people didn't realize that Synology does such a good job with and this was in a forum, not on my post here, did such a good job with hosting virtualization as a storage target. That's actually something we've been testing for quite a while. And I reached out, I know some people that use it heavily in some larger environments. Synology makes a solid storage target. We have really had all of our lab testing and a couple deployments have been extremely favoring. The speed from the Synology actually surprised me. Good cost ratio they have between, you know, what does Synology cost you and how much performance we were able to get out of a Synology on a 10 gig connection using both iSCSI and NFS testing. So yeah, I'm actually I was I see one of my staff jumped in here. I was even talking to them that maybe next week, I'm going to I'm in too busy to do it, but I will just delegate that process to them and share the results in a video of doing a series of speed tests under different scenarios with the different Synology configurations with the, like we'll just do it with XCPNG. But honestly, whatever hypervisor you're using doesn't really matter. We're talking about the different performance aspects of like NFS versus iSCSI. And then we'll repeat some of those over on TrueNAS. Now, Synology better than TrueNAS? No, I would say Synology is a competitor in certain aspects. But when you get to the enterprise level, sorry, Synology enterprise, depending on where you devout where you changed that or move that line to. But once you get up to the real big areas, it's no doubt that TrueNAS scales bigger. TrueNAS is able to go a level higher than Synology. I couldn't propose right now some of the solutions we've done, the scaled solutions we've done in IAC systems over in the Synology. So I mean, I think Synology is a really good fit, sometimes even a better fit for certain small business scenarios because of the softer packages Synology offers. You know, we built out backup systems and architected some of that for companies using Synology to be able to back up everything to a central Synology, backing up all the local workstations. It's a great setup for things like that. I think it's really good. And because of the no license that gets attached to it, it can be a compelling solution. And so if you have an office with like 50 computers in it, you can buy a decent sized Synology to back up all 50 computers and your servers and act as your file server and then replicate that data over to the Synology cloud or somewhere else offsite to another Synology. And you can build a really robust solution that doesn't have a lot of recurring costs just has some upfront costs to get this going, but doesn't have a high recurring costs. So that your total costs of ownership, let's say in a five year lifecycle of hardware becomes very reasonable, you're going okay, you know, let's so let's say we're going to put this in over the next five years. What does this cost versus what does something competing costs? Have I worked with NetApps? I have not. I have also had people who have who told me don't, they don't like them that much. And they when they've compared them, they've told me they like TrueNAS a lot better. The same goes for peer storage. And matter of fact, one of the other people I talked to someone who used to work for Dell EMC and they quit and they said they after Dell bought EMC and their product solutions just weren't that good. So yeah. So I don't know. I'm not a big fan. I have most of the time and granted it's a bias I have. We're bringing people away from those other storage proprietary unusual storage solutions over to TrueNAS and the enterprise market sales that we've done are often that way. So it's kind of like they're it's just not the same fit to say, oh, they were going to use NetApp or they were going to use the HP Nimble server and they're comparing it to TrueNAS. Once you start using the software on it, you realize the software that TrueNAS puts out is far superior to that of the other companies. And yeah, so it's it's all those things like it's it's I don't know. I'm not even interested in really digging into any of the NetApp ones. Plus all the reseller agreements and partner agreements are always a pain. Hey, awesome. Congratulations on starting your IT business last year and handling four companies. That is wonderful to hear. Love hearing that. What else do we have? Have you got a full video on how to set up and secure a style? You know, don't open it to the Internet would be the easy way to secure it and don't put it keep it up to date. The good news is style G updates easy. Don't put it on there. The problem with doing a how to secure a style G NAS video is you is people go well I want all these external services. The moment you offer external services not behind a VPN or anything like that you immediately start increasing your threat surface. So it's kind of like really easy on the on the inside of it to just say don't use those things. But the reality of what people want to do is use those things. So there's not an easy way to stay secure because here it means not setting it up to the full capacity of remote access. So if that's something you're willing to say, yeah, I only need it internally. Great, it's secure. If you want it externally available. Now you have a problem. Yeah, like Eric said, this is a solution we we put this together for people Synology Active backup Hyper backup for Synology C2. It's a great system for that. Yeah, Nutanix is interesting. I think we're still going to see a lot more market disruption though from these big companies compared to you know how it actually plays out like it's cool. But I'm we're seeing companies move away. I just really like this company we did some consulting with and are moving 2100 virtual machines off of their ESXi over onto well now it should be passed since it's all done. But moving it off of ESXi over to XCPNG 2100 VMs. I mean, that's a scale that's a lot and you can do it. There's a lot of data centers running XCPNG. So it's it's it's getting interesting in the market because when you see an open source product that you can download for free, but does have support does offer support agreements does offer the things that are important to enterprise that you're not just using something you're using something that has a support plan behind it and it's works. It's not some toy something to think about. I have never used Borg backup. I like the name. I've never used it. Recommendations for web hosts. Not really. We don't really we used to do web hosting. We still host some things on a to hosting. It works. But I don't have any I don't have any particular love for them that there's all the web hosting companies have sunk down low. It's a race of the bottom who can do the cheapest which often means the least amount of customer support. So I don't really have any particular companies and I don't spend much time evaluating different companies to tell you who's good and who's bad. So I don't have much of an opinion on that. We just see a cross vendor integration think on site data cache, mythology, main data deposit, TrueNAS. That's not really realistic. From it depends. If you're scaling vertically, if you scale something vertically versus scaling horizontally, there's different ways you could actually implement some of the things like that. But it also requires the software to be aware. And this is where you can get into things like distributed file systems more like stuff or something larger enterprise. But I don't think you would include Synology and that list there. That that becomes a whole different discussion of storage architecture. We are moving to XoA to people get XoA support XoA NH. It kind of depends on the client. And we reach out to them and figure out which support plan you want to buy with them. The best people to talk to other people selling it and tell them the scenarios that you're working with and they will tell you the support plan that's best for you. They're really easy to talk to. It's it's actually a pretty easy solution. I'm using let cause open next hot on open not certificate is that secure enough. I anytime you expose next cloud to the internet, you're going to potentially you're opening yourself up to people attacking it. So yeah. How is how bitwarden going and looking to get off last pass. I like it still using bitwarden. I don't use Citrix next scaler. So I'm not clear what alternatives there are for Citrix next scaler. So yeah. I don't not sure what replacement. All right. We're down to the final round here. Last couple of minutes. What are questions we want to throw at Tom? I didn't I don't have I don't think I have any. Do I have any new interesting things to off topically share? I don't use a piehole. So I seen someone asking about it. I don't use a piehole. I just use the default list. I don't care as much about ad blocking is probably a lot of you do. Yeah. There's no interesting photos for me to share. I mean I was at a car show not that that matters much. I don't think anyone cares about that. Sauce. Oh, it didn't cover any hot sauces. Yeah. Small cheap NASA solution. Synology or DIY true NASA. Motorcycle news. I don't have let me see if there's anything in here I can't share. How's that? We'll start with that. Is there anything Tom can't share? I got to make sure some what I take. All right. Cool. I can share the screen. Ha. Can you always show me to take as this question? Yeah. Oh, hit the like button. I don't know how many people have been hitting that like button. I'm not paying attention. Oh, we have a lot of people hit the like button. That is great. Awesome. Thank you. All right. Let me go ahead and stop this screen share and start another share. Share screen Chrome tab. All the crap in my photos. Let's see here. Oh, someone will laugh at this because. We got a new EFF stickers. First thing my staff does is stick it to a screen and do that because we're childish. I got this cool picture of the bug that was stuck to the wall, stuck on the outside wall. So I brought them inside. This this made the bug very unhappy, but I wanted to play with my macro lens. So then I turned the bug away and let them lose. Oh, this is some spicy vodka that I have. I took a picture because someone never heard of a Chipotle flavored vodka. I made it across this bridge on one of my old motorcycles. I think I probably shouldn't go across that bridge in my motorcycle. It's really getting bad. It's my wife always asked what I'm doing sometimes when I'm out in the woods for a long time. What are you doing? And I'll just send her a picture. I call it my proof of life pictures. Oh, I shopping for furniture. I was seeing how much tires cost for my motorcycle. These are then I was at a car show. So this is the car show stuff. Oops, don't check that box. That's my Tesla for those. Oh, have you tried to pulse or stick with the Tesla? I'm sticking with the Tesla. Need a video on reviewing pfcents how long to actually tow a particular machine is not able to connect. I have a troubleshooting video for pfcents. That video exists. Tom drinking game next time. Someone asked me to take her open sense. You have to drink some vodka. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, I shouldn't. Like I said, that bridge is getting a little sketchy. I ride across it and I was like, it's getting bad. What else did Tom do? Oh, more car show stuff. Oh, this was cool. This is the new Ford Mach-E if you haven't seen one before. It's got a frunk. This is at the car show. He's one of the Ford engineers that worked on the team designing it. More pictures of Tom's Tesla at the car show. What else is down here? Oh, more cars. Oh, I was at the the party at the airport. So I did that. These are all the things I'm doing when I'm not doing this. Taking pictures of cars. I love these old Lincoln's with the suicide doors. Another car show. This is my friend's Hellcat. I love this thing. That glows in the dark, by the way. This is also the first generation Ford Lightning. Well, technically second gen because there's one before this is when Ford made the Lightning truck, which now they make an electric version of. And then there's this guy who showed up at the car show and just stuck everything to his car. I'm just like, I don't know. Before I scroll down any furthers. That's something else interesting in there. The motorcycle pictures are from two weeks ago. So yeah, fireworks Fourth of July fireworks. It's an event they do over on the island. So as far as I know, is PIA still compatible open sense to my knowledge? It works fine. My staff use it. I don't use it that much. Yes. This is for sure. It is called the Motor City for a reason. Detroit Motor City where they have birthplace of the automobile essentially. Well, the automobile industry. And yes, there's definitely a rich, rich car history here in Detroit. So that is absolutely a thing. What else do we got? I don't think I got too much else. Close that. That'll stop that. How to join the giveaway. It is in the comments down below. And it was mentioned at the very beginning of this. So you'll have to go ahead and watch the beginning. EV bike. When they make a good one, EV bikes are cool, but they have very limited range and they would definitely be more challenging to ride right now. I've looked a few of them up and until the range gets reasonable, like they are. The car is easy. I can go places. The bike is hard because I want to go off-roading and you're like, oh, yeah, by the way, you can only do I do a lot of, you know, off-road riding and I'm like, if I can only go so far and that's it. That kind of limits it, especially because of how long they take to charge. There's a new company that came out with some I've been looking at. They make a pretty cool bike that has interchangeable batteries so I can buy an extra set of batteries. The downside is they're just stinking expensive because by the time you buy another battery, you're like, oh, I'm $10,000 into a dirt bike that is not nearly as capable as what I already have. So, yeah, it's it. But the cool thing is they're coming. And like Eric said here, once battery technology becomes more compressible, the bikes, yes. It's an energy density issue is one part of it and the efficiency of the motors is the other. This is one of the advantages Tesla's held over a lot of the competition is even when they put the same size battery in an equivalent vehicle, it doesn't go as far. So watt hours stored in these batteries at some of the competitors are the same as Tesla. They get less range because Tesla's more efficient power delivery system the way the electric system or delivery system the way the electric motors work. So, yeah. They are getting there on this because the four by four system I think it's going to be huge when they start getting that better because of the low end torque and not having to switch between like four-wheel drive low and high. Having that direct drive at the wheel with high low RPM torque is going to be a game changer in the four by four market. It's going to take a while before they get there. But yes, the Harley's 30K and only has 150 mile range. Yeah, that's kind of the problem. It's up there at the price point of a Tesla with half the range of a Tesla. So, speaking to Tom about automotive is the same as beating a teacher to go off topic. Yes, I love motorcycles and cars in firewalls. So, those are definitely places I will wander off. All right. That's enough for today. I do have another thing I have to go to dinner with friends and all that fun stuff. Yeah, I'm running late. I'm running late but it's cars. Well, how far to go? I have meeting some friends for dinner at 5.30. So, yes. So, thank you everyone for joining and awesome seeing so many people here. Thank someone whoever mentioned the Sonology DSM needing an update. Thank you for that because now on the latest version and it's a release candidate not a beta. So, I know we're getting closer. But awesome. Hit the forums if you're interested. All you got to do is post. Follow the link below. Provided you're in the United States and we're going to give away that Cisco. Sometime next week I put the date and details in there. But just, you know, post a message in the forums. Join the forums and have a discussion. Hit me up on social media places like Twitter to interact with me or see the stupid memes I post or, you know, all that fun stuff. And thanks for joining. All right. Appreciate it. Bye.