 I don't know what they expect I get some negative comments on That's all I got. It's people like, this isn't what I expected, but I don't know what they expect is they never reply to that question, which always makes it curious to me. Like it says live stream Q and A. If I put something in the live stream, I like if I have some context, I try to make sure that's right there in the front of it. But hey, unless here I am, got a couple of ideas and things I wanted to talk about and I figured this is the audience for it. So I'll put this at the beginning. And the first question really is, I'm always looking at different ways that don't involve sponsors to monetize the channel. And I certainly don't wanna go through generic ad reads. Those are just terrible. I mean, I get it. You gotta advertise. It takes money to run the channel. There's an alignment there. Oh, let me grab my water. Got something in my throat. But the challenges with those advertisers is of course some of the influence they may have on things. So trying to think of what would be more useful. And I know Chris from Cross Talk Solution, he holds some in-person classes. And I've thought about joining him on those in-person classes. But on the other side, I've also thought about just holding online classes, selling some seats to do a training on a specific thing. So I'd sell maybe, I'm trying to figure out how many people should fit in the class if it's like 10 to 15 people, maybe 20. I don't want it to be too wild or there's too many questions. Generally when I do talks at some of the open source stuff, there'll be like 25 or 30 people in there. And it's usually only a handful that ever have questions. I don't know if it works really the same for online courses. But let me know what you think. You can throw this in the comments. And if online courses are something you'd be interested in and maybe I'll put something like that together or I'm not gonna stop doing any of the other tutorials on things and changing it to classes, it's a way to offer people a one-on-one live class. I'm not gonna sell pre-recorded classes. I know it's funny because if you talk to business people about creative enterprises or what I do, they just tell me, I'd make way more money if I packaged it all up and sold it. And I'm like, I'm just not big on that. I'm just trying to make sure that all of the content is as much as possible, is as much as reasonable, which is pretty much all of it. I give away for free, but offering something extra going, hey, I'm gonna do this class, but I'm going to do it live with 20 seats available so people can do Q and A as I go to make sure that they understand it. And then for each section of the class, the way it would be taught is I'd have one of these online courses that I would be a live teacher for. And then in between after each section, is there any questions? Do the Q and A with people to make sure they understood each part of the course material, then move on to the next one. If that's something people are interested in, yeah, that's why I agree with you. I was 20 might be pushing it, but this is something I'm thinking about. I just wanted to throw that thought out there. I feel like you've asked before, what do I think of the VMware Broadcom thing? I already have a video on it. I mean, VMware being bought by Broadcom is going exactly as expected. Broadcom, I thank them for the clarity they brought of what they were going to do. They didn't hide it. They said, we're going to increase all the rates. We're going to listen to the noise and ignore it or not listen to the noise and just ignore all the small businesses that complain because they don't make up our revenue as much. Most of our revenue comes from the big companies. Big companies aren't gonna switch. They're just gonna pay more and they're gonna complain about it, but then they'll write the check and success. It's one of those things. What if register has that? The register, Broadcom VMware. I guess I got to put the register in brackets so it finds it. One of them. It was last year's article, it was so good. I have to dig for it. As before, I was using my journaling software so I have a hard time finding it, but it's one of those things where they just read through the earnings calls and read what the Broadcom CEO is going to do. So, let's see. Always interested in all the courses, even the stuff it's already known, never stopped learning. Yep. Yeah, if I can make it reasonable and I can sell enough of those, that would definitely be a way to avoid having to deal with more sponsors to keep the channel going. If not, insert name of whatever sponsor that I do. I get more sponsors reaching out to me. I just don't always like doing all the sponsorships. I want to try to minimize how many I do. And on the sponsor topic, there is definitely some contention I have. I'm noticing more YouTubers and I think their audience is not realizing what is or isn't sponsored. Not only that, the sponsor mentioned doesn't seem to come till far later in the video and I think that leads to confusion because if you don't watch it to the end where at the very end they go, thanks for blah, blah, blah for sponsoring this video. You're waiting a minute. Your whole talk was a excited talk about this product and how wonderful it is. Then at the end, you're like, hey, by the way, they made me to say these things. I don't know. I'm trying to avoid some of that. There's no real policing of that on YouTube. There are rules. There is Federal Trade Commission rules. They don't have time to chase YouTubers. They're so busy with trying to enforce rules against companies that they're understaffed and overwhelmed with dealing with that they don't really take the time to chase around YouTubers they're doing unless those YouTubers make millions of dollars and somehow get noticed by the FTC. So I don't know, that's kind of my little rant on that topic. Eventually the big companies might transition away but you gotta figure out how the life cycle will work. So the CEO comes in, buys VMware, makes all these changes, makes a bunch of money, destroys the pipeline that made VMware popular. So the usage actually starts trailing down but not right away. And then that CEO makes an exit in four years and gets a giant pat on the back, writes a book of how he made $10 billion in profits off of buying VMware. You know what I mean? And everyone reads the book and like, oh, look, this dude was so smart. Look what he did here. And the reality is he destroyed the company but the aftermath of it later, no one really thinks about. It'll be a footnote. What's more important for TrueNAS performance? Single thread rating or more cores, more clock? Well, if you have workloads that require multiple threads then multiple threads are gonna be better for performance. If you have single threaded workloads, like I have a device connecting then you're gonna wanna faster clock. So the answer isn't which one's faster, the answer which workload do you have and you have to match it to your workload. Frosty hello from Germany. Yeah, it's still pretty cold here in Detroit as Travis points out. Travis is not far from me. 24 degrees Fahrenheit. I don't know what that is in non-freedom units. It's 24 freedom units. We need more hygiene ads. Yeah, what is that one, the shaving one that everyone does? IT is a work of repetition, so it's good to hear others think and about a solution and what approach they use. Need to get a new laptop to daily drive. What are your thoughts on Tuxedo and looking at the Tuxedo plus? You know, I think J from LearnLinks TV has reviewed the Tuxedo ones. I've never used them that I read. Well, no, I think I've messed with J's but I've never owned one. So I have not read, I just don't have enough information on it. But yeah, I don't know enough about the Tuxedo ones. I think the framework ones are the most promising looking ones out there because there's a lot of hype and popularity about it, but it's hard to say. The Seneca IP I said on WAN is in the same RFC 19 I received from DHCP and was able to get internet but no DHCP WAN equals no internet. You can turn that off if you're talking about PF cents. There's an option to not have it checked for RFC 1918. My former customer had tens of thousands of VMware VMs. Ooh, eight to 10 drives, what's the best configuration? Once again, depends on your workload. These, I have an entire forum post, let me pull that up because that way we can just keep linking back to it. There's a reason I wrote it off like this. And what would it be? It's called true, find this one right here. There we go. We will share this on the screen because this is the same question everybody asks and there's not an answer to it that isn't contextually related to how you wanna do things. So get that zoomed properly. Capacity, performance, integrity, you can't have all three. You pick which one is better for you and that's how you set it up. If you want the most capacity, you put them all in one RAID-Z, RAID-1 VDEV, will give you the best capacity. You want better performance or the most performance. Take nine drives and put them each three in their own. You're gonna get better RAID performance on there but you're now sacrificing integrity and you're also sacrificing capacity. So which one is for you? Just finished the server upgrade to 2012 R2 to 22 R1. It's a camera server run from thinking four to six hours and just finished in 20, oh good. Oh man, escaped, that's the one. I gotta admit, Jeff from Craft Computing has the best advertising for Manscape. He puts a lot of time and effort into his ads. I really appreciate what he does there. I would buy a framework just not available in my region. Oh, okay. Yeah, if what's not available changes the dynamic quite a bit. Has anyone used NetBox? I know it's inventory of your network devices but I can probe scan network on Mancliad inventory. I already needed that. It kinda depends. I'm kinda gonna do a video on NetBox at some point because I'm gonna build my new lab with it. It depends on the kind of plugins you have but you can have it do things and there's actually a NetBox plugin for XCPNG and with XCPNG it will auto build that information so you don't have to manually add everything there. There's still gonna be a lot of things that are manual but you can have it tie into your infrastructure so when you create new VMs they will link automatically in NetBox. I haven't set this up. I've only just read through the docs on it so it's on my to-do list to build that. It's just not on my done list. I got a few other projects I gotta finish first. I probably would have bought a framework not available in Switzerland. Yeah, more people saying, is that really kind of a US thing? I don't know. Is there limited availability of framework once you get outside the US? If you have no intention of having internet can we just use Layer 3 switches instead of VLANs and routing? I don't understand your question. You can use a switch to route traffic between subnets but I'm not exactly sure your goal. What do I think about Cisco and SDN? I mean, Cisco's popular. It's not a bad thing to learn if that's your question. Which cloud provider would you say is good as backup? If you're talking about like storage backup I've used Backplace for years. I've always been happy with them. It's been very reliable and works and very compatible. So Backplace has been my go-to for a lot of my Chernas storage. Oh, let's see. Nick Mullen ad reads. I'm not sure who Nick Mullen is. Hi Lawrence, I've been working on the EVE project of lately but I have not been able to configure or install my Raspberry Pi 4. Do you know what's the easiest way to do this? I don't, I mean, they have the Raspberry Pi image tool. That's how I would load a Raspberry Pi the easiest way. Windows laptop and AdLinux or Linux laptop and AdWindows. I don't run Windows except for in a virtual machine. So for me, it's always gonna be a Linux space in a virtual machine of Windows. That's kind of my solution for that. Imagine Jeff making a Lawrence System ad. Yeah, I could do that. I'll give Jeff money to make a Lawrence System ad. I've got a AMD framework about two months ago. Kicks of crap out on Lenovo X1, cool. What do cybersecurity or data science? What do, what to do, cybersecurity or, oh, what to do? You gotta follow where your curiosity takes you. That's the biggest thing. That's why it's maybe harder for me to give advice because I know where my curiosity takes me but I think that's like good advice if you, which one makes more sense to you? Because if you do something just because you're like, hey, wait, there's more money, my annual pay is probably better right now in cybersecurity than data sciences. I don't know that's true. I'm just saying if you think one or the other pays better and that's your only deciding factor, go where your curiosity takes you is a little bit better because that way you're going, hey, I'm happier doing this. And honestly, I could make more money doing something else. I make good money, but I know I can make more money doing some of the other corporate things but I would be very unhappy. I have myself been lucky because my curiosity is aligned with things that pay me really well, working in tech for example, but ultimately I do try to optimize for some happiness because I have some friends that make way more money than me. Their unhappiness reminds me that I have made a better choice in my opinion. Like they can't wait to be off work, they can't wait, they don't look planning for retirement because older age and things like that, that's their goals is like, why can't I get the hell out of this business because I hate work in these places? So think about that as one of the deciding factors for your career if it's possible. Did check everything, but it's saying devices using SIEM IP. I've struggled with this before from AP and Switch. ARP doesn't show duplicated max. Yeah, it might be a better forum post. I'm not exactly sure where your problems are. I will now set a mount crown job. Hmm, I'm assuming this is referenced in a framework. They're new all countries, therefore returns and support go from the country of purchase from the framework, got it. Is there a way to use two 10 gig ETH ports to get a 10 gig, that we can use two 10 gigs to get 10 gig over to a NAS? Usually once you start going more than, you can use a 10 gig, but when you go more than 10 gig and you can bond them together, you run into limitations on the speed of the NAS like the drives themselves. Synology cloud, yeah, we've got a few clients using a Synology backups, they work great. I think they're very reasonably priced. I posted on the forums a few weeks ago that my tail scale not working as per the video guides you have, however, I finally got my tail scale working on P of sense after the album not setup change. I thought that was covered in my video. I let them watch, I double checked the video, but I haven't had any problems. I wanna make a new tail scale video because there's some changes that I think are worth noting. They've added a lot more features to tail scale. How do I get a job at MSP as a tech when they don't advertise postings? Knock on doors and ask. Just say, hey, send your resume, figure out who to talk to, reach out to them, connect with them on LinkedIn. This is, my career advice is usually not using the system because I've never used the system. I've always, all my jobs are not because I filled out applications. And I've only had a couple, how many jobs? I've only had a couple jobs and I haven't applied for a job since 1998. So my information is also a little bit dated. I will completely tell you that up front. But from being on the other side of people I hired, I didn't ask them for their resume. Usually they reached out to me and that's how I ended up hiring them. Well, my curiosity takes me somewhere I usually lose money. Yeah, that's true too. Did your eyes feel relieved for such glasses? I mean, lens coding? Yeah, these do have a coating on them. It's supposed to be better. I don't know. Thanks for the great log windows video today. Awesome. I figured, there's another video I'm about to release that I needed that video to be out there because it had its context that I have to reference in the next video. The other video is recorded. It's an interview with a cybersecurity specialist. It already flashed to my Raspberry Pi, but the problem is that when I started, it hangs on restarting 120 seconds. But after 10 minutes, it doesn't work. Try a different card? That'd be my guess. Cancelology directory server be added to Windows essential servers as a backup DC and promoted for base area? No, I don't think so. I've not used it, but I don't think that's possible. My homelab, I'm converting half of it to host XTPG from VMware as a proof of concept. Do you know any gotchas already discovered that WS 2019 won't uninstall VMware tools after import? I don't know any other gotchas. I mean, removing the VMware tools is not really a gotcha. Just you can Google how to do it. There's ways to manually remove them if they won't come out of the system properly. So, hey, what's your preference? PF sense or open sense? You know, I wrote this up the other day and it still holds true, but it's getting closer. We'll share this tab real quick. This is an argument I've had with people all the time. They tell me PF sense doesn't have as many updates, therefore in their head, not to the truth, in their head, they're going, well, that means PF sense must be behind on security. PF sense does update less frequently than open sense, but yet, and I left links to all the different forum posts on the last six months of security. Open sense, which is finally getting in beta, I think, of the open SSL problem, it's they're behind on all their security updates. This is one of the reasons I've pointed out with open sense that it's, I don't hate it or anything, but it's trailing behind because it relies on NuttGate to do contributes to the free BSD system, then open sense pulls from free BSD versus NuttGate contributes to BSD. Therefore, NuttGate is generally the ones on top of security much faster. So this is a link, I will let anyone who wants it just to read, it's in my forums, it's the open sense versus PF sense security debate. So that's why I prefer the PF sense. Let's see, what do you think is a must have network appliance will go with PF sense? Well, let's see. Anybody experience issues with their L2T ITV6 access VPN after updating PF sense plus for some reason after update couldn't access my LAN devices under PF sense. I don't really have, I mean, we have some corporate customers using IPsec. I don't think any of them are using L2TP. I have like nobody using that. I would actually, and you've mentioned it right here, I would use WireGuard. One-off question would you ask scale and TDRR, what is TDRR? Then using Windows as a node, will it show up on the TDRR server? I don't know the TDRR server. So TDRR, never used it. Distributed transcoding system. So I have no idea. My video from XCPNG from sources work like a term, awesome. Yeah, I made that new version because there's been so many changes. Really love that one, it's just, it's a great setup. What security layer do you apply to protect your forums? Just making sure it's all up to date with automatic updates. I rely on the forums security of what do you call that? Discourse, the company that writes it, I rely on their security of it. I don't run anything special on the server. Can I use AWS as a free tier as a VPN client? I don't know what their limitations on the free tier are, so I'm not sure. Cool, stood to toes in the realm of immutable OSes. I saw the Fedora OS and I think I love it. I think it's interesting, but I have not tested any of that. PF Sense dual-WAN IPv6 on both is fine. Unfortunately, IPv4 for Comcast is not a trade. Everything beyond rebuild of PF Sense, but I don't think it's a PF Sense issue. We do HA on Comcast, I'm not aware of any problems with it. We have, Comcast is popular in Michigan, so we have clients running that. Do you know any good resources for how to monitor and interpret Samba on TrueNAS? Monitor and interpret. I mean, you can use the logs in TrueNAS to turn up to a verbose logging, but I'm not sure what your goal is. Greetings from Libya, awesome. I don't use Proxmox, so I don't know what IPams are good for it. Can you have a VPN connect back to my house with the ISP router or would it need a switch? VPN to connect back to my house. We need something that can support the VPN, like PF Sense to be my go-to for that. If you don't have a PF Sense, you can look at other tools like overlay networks like TailScale. TailScale's pretty awesome. I'm gonna do some new videos on it. I'm also gonna work on a new NetBird video. I did one, just mentioned them, and I've talked to the NetBird people a couple of times, so I am looking forward to doing an updated video on NetBird. I think they have a really cool product. And it's self-hostable. So I'll throw the screen up here. They're making some updates. They have a new version coming out, and I told them I will wait till their new version because they're doing some nice interface updates. So I'm gonna wait till that new version comes out. And this is just NetBird.io, but I referenced it in one of my other videos. I'm really impressed with how well it works. Like all my testing has gone really well. I'm waiting to this new version and I'm gonna do some more testing with it and before I do another video. The overlay networks are definitely really cool. You know, there's an article here. Before we do, yeah, this article here. I thought this was kind of fun. And this is a nice retro readback. This is me just jumping topics here, but I'll throw it in here for anyone who wants to read it. I thought this was fun because I was a Y2K certifier back in 1999. I was part of the team working on this where we had to run around testing everything and validating that it would work. Which by the way, if you're wondering how do you validate whether or not something works for Y2K, you just roll it forward. You set the date and you see what happens. Does it die? Does the date roll over or not? So this was a lot of testing that had to be done on a lot of different equipment and it broke a lot of things. But you know, we slowly went through and fixed it. But this is the thing. Everyone called it a big nothing like nothing happened. But I used to be aggravated because everyone calling it the big nothing. I'm like, do you know how much work and how many hours? Like for, we started on the project almost a year in advance because at the time I was working for a big supplier. So I thought it was all like, when everyone said nothing happened, it was like me and IT people go, what do you mean nothing? You know what we've been working on for a year while you complained about us working on it for a year because we're supposed to be doing other IT things. I was like, we did this as a community, like not just I was a participant and I was in my very early years of tech, but still I understood technology enough to understand what I needed to do to make this testing happen. So I thought this was a fun look back on the nothing happened, why to gay bug and how the industry worked overtime to save the world's computers. And it brought back memories of me working overtime to save the world's computers. Yeah, it was, it was a fun think back and time for that. What do you say connect car infotainment systems and not knowing that to click? You know, it's worse than that. It's worse. It's Ford, which is the local big name here. They're literally got their headquarters relatively close to here. Ford Motor Company drops attempt to patent tech allowing lenders to remotely metal with cars as if they didn't stick more garbage and tracking stuff in the car. They go further in trying to allow remote access to have the cars. Ford had a whole patent idea to have the car drive back to the dealership. And I'm like, really? So yes, so what do I think about it? Screw those companies. That's what I think about it. I mean, I'm quite the privacy advocate for those that didn't know. And this is no exception. I don't, yeah. Ah, can't wait for the net beard video. Just got a t-shirt from them last week since we're in touch with them daily. Great, hey, awesome. I know they sent me a shirt too. I don't know when it's gonna arrive. I know it's been shipped. Because they told me, they asked me for my address and said they shipped my shirt. I was like, awesome. When I hear people talking about poking holes in their ISP router, clearly you don't understand that. Firewalls are just figured forward it. I think the X key CD drill holes in the new house. Yeah, there's been a discussion about that amongst some of my friends because I'm in the car-centric world of Detroit. I've seen a few discussions going around of, we're just gonna go back to old cars that don't have all this extra technology. No, I miss my old Chevy truck. I'm not gonna lie. I really, I wonder if I have a photo of one of the truck. I built several trucks. I'm gonna go off topic here, but there is a nostalgia I have for those because of the simplicity. Where is my old somewhere? Oh, maybe not. I thought I had a picture of it. Yeah, oh well. If I keep looking, I'll just get more distracted. Where did my orange truck go? I have owned numerous hot rods over the years and that's, well, I've lost it. But yes, they're all old school. I really like the old vehicles. I started my IT career thanks to Y2K. We had a number of Y2K things that we had to update, interesting in-house configuration stuff that broke without testing ahead of time. It would have been the great, nothing. Yeah, it's all that testing that went in there. I've recently started my own company in UK having issues getting on the partner programs. Any advice? Persistence, that's all there is to it. I hate all the partner programs and everything else. I was never involved in that many of them. The only partner programs, even after 20 years in business, I mean, we used Pax-8, we used TrueNAS, 45 Drives, some of the things I've talked about on a channel. It just takes persistence and paperwork. I hated dealing with all of it. Now, there's a truck right there, Toyota Hilux. Let's just, if it wasn't for Whistlin' Diesel buying them all, I think he made them pretty popular. I used to like cars now. I just think about being stuck in traffic so it's getting from A to B, yeah, true. I don't care about cars as much as I used to. I was really into hot rods and building them when I was younger and I just don't. They're point A to point B machines now. I just like, and I don't even go point A to point B. Point A to point B for me is studio, couch, occasionally grocery store. This is my studio, it was at my house. So I did that on purpose. TrueNAS scale question, I just did the change and set up to mine OS to test access, have traffic running, can't access the game server and site issues. I have DuckDNS at point B. I don't use traffic, so I don't know enough about it, but DNS, making sure your DNS entries are where they're supposed to be is huge. That is most of the time people have a problem with HE Proxy. It's not HE Proxy, it's DNS. I think I have a video titled DNS and Certificates and that's what it is, is figuring out DNS and certificates because they're almost always where the problems are. HP buying Juniper, how do you think it'll end? What were we calling it? I have that, I posted somewhere on Reddit. Let's see, there was something, I talked about this on Reddit with people. I can't find it. We were just making fun of the different stupidity around it. I don't think it's gonna go, it's gonna be terrible for consumers. No matter which way you slice it, it's worse for consumers. There's no good for the consumer market that will come out of it. That's my prediction. Track back to home ISP. I can't get the port with port forwarding set in my Unify switch. Don't understand the question exactly. You're asking how to do port forwarding in Unify? And are you sure you're getting a public IP address and are you sure your ISP isn't blocking what you're trying to open? Some ISPs block ports. And if they are blocking ports, you have to then talk them out of it. My blind or net bird does not support 2FA or U2F. I don't know. Let's log in. I have a net bird system stood up. Users, it doesn't appear to have a 2FA in it. They may have one in a new version. I have not updated this. So they might have it in the new version. I don't see a 2FA option in here. So you might be right. I'll have to look into that. Hi from New Zealand. Welcome to my TV. Thanks for all the great feeds. I know very little about networking, but thanks to you. I have a PF SenseBox up and running while I glitch. That is awesome and congratulations. I'm not big on Piehole. I use Ublock Origin. So someone was complaining in my forums about my website not working properly because it's something they had blocked and I don't understand why it wasn't working. But one of the reasons I like Ublock so much is because if I go to a website and it doesn't work, I click a button and it works. And I can fix it immediately in my browser. And I don't have to worry about having DNS. I mean, use it if it makes you happy, but honestly, it's not something that I care about as much. Xfinity blocks L2TP IPsec. Hmm, my ISP blocks only port 25. Yeah, that's very, most ISPs block port 25. For good reasons, they should. Most of your email receiving, your large email inbound companies, they block all the IP ranges, the ASN blocks that are assigned to ISPs. They just block them by default. They're like, yep, if you have a IP address that's in the Comcast or one of the ISP ranges, they just blanket block all of it. They support IDPs and you'll use 2FA from the IDP. Yes, they do identity provider. That's right. I think I mentioned that in my review of them or my shorter video that they have IDP support. They use Zidadel, I think it is too. So you, it depends on how you configure these things. This is even like technically, tail scale doesn't support 2FA. You could say that, but the reality is tail scale doesn't support identity. They let, the identity is not their business. I think they have some line along that. Like they let you choose your identity provider and then from there, that's how you decide if you would like to have 2FA with your identity provider which I think is fine. I don't blame companies for not wanting to be in the identity provider space. I have seen a lot of your shirt dance videos. I now have tried about eight hours, set up a paperless NGX. I still don't know how to back up the database. Maybe I should reach out to you. Post in the forums as well, but I'm not exactly sure what paperless NGX is. I'm not used that. No, if you want better filtering in PF Sense, I'm sorry, there's not any good filtering in PF Sense for websites and it's about to get worse. Not because of PF Sense, but right now, Cloudflare is really pushing the encrypted hello which has all the privacy people going yay and everyone who wants to filter everything going oh, no, there's no good filtering and filtering is gonna get harder and harder as we encrypt things. There is opposing forces. The people who want things encrypted for privacy are celebrating, people who want to do things for filtering are going oh, we can't filter things as easy anymore and it's getting harder, yes. What ISPs do you like to work with? There is no such thing as an ISP I like to work with. I don't know any of them that I said wow, these are great people who are really on top of things and don't cause me lots of headache. I can't even name one that I say is wonderful. I'm impressed when they work. Like if they just do their thing and don't give me bad information and fill out the sheet and give me the IP address and it works without me calling them, I'm impressed. I shouldn't be impressed. That's like the lowest bar. Like it worked as expected more frequently and yeah, I've had some real headaches in the marketplace. I've dealt with so many companies. I've had ones that blame me. They were mad because my client wouldn't buy their equipment. Therefore they blamed all of it. So we had them bring their equipment out. They couldn't make it work. And I got the biggest sigh of ah, it's not configured properly. I'm like, hey, that's what we told you assholes for two weeks. That was my exact reply because I could not let it not slip out when they couldn't get their own on-prem equipment to work. So yes, yeah, I've watched these people screw up. People with big expensive circuits and fiber circuits, I've watched them screw up. I had a guy who even, my favorite time because the owner lost his mind over it, the owner of the company that we were working for. The person goofed up the config, locked themselves out of the box. The only thing we requested was an upgrade from 500 to I think it was 750 was our next tier. So we went from a 500 circuit to a 750 circuit. It was just so hard talking to these people on the phone and a guy led us aside. He goes, I'm really not experiencing this equipment. I've just locked myself out. They go, what does that mean? I don't know how to get back in and I don't know when a tech is available to help me do this. I'm just gonna jump off the call, click. I'm just like, and the circuit was down. And we're like, well, the circuit's down and now what? So ISPs, I'm happy if they work. I'm impressed if they work. I found some nice ethernet to 4K HDMI stuff on Amazon. If you have two gig fiber it can make a little latency VLAN for it maybe. I don't know, I've never tested any of that stuff. What's a better way to map configurations of L2, L3 switches and routers besides GNS3? Oh, I don't know. I don't really have an answer for that one. I usually just draw all my stuff and draw it on IO but I mean, there's probably GNS3 and other tools for mapping. I just draw it all. I can also draw it all from my head after looking at some of it too. So I don't really use a lot of third party tooling for that. I mean, in a commercial side, we use Aavec which draws it for us. So is it just me or is it a blurry beer can on a left screen here? It's not a, now I can be blurry. So my microphone is not fun on the screen. Yeah, so if we move it to the edge of the screen there now we have less of a blurry beer can. Can anyone help me with a lab portainer? I'd like creating a new container for it to be automatically added to my bind nine. Is that possible? I don't know if a live stream would be anywhere we could type all those instructions to do that. Hey Tom, great video as always. Did you ever complete your TP-Link OMADA testing? I got bored of testing it, it's buggy. It's a buggy product. That's how I feel about it. We've done some consulting with other MSPs that bought it and my techs have told me that they just disliked all the bugs that they found in it. It's like a knock off version of Unify that's barely, it's a little bit less expensive but not as high quality, not as on top of security, not as well documented. It's like, you get what you pay for. Unify is already pretty inexpensive compared to Cisco, Meraki, Juniper, et cetera which I know it doesn't have the same features. It's not exactly the same category. And TP-Link seems to be just a cheap knock off. What do you think of Piehole and the Enterprise? Never used it there. Don't really have a plan to. Thanks, do you have any YouTube videos that have a good solution on how I can get my whirlpool to work on port 102.2 when my ISP blocked the port on a network VPN, thanks for everything? Probably, I mean, look at things like tail scale when your ISP starts blocking things. Look at tools like tail scale. I've got a video on how to use tail scale with PF Sense. It's a good solution for when ISPs block VPNs. Trying to run HA file servers in SMB and HomeLab can't find a good info. There's not really any good write-ups on that. I mean, the way you, the enterprise way to do it is with Ceph clusters. Outside of that, I don't know that there's any other good ready to go solutions. And setting up a Ceph cluster to do it, not for the faint of heart. It's definitely a really, someone's gonna complain and say it's easy. I've gone through Ceph training. I know what it takes and I've worked with some of the enterprise ones. I'm not a Ceph admin. My friends at 45 Drives are. They have the best tutorials on how to do it. That's a very beer can microphone. I should just wrap it in like a beer can now. You guys are giving me ideas. Hey, Tom, is the union profile as strong as PF Sense? Strong is not the right word. Features, does it have the features you want? That is the biggest question. For example, I mentioned tail scale a couple of times already on this and tail scale works wonderful with PF Sense. Tail scale does not have a plugin for UDM and I don't think they will. And that's because UDM has their own solutions for magic VPN and things like that. So I don't think they're pushing any third party products. So if, turn my heater off, if you have the features you want in the firewall, that's more what it comes down to than anything else. Ever noticed issues with iOS using local DNS and Pyhole iOS seems to not resolve host names, despite being pointed there. Yeah, this is another challenge. A lot of these will not, will bypass even browsers by default and you can change this. They want to use DOH, therefore going around your Pyhole. I believe that's what browsers are doing by default right now. There's a discussion in my forums on that topic because I think that's just the way the new defaults are. So you have to go in and turn off DOH. Like I said, I don't run Pyhole, it just doesn't interest me. And I like Ublock, that's just been my solution. Is buggy software ever cheaper? Nope. I just watched your great log video and you used, are you using that instead of Blumerra for Windows login? Just know we use Blumerra for our clients. I use TwinGate as my VPN, it's secure and I don't have to open any ports. I'm doing a PF Sense Unify with VLANs. I'm set up on a lot IoT VLAN for my home assistant. How do I go about securing it better? I mean, setting up my VLAN for my home assistant, how do I go? I think you just don't want to open it up to the internet, we'll say that. But as far as securing it better, I'm going to need a little more context. Most of these devices are secured by default until you start opening up ports to the internet and allowing different things to access them. Nutanix has HA, yeah, there's other, there's plenty of commercial companies selling high availability SMB NFS. It's not, you can get it from Synology too. It's not that it's not available. There's just not any good open source projects that do it. I know at some point in the future, it's in very alpha, beta and more alpha, I think right now. SureNAS is working on it, but even they are going to require a license for it. I don't know any free open source, good resources I can point someone at to set up HA with NFS or SMB. There's just not a lot out there for that. I mean, Ceph is probably the biggest one out there, but there's not like a press button, load this config and automatically it works. There's nothing as turnkey as loading like a TrueNAS to get high availability on that. Budget Home Lab on Dell Workstations using Proxmox Bare Metal. Any suggestions? Buy some Dell's. I don't understand the question maybe. I like the mini PCs versus the old Dell's and the reason I like these mini PCs is because they're so low wattage, but there's now more of these little mini computers coming out. Which ones are those? The little Lenovo ones are pretty cool too. I don't spend a lot of time reviewing them. Check out Hardware Haven because they just did some on the mini forums ones. I thought those were pretty cool. Wendell from Level One Text, he's reviewed a few of them as well. I just don't spend a lot of time looking at them, but there's definitely some options out there. We deployed the UDM Pro for a client going from PF Sense. I miss a lot of the features and the client, the client was used. Yeah, that's the thing. It's, if you don't need the features, I mean like for, I have a UDM at my daughter's house because she doesn't need any of the firewall features. So yes, Dad just gave, he didn't put a PF Sense in for his daughter because I knew the UDM would work. Do you think it's a good idea to have my PF Sense box behind my ISP provider router? Double Natting creates its own headaches. So generally I try not to do that because if I open a port, I don't want to have to have some other box in front of it. So I prefer not to have double Nat. So what do you do to block kids from accessing sites they shouldn't? There's software out there. I don't really, my kids are older. So this isn't an issue I really deal with. Commercially we use a product called Zeros Z-O-R-U-S, but that's a commercial software out there. I'm sure there's other commercial softwares out there to babysit kids. I don't know what the names of those software. I don't know how good they are. That's not really a realm. I don't really deal much with the consumer stuff like that. Are you thinking a mini PC at each port is cheaper than ethernet converter at ether port? I'm missing something there. I'm to the party a bit late. Would you consider doing a deep dive into TrueNAS build speeds, network processor speeds? I'm starting a DevTek 8 series card seven, eight years ago, yes, the next projects, I have a couple of projects I gotta finish. Then I'm doing some deep dives. The order of my deep dives is gonna be XCPNG because there's so much demand on that right now. So I'm gonna do a deep dive with XCPNG, a getting started 2024. I'm gonna do a PF Sense 2024 video and then I'll do a TrueNAS 2024, like getting started hour and a half long deep dive video. Excuse me. Serve the Home has some really good mini server reviews as well. Arista versus PF Sense, I've been on Tingle for years with the Home Protect Plus. Does PF Sense have all the same features? No, matter of fact, Arista's not been too bad. They're not a terrible solution. I don't know how good they're, it's been a while since I used them. We have a few clients left. We're not really pushing that as an option for our clients anymore because I don't know. The product seems to work, but I'm not thrilled with the interface. But if you're happy with it, I would stay with it. I don't think it's a bad product at all. The Arista seems to be maintaining it. That's probably your best bet for filtering. They have some decent filtering in there and you do not get that level of filtering with PF Sense. TailsCale just added subnet routing to Apple TV. Yeah, that's pretty cool. This is one of the things I really like is not just for clustering, but they're just low power. I'm running a bunch of random things on this tiny little mini PC. I'm like, why do I need to build a big fancy server? All the projects, the gray log demo I just did, for example, I did the whole thing on a little tiny Ryzen mini PC. Like these things are low power, low wattage. They don't make much noise and they work great for projects. Any advice on how to use Mikrotik RouterOS as a switch or multiple physical interfaces with VLAN? Read a lot of their documentation. There's also a YouTube channel called the Network Berg and he has some good videos on Mikrotik. Is it possible to trigger recording on my unified cameras? I have some sensors alert me if movement and I like to trigger recording when those are triggered. Not that I know of. This is a bit specific, but I run a UDM Pro and a something UV printer. Mimaki, I'm guessing I'm probably saying it wrong. The printers show on the network and link status, but I cannot send any jobs to them. I mean, if you can ping them, then you know the routing's working. I just don't know what is required to send a job to them. If it's a TCP, UDP connection, is it using some broadcast traffic? Is it split across VLANs? I see there is a light Linux and I use an old Samsung Tablet. I don't know which ones. It kind of depends on what processors in that tablet. You'll have to figure out if there's a distribution that supports whatever processors in there. For filtering adult content, for example, for home as well business, use something like Next DNS or Control DNS or probably work fine. Yeah, you can do that, but usually people want to be very specific and they only want it for certain family members and not all of their adult viewing habits to be curtailed. So you probably would have to look at some type of application and a load to control those individual devices. As far as you know, who makes the smallest PC that also has one, three and a half inch hard drive? That's a serve the home post. I really don't know. Most of the mini PCs are MVME now. There's not as many of them that are supporting the like three and a half inch drives until you get into the NAS. If you're looking at the NAS boxes and yeah, you're gonna be able to find some stuff that does that. Can you suggest a good HomeLab config start? Well, where do you want to go with your HomeLab? Are you looking for the hardware itself? Mini PCs are like we were just talking about serve the home being a channel that has a ton of reviews. Patrick really runs through reviews. I think those are really good starting, but some people build Raspberry Pi Labs. And I think Raspberry Pi Labs are awesome. I've been playing more with Raspberry Pi lately cause they're fun. And I think they just make a really fun project to get started. They're actually one of the least expensive ways to get started on some of the projects as well is look up Raspberry Pi projects, find yourself a Raspberry Pi and take, you know, go where your curiosity takes you. Hey, thanks for your tutorials. They've been very helpful. I'll put your recommendation on an OS for running Home Server NAS with four 16 terabyte hard drives. And I would not, I'm not a big fan of Unrayed. I don't really feel it performs as well. Well, as a matter of fact, I know it doesn't perform as well as TrueNAS, but some people really like it. I have always gone with TrueNAS. Watch videos on each of them and decide which ones you want. If you look up TrueNAS, you'll find a lot of my videos. If you look up Unrayed, I think it's a channel called Space Invader One. They have a lot of Unrayed videos. Walk through each one of them and weigh the pros and cons because Unrayed's fairly popular and I don't know of any problems why you shouldn't run it. I just know it's not going to be as performance oriented versus if your demand for performance is there, you're going to have to go with TrueNAS. Would it work with PF Sense in front of the Unify gateway? I want to keep Unify doing the routing as much as possible, just PF Sense. I have a PF Sense and Unify video to put them together, but it's a headache. I wouldn't do it. I did it because enough people ask about it and it's a fun learning opportunity, but it's not something I'd run in production. But I have that video breaking down the different scenarios for setting it up. When should I use MVME drives in my TrueNAS? Is a mere RAID ZXA better choice? I mean, MVMEs are faster so maybe I don't understand the question. What are your thoughts on BIOS compared to PF Sense? Thinking and moving my PF Sense to that but learning curve is high but it does containers. It would be the question of do you like my Dodge truck or would you like a giant freight liner that can hold 40,000 or haul 40,000 pounds of things? BIOS and PF Sense are not, I mean, they both are firewalls and the way I compared that two different trucks are not really the same or I guess if you're overseas it'd be a lorry. They're not in the same category. There's nothing wrong with learning BIOS. I think it's great. But if you even look at the licensing unlike at the commercial version of BIOS you'll realize they're targeting a very niche enterprise market. I think their licensing is something like 25,000 a year or something along those lines. It's pretty expensive. It's on our website somewhere but I don't think anything wrong with BIOS just be prepared that it's a big learning curve. Is that what you're interested in learning? I don't know BIOS myself. I don't really have an interest in learning it because we have zero customers using it. Well, I can't say zero. I know some that use it but it's not the part of the customer we deal with. Have you ever tried Paperless NGX or any other document processing program? Nope, I have no need for them. I don't really deal much with anything that needs to be paperless. I mean, years ago I did when I managed IT 20 years ago for the corporate world but I just don't have a use case for any of that. Even like our business everything's just digital documents. So we don't have any paper or work. We barely use the printer at our office. How risky is it to boot TrueNAS? The problem with booting TrueNAS off of USB is ware leveling. The USBs generally because all the logs are gonna get written to it as the system runs you're going to possibly wear out that USB. So it's not really a risk it's just a failure mode that you'll run into of, hey, we've wrote to this and now it can't be written to anymore. It has now reached the end of life. They do make high durability at USBs. So that's the way you mitigate it. Did you deploy Wi-Fi seven? No, you know, if you're in the commercial world home users love Wi-Fi seven they're all excited about it but the commercial world goes we are sending kilobits, not megabits kilobits of data and we want the most reliable connection possible which means I deal with it a lot less. It's just not that there's not much demand in the commercial world for Wi-Fi seven. Anything commercial like, you know we have editing and design firms and things like that especially the, we have a few movie editing companies for clients, they always hardwire everything if they have a demand to have it fast it's getting hardwired in. How about I see my TrueNAS config to the cloud provider along with my data there's not a way to automatically sync your TrueNAS config. You just have to back it up. What home NAS setup would you recommend asking for a friend? Definitely a TrueNAS. Do you keep MVMEs to edit videos directly off the NAS or spending rush is good enough for that? It kind of depends on your setup and we will pull up my setup that we were on the same page here. So in my network ooh there's a new version of TrueNAS scale I got update to. I'm not doing that, I gotta do that later. Yay. Actually if we go here pull all the data for the enclosure these, if you can't guess by their name flashy, these are my four flash drives I have and then these ones here are spinning rust. The way the spinning rust is configured though I can if we go back over here like the storage I can edit on both. So these are four 1.75 terabyte drives no problem editing my 4K 60 all my video is done at 4K 60 right here is a RAID Z2 eight wide nine terabytes and this is also fine so I can edit my 4K 60 files on here as well no problem scrub through content so if you have enough drives yes you can still edit on a spinning rust. What does dual SD and Dell PowerEdge risky with RAID 1? I mean now you're writing the two of them and as long as you use some high endurance SD cards they should be fine. I've got a whole video on firewall I share my thoughts on it. I don't use one. I mean, I don't hate them or anything I think they're a good consumer device. Nikkeyt 4200 or 2100 for a small office with 60 people oh definitely a 4200 if they have VPN needs. Will you make a 2NAS video when you add it to Active Directory? Yeah, I'm gonna make a dedicated Active Directory one. A few days ago, power supply for Univice Switch 16-part view a diet I'm unable to give a new one does ubiquity self-spare parts or equipment? No, you're probably gonna have to hunt them down in eBay I'm not aware of any spare parts that they sell. Is Xabix useful enough to be deployed at large companies? Yes, it's used at very large companies. There's a really good Xabix talk given by a school district with like 30,000 devices or something crazy. So Xabix definitely can scale. You just have to really take the time to learn Xabix. It's not a set it and forget it. It's not a turnkey solution. It's a you have to put the time and effort to configuring it to making it useful. Online courses, because I've never taken any online courses I've only given them, I don't know. And I mean, I've given them through YouTube and things like that. I don't have an official course yet. But I did mention at the very beginning in the video that maybe I'll work on some official courses. I don't know which ones are good. I will say, they have an, is it ACI learning? IT Pro TV, which then became ACI learning. I think they're good. David Bombal has some recommendations for some, I think it's Udemy courses. What cloud-based hosting do you recommend that is cheap to? I like Linode. I've been happy with Linode. My website and several things are hosted on Linode. Yup, there will be no free version of VMware. They have killed all the free. Have you ever deployed NetApp disk shelf on a client playing around with in years? No, I have not used NetApp. I met someone from NetApp though. I didn't used it. TrueNest Core scale for simple home storage, maybe VM storage. If you're gonna use any VMs or any features like that you're gonna have to run it on TrueNest scale. TrueNest scale is your personal home NAS, which makes it over core, the apps. I'm using a few apps on here. Net data, for example, and sync thing. Sync thing's probably the biggest reason why I have scale on here. It works perfectly fine for me. Oh, I do have a, I think I got, yeah, one virtual machine running too. So my virtual machines run on there as well. I have a video, I'm assuming you're talking about TrueNest and their permissions. I have a video covering permissions on TrueNest. Cause you wanna use the, I did the video on it. You wanna set up the, permissions properly on this, what are they called? ACL permissions. So I have a video covering that. NetSuite Oracle have used it. Nope, I have not used NetSuite Oracle. I avoid Oracle. I think they're a truly awful company or at least their CEO is truly awful. Therefore they do awful things like sue people, send out takedown notices and licenses. They're a bad participant in the tech community. Will the PCAE slot and Minisform MSO1 support LSIHBA card? I wanna connect to you MSO1. I don't know, cause I've never used the Minisforms MSO1. Yep, I've done, I've talked about NetData and I've talked about the NetData cloud. I think the NetData cloud is pretty cool. Although there is someone who was commenting on some of my videos, they are so angry at the NetData cloud. They think the NetData cloud is a slap in the face of open source because net data charges for their cloud and doesn't give it away for free. And I'm like, well, they give the product away for free that's open source. And this person has left comments because they are angry that the cloud exists. And I'm like, well, you don't have to use it. But I wanna use it cause of the cool, you know, aggregation features. And it was like, well, you can't wanna use a service that costs money and get mad when a company doesn't give it away for free. But I think it's cool. I think the NetData cloud is actually really nice. Hey, I love your channel. Just installed TrueNAS scale last night. Awesome. Thank you. No more VMware player free. Yeah, they're just destroying all the free stuff. What do you deploy monitoring metrics? I see a lot of Prometheus Grafana on self-hosted YouTube. People really like Prometheus Grafana. The reason I like NetData so much is it works really easily without having, it's the easiest one to set up. That's my biggest reason for using NetData is it's simple to use. Doesn't mean you shouldn't use the other ones. If they're the ones that you like, if you prefer to set up Grafana, go ahead. I don't know any reason not to use it. I just don't feel like doing the extras that it takes to get that working and setting it up. People turn Grafana into a full-time hobby playing with it, which is fine. I mean, I just don't have an interest in dashboards. Not enough, but I look at the NetData one and go, hey, look, this is easy. I can set this up. I can look at some data from these. Look at the data that's turned off right now. See data from my Unify controller or whatever I want to look at. I think my website's in here somewhere. There it is. Look at data from my website. It looks pretty. There's the traffic hitting my website, people visiting and things like that. And I didn't have to spend, I mean, the reason there's so many YouTube videos on Grafana is it just takes a lot more to set it up. You get some really great information out of there, but that's what it really comes down to is how much time you want to put into it. Never heard a blue coat proxy and I don't recommend anyone use squid. Does you even have a development API for programs you want to add additional functionality to it? I think so, but I don't know how well documented it is. What are the flash drives that save your keys? Are you talking about, they're not really that you save your keys on them? Are you talking about the Yubi keys? What do you think about the risk level for using end of life hardware? You know, as long as you're not exposing the management interfaces to the internet, you can generally get away with it. The big challenge right now with enterprise hardware in the home lab is how much electricity it uses. Usually where people have a lot more problem. Hi, Tom, we finally able to get a couple of Unify Express, one of my home and one on another site. Everything seems to work fine. Question, how can I check from running double NAT? Does your WAN have a public IP address? That's the question. If your WAN has a public IP address, then you're not necessarily double-natted. What is the best way to secure a Plex server open to the internet from your personal data stored on the same machine? Don't open it to the internet. That is my advice. There is a lot of good VPNs out there. Use them and that's the better secure. If a risk, the risk of putting it out there means you expose it and if a flaw is found in Plex, your data may get owned. Now, ideally it's containerized and there shouldn't be too much lateral movement because if you've only granted Plex permission to something specific, let's say the data that you use for your media, then you're safe because that's as far as they could get if they crack your Plex server. But you're also relying on the people at Plex. So I think do a good job. I don't think there are no slouches at security, but hey, things happen, flaws happen. Last pass got hacked because of a flaw that was found in a Plex server. Any recommendations in mail servers? I have no recommendations. I usually recommend people don't run their own mail servers because it's a headache. I thought about going through a video talking about all the challenges you'll run into with a mail server. It's a good learning exercise. There's a reason I quit running mail servers because I didn't feel like dealing with the headache of, you can receive mail, it's delivering mail. You have to use a third-party relay service to deliver mail. Do you ever deploy radius with unifying networks? Not often, but I think we've done some Windows ones out there. We've done a couple of consulting jobs on it. There's not that many people that request it. Server of the Home has a forum on PCA cards that they've tried. HPAs seem to work other than a multi-purpose card for concerns of lack of cooling possibility. Yeah, that's something that's worth noting that some of the HPA cards definitely need some room to cool. Trying to find what HomeLab dashboards you're using. What am I using right now? I might look at a different one. I don't love this one. I just happen to be using it. This is Homer, H-O-M, is it H-O-M-A-R-R? Yeah, Homer, H-O-M-A-R-R. Everything should be free. No one should charge for everything. Yeah, yep, yep. 300 people only, yeah, 300 people on my live stream, but not enough likes. Click those likes. VMware blog December 11th, free for persons who just stay. Well, they say, for now, until they change your mind. That's a problem. See, a problem with any proprietary software. You're renting it until they changed their mind. They're the landlord. They're controlling the product and they decided that the free, it's the same way right now. They're defining perpetual licenses. They were called perpetual, but they're perpetual, which I think it's dumb because they're only perpetual as long as the company wants to give you a perpetual license. And then the company goes, you know, we got bought by another company. We don't need those perpetual licenses anymore. There's no foster clothing, a blue coat. Squid is buggy and I don't believe in squid proxies. I don't understand their use case here in 2024. Caching proxies don't really make any sense. Installing certificates, so proxies works, makes even less sense and generally makes more headaches. What website host dashboard would you recommend such as virtual admin or cyber panel? I don't use those things, so I don't know. I mean, Cpanel is what we've always had for our hosting stuff. It seems to work. I don't know if there's something better out there. I've never really researched it. So we recommend open source proxy solution that supports VRP, AD authentication, LACP. I don't recommend proxy solutions. Let's see. Yeah, unpatched plexus, how last pass got hacked? Yep. A flash drive you put in your TrueNAS keys, import data and store somewhere else. Not sure what you're talking about there. TrueNAS, I'm curious if I get the same transfer speeds of 45, 60 transfer between 50 gig machines, Mellanox, MVME. I don't know the, understand the question you're asking. What do I recommend for spam filtering? We use a MIMECAST. Neither one of those tools, neither net and top or net data are gonna diagnose a bad link, ethernet or optical. I mean, they may show, you may figure out that there's certain amounts of package dropping, but they're not really tools for doing that. Concerning moving from VMware to XCPNG must, we use XOA, also considering a change from 48 to PF Sense is that a good choice? I mean, 48's gonna have certain features that PF Sense won't have. So that comes down to, do you use those features? You know, the content filtering that's been coming up here in discussions, PF Sense does not have good content filtering. You know, I've had a few people that have reached out to me going, we would like to swap our 40 gates because I don't wanna pay licensing fees anymore to PF Sense, but I need the content filtering. Then I'm like, then you don't need the PF Sense. There's not a solution in between. They are Darth Vader. Yes, they've all taken the book out of the Darth Vader business one, for sure. I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it further. Any hope of getting a unified fiber modem? I don't know. I don't think I'm ordering one. I do need a drink. So I'm going to be right back to after I do that. So yes, that fluke would be a better thing for diagnosing cable problems and things like that. Protecting one's business is important data not to be cheaped out on. And that cheaped out is just because it's expensive doesn't mean it's good. Cisco's had some seriously dumb flaws lately. And they're definitely on the side of expensive. Fortinet had some egregiously bad security. They're definitely on the side of expensive. So unfortunately, you can't equate cost there. What are we drinking today? It's middle of the day. It is not drinking, drinking time yet. It is Tom's out of water time. So I will be right back. Let's see here. Have you tried using sidekick? I've seen it but never used it. Don't really have a need for it, I guess. High time, is there a difference between Ubiquiti Gen 1, Gen 2 switches other than the LCD screens, more like feature software or less hardware or similar? Yeah, I mean, you can read the specs. The Gen 2, I think are where they started the better cooling systems in them. Oh, and instead of water, I did find, if anyone's wondering, peach raspberry, whatever this is, something random I bought. Most Fortinet security was identified internally and transparent. Oh no, it was not. If you read about the magic backdoor, I've got a whole video on the magic backdoor. They screwed up and accidentally put a VPN backdoor in their system. And the security researchers going back and forth to them, it turned into a presentation at a hacker conference and it just put them in a horrible light for coding practices. They just didn't want to refactor their code. Their code was full of bugs. So we've seen Fortinet vulnerability after Fortinet vulnerability after Fortinet reliability from exploitation in the wild, not through clear proper disclosure. Matter of fact, they argued with the security researchers. So I would say Fortinet is anything less than transparent. So to keep running out of post space, Churnass capable supporting one and a half two gig transfer speeds based on number of drives. Yes, it is capable. It was capable of much faster than that. Are we on the 404 stream? You know, it's been an hour and a half. I don't feel like I'm going 404 today. I need to bring my friends in for the 404 stream. That's going to take a lot more. And at some point before sunset, which is a while from now, I do, or maybe I can do it after sunset. I kind of want to go chill out on my hot tub. So that would cut into my hot tub time. Is this where we try the website again? Ha ha ha ha ha. Everyone broke it last time. Does syncing a nice cloud plugins on Churnass core work, not work well? I would say no plugins work good on core anymore. If you need plugins at all, they're just dying on core. I don't know what the current status of some of them is, but basically they seem to get more and more broken and they lack maintainers. I've never really spent a lot of time testing the band steering. I guess it works. I don't know if it works really well or not. Do I use Kaspersky? Nope, but I did use Kaspersky site to create that I'll be right back soon thing. The Kaspersky map is really cool. Yes. What pool VDev config? What Churnass with two, two and a half inch drives and four NVMe slots? This count includes a boot drive. I would boot off on the two and a halfs and then build, I mean, you don't have any options here. That's a small number of drives. You would just take the four NVMe's and build them into like a RAID Z1. Do you have how to set up a VPN connection filter by PF Blocker? I don't understand the question, I think, but I have a PF Blocker and I have a VPN video. And if you want a device across your VPN to use PF Blocker, you'll have to set the DNS settings in there. Any Vodka NetJuice? No, I don't think so. It might work in here. What are your thoughts on virtualizing PF sensor projects, CPNG? I prefer not to, I have it in my lab. I don't prefer production systems like that at all. And the reason why is just the bugs people run into and it's harder to troubleshoot. I mean, I know how to troubleshoot it, but I've watched people do it and they go, oh, I've never used any of these tools before. Let me start there by virtualizing it. It's a good way to learn, but it can be a headache to troubleshoot. Nick that will work with XCPNG and MiniPC, Intel Base, go Intel and your life is better. Just avoid real tech. And that's not just an XCPNG, avoid real tech and your life is better. How well does PF Sense work on a Xemaboard? I imagine it works just fine. I believe I've loaded it and not had any problems with it. It seemed to work. Feedback on the random bottle of liquid. It is apparently got six essential vitamins and I taste them all. It tastes good. Would you consider deploying a dedicated DCEAR for 2,000 plus clients on PF Sense? Well, you shouldn't have 2,000 clients on a single subnet. You should have that probably divided up so it doesn't have as much broadcast noise. But I mean, PF Sense, we've got 4,000 on another one. So I know it can handle it. It's just a series of different subnets. I've never used Portmaster. Hey, bearded IT dad, how are you doing? I should have you join one of these live streams sometime. I can just send you a link. When I'm not at home, I use my VPN to my home. I wanna save some ad blocker, security with PF Blocker G or a VPN connection. Yeah, you can just set the VPN options. You can push the DNS. That way, the DNS should be your PF Sense. And if you got PF Blocker, it will help do that. And by the way, if you don't follow the bearded IT dad, he does some good career advice stuff. I've done a video with him as well. So definitely go follow his channel. The fun of learning career advice. He talks a lot through that. That's an important aspect that I get to hang out with him at Vid Summit last year. It was definitely a lot of fun. How long ago did you start learning computers? I actually have that on my website. So if we go to my website and we go here, my first computer was a TRS 80 in 1986. Yes, we can do a live stream now. I got a message. We have a group and we have a group chat with several people that you may have heard of on YouTube, which includes the bearded IT dad and Jeff Geerling and Jeff from Craft Computing. And yes, we all chat from time to time. We need to get together more to do live streams together. Subnetting then segment based on location and purpose. Yeah, and that's the fun. If we all learn together, that's the fun part. Yeah, I don't know when I'm gonna do this. I have started the template for, so this is my story I have posted. Now I'll share a link for those wondering. This is on my website now, but this is something else I'm working on. And hey, feel free to offer your opinions. What all should I be putting in here? Do I have this pulled up somewhere? Well, yes, I do. But I was gonna walk through. People always ask me questions like, hey, how did you get started in IT? What was your first computer? So I'm gonna make a video that'll be embedded on my site, kind of walking through that. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time talking about my childhood, but I will talk about all the business stuff that I did. When I started Lawrence Systems, another company I had that I no longer have called Suburban Electronics Computers, PC Pickup, another company that is now gone, started my YouTube channel, updated my studio, stopped all my retail operations, was actually a year before 2020. And 2023 is when we merged with CNWR, and this is what I'm doing today in present day. But let me know what you want on that story. It's something, like I said, I'm putting it together. I've got a template where I've started putting together slides, because I'll walk through it. This is my slide for what it looks like when you start a business. By coincidence, this is the year I started my company. Unrelated to me starting my company, but this is the year I started it. So this'll be the part where, how did I get here and how did I start the business? But this is me doing Y2K testing. This is from 1999. That's when this photo is from. But I've documented a lot of my life. So I can walk through all the things. And for people wondering when I was a nerd, this picture isn't just me when I was a kid. The thing you, will it present? So you can see this bigger? What do we got to do? View slide. View slideshow, duh, it's right there. There's a calculator in my pocket is what I wanted to point out. I've had a calculator in my pocket long before I got one in my pocket all the time. So I used, then I went to the wristwatch calculator. So people ask how long I've been a tech nerd, quite a long time. Ever since this is like me running a firewall. Does it got a date in there? No, those are IP addresses. I don't see a date. You can have my IP address from, oh yeah, there's dates right here to bottom. This is from 2002. So this is me hacking away at firewalls. This was at my house back in 2002. So yes, yes, I've been doing this. I've been doing this for a minute. Netbird, TwinGate, Talescale, have you tried Netbird Self-hosted? Yes, I just recently talked about Netbird Self-hosted. If you search Netbird, there's only one video on my channel and I was talking about some of the other overlay VPN networks and the Netbird Self-hosted was really easy to set up and I thought was great. So I definitely think Netbird's awesome. C64 and 84, there you go. Good old 133 Pentium. I experienced remote backups for Synology. Active backup, I have a 350 mega ISP upload but only seeing 824 megs upload and an ass, quick and act, Talescale VPN. I don't know. Not sure what's causing the slow. Might be Talescale. Try using it. You gotta do troubleshooting. You gotta try it without Talescale, connect it to a local service, figure out how fast it is and do all the troubleshooting. But my story thing I'm gonna work on, a lot of people ask the questions a lot. I try to do tutorials but I guess people are interested in more things than I necessarily think about. They are because I don't, I feel like it's a self-indulgence of me just to talk about myself on the channel. But then again, I was completely wrong about this and let me show you something I was wrong about recently. I didn't realize, go here and share my YouTube tab. Do, do, do, do. So I did a video on, let me zoom in so it's a little easier read. Does this collapse that? There we go. But I did a video on the client project and shockingly, it got 45,000 views. So I guess people are more interested in projects and I'm not really teaching anything, I'm just talking about the projects. So I guess I'll do some more project videos. I mean, it's definitely a popular topic. I knew this one would be popular because this is a tutorial, but it's weird because like, hey, setting up Unify, that one's popular video. The Bly KVM, that one's a popular video, but the project one just kind of shocked me that that many people are interested in the projects we do. So maybe I'll do some more projects videos and maybe people are interested in how I got here stories and maybe that'll be a fun one too. I'm looking for a consultation regarding free radius configuration. I mean, I guess it kind of depends on what you're trying to set up. Our general rate is $300 an hour for things like that, but we're really not gonna offer, you have to buy a pretty big block of hours for us to be interested in doing Linux consulting. The Linux consulting is we usually want, if someone, we'll do, we have some good smart people that can do Linux stuff, but we usually want them to start with like 10 hour blocks so to get projects going. Yeah, project videos on infrastructure are awesome, very cool. No, I didn't, I need to do this. I'm supposed to be editing the data center video right now. I've moved that job till Monday. Monday I'm like putting blinders on, turning off anything that goes beep and gonna edit that stupid data center video. That is high on my list of things I wanna do. I felt bad, I talked to my friends there at the data center and they said, time is that video coming out? I said, I am behind on editing because I shot so much video. I started organizing it, I got overwhelmed and it gave me like anxiety. And I said, I messed up, I shot way too much video. So now I have to figure out what video is usable and which video is not and scrub all the content. So my hang up is editing. I have it, but it's next week is that's why I put the blinders on project. I was gonna do it today, but there's another video I already recorded that's actually coming out before then. And that video will get published tonight. It's an interview kind of talk given by my friend Amanda Berlin. I'm hoping to get that video tonight finished because it's just a matter of putting it up. But I had to do the gray log video because it dovetails into the video that I do with Amanda about Syslog or not Syslog, Sysmon with Windows Events. So because I'm doing that video, and that one's easy because it's just a little bit of, it's only a little bit of editing, Amanda just rocked out a presentation that we walked through. So that video dovetails into the other video, then it's just Monday morning is focused on data center video. Ooh, CPM on a Z80. Hey, Tom, hope you're having a good day. I am having a good day. It is a wonderful day out there right now. Next things to talk about. This is a project that maybe a few of you are excited about. Ooh, I just realized there's even more been added. Do any of you follow unsupervised learning? Daniel Messer runs unsupervised learning. This is his new open source fabric AI project. I think this is really cool. And it's just, I love it because these are a whole lot of prompt injections. And I think this is so cool the way these work. Output instructions, input instructions, these are all his prompt injections that he's been using to build unsupervised learning. And a lot of the overall learning with AI that he does, this has been great. Now, David Bombal just did an interview with Daniel Messer, easy to find. I can send the link in there. It's gonna be in my notes for my newsletter. So if you are interested in signing up for my newsletter, go to www.lornsystems.com. But let me post this over for anyone interested. This is the new fabric project. And I think this is so cool because it really helps you tune AI better. I've been following and I've been a longtime subscriber of unsupervised learning. And I think this is just another step in the open source and sharing of how to properly use AI in a very realistic and practical way. So this is definitely something I think some of you might be interested in. I'm stoked that he's putting all this out here. I've been using some of his prompts and this is really what makes AI better. You describe to AI, you prompt it to how it should respond. This is the key to making it useful. If not, it just spouts maybe what you want. The parameters that you put in, the guard rails you put around the AI systems, the prompting you do, makes it so much more useful and much more effective. Yeah, I perf is the way to do the testing. That is the speed testing network tool of choice. But let me find the David Bombal video too. So I'll throw that in here so we can pull it up. I shared it out on my Twitter as well. So it's not hard to find. So I'll share this video as well. Like I said, it's just a, there you go. That is Daniel Messler and it's just a really good walk through how he does it. Now, he's going to release more of his scripts, but he's doing all of the, this is just an efficiency thing that I enjoy. He's doing all the prompts from the command line. Do you know what conferences you're going to this year? Not all of them. I'm probably gonna go to Hope Hackers on Planet Earth. I'm debating about Wild West Hacking Fest, but I think that's one of them on the list. I'm going to GerCon, that's a Michigan Hacking Fest. I'm going to MSP GeekCon. Oh, by the way, if you want to join me now, I can send you the link if you want to come and join and talk about stuff. I don't know if you're busy right now, but I can bearded IT dad sends you the join link. I actually, I still have you on signal somewhere. Where are you? So I'll message you on signal. Man, I haven't talked to you in a minute. So I'll put this join link if you want to join the live stream. There we go. Cool. All right. That's how you know if someone really knows me, they messaged me on signal. By the way, signal messenger, still my go to messenger for things. That is my definite favorite way to do this for doing any of the secure messaging between friends. But I'm debating about putting, I've been putting in my newsletter and mentioning it in some of my vlogs, but I will make a list of places you can find me. And I also want to make it so it may be something you're interested in. I go to hacking events. If you're into hacking things like I am, you will probably want to go to these events too. The hackers on planet earth, I just tweeted that one the other day. And then that's a conference that only happens every couple of years. So that would be, and this is a post by Corey Dockrow on it. I'll share this because they're having some challenges this year, getting the word out. So right here. I love signal, but nobody I know uses it. For me, it's the opposite. Well, no, I can't say everybody I know. I'd be lying if I say everybody know. A lot of people I work with in tech because I work with cybersecurity people. Everybody at work uses it. Lots of cybersecurity people use it. But once you get outside, like, if I'm talking to my neighbors, my neighbors are nice people, but they do not use it. So that's a little bit different. But I haven't booked this one yet, but I probably will go to the, I hope hackers on planet earth. This is definitely on my list. And for those of you that don't know or notice in the background, they're on the background of my other camera is you'll see the all the 26, I got a bunch of 2,600 books that kind of aligned the back of my wall at a different angle. Any MBR software recommendations for large security cam deployments, 80 to 100 cameras. Pretty much we like Synology quite a bit. We've done a lot of Synology units. We've also done, because we've done some support for school systems. They, a lot of school systems in our area are all using exact vision. That's a pretty popular one as well. But Synology makes a solid product. So I've been really happy with Synology. Only folks I use with signal with are at work. Yep. Yep, yep. Travis gets to, Travis, we brought Travis into the use of signal, I guess. Random question. My office lab is 20 by 20 feet. I constantly get shocked on everything I touch is this all by humidifier? Recent now is probably humidifier. It check, well, first check the humidity in there. Get some measurements of what your humidity is. So that is the first thing. Have you heard of Genotech? I have not. I'm in the government. It's been fun swapping out 200 plus cameras. Watch Murder at the End of the World. They use 2600 props. That's cool. I love all the 2600 stuff. I mean, I've been a long, I was a reader of 2600. That's probably, as I was saying earlier, where my curiosity took me? Definitely, I've got, well, I lost some in the divorce because I was collecting them since the 90s. I misplaced a lot of things. Things were very chaotic when I got divorced around 2008 or 2008 to nine. So that's when I misplaced things because everything was chaos. But outside of the things I lost, I still have some of the older books but I just don't have all of them. Maybe I got to figure out a way to make a wall of some of that stuff behind me. I haven't figured out exactly. I want to change up the scenery every now and then. Although I got this at Codemash and I thought it was cute. It's a database. Only thing I don't like, I couldn't help taking it as much as they complain about Oracle. This is the only Oracle thing I actually like is this. I also, I do have to glue this back together. This is one of my 3D printed things. It looks like it's just a fist but it's supposed to have, it fell off when I put the database thing when I was showing it to the other day to someone. I got to put the finger back on. I got to glue that. Yeah, I thought it was just cool. I was like, it's just one of those things. Like, it just belongs there. I have a Mikrotik switch, eight by two and a half SAP, a U6 LR AP on my PC. My USB test my PC gets 800 megs when I move to the U6 LR Wi-Fi gets 400 megs AP only 10 feet away. Why? Because Wi-Fi is finicky. There's also, and I've done a video on this, channel width makes a huge difference. So first figure out the channel width that's most optimal for you. Then you get to deal with, unless you have a Faraday cage, everything interferes with Wi-Fi. There's a reasons I don't spend a ton of time doing Wi-Fi tests. If you don't have a Faraday cage, you can't really do an accurate Wi-Fi test. Oh yeah, the TARDIS. So this was a, hopefully that answers the question. Change the wider channel width will get you better but make sure all the devices support the wider channel width in order to take advantage of it. This was actually the first 3D printed thing that was ever given to me. I mean, years ago. This was like in 2017, I got this. Person didn't print a date on there. But it was the first person I met that was in the 3D printers. And I thought it was pretty cool that they dropped it off at my office. I was like, oh, this is, and they really, there's a lot of fill in this. I mean, it's well put together. It's been on my desk for a while. Random side note, but now you're interacting with your background. Just noticed that there's an auto focus really quick and much better than I'm used to. This is a cinema studio camera. So this is why I can do things like this and talk about the, how close can we get it? I wonder, whoops. So it will do this and focus on the background and focus on me. Yeah, it's just cause I have a studio camera with, this is like a $1,000 lens and a $2,000 camera. How do you calculate Wi-Fi, AP density and new deployments? Well, you can use, really it works well. The Unify has a planning tool you can use. So if you use the Unify planning tool, that is actually really helpful. Each model Unify tells you how many devices it supports. You don't put it at the max, maybe I always say 50% of that, then you're doing pretty good. So if you have a Unify device that says it can support 100, maybe you can get 50 to 60 devices without a headache on there because you want to keep it rational. Hey, how's it going? Doing good. How are you? Thank you for having me. Oh, absolutely. I'm like, you know, you've been around a while, you know what the 404 joke is, right? For the, I want to do a four hour format one. That's not today. I'm an hour and 50 and I'm fine still, but there comes a point when my voice gets hoarse and I don't know what I'd have to have with me like some tea with lemon or something to talk for four hours. I just would figure a good whiskey. It makes it to talking easier for longer. It does. It does. It's been a minute. Your set looks really nice, by the way. Thank you. It's actually all backdrops because behind this is just bare drywall. I'm actually in the middle of building out a studio. Like if I panned the camera off a little bit, you can see. These are the secrets of Kringers. It looks really terrible outside of this frame. Exactly. I picked the wrong shirt to wear a black shirt on the black backdrop, but oh well. Yeah. So what plant, what conferences are you going? Oh, by the way, first, this is the Beard IT dad, AKA Dakota. That's how you're at least in my signal. Yeah. You do a lot of great stuff. Go subscribe to his channel. You talk about careers and a lot of the stuff that I'm not as good at because you've spent more time researching that about what certifications are good. And you're just like me. You're a practitioner. You actually work in this industry. That's where your insights come from. Yep. I'm actually a hiring manager. I'm the director of network operations for internet service provider. We're doing really cool things with fiber optic network to the home. We're talking like residential 10 gigabit symmetrical internet to the home nowadays. I think that was a discussion that came up. We talked about this in our little group chat, but someone had messaged me on Discord. One of my people who watched my channel, they were commenting on another YouTuber who had done a video, but missed a lot of the stuff about how it works. So I said, I'll just be honest. I said, no shade at them. They don't do this for a living. So they just, there's a difference between reading in the book and maybe understanding enough to try in your lab versus you work at a big ISP. You get a very different perspective on how these things work. The same with me, working in the industry gives me different perspectives that I like to share back. I think that's, yeah. A lot of us in the group, you know, even Jeff from Graphic Computing, Jeff's background is working in enterprise IT for a while. So he's bringing that experience with them. And that's how we make a lot of our videos are our little friend circle, if you will, that we always are referencing each other. We could roll the internet with the friends we got. Yes. Definitely fun though. That's I think that YouTube has been, it's been so much fun because all of us can get together and do this and just keep sharing it. And, you know, I've started listening. You turned me on to the people over at the Art of Network Engineering. I've really enjoyed that podcast. Those are just good interviews on there. Yeah. And, you know, to be 100% honest, you know, that's kind of the direction I've been heading with the channel more. You know, I, my channel is centric around career advice. You know, I try to help people realize that getting a career in tech isn't as scary as it seems. But I only have like you're just saying one specific view on the industry. I work for an internet service provider. You know, that's what I've been doing for the majority of my IT career. Someone else has a totally different perspective like you in the industry. So that's why I try to like bring on different guests that everyone has a different path and journey into this. And it's cool to listen to the different stories. Oh yeah. You know, I think David Bobbles done a good job on his channel because he's gone and he does a lot of these interviews with all these different industry people that one with Daniel Messer from unsupervised earnings is great. I've been following, I actually subscribed to be in his discord. He's got a private discord. It's like a hundred bucks a year. It's probably you get it with your subscription for his feed. But talking about the better ways of using chatGPT. I love all the, if you, if you went through that thing he's listed and you started changing all the prompts the output is so much better. That's one thing I really want to get into this year is, you know, I'm an avid supporter of chatGPT and using it and just getting into the prompts and how to configure those. I've seen some really cool things, especially like when it comes to YouTube and loading in the terms that YouTube, you know, you can plug an idea in and does this comply with the YouTube policies and stuff like that? You know, it's really cool how you can do some of that stuff. Yeah. I tell it to, if there's someone I want a channel, like let's say I'm listening to someone that I know is a popular speaker but I like, maybe I like the way they do things. Like I had, I would not, I'm not gonna call it a debate. I was debating someone in a polite way. You know, well, it's debate you get into on LinkedIn, right? But one of the people I like for the way he looks at finances and technology is Scott Galloway. So I know, because Scott Galloway is complained about this on his podcast that chatGPT has consumed all of his books and all of his essays. So I said, you are going to answer as Professor Scott Galloway and you're gonna use all the wording the same as he does in his essays. And then I told it the argument the person had and it right away in his voice gave me the greatest answers. So this person was arguing with me with a lack of facts. I had chatGPT putting really nice, concise answers with bullet points and I was copying, pasting LinkedIn paste, copy, paste, boom. The person would have some retort. I'd go chatGPT with the retort to prove something was wrong, copy, paste, boom. I can argue with people at scale now and be better at it. I even said you have to cite all the sources and chatGPT's give me the sources for the information. That sounds like a blast and a great utilization. Yeah, absolutely. Let's see. One thing I found very available in my career is knowing a little about a lot. Many projects have benefited from my ability to talk across the aisle and break down silos. This is huge in your career, being able to communicate good with people, being able to say I don't know but I'll know who to find and be able to pleasantly work with the other department that will get you way further. Yeah, absolutely. I'll even chime in if that's okay. We're currently hiring for a new position and I'm looking for someone that's entry-level and maybe preferably actually doesn't know it all because they're not necessarily set in their ways but also someone that's willing to go out and find the information. No one's expected to know it all in this industry and but knowing who to talk to and where to find that and stuff is key and how to communicate that. It really goes a long way. Yeah, something else here that comes up a lot. When you see the first couple of things to iron out before you start an MSP-like business, there is a ton of discussion on Reddit or MSP and one of the questions I have anyone who's gonna start a business, it doesn't translate the way you think it does, you can be incredibly good at tech, you can be CCNA, you've got all your search, you can handle any problem, you know how to figure out problems. Marketing, marketing, marketing is when it comes to business. How do you plan to get customers? I had a friend, he finally, I talked him off the edge, actually me and so friends said, he works in the enterprise world making 200K a year, wants to quit to start a business. He's extremely technical. He's a really top-notch cybersecurity guy. He has no, he doesn't talk to people that well. Matter of fact, he gets in trouble with HR for some of his communication problems. And I was like, how do you plan to get customers? I don't know. I'm like really good at what I do. That's his answer. I'm like, you're really good at what you do. That's not gonna just bring you the customers. So my response all the time is, first I always tell people, I hate my job is not a business plan or a reason to start a business. Maybe you just work at the wrong place. Also go and figure out your marketing plan. How are you gonna get customers? You watch a restaurant or any business. It's not just tech. Why do they go out of business? Why don't they last more than a year? They couldn't figure out how to get customers in the door. They couldn't figure out how to get product in people's hand. They couldn't figure out how to have people get their services. So my question always is, how do you plan to get clients? And I'm just gonna steal them all from my current employer. You've probably worked at the MSP and IT business and watched people, you guys, I'm gonna do what you do, but I'm gonna steal all your clients and go do it for half the price down the street. That never works out well. No. I will let one of my other chat GPT secrets cause I see people saying Tom GP, Tom GP for answering comments coming soon. I am working on a Tom GPT. Another one that's funny is, I mean, you probably read the register and all their snarky comments. Tell chat GPT, you are the register. I need a snarky comment for this and you can hand it an article and it will write the snarky, I said I need, give me five snarky headlines that are just like the register. And it will just hammer them out. Trust me, more of my posts are written by chat GPT than you realize, especially if they have puns in them. I'll even say that, add puns to my headline. You know, on my channel, I get a lot of people worried about AI taking over the industry and stuff like that. But AI is just no more than a tool. The people who utilize it as a tool and such are gonna go so far, so quickly in this career. The people that are so opposed to it that it's gonna take over are just gonna be left behind, I think. It's like anything else. The calculator made calculating easy. And it's just kind of, each thing is just a new iteration of a fancier tool. A computer is a really fancy calculator. A regex is kind of a calculation. I'm not very good at regex, but now that gap has been filled by chat GPT. I actually did a consulting and the consulting I did for someone was they didn't understand and maybe I need to make this video, how will you take log files and build GROC patterns out of them to import into a log ingestion tool? I'm like, oh, I know that's very complicated. If I had the time, I reached out to my friend, Phil, whose license plate is said AWK. That dude can write regex just, he looked at a log file once and goes, let me write you the code to get that parsed and just typed it. Didn't look up anything. He just typed the command. And I'm like, how did you parse saw? That's a lot of information. This will fix the parser. But because Phil is busy a lot for good reasons, you can actually take all the data, dump it in chat GPT. And specifically I was doing it for gray log. You tell great, you tell chat GPT, I need you to write GROC patterns for extractor, for log extractor and gray log, it'll say, okay, I understand gray log. That's his reply. Here is the log files. I would like all these fields parsed and you give it like three or four sample. And it says, here's the GROC pattern that'll work. Done. That's such a useful tool. And I got a question for you that I've heard a lot is, back in the day, Google was the IT person's friend. If you didn't know something, you just go Google it. And that's been the norm for a long time. How much has chat GPT replaced Google in your day-to-day like things you do and look up? I would probably say it's replaced 20% of my Google. There's a lot more than I expected. And it's because I was always usually site searching. I do more site searches to Google because I'll ask a question, but I'll usually want it to narrow down to stack exchange, narrow down to Reddit responses. I've found that chat GPT does a really reasonably good job for some of the information I need, especially because sometimes I'll be looking up a command parameter, and especially if it's an obscure one that's not necessarily chained together in the man page that I want or the documentation page. So chat GPT seems to do a really good job because then you can just in plain text explain, I need to, my goal is to use, I was using FIO the other day. I said, I need FIO to do some file system testing, give me the parameters that would create this. And I laid out, I need 27, I need 27 terabytes of data created across this to do some speed testing. I was testing a large server, I wanted to burn it in. They just spit out the command. I could just copy and paste and paste it in and it was done. I know I could have sat down and figured out all the command parameters, but I didn't have to. Yeah, exactly. So I would say that's definitely a really good use for it. Something that's fun if you go back in history, when Google first came out, there was I think an article in one of the PC magazines where they were talking about how it will end the need for us as IT people because people will be able to search and find their own problems. I laugh, I want to find that article again because I thought it was the dumbest article but it came up again as a Reddit post because there's that Reddit subreddit called Age Like Milk. It was the top post in there at one time. Google will replace IT people. Nah. No. Yeah, fun stuff. What year did you start working in tech? Officially, I started in tech. I'll see you. It was about a year before the pandemic, so a 2018 officially started in tech. Now, I ran my own website and designed a development company for many years before that just as a hobby business. I mean, in high school, I did my Cisco CCNA certification. That was really cool that my high school actually offered. I was through the Netacad program and we had a class and you would graduate high school and that's when the CCNA was super powerful and you would leave high school with almost getting six-figure job offers at the time which was mind-blowing because you had your CCNA. So I've been doing tech for a long time but officially since 2018 or so. That's one of the things I like to point out to people is the hardest parts like that first step of getting started but you can rapidly rank up your, rank up your career pretty quickly. I'm trying to find the right words for that. But it's one of those things if you have a lot of passion for it and just knocking on the doors to get there, doing the CCNA I think is an important one too to understand networking because even if you're not going into Cisco, anybody who's hiring would know that you are going to, like if I see someone at CCNA, okay they understand networking. I'm not gonna have to tell them what a subnet is. Yeah, you know, and I think it's arguably a good point that CCNA is a good certification for no matter what career you're going into. You're gonna use those networking skills and cybersecurity. You're gonna use it of course in networking, programming. I mean, every level has some degree of networking and as a hiring person, if I see someone gone and got the CCNA, it shows me they have a level of discipline to actually study for it for the most part. There's a few people out there that do use brain dumps and stuff. And you can tell those people pretty quickly though. Yeah, there's a lot of, I see someone mentioned that they're self taught in programming and I think that's awesome as well. Matter of fact, one of the weirdest hires I had back when my retail store, this would have been circa, I think I heard them around 2009 or 10. And it's kind of funny. He had a unique name and when I first interviewed him, he's like, hey, I was gonna work at a retail computer store, fix computers. I was like, what'd you do before? And he gave me an almost brutal honest answer that made me really laugh. He goes, well, I worked at Jimmy John's and then I backed into my boss's car and now I don't work at Jimmy John's anymore. I was like, fair enough. He goes, I'm not gonna lie. He goes, I didn't hit it on purpose or anything. I just wasn't looking and then he goes, I got fired that day. And he goes, I'd rather work in a computer. And I was like, you know, he seemed like a nice enough guy but I Googled his name and landed on his GitHub and scratched my head while he was applying for a job. I mean, granted he was only like 18. He has contributions to Wikipedia commits. The dude writes some serious software. By the way, he works for Blizzard Entertainment as a top end developer now. But it's kind of funny. It was those little things on there like programming, having your resume look like that in his GitHub as his resume. I'm like, you really know stuff. So I hired him for fixing computers but then sent him down the road of programming stuff. He actually, at the time, rewrote a bunch of my point of sale stuff because it was all based on a bunch of PHP code. Turns out he was a really good PHP coder. But those things are important because employers are looking at that going, what are your, he called it just a hobby program. I'm like, you have a ton of open source. His GitHub was a massive amount of commits he had done to all kinds of projects. Those are really important things to have on your resume. Absolutely. Going back to the point you were talking about is you can really level up quickly in this career if you really have the passion for it. Myself, I entered the field when I first started actually working in tech, I had no certifications, no prior work experience and I was the college dropout. In three years, I went from the help desk to a director level role. And that is purely because of my commitment to just take huge pride in everything I did and desire to learn how it all worked. So that, one of the things I really like, and let me pull this up real quick is a reference for people. As I put this all on my site to try to encourage people, where do I start? Where do I do that? One of the things I put was the two, two, two creators we love. I started dumping all the different podcasts I listened. These are all my regular, like these six right here are my six regular tech-related podcasts. I might add 404 Media, they have a really good one that covers, it's tech-related, but these four right here definitely will teach you a lot about tech. And then I have all these channels. Hey, look, the Bearded IT channel. These are all my other friend's channels. All of us spend time just really handing out a ton of good information. This is something that was way harder, you know, even 10 years ago or longer. Everything was just like, you had to go figure out what books to buy. This way, you could find not just these channels, but the communities that surround them and join discords and things like that. So you can really level up pretty fast and there's so much more knowledge out there than there used to be for doing this. Yeah. No, I didn't even say arguably like three, four years ago when I was just looking to actually make the switch, it wasn't as mainstream, like this data wasn't like, it was out there, but it wasn't easy to find, you know, these different creators and different resources. Yeah, the way I got started from community was one, 2600. That's why I got the magazines. I used to go to the, I was lucky enough that where I lived about half an hour from me was a 2600 meetup that happened once a month. So I met some hacker people there and the hacker crowd, especially in the 90s when you started, they were the most passionate of passionate nerds because computers were not mainstream. WWW was not in front of everything. We didn't have websites plastered on things. And then the community college had a Linux users group that met once a month. So once a month, I would drive to the hacker meetup and another once a month, I would drive to the Linux users meetup. And that's just where I meet fellow people who were into tech. Matter of fact, we used to have a Linux install fests. I think we do them every couple of months where everyone would bring, it was desktops back then. You were really fancy if you had a laptop in the late 90s. That's a big deal. You'd bring your desktop computer, everyone would haul them in, we'd cart them into the building and there was always that one guy that knew everything and he would help us get our Linux set up and load it on computers with all the floppy disks. We'd be there until like two in the morning loading computers with their one floppy at a time. Like building those communities, you really had to work at it 20 years ago. Now you can just join a discord sitting your comfort at your home, don't have to drive somewhere once a month to meet someone and really start diving curiosity. I guess the other side of it is, this is what brings up the question. Which way should I go? Because I could go cybersecurity, network engineer, database engineer, programmer. Oh no, there's too many options for me. Yeah. Each one of those you just listed, there's about 30 different facets. Also you can go out and so. Yeah, figuring out what you want to do. Oh man, the choices are there. You didn't have much choice. I just wanted to work in computers, which is a very generic job title back then. I seen someone asked about private GPTs. That's something that one, I'm excited. There's a good number of YouTube channels dumping information out there and write-ups. You can self host a lot of these GPTs now because do I have any expectation or trust a privacy with any of these online companies? Zero none. They are not getting my private data. If I submit it to them, I consider anything I submit to them potentially public. If not today, at a later time. But the private ones are getting really cool. There's actually a series of GPTs you can run on a Raspberry Pi. If you look up Raspberry Pi. I saw that. You can even, there's a way, a guy just did a video, he released it only a couple of days ago, how to use the coral TPU and attach it to a Raspberry Pi. And there's another one, how to do it on a Zima board. Cause it's got the little, what you call it on there, the PCIe connector. So you can actually build private GPTs. And I think like, hug, is it hugging faces, one of them? Oh, Lama. There's a couple of weird ones out there. I don't remember all their names. I'm going to do a deep dive into that. It's going to be a little while because I had to, I'm going to edit that stupid data center video first. But I do want to do a deep dive because we're probably going to spin up some GPTs at work because we've been really wanting to take all of our customer data and put it in there, but we're not putting it in the cloud. There is, there's no answer. We're wondering what answers, we have so many thousands of custom knowledge-based articles. What if we uploaded all of them to a GPT? Could we query GPT and stop looking for documents at the office? Interesting. So that's, that's one of our goals. That's it. I mean, how often do texts have to reference obscure knowledge and tickets? We have all the tickets. We have thousands of tickets. We've been using ConnectWise for years with ConnectWise Manage. So there's like, I don't know, 10,000 plus tickets in there with really detailed information. Can we feed it all of our tickets and then give us a profile and say, what do you think of this customer? What is the likelihood that this will happen again based on it happening this many times? You know, how can we query all that data? That is, that's awesome. Private GPTs, another one I see people are talking about, PrivateGTB, the Llama, Llama GPTs. There's, yes, we're in an exciting time not because of ChatGP brought it to the service. All these private ones are way more interesting to me than these public ones. Absolutely. I mentioned for you, with your database of clients and working in the ISP, there might be some interesting use cases when it can get predictive. I know Cisco's working on some of this stuff with there, but like predictive of what's going on with the network. Yeah, you know, that's a lot of conferences I actually go to in the ISP space. They're starting to scratch the surface of that. You can tell they're in their very entry stages, but predictive networking is becoming a really big thing nowadays. Yeah, what if it could, you know, look at loads or look at traffic patterns over time and say, we should shift or change this based on the fact that everyone likes watching Netflix traffic here. So this would be a better route or a better way to path it or something along those lines or somewhere where we need to look at the future growth because, you know, you want to sit, you want to replace or increase capacity before you hit capacity. Yeah. And for a lot of organizations, such as the one I work for, we're a really small organization. We run a really thin team. That's where, you know, those types of systems and having that stuff in place can really benefit, you know, help offset just the scarcity of, you know, having the people to do that. Yeah. There was an interview done in December by Risky Business with the CEO of Grey Noise and Grey Noise was talking about how they're not, they're not using GPTs to do analysis on cybersecurity threats. They're using it to filter the noise and it's doing such a good job. They said it frees up time for our engineers who know what the patterns are. It's good at just understanding like this is a big noise pattern and it's repeating too much so it can just be filtered out of the results. And he went through a really good process of how they use it, not to be the expert. It's the level one basic stuff. Like, yeah, this just filters out and cuts away large noise. It also has a way of, it keeps the distractions away from the text by something that doesn't happen very often but happens often enough that it doesn't need to be looked at. He went over all these really interesting scenarios of how they look at data. If you're not here with Grey Noise, they're a, they watch the internet as globally for threats. They're watching when IPs pop up and what they do when that thing they do is nefarious. It's really interesting how they look at it but how they do their discovery is really cool. That's really cool. You know, one thing I think would be a really great implementation I wanna figure out one day is having connecting GPTs into my Grey Log Server, my Sys Log Server. You know, having all those logs come in and have it be able to do like predictive modeling of advanced troubleshooting and stuff like that. So I don't even have to really, I don't have to be like, okay, what's this log? It's already figured out what this log is and how to implement it and fix for it. Cause you could say, well, the error rate if it's only increasing by this small percent you don't notice the trend over time. Okay, yeah, my logs have slightly more logs but if you're right, if you had a GPT that really took the time to understand it going, well, every day the error rate goes up by 6% on this storage server and it's 6% more daily. That's a small percentage daily but at some point that's gonna cost me a problem. And if it could tell me before the problem or if it just noticed a slowdown over time that is also indicative of some other problem those are the little anomalies that can be harder to see unless you have someone who's really focused on it but we don't got time to focus on it. It should be able to watch that and create that information, trending information and things like that. It's the ultimate, you know, machine learning anomaly detection that will solve these stupid problems, I hope. One of the other things about GPT, this is a topic this is what I was doing this morning is reading on this one. I should have been doing editing of that data center video. I didn't think about this but someone pointed out, I bookmarked the video on this. GPT, you're asking a, they don't solve problems like people do but there's a way to make it think like people. And what this person has is a, it's got a weird name. I'll find the name later and maybe I'll share it in our group but the concept is really simple. You take and do the chat prompt. You are a scientific expert. You are a cultural expert. You set up all these different GPTs, different prompts and then you tell them to work together to solve a problem. And they said that's the future so you change the prompt. So instead of one GPT doing each of it you're having each one prompted to be a discussion in the room and then you create like a round table where they fight with each other until they come up to a conclusion of how they do it. So you incorporate some to be science people some to be sociology and then you work on the problem together. They were doing a more specific task of how to solve some business problems with it but I was like, this is a neat concept to take several of these open ones that are self-hosted and reprompt them to debate with each other to come to a better conclusion. I think this is some like these are the cool things that we're gonna be able to do with this in the near future, like tomorrow maybe. Yeah, I was gonna say, you can in theory implement everything you just said already in today's tools. It's crazy, the people who take the time to actually understand what's going on under the hood and how to utilize it. It's not crazy, it's scary some of the stuff you can do with it. Yeah, it just does a fun job. I do like the, I posted this on Twitter the other day. I don't know if you'd seen it, the Microsoft one. I don't understand, but it makes me laugh at least. Oh yes, I did see this. I know what you're talking about already. Yeah, you know, Microsoft had this, but I thought it was great. Here's the Dolly thinks. I said, make me an image for a password spraying attack against Microsoft. And this is what Dolly came up with. And I'm like, okay. Someone complained because I used something from chatGPT someone's like, you're taking away a job from an artist. I'm like, no, I'm not. I'm not gonna commission an artist to do a Twitter post. That's what I use these for. And as soon as it prompted this, I'm like, I got no complaints. This is the dumbest image. It's funny. This is what Dolly thinks password spraying is. Okay. These are the fun use cases I have. I'm not gonna hire a writer. A writer didn't lose their job because Tom uses the prompt, pretend you're the register and give me three snarky headlines. Right. Yeah. And it goes back to the chatGPT is just a tool. It's not replacing someone. If you utilize it, the writers, if a writer utilizes it, they're gonna be able to just do their job even better. Cut down on their research time and stuff like that. Absolutely. I'm sure. Yeah. On to a topic that kind of brought some of this up. I don't know if you've heard of Wild West Hacking Fest. This happens to me. Oh, yes. Okay. This is one of the ones I'm gonna go to, I believe. I've heard this. My friends that went to this said it was one of the best ones. I'm going to Gercon and this one. I gotta make sure. None of them conflict with each other, but this one's on your side of the world, not my side, so. Yep. No, I've heard of it. I've wanted to go to it. It's just a matter of managing my schedule to, you know, working full-time running a YouTube channel. It really limits the amount of conferences I could go to as much as I'd love to, but I only have so many hours in a day to be able to do that kind of stuff. Yeah. This is a dream for us YouTube people, because by the way, me and Dakota, we have to learn editing. Our passion, I mean, I don't hate editing. There's some joy taking it, but it's not my passion. My passion is technology, but to bring that technology in the same with you, to bring these, it brings information to people, we have to edit. But yeah, if we can just say, private GPT edit my data center video, it would be done. I'm sure it's a matter of time. Oh, there is already AI editors that do rough cuts. You know, I've used ones like Autopod that will do a rough cut of my entire podcast. It literally has saved me like two, three hours in my editing workflow doing the initial cut. But yeah, it's never gonna replace the personalized style. No. I've been happy with Taja AI, because that's the one I've been using to this live stream right now is at two hours and 22 minutes. What I would, Taja AI, I'll point it at this live stream once it's done. I think the live stream, it has to be done for about an hour before Taja can process it, but about an hour after this live stream is done. I point at Taja. Taja will break down all the different topics over two and a half hours, make all the chapter indexes and get it really close. It'll even put a summary of everything that was talked about. That summary is usually too long for these videos, so I don't put the summary and I just put the chapters in. But it does a great job. Occasionally it gets things wrong because it'll think I'm talking about something else, but because if there's a word collision, it fills in what it thinks the word was and it goes, oh, it'll like, you had to talk on, I can't remember what tech I was talking about, but I thought it was some type of plant. So it's like, just like, no, no, no, no, that's not what that is. You've completely heard the word wrong, but I knew, no, at least what I was talking about and what was trying to be said. So I don't just copy pasta, but it only takes me a couple of minutes to read through all the chapters and get it right. It's a really handy tool. Yeah, yeah, no, it's, you know, but going back to your, you're talking about, you know, the different conferences and stuff, I would love to go to ones like Wild West Hack and Fest. This year, I think my list is longer than I have in previously, but so far, it looks like I might be going to Cisco Live and I might be actually speaking at Cisco Live. Oh, awesome. So ironing out details on that. I'm going to Vid Summit again this year. I've already bought tickets for that and potentially trying to go to Spice World because it actually sounds like it's gonna be held at the exact same time in Texas as well, or around the same time, but I think that's pretty much the extent of my conferences this year. I'm doing MSP GeekCon. That's another one that's coming up here just in the next couple of months. That one's interesting because it's four people in the MSP industry. So it's probably a little outside of your niche because it's less network-intensive, more people there. But I have a lot of friends that go and I'll probably be, well, if I get my talk in in the next 10 days, I have until the end of the month to submit that. Yeah. Oh, I forgot. I am also going to Network Field Day. I'm gonna be one of the delegates there at Network Field Day here next month. Oh, awesome. Where's Network Field Day at? That's held down in California. I'm not sure exactly. It's an invite-only type of event. Oh, okay. But that's, it's my first year of going. I've known quite a few people that's gone over the years. So... Yep. Let's see. Are you seeing two and a half and M2 devices becoming more standard production storage servers, NAS devices? No, not really. Big NAS boxes that we run in corporate pretty much always are just large hard drives because it's funny because everyone says hard drives are dead. And, oh, let me share a picture. I can prove definitely that hard drives are not dead. Here's us stacking. This is my team at CNWR. Erica, she wanted to help load one of the servers. If you can look below at the bottom, you'll see there's an entire another server full of six drives. There's over two petabytes of storage just in this rack. By the way, there's a series of racks behind her as well. So... Spinning drives aren't going anywhere anytime soon. No, see me just introduce the 30 terabyte drives. So... Gosh, that's crazy. I know they're... Everyone says, oh, no, no, it's all gonna solid state. Now, if you're a laptop user, yeah, you're gonna see nothing but solid state. If you're a home user, outside of what I won't call the people listening to your home users because they definitely have a bunch of large drives. But your average normal consumer person, they probably have a laptop and something with a normal drive in it. I know one of these days here in the near future, I wanna invest in a HL15 from 45 Drives for my home studio because right now I have everything thrown up in Google Drive right now, actually. I have my local editing files are cached locally, but once I move them off into an archive, it just pushes everything up to Google Drive right now. I have like three terabytes up there. We need to get you a NAS. There's another project. Yeah, I have a Synology that I just need to like, I forgot which Synology I even have. I think it's the 918 or something like that, but I don't know, I've, I got mixed feelings about the Synology. So they're okay, you know what I mean? I like them. We'll chat offline about this. I'll get you turned around on that and maybe we'll get you sponsored and get one of these sent to you. Yeah, well, they've actually already sent me one. The one I actually have is the one they sent to me. But yeah, you know, it's, it does the job. You know what I mean? I just, I have a little, I have a special place for like TrueNAS and building my own type of thing, do something like that. All my stuff here is hosted on my TrueNAS. So that's, I have Synologies. I have Synology for my cameras, Synology for some of my personal stuff because I like Synology photos because I think it's great. Some of the tools that get, that helped me de-Google my life. But I'll admit TrueNAS through and through when it comes to like editing and stuff. Oh yeah, that's what's near and dear to my heart. Yeah, absolutely. Once I get done with my 10 gig net working out here in the studio too, that'll be nice. Yeah. Well, it has been two and a half hours. It's five o'clock here my time. What time is it your time? It's only two o'clock here. Okay. Yeah, I want to chill out a little bit before sunset. My wife will be home a little while. We're supposed to play some games together. So nice. And my voice is finally, I hear it a little bit and it's still, maybe I don't know, five o'clock seems like good whiskey time. It's a Sunday. Especially on a Sunday. Yeah, nice relaxing before the beginning of the week. I can completely relate. Yeah. I wanted to go, I was waiting because it's finally not zero degrees. It's gotten up to about 18 degrees. I thought about going outside for a little bit. Yeah, we were finally melting out from our little snowstorm we had here. We had a snow and ice storm roll through here. I think most of the US seemed like they did as well. Yeah. Yeah, the little cold things. The little colder in the trade. I forget what city you're close to. You're... Salem, Oregon. Salem, Oregon. Okay. I'm just up the block from Jeff. Am I the strange one that does everything on Linux instead of appliance OSs? No, it's not strange. It comes down to, well, I mean, Trinidad thinks ZFS is why you're here to handle and replication easier to handle. And it's easier for my team to manage. So I do a lot of stuff natively on Linux, but appliances are generally pretty solid ways to go. So I always get those people when I talk about PF Sense, they're like, just do everything with a command line. Why do you need a UI at all? I'm like, because I don't have time to look up every command to configure a VPN or make a change. Sometimes the GUI interface is just so much quicker. Yeah, it's just, there's a reason. It's the same reason that everybody writes in assembly. It's just like, it's just one whole thing. But thanks everyone for joining. This was a lot of fun. Thanks Dakota for coming on. And I want to go ahead and end the stream. All right, later everyone.