 Right now. Go live. All right. Like it or not, Jay, we're live. Ready or not, I should say. This is Tom Lawrence of Lawrence Technology Services, which people know that because this is my channel, but you are. Jay from LearnLinux TV. Yes, and me and Jay do this thing where we hang out on Tuesdays and talk about technology. And we get way off topic a lot of times, but we just dive around talking about some of the YouTube stuff and some of the Home Lab stuff. And we said, you know what we really need because there's a big crossover in our channel of audiences. We need to really dive just into being able to help people with Home Labs. It's kind of a driving thing, is the self-hosted community, the Home Lab community. And it helps people come into technology and then get a deeper understanding, maybe even get a career in this and understand all the aspects. I cover a lot of hardware and storage servers and network engineering. And Jay is an expert on things like he's got tutorials on Docker. So we just said, you know what? Let's combine forces and share our knowledge with the world. And also we want to do these as some live streams because Q and A, we each have our own forums and based on the type of forum, like if you have a Docker question, don't even ask me. Because I don't use, I mean, I'm very basic with Docker. I'm going to say, Jay knows about Docker. If you have a question about true NAS or you have a question about PF sense, those are things I dive heavily into on my channel. So hey, I might be the better person to answer that. But either way, between the two of us, we're here to answer your Home Lab questions. This is episode zero. We're only going to be doing this for 30 minutes and then we're going to try and make this a regular thing and bring questions and ideas. And if you don't have questions or ideas, don't worry, we do. We can always just talk about all the projects we're working on. We could definitely do that. We'll figure it out as we go. This will be defined as we go along the structure and everything. So we're just having fun with it today and then we'll see where it lands. And doing a lot of defining of what we want to do. And I'm already fascinated because right behind Jay's head, actually looking at me is the, you call it Jarvis, am I correct? Yeah, it's Mycroft and it's one of the things that I want to get back to, but I had it configured to do pretty much everything like the home light, the lighting and things. Now, so are you familiar with Volumeo, if I'm saying that right? It's a Raspberry Pi solution for having like a jukebox, hook up speakers to it. It gives you like a web interface to your music collection. So for many browsers, you just play music. So I would say, hey Jarvis, play lacuna coil. And then it would start, I'd start rocking out, but I broke it and I need to get back into fixing it. But it's just eventually what I want to be able to do is tell the assistant to update all my servers and have it go to my Ansible server and just run a Ansible playbook to install all updates on everything. I want to be able to control my home lab with them. I've just been sidetracked lately so haven't gotten that done yet. So, and he was kind of interrupting us earlier while we were testing, I had to tell him to shut down. Yeah, that's what caught my attention on it. I'm not a big, even though Google exists in privacy aside, I just don't use voice activated assistance that much. The kind of exception because I think it's kind of a safety thing. I do like telling my Tesla to navigate places because it just pulls the map up and goes somewhere. So I mean, that is the one function I use as a navigation but it's just sort of not the type and address. I can just say Tesla navigate to and my Tesla will take me somewhere, so. But it's still really cool because of privacy reasons the Jarvis one looked pretty interesting. You would also, in one of the topics me and you were on last week where this is one me and you were talking personally, we were diving into some trouble you were having with the smart plugs and I will be that's a whole fun story that we'll share and show sometime. But one thing funny about the smart plugs though is I didn't realize how much better they have gotten since I looked at them a few years ago still without their problems, which is what led to the Jake's problem. But the home assistant running on a Raspberry Pi is actually a pretty impressive project being able to manage all of that. It really is, it's a lot of fun. It's a rabbit hole when you get into it but it's a good one, it's a fun adventure. And if you're into that kind of thing, I mean, not everyone that runs HomeLab runs Home Assistant and vice versa, but there is a market for it and I think they're doing pretty well. I actually pay the, I think it's $5 a month or something which isn't really all that much but I like to support projects that are giving me an added bonus. So I like to send some money their way and overall, I think it's a great solution. And I also like what I like about it is you're in control because you don't want to expose things to the internet that you really don't need to. So having your own little open source assistant and then your own little HomeLab Home Assistant server, you could just decide not to expose it outside your land. You could even create a firewall rule to make sure that it can't get out of your land. So there's no way other people can get in and you're in full control. You don't have to worry about what Google and Amazon are doing because you're not using them for that. So I think there's some power you can get out of having that. Yeah, and for, I see a few people, a lot more people are joined now. What we're talking about is Home Assistant and you have MyCroft, that's the voice activation server, the open source voice activation server. So if you do want voice commands, I'm still in my house, I'm gonna flip light switches on and off. I'm still that person. Maybe I'm just old or something, but. Well, okay, so let's think about it. Let's have a thought experiment then. Because I agree, it's faster to flip a light switch than it is to speak a half sentence, that that's true. But what I had it set up for, and I have to again fix it, that's part of HomeLab, right? You break it, you fix it, that's how you learn. I would say like it's time to record and my studio lights come on, I'm gonna have it turn on my studio PC and my TV. So yeah, turning on my PC, yeah, that takes five seconds, but it takes longer to turn on all of those devices. That's where I think the value comes is when you have a scene and you could have it do a thing. Like I wanna be able to get to a point, like it's party time and then a disco ball just comes down for the ceiling and then the speakers. I mean, I'm not there yet, but if you think about from that lens, like if I wanted to update my servers, I have to open up a terminal, like an SSH into my Ansible server, I can run a playbook, no problem. How about when I just walk into the office and say, hey, update all my servers, then walk out and then it just does it and then I get an email and it's done. So the value that's something like that gives you depends on what you're actually automating. If it's just a light switch, but if it's a sequence of events that you are automating, for example. Then it makes a lot more sense because you're stacking. And I can imagine for my studio building something like that to, like you said, set a scene for my studio, adjust the lights and get things the way I want it on one thing. Now the box above Jay's head, like I said, it has two eyes on it. That is his server cabinet back there. What is that box you're actually running it on? So, okay, so which box are you referring to? The one that actually has the talky face on it before we stopped it before the show. Yeah, so that's my craft and it's just that white little device. He's just a little tiny box with a power cord and an ethernet cable that he just sets on the top of the cabinet. The cabinet, I get asked a lot. Everyone's like, hey, can I know what cabinet you have? I wanna buy it. I'm like, no, I made a big mistake. This is embarrassing, but I think there's a lesson to be learned. Make sure you check very thoroughly before you buy anything for HomeLab. It's a network cabinet. It's not a server cabinet. It's not the right size. Those servers are hanging off the back. They're exposed. It looks horrible behind it, but you can't tell. I need to replace it. But someone in the chat asked, what is that big box? And that's the answer. It is a server rack. And part of it for me was I wanted that in the background. It takes up a lot of space, right? But it looks cool when I do videos because I talk about the stuff. But then you can see in the background, I'm actually working on these things that I'm talking about. I actually am running servers. It's not just decorations. The two fans, each one is a Raspberry Pi cluster case that has four Raspberry Pies on them in layers. The fan is in the front to cool them. In fact, I'm working on this right now, which is the same thing, but it's stacked three high. And this is a 12 layer Raspberry Pi tower case right here, which I'm going to be doing for a video. Don't know when it's coming out. But those are the smaller version of that same thing. One of them is a Kubernetes cluster. The other one is the one that has a Pi dedicated to Home Assistant. I have one called Dev. That's what I call this Pi. It's just, I don't know why I chose the name, it's just my central SSH box for all my projects. Like I have a TMux thing going on in there. On any computer, resume my terminal session and a number of other servers. Below that, the really big wide server that's kind of blue. I can probably just open it, make it kind of easier to see possibly. Maybe not all that much, but you see my unified switch on the top and then this right here is going to be my TrueNAS server. That's this big thing. And then we have the Proxmox server and then the UPS underneath it. Probably hear it now that I've opened it. Yeah, didn't make too much of an audio difference. A few questions that people ask though, and this is a really popular questions about what you should or shouldn't virtualize because there's two questions in this. Someone said, should I virtualize PF Sense because they don't want more hardware. I personally, other than for my lab in lab work, I don't virtualize PF Sense because whenever you're running an update on your server, your virtualization stack, I should say, or you have to do maintenance on it. You don't have internet access. The challenge with that is, what if I have to get a file to fix a broken update to load something and I have to have the server down for that or if it goes wrong and I have to troubleshoot it, I need internet to do those things. And yes, I could just pop up internet on my phone but that's greatly inconvenient. So I've always been a big fan of just running your firewall, like your primary firewall as a actual appliance. And I think you do the same, Jay, am I correct? Yeah, I started off the same way. I think for me, and this is probably true of many people at the time, I didn't really have much money for this. I think the server that I had was maybe $100 used or something and I needed to make that stretch because I just didn't have the money to add anything else to it. So a lot of people that asked that question, it could either be for consolidation, right? I think a lot of people just don't have the extra cash for multiple servers and that's where it comes from. But then when I did it that way, with a virtual machine with PF Sense, I think I might have lasted two weeks. I'm like, I can't stand this, I have to change. You can make it work. But like Tom said, you're going to have some rough edges. You are going to have some challenges. And one of them is like, you don't realize how many things depend on internet until you shut down the box. If you're rebooting your virtualized solution, your hypervisor, everything in your house stops. And if there's a problem, okay, let me go ahead and just connect to the KVM, the IKVM and get a console on my screen and kind of go, oh, right. I don't have any internet. I can't get to the console. That's not the thing. I can't get to this. I can't get to that. And then you find yourself with grabbing a keyboard, actual keyboard and display and whatnot and connecting it to the bag. It's just, and it becomes a chore. There's other challenges too that I think you'll run into. It's easier. It's easy to think like, should I consolidate this? You'll run into trouble. A lot of people do it. I want to be clear. A lot of people have successfully done this, but you have to understand there's some interesting quirks that you'll run into. In the same goes where someone asks with running TrueNAS, you have some of those same issues of can you run TrueNAS virtually? You can. You can do pass through. I've seen someone mentioned on RAID. You can do pass through in XP and G. You can do pass through in Proxmox. If I'm not mistaken, I'm not an RAID user, but my understanding of on RAID is they have it just as a checkbox. Do you get that with the Proxmox? If you want to pass through a device, can you just check the box in the PCI and you got to go to the command line and find the device? It's kind of complicated there because it really depends on the hardware, whether it's actual RAID, fake RAID and what have you. The options in Proxmox became more limited, which is kind of why it's hard for me to answer. When I first started, for example, and I installed Proxmox for the first time, it asked me if I wanted ZFS or if I wanted just MD RAID 1, MD RAID 5, I had all those options. Nowadays they removed a lot of those options and you don't have an MD RAID option. You have like a single disk option. But if you want RAID, their assumption is you'll just use ZFS instead. Well, maybe, but you have to start setting things up kind of manually. It really depends on the hardware. I don't know of any checkbox. The options are very limited when you install it. So I'm gonna have to say probably not. Yeah, it's a little bit of a challenge. It can be done running TrueNAS in there. I don't recommend it. I would never recommend it for production, but for non-production or learning, absolutely. And one of the fun things is, and I've seen a lot of people chiming in that they've run a PSNs virtual for a long time, absolutely you can do it and it can be a learning experience. If, and maybe that's the goal of, especially if you are trying to get into the career, you wanna learn a lot of aspects, nothing like trying something hard to really level up your skill because you're doing it the hard way, which means there's gonna be more reading to do. You'll have to get a deeper understanding of the hardware. So there's an advantage to doing it that way just because I've taken some projects and done them in a more difficult manner because I got to learn more. It's like building a wire guard server from scratch. I did that video because why not start from ground zero, build it up and learn it? That's not something the average person is gonna do. They're just gonna connect. And my site to site video, for example, on how to use a wire guard in PF Sense is easy. It's a couple check boxes. You move the keys into the pier, into the server or the other one and that's it. It's done. You didn't have to do all the legwork it takes to build a system that can route and load the modules and things like that. Someone also asked about QNAP and Synology NAS and their virtualization. I have not used a QNAP before. I'm not the biggest fan of them. My feelings from all my friends who have used them and compared them to Synology is Synology just has better support. Some people say QNAP has slightly faster hardware. I'm not someone who's ever used the one, but I definitely have used plenty of Synologies and I do think they work well. J's use Synology in the past as well, but they do have virtualization on Synology. I might do some videos on it. It's pretty basic. It doesn't support any clustering or anything like that without licensing though. So it's not like your other open source hypervisors. You have to buy licenses if you want some of the advanced features. They give you a limited set of features which may be perfectly adequate for your needs, but you may have to buy a license if you want some of the advanced clustering features and live migration of VMs between servers and everything else. That's all paid license from Synology. I don't know how QNAP does it. Yeah, I haven't used QNAP either. I've used Synology. It's been a long time. I do have a Synology in the studio that I will be reviewing soon. I don't know when, probably within a week. A lot of hardware reviews coming and I'll be looking at the same thing too. When I did use Synology, I actually liked it quite a bit, but Strudan asked one over for me just for very selfish reasons. I like ZFS on it. Honestly, like there's nothing against Synology at all, but we'll see how I feel after I check out this Synology that I have in the studio. Maybe I'll change my opinion, maybe not. Yeah, someone says, so the site to site warrior guard video, would this be applicable to myself looking to have all clients on my network connect to a VPN provider over the WAN? I've done a video on that and this is something I've always got a mixed feelings on. So you have to stop and define, in my opinion, why you want a whole home VPN. And the concept is you're gonna take all the data from your network and pipe it out of a VPN. You're slowing it down for one because you're gonna be limited to whatever the offerings of that VPN provider. Also, you're limited by the hardware you have because, well, VPNs require high levels of math and cryptography. So running that inside there may slow it down. And for people whose only answer is, oh, I just don't want the cable company to sniff my data like my DNS traffic. I'm like, so you're gonna pay money to somebody else to do it. Now, region locking or if you're seeding your favorite torrents of your ISOs for Linux and you know that companies don't like torrenting, okay, those might be good reasons to use a VPN. But I usually push for people to do it on a policy routing basis, as in you create a policy where some device may tunnel out. My preference is always if I can load the tunnel on the device itself as opposed to the firewall, it makes it easier, but that's not always possible with some of them. So kind of think about how you wanna do that because it creates a challenge, great learning experience to learn how policy routing works. I have a video on how to do it with PIA VPN and OpenVPN. That video is gonna be almost identical when you do it with WireGuard. It's just a different VPN service, but the backend is the same. You're gonna create rules and policies of which gateway to go out. So you take the WireGuard or OpenVPN, either one, when you create them as a gateway, and then you have to create a rule to say, traffic from this IP address is gonna head out over this gateway. That's just referred to as policy routing. So I do wanna do some more videos on it because it is the thing that people think I should know off the top of my head all the time. We don't really do as much policy routing in business in the same way. It's pretty much exclusive to people who wanna hide traffic from VPNs. In the business world, you see less policy-based routing. You see it in a different way. Most of the time you are setting up, for companies that do full security when you set up a business VPN, they either want their endpoint traffic for the external customers 100% routed in, but then in 2020, with everyone switching to doing that, they realize we don't have enough bandwidth, split the tunnels. So it's only for resources. Like someone opened a VPN and whatever traffic goes out the normal internet, but then a VPN is for resources in the company network. That way, not all the traffic gets routed that way. That goes back into business stuff. We wanna focus on the homelab and self-host ratings. Right, and I agree with everything you said. I think the important thing about security is not to be overconfident. Sometimes, depending on how you have everything set up, whether or not your traffic can be seen, all comes down to how far down the subpoena chain someone's willing to go. Because if it's maybe at the very first level, oh yeah, this isn't worth our time because it's not that big of a deal. But if they really, really, really wanna see what you're doing subpoena after subpoena after subpoena, then they get to you eventually. And also when it comes to overconfidence, it's gonna be whether or not you get hacked can also depend on how determined the hacker is. Most of the time, okay, that's gonna take more than five minutes. I'm gonna move on. I don't wanna deal with that. I really want his stuff. I wanna break in, I'm gonna try for days, months, however long it takes, I'm gonna get in there. Really depends on that. I'm not saying you can't have reasonable security, but just have reasonable expectations and backups and whatnot, because honestly, it depends on, like Tom said, what you wanna do, what you wanna accomplish, don't have a VPN just for the sake of having VPN just because the ad on that YouTube channel said that you should have a VPN. Why do you want one? What do you want to accomplish? What's the problem that you think it's going to solve for you and then plan it accordingly? Yeah. Back onto some of the network hardware someone's asking about Unify versus TP-Link. So, Unify has definitely had some missteps in the last few months and things that didn't make people happy. For example, the fact that they needed to register before you can activate the hardware cloud key. That's only the hardware cloud key. You can still host your own Unify controller software. That hasn't changed. But people keep thinking that's the reason to throw away Unify. Now, granted, they've had firmware updates, et cetera, and problems that, but all the companies have this. The thing is, I've never found TP-Link in the past to be a commercial company, so to speak. A company with great support. And TP-Link now has released something that looks a whole lot like what Unify is doing with its self-hosted controller. TP-Link did reach out to us and because it seems like some of the kit is not very available, so they have like a package they send us to review. So, they're sending us one to review. So, we're gonna take a kind of critical look at it and set it up here and do some testing with it. I am not at any means ready to get rid of Unify because Unify themselves, misstepings are not. There's not really someone in their space right now that has all the bells, whistles, and features that Unify offers. So, in specifically, I'm talking about their switches and their access points. I don't even care about their routing equipment because it's too basic and too buggy. But TP-Link, one of the problems right away, we already know what the TP-Link going into this. So, you can't assign multiple WAN IP addresses to the Unify routing equipment, which is crazy. There's been a request for six years in their forums that, hey, routers normally can have more than one WAN IP address by the way, Unify, but you in six years have not figured out how to do this. And someone will then point out, well, they have a beta firmware that you can do it coming sometime in the future. That's cool. TP-Link designs a new product that looks a whole lot like the way Unify does it, even a similar interface, even the same icons on the side that also can't do multiple WAN IPs right now. Yeah, I've run into the same thing. There was a time where I was considering checking out that the gateway, but I look at the feature list and I'm like PF Sense every single time. But I mean, I think PF Sense is gonna be more of a challenge to configure, which I don't really think is a problem for the majority of people that are watching this because they're probably up for a challenge. I mean, why else would you do HomeLab? But for me personally, Unify has been great. So I'm the same as like PF Sense for the router slash firewall layer then Unify for everything else. And I don't like the fact that you have to have a Cloud Key or a controller. I don't care that much. I'm uneasy about it, but it's not enough to make me not use it. It's worked so well for me. It's been the only solution for me that has continually worked well. I think what it comes down to is cost. When you're first starting out in the HomeLab, I mean, how much money are you gonna put into it? Yeah, you link his way to go for that because it's cheap, right? It's a good way to get into it. Yeah, and here's one of the things that I want to comment on. Someone said, why aren't you using Jitsie? Before I answer that question, hey Jay, does your recording computer run Linux for recording stuff? It currently doesn't, actually. Right, it runs Windows just like buying. So here's one of the challenges and me and Jay want to get content out. And at some point we have worked really hard to try to make something work and I see Jay stream deck within reach. We realize that if a tool just is not ready as much as I'd prefer to be Linux and Jitsie's one of those tools, we've tried to do some stuff in Jitsie. It doesn't work as well as Zoom. It wouldn't do the things we're trying to do right here as well. So we've chose to use Zoom. If soon as Jitsie, and the thing is I'm not a Jitsie developer and the developers are aware of where the shortcomings are. It's not like they're unaware. It's a matter of throwing money at it. Zoom has lots of money and they did. They threw lots of money and talented programmers at it, including destroying one of my favorite projects which was Keybase because they just assumed it. They didn't even want the Keybase project. They wanted the team that built it for security. So they bought the entire company that developed Keybase and yeah. So that's how it is. That's exactly how it is. I think, so I do have a Jitsie server that I set up and I'm interested in trying it out. I haven't had a chance to try it out yet. It exists. So that's one thing and Tom and I, we've talked about maybe trying it out just the two of us see how it works now. And we will. The way I look at it, if a solution comes out that's open source that does what I needed to do I'll switch to it like right now. And that's just my mentality. It's always Linux by default. And then if it doesn't do what I needed to do I'll just temporarily go a different direction and I'll check in every now and then kind of see how the environment looks and then maybe gravitate back to that solution. Like I'm going to be potentially converting the recording PC back to Linux possibly pretty soon when I have time. But like Tom said, it's like we have people on our YouTube channels that want content. We want to do the content. We don't want to make people wait too long for the content. So sometimes that's what it's all about. And even with my Windows server that does my recording studio I'm getting ready to do an updated studio video because I've re-engineered more stuff on it. I like to share with you know how we do things and but it's one of those things. I still have bugs with the Windows one and those bugs are compounded if I try to do this on Linux. They get worse. So if it stops me from producing content and by the way, like you have people like EposVox which I follow on YouTube. He does a lot of like how to he does a lot of Streamlab tutorials and how to be a streamer. And I learned a lot from him but he does that full time and still is constantly learning and doing it. So I have to rely on someone else's knowledge already and he only does it in Windows. So trying to take that knowledge extrapolate it is at some point, where's my job? Is my job teaching more people? Would you like to have me do another PF Sense WireGuard video or spend a week working on trying to figure out how to make something work in Linux? By the way, you don't care. If I did a whole video of how I got Streamlab's working in Linux there's like people like Jay who'll be very thankful. And unless any of you are streamers and cruising content like me or Jay and you're like, oh, that's a novelty thing. And other streamers are like, well, you guys went for a lot of work. I just hit record in Linux and got my content out there. Oh, that's true. To have someone ask about the Raspberry Pi is a good enough for security and also said that it was slower especially over SSH, you're running basic commands. When it comes to Raspberry Pi there's a lot of variables more than I think when you're just running a server, a proper server. I use Raspberry Pi's for almost everything nowadays. It's, I use it for SSH because depending when you joined I actually mentioned I was using a Raspberry Pi as my central dev box when I'm developing or doing administrative things it's my central SSH thing. It's like an internal bastion but the reason why I use it for that again is because I could just close my session on one laptop, reopen it on another and it doesn't matter if I reboot. And it's fine. I have no problem with basic commands. I did make sure that I had really good storage like the SD card. I paid $5 more to make sure that it was a really good SD card. I put a USB flash drive on there, a really good one for the home directory. So I just put the home directory on there. I have a Kubernetes cluster running off Raspberry Pi. So I would say don't underestimate the Raspberry Pi. It can surprise you with what it can do but it also depends on how you have it set up if you don't have enough power it'll run slower or not at all. Storage like I mentioned make sure it's Raspberry Pi 4 if you don't already have one go with the Raspberry Pi 4 as long as you're not trying to just run some ginormous operation for one Raspberry Pi should be fine I think. Yeah, the Raspberry Pi's are still just a fun tool to play with because it's an inexpensive way and you've got some videos already on this topic and it's a way to build out a cluster of servers and without breaking the bank. Like you, cool if you could afford all the fancy stuff but like a lot of people starting out they're going, I want to get into this I only have a limited budget buying a handful of Raspberry Pi 4s and loading some tools on there and building I think you have an entire series of videos on it Am I correct Jay? Yeah, I have all kinds of content on that too. There's a lot you can do with them. I think that what I want to know what I want to see as an experiment I don't really know how to go about this because I already use Raspberry Pi's and yes I am a business but I'm just one person. I'm curious how far a business could go hypothetically with just Raspberry Pi's for example, rather than having a hypervisor. So hypervisor obviously you're going to run a bunch of VMs on it. Let's just say you have 30 VMs on that hypervisor. What if you have 30 Raspberry Pi's and each one is doing something that one of the VMs would be doing. Already the power usage would be very, very low. So it's possible maybe that it would pay for itself maybe not but I want to know how far companies can go because I feel like Raspberry Pi's are basically considered the only the testing or the play thing. I find them incredibly stable. I want to know how far a business can get with that. I think they could get very far. Depending on what they're running obviously they're running Windows Server, no. But they're running just Linux VMs. If each Pi was one of those VMs I think that could actually work for some businesses out there that might save a lot of money. Yeah, there's a couple companies, 3CX comes to mind. If I'm not mistaken they have Raspberry Pi phone bridges and if you have a cloud controller for your phone system your PBX system but you want to still do things. One of the challenges you have when you have a cloud PBX is local calls can't get to each other in the office without going through in and out the cloud. But if you have local bridging systems they can handle some of the inter-traffic and then have a single point by which things go in and out and they can build those on Raspberry Pi's I believe. There's a few other projects. There's a free PBX project that runs on there. So I've seen people use them in the commercial space for phone servers for example. It's stuff that runs on Linux. It's stuff that you can find compiled for ARM and it does work. That's definitely there. Real quick guys, if you there are 490 concurrent viewers but there's only 98 likes. So bash on that like button a little bit. It helps the algorithm of the YouTube system tell everyone that this is a good video to watch. For sure, one last comment about the Raspberry Pi thing. Someone mentioned it's only ARM. Excuse me, yeah, that's true. You are gonna have some downside there but just if you think about just playing the devil's advocate on here. If you go with Digital Ocean, Linode or whatever let's just say you're paying $5 a month on your website. Raspberry Pi 4, you can buy one with eight gigs of RAM for cores. That's more powerful than that $5 droplet or $5 Linode instance which I love Linode. They're sponsoring my channel but that doesn't mean I think everyone should use it every time because it's gonna be a good bit for this, maybe not for that. But already instead of paying $5 a month how far is that Raspberry Pi gonna get you if you have like a proxy going to that Raspberry Pi. And also when you think of Kubernetes clusters which I have one running on Pi to get to the point where it's just bogged down I'll just add another Pi to it and add it to the cluster and another one and another and I'll keep scaling it. You could get pretty far with that I think. That's one of the things I think can be overlooked with those. Yes, they can be a single point of failure but that's where clustering comes in. You build a Kubernetes cluster you have a more elasticity to the stack you're building therefore as you said, when you need more you add more and then from there they're inexpensive. If one dies most likely thing to die is not the Raspberry Pi itself but the little memory card might go bad on it and provides you didn't go through the trouble setting up to boot off of the network or something like that to start distributing them. You pop another memory card in or just replace that piece of the cluster and you have the kind of neat basis to build something. It's an interesting lookup and I think it might be Chick-fil-A it's called the Intel NUC and they call it the cluster NUC and what they did was they took a series I think of them and are using if I'm almost positive they're using Kubernetes as well they just instead of building a server to go at the retail locations they built a small cluster running Linux and that way it's redundant across all the machines that way if one of the machines fails, whatever we they stack five, I think five of them at a time at each location and five NUCs costs a reasonable amount of money and they're modular, they're replaceable if one of the five nodes goes down they know they got to replace it but it didn't take them out of business. So there's concepts you can build around it but it comes down to having a full thought running a business on a single Raspberry Pi absolutely that is not a good idea. No, no, that's not a good idea I just, I think it's a fun experiment it's more of a thought experiment obviously but I just wonder, right? Like how far people would get and I'm totally okay with the fact that it could be a massive epic failure that's fair, you never know how it's gonna go but maybe there's a company out there that is just starting and maybe they'll try a few Raspberry Pi see how far they get it's just an interesting thought experiment we had someone ask about a VLAN I'm trying to find it now but it's growing kind of fast wanting to know how they would know that their game console is on the VLAN and my first thought is as long as you have GHCP on the VLAN then you look at the IP address in the game console what IP address was it given then if it was given one in that address space you know it's in the VLAN and then the next question might be can it talk to other things if you don't want your game console to talk to your desktop for example, if you want the separation there you could try pinging the game console from your desktop assuming that the game console didn't disable ICMP pings if you're able to ping it obviously the communication between VLANs is still happening whether you want it to happen or not that's on you, you can block it if you don't but I think DHCP is the way on the top of my head you would know what IP address it was given you would know what VLAN is currently in and that's why it's important when you build out the rules and now that PF Sense 2.5 is out I'm gonna be doing the long tutorial of how to build PF Sense I've already started a couple of the 2.5 tutorials specifically around WireGuard but one of the important aspects that I even cover in my videos is once I set something onto another VLAN and I fire something up on that VLAN you test it, you go in there and you ping it did it get the IP address we expected did it have the response we wanted because a lot of mistakes are made and people will start separating things but forgot they left a rule somewhere that allowed traffic and it's not the rule they wanted because I always say start out with implicitly all if we start with all and build from there, cool now remove the all rule and or swap the all rule for a more restrictive rule do, does things still work it's just an iterative process of not just guessing your way through it and let, you know, once you're really good at it like we do these all day so we don't even think we can go through we still test even though we do them we start out with just the rules we want because we know exactly how we want to run these but yeah, that's just it's just an iterative process until you get used to it someone says about getting started getting started is kind of a big target to throw because you have to first start with where do you want to start some people really have an affinity for playing with hardware and what surprises people is Xavier who's done a lot of cybersecurity videos on my channel Xavier didn't touch physical hardware until only the last couple of years and he worked for Fortune 1000 companies doing IT and cybersecurity he always built things in the cloud and that's still a valid answer some people, whether it's line order digital ocean they both have like $5 a month things that is one of the lowest cost ways to spin up a server that you can log into and start doing something on and that's how Xavier, a lot of his early learning is as good as he is and big as he has cybersecurity it wasn't only till a couple of years ago he actually had servers or anything at his house he did everything and matter of fact, he's AWS certified so he built entire stacks of systems and very extensible systems all in AWS so you don't actually need to have any hardware and for $5 a month or there's ways to get even cheaper servers I just mentioned to companies that we're familiar with but definitely ways you can do it but yeah I'm gonna totally agree with you I think that there is a, it's almost like a debate like where do you draw the line what is HomeLab defined as I think I'm gonna give my opinion because I think especially for episode zero it's important and I know a lot of people are going to disagree with me and that's totally fine because I agree with the disagreement I know why people disagree and that is people will say if you are running something in a BPS provider DigitalOcean, Linode, AWS, whatever that it's not HomeLab anymore I disagree I define HomeLab as you are taking control of your server environment you are owning it and that's it whether you decide to run something in a BPS provider you are still in complete control of that now obviously the majority of people that are looking into HomeLab wanna run servers in their house I think ultimately it comes down to okay there might be a few things that you wanna run outside the house for example maybe you have a directory not very big but very important files maybe you set up a BPS and you just R-sync the data over to that server every now and then for a poor man's offsite backup for example so that's an important definition I think it's always important to use what you what aligns to your goals but I will shameless plug I do have a how to HomeLab series on my channel which does it's still early but there's enough episodes where it does actually go over how to start out and I think it's a good watch I have asked Tom to join the series and we've been talking about it but we're looking for a good insertion point where to bring him in at a certain point that makes sense because I've just been putting these out and we're probably gonna keep talking about it and maybe make a decision but for now there's enough episodes to check out where I think it might be helpful to maybe to answer some of the questions people have as they're starting out yeah so there's a lot of factors like I said they go into it and someone asked and I will answer this because I haven't done a video on it and I think they've not done the best job of getting the word out but so I wanna do video if you're running PF Sense 2.5 and you're having problems unbound package update package upgrade or upgrade update it's the command line package tool for PF Sense if you do that you'll find that it pulls a new version of unbound and you have just solved a problem that I or potentially that I was having I think I was having a few issues with unbound so I am going to do exactly that as soon as this is done because that's a good tip yeah so and someone says this question always comes up if you wanna use OpenSense feel free I don't use OpenSense I've always used PF Sense and OpenSense is a fork to me there's not enough extras in that fork that make me want to use it so I stay with the main platform and you know for example like the big debate like they had WireGuard first is like someone was excited about that I'm like no they did but they had the go implementation they didn't have the kernel implementation and the folks over at PF Sense sponsored the kernel implementation for BSD which is now proper and much faster than the go implementation that PF Sense did I really when it comes to your firewall you have to have a level of trust with the company and I know the updates don't come as fast from PF Sense but that actually kind of makes me happy that they're not constantly forcing me to update the firewall because security is one of the first concerns about the firewall and the slow steady process that PF Sense is you know produced with that firewall means it makes me comfortable with it I think Jay really shares some of the same sentiment there I do and I think another thing on your side that I don't think you mentioned was if PF Sense did update as fast as OpenSense did your call volume at your company would go crazy that would be hard to deal with right because you'd have like oh an update every month you'd have like people calling like daily asking should I install this update should I install this update you'll probably be dreaming of people asking you should I install this update should I install this update but my reason for not using OpenSense is twofold one I share what Tom says about that but I've been very interested in checking it out two reasons why I don't real quick one I'm a little bit biased towards the YouTube channel so if I'm gonna spend time checking out something new then I want it to be something that could translate into a video and it's just not because one I just don't have time and two I am LearnLinuxTV that's BSD I leave that up to Tom he does a great job with all that and OpenSense is kind of new it's just I don't know but also it's very time consuming for me to migrate over to it because you can't export the settings very easily from PF Sense yes you can do it and people have opened up the backup file and an XML editor and I can do that but I have a YouTube channel that I'm trying to go with everything else and I have a very finite number of hours so unfortunately that makes it so it's very hard for me to check it out even though I really do want to maybe someday in the future but for now I'm just biased in focusing on the Linux thing and PF Sense works I guess Yeah and sometimes just happy it works we're gonna wind this down but while I'm impressed we have 557 so far as we're peaked at for concurrent viewers so I think there's some interest in this topic what do you think Jay? I would think that there is so what we've discussed is that we're gonna alternate next time it'll be on my channel then the time after that it'll be back on Tom's channel and we'll go back and forth I think it's probably fair to assume Tom that you have a playlist on your channel after we get some episodes in we'll probably have episodes regardless of what channel it's on so you can go to his channel or mine either way or his forums or my forums but we'll just kind of keep alternating back and forth as we go along I don't think we've decided on a cadence yet we're kind of still working this out to see how we want to go about it that's why it's episode zero I thought about calling it episode beta or episode alpha first we'll figure it out but yeah One of the things right now I mean we're doing this in a visual format and Q&A here but if we can turn this into a podcast that's something we really talked about which would mean we just have to focus on not doing anything that would be visual because then that doesn't translate but we can still have the visual and host it here live and then in the end strip it out and put it back over as the audio as a podcast so me and Jay have talked about it you're actually looking to look on Jay's faces because we still go, we talked about it we haven't decided so you're watching the decision making process in real time right now you watched the gears turning in our heads podcast one time and then a live stream the other time there's all kinds of different ways we can go about it but one of the things you talked about folks are go ahead well let's say years ago what we did with the Sunday morning Linux review was it's always been a podcast but we recorded it live on YouTube so we could have a chat session so we always made it a podcast we just happened to do it also simultaneously when we recorded the podcast as a live stream to allow an audience interaction YouTube is an easy platform for that part of it but the other side of it's going to be then you just rip the audio into a podcast but people can then listen to the podcast and enjoy it on their own time but if they wanna participate they would come to this session over here and we'll real quick Renee mentioned that both you and I had a huge impact on learning networking both of our channels virtualization and to keep up the good work and this is why I do it I love hearing things like that because knowledge is eternal when I give it away when I put it out in a video it's for everybody at that point everything I forget to put in a video nobody benefits from so I love hearing things like that that it's having a good impact that's really awesome. Yeah I've seen all the number of people saying podcast yes so I guess that means we could just put this in a podcast we're just telling the audience even if you're just listening you're not looking up the screen while we're doing it we're reading out the questions as they come in maybe we could just consider just dropping it in a podcast form for the people that are commuting but we'll talk about it we could talk all day about making plans and things we're always doing that so we'll do that behind the camera a little bit and we'll find a system that works for everybody. Yeah then we'll pick some topics that we'll have and when we do is live shame we don't mind answering people's questions now as I said at the very beginning and this is how we'll end it I do have forums and they're linked down in the description Jay has forums so you can find Jay at learnlinux.tv you can find everything about me at laurancesystems.com my forums specifically which are linked there as well but forums.laurancesystems.com and also we're still doing more of it but more of my tutorials are being consolidated over at laurance.technology once again I linked all these things in the videos as well so I've done everything I can to make it as obvious as possible we're to find any place I post content there you go yeah that's great I mean just like you said learnlinux.tv everything of importance is linked right off of that one site so community forums all that should be right there community.learnlinux.tv if you want to direct link but yeah it's all right there yep all right well thanks everyone for joining and