 Welcome to vlog Thursday 306 and happy Thanksgiving if you're based in the United States. Though it is a official holiday. And because of that, and because I have family things I'm doing later, I decided to do this in the morning. Cause doing it late at night, I might be tired and I'll be less enthusiastic, but I'm a pretty enthusiastic morning person cause I do wake up early. My usual routine is 5 a.m. But the first thing I wanna mention is Ohio Linux FEST 2022. I will be there. I'm excited cause I haven't been to that particular event in quite a while. So I thought I'd get out of the way. That's the only thing I really have to say about it is I will be there. And if you'd like to say hi or I go there to have conversations with a bunch of other Linux people and have some fun. Hey, that's maybe even learn a few things or learn a lot of things is usually my goal. So I'm excited about that. I did a few tech events this year. I mean, they're great. I enjoy them. But I get more excited about some of the nerdy or the events, so to speak. The deeper we dive into topics, the greater my happiness is with said events because I usually even at the other events because they're a little bit more business oriented, I'll usually gravitate to the people who wanna nerd out even deeper. Ah, let's see. We got Cody, congratulations. We gotta get Cody to 100,000. He needs one of them fancy silver play buttons. So I'd like to see Cody's name on one of those. So if you guys can go and subscribe to MacTelcom Networks, that would be great. IBC covers a lot of ubiquity stuff like I do and a lot of other things. It does a lot of, well, he's been doing a lot more than I really had time to do when it comes to a lot of the wiring stuff. I'm trying to change that. I actually filmed some more wiring stuff. I just gotta get off my button, edit it. So nonetheless, let's see. Hello from Sweden. Yeah, my European people. And I see Oliver Lambert, who's head of the VATES team, the people behind XCP and Jean Zenarkasha. So over there in France, I believe. So that is, it's probably afternoon over there. So nonetheless, I say good morning though. The thing we'll jump on right away though is to talk about mastodon and let me pull up my mastodon thing here. And there's been a lot of questions and a lot of people wanted, it's hard to describe exactly, but let me pull this up and we'll talk about it. A lot of people talk about mastodon, obviously, because with all the current changes of Twitter, you're like, hey, hey, 2 p.m. there, awesome. But with all the changes in Twitter, there's obviously a lot more discussion around what are alternatives to using that. And reality is, it's not about any of the controversies. I think a lot of people get caught up in those. I just go where the audiences are. And with the numbers being what they are, and I joined Infosec.exchange, I was like, okay, hey, there's, look, people here. Lots of posts, lots of people. I was able to start curating my own lists of things, which do include, so far, I'm following 109 people, and I barely posted anything. I only started posting the other day in my usual memes, and I'm just dual posting on Twitter and on mastodon. But I might do a video because one thing I think people aren't clear on, and Jay, by the way, did a great video, Jay from LearnLinuxTV on how to set up mastodon in terms of functionally what server tools to load, but I don't think everyone understands that mastodon works more like email than it does a traditional social media platform. And I might do a video explaining that because it was a little bit of a different concept. I understood it after I started reading through it, but not everyone seems to kind of get how that works and how instances work. So I'll give you a quick analogy and, you know, let me know if I should kind of break this down a little bit more detail in like a dedicated video. But essentially, each instance you can think of as your own mail server. So mastodon, because it's a open source platform, I forget the name of the framework that is built on, the protocol is underlying but not relevant anyways, but it will be in the video. When I do the details, I make notes to make sure I get it all right. But with mastodon, each instance you can think of as your own email server. Email is actually a federated platform as well. You can email me. You can email me. I happen to use Google's servers for email. Some people do host their own email and you can email that person and you can have people on your mail server and other people can go back and forth. This is an interoperable protocol. Mastodon works much the same way. So for every instance, you can choose where. Ruby on Rails is the backend framework. What's the name of the protocol that federates everything together? It's got a name that eludes me at the moment. Veronica explains that a video on it and brought it up. But when you think of as on like email and with each person having their own server and I'm on the Infosec.exchange at Tom Lawrence, I can throw that in there if anyone wants to follow it. Activity pub, that's the one. Activity pub is the underlying protocol that allows all these things to happen. Now I think it's really slick how this works because each instance, as I said, think of them like an email server. How do the email servers talk to each other? Well, DNS, that's the old school way email works. We look up the mail server through DNS. We understand where that email address at that domain gets to and the routing will take care of it. So I send an email to sales at whatever company or whatever the email gets there. Activity pub is the underlying protocol that allows each different place to talk to each server. So when you look at how this works, and for example, I'm on Infosec.social or Infosec.exchange, but if someone's on another one and I, since we have VATES in here, I know they, where did they post it? I'll find it real quick. XCPNG has their own, there they go. And this is at social.vates.tech. So being at Oliver's here, this is how they set up their instance. Now, how does Tom follow them when they're on another server? How does this talk to each other? It's actually really simple when you follow someone on another server. When you click follow, because I'm already there, it will find it. But if you go to somewhere and we go to was head right to their instance, I'm not logged into this instance. But if I wanted to, and let's go back so I gotta make sure I get the right one. Yeah, it's just XCPNG. We're gonna add to PNG. And I wanna follow this person. Alls I have to do is go here. I can just copy this because I'm not signed into this particular instance. And I can copy this and paste it into my server and it will allow me to see in my feed all the different things that are going on with XCPNG. It's once you kind of grasp those concepts of it, it's pretty simple. And you're like, okay, that's how it works functionally. Now, why use this over Twitter? Well, the problem, and this is something that is long before the current situation Twitter has found themselves in. Anytime you have a singular social media platform that has a huge, huge following. And I've, you know, follow me on Twitter. And I still use Twitter, by the way. And the other ones like Macedon and LinkedIn and Facebook, yes, I use all the services. But when you have a particular concentration of control, you can then have that particular company dictate things in a way you may or may not like. And Twitter has been a disaster for a long, long time. This is not a recent problem. The trending, the number of spam bots, the, I don't know, you know what I mean? I just got another group message on Twitter today. Of course, you know, you can make this much money by doing this. Here's the link for some blah, blah, blah thing that you can click on. And that's just so common. And so it's like, I don't know, it's not been a good platform forever. None of them have been. And as they get bigger, they become less good because there's less incentive. They make the switching cost of moving them, moving from them very high. But back to Macedon, I'm just going where the audiences are. So if there's an audience of people that wants to follow me there or I can engage with in a great way, I'm going to go to that particular social platform because this comes up a lot when people ask me about posting my videos on other platforms. And I've pointed out in a couple of them, like they get no views and they're toxic communities. I don't want to be part of any toxic community. So I will always stay with, you know, where I can have good conversation, good intelligent conversation, I should say. So that's my reason for using Macedon for now until there's a reason not to use Twitter. I'm used to the spam because spam is spam, won't be long for Macedon has uncontrolled spam. Well, they all get it. But yeah, they all have a DC, uncontrolled spam. But I'm going to say, I probably will see less bots on Macedon. So far I've seen very few bots on Macedon. I imagine there's going to be some DM spam, but less bots, there's definitely Twitter bots. Well, that's something I believe he's right on. So, and this one right here, depends if your server is well managed and well moderated. Yes, this is actually what's really interesting about Macedon is you're actually creating a competitive ecosystem for moderation. The concept people may not understand is the value is not technology when it comes to any forum. I have forums, I'm using discourse. It's a pretty common open source tool. The people over at XCPNG, they're forums. Let's pull them up real quick. I think they're using discourse as well. The value though is not the technology. The value of any forum is the audience it curates via the affinity groups you kind of put together to say this is our, what we're going to be talking about. And then the moderation, the value of any particular group is that moderation. This is, okay, using node BV, okay. But same principle. I believe no BV is an open source one as well. But why do I like these forums? Well, there's a lot of fun and interesting things I learn about XCPNG and things like that. So I like all these individual forums, but if you made one giant mega forum, you would just have kind of a dumpster fire to deal with. When you take a whole lot of smaller forums, and I'm partial to forums more than social media, by the way, you can curate these great audiences and have good conversations. You can restrict it to the topics at hand. And that's my way to enjoy a lot of the internet. I spend a lot of time going through forums where I have interest. I saw the reasons I run my own forums for things. It's the same reason. It's just to be able to keep things around the conversations I wanna have. So curation is the output of any of these platforms. Curation and moderation. It's not the technology. Technology is just the technology. So that's my whole thoughts and a rants on it. But if someone wants a more explaining video, I can definitely talk about that. But nonetheless, but the, what was I gonna say? Yeah, by the way, if you have a lot of SCP and G questions, their forums are actually very good for that. I participate more and more in them to just kind of share knowledge, give feedback to people. I always click the unread ones and start going through and seeing if there's anything I can help with on there. Cause recently I just was talking about, what was I post? I SCSI, yeah, I'm active in these forums too. So nonetheless, if you're an SCP and G fan like myself, head over to their forums. The next thing let's talk about is the rack updates. Yeah, we can manage spam at our scale because it's not that big indeed. Oh, yeah, by the way, even my forums, I mean, I have, I think about three, all over 3,000, somewhere between three and 4,000 people that are on my forums, like registered users and oh, happy to participate as well. So, you know, I love the, that's one of my community give-backs cause I can't write code like the team over at VATES. Tom decided early on in life, I actually used to code. So I understand things in concept, but I haven't actually done anything but some bash scripting. So one of the ways, and I tell people one of the ways you can really give back to open source project is go participate in the communities if you understand how the product works, even if you can't write the code or even simple things like language translations, you know, that those are all very helpful things you can contribute to open source. Me and Jay have talked about this, I believe in one of our homelab show episodes where we talk about how to give back to things. It's, it doesn't have to be code to help out with an open source project. So worth mentioning that because anyone can develop master on client, it's sort of a uncancellable party with two social, oh yeah. And two social being my example of a garbage platform with toxic people. So there's, and you know, they, so I don't use it. I do agree, I like forums over social just because most of them are topic based that I'm looking for. Yes, that's the biggest thing is you usually do well in your focus community groups. So if you're in a community group where like the topic is one thing, it's XCPNG. Why would I visit those forums to talk about XCPNG? And it's the same thing, I have my own forums for a couple of reasons to talk about the things I post on this channel to have a more engaging discussion on it and also to control my own content and control it. I was, I had originally started because before I found discourse, I was like, okay, I will quickly surrender. Cause I wasn't, I heard spam was bad and her dealing with it and moderation was hard. So I did sign up forums for Facebook. And then I quickly discovered discourse and said, you know, I don't really want to be on Facebook. And I don't think my audience all wants to be on Facebook. So once I decided to build my own forums, I was like, oh, this ain't too hard. And a moderation hasn't been bad at all. You usually can find some trusted friends pretty quickly that will help moderate. It's not been much of a challenge to me. The bigger challenge, cause I don't use it, I should say I barely use it would be discourse, a discord, cause don't mix up discourse, my forum software with discord, but discord is much harder for me to moderate. Cause I don't do well with real-time chat in terms of helping people and support. It's also, that's just more challenging to me. I never, real-time chat never really clicked in my head. Now it clicks in my head for how I communicate with my team via Slack or messaging applications. That makes sense cause it's real-time like, hey, I'm working on this. Can you help me with this problem and I can jump in? But from a support standpoint, people setting up a discord for support seems weird to me because everything just kind of flies by and it doesn't give me the opportunity to write a nice, concise response. So in terms of moderation though, I will mention it, I do have a few people ask me about this when it comes to my forums and no, I'm not changing this or my opinion on it. First, you have to give me an email address. Second, you have to be approved in order for me to let you in. Jay has to do the same thing on his forums. He's using discourse as well. If you don't, people will just post garbage. And one real interesting advantage, and I won't call the company out because they were quick to fix the problem and delete it. Someone with the company's email address, it was someone who actually asked me about sponsoring my channel and I gave them some options. They said, they'll think about it. I said, cool. Then someone, not the person I was engaging with, signs up for my forums and starts posting as if they have never heard of the product using the products from the product email address. So it's just one of those funny things where you will immediately find ways for people to go in there and post things. I used to have this weird bot that posted in there. I finally, I let it post a couple of times and deleted it. I just didn't understand the purpose. It was like one of those chaotic write prompters that would write a whole series of paragraphs that were kind of started on a topic, but then were very disjointed. So that's been the only weird spam. The other, some people just post hateful things and I don't know why they just go, hey, look, I'm gonna sign up and do this. And I'm like, okay. And it gets flagged almost immediately and it gets deleted. So yeah, Oliver says, you gotta do the same. You approve here too, forums stop. It stops a lot of fake spam accounts. I also, if you send me an email or try to register with an email address, that's a one of those temporary emails. I reply to them because I can reply before I reject. I reply, you look like a spammer and sometimes I'll get a DM from the person. Hey, you said I look like a spammer. I'm like, well, you were using what email just used and they tell me and I'll be like, well, you were, you were the person using, you know, one of these temporary registration addresses pretty much that's what the spammers do all the time. So sorry, if you don't, you know, I don't use my forums in any way to market or notify people of anything. It's just a way to, you can't just make them open. Sorry. So that's kind of been the story of that. It's been, you know, even with over 3,000 between three and 4,000 people on my forums that it's been great engagement. And the other advantage forums have by the way is this here, pull up the moderation. Where's that? I'm sure I'm not showing anything. Yeah, here we go. I can pull this up, but these are some of the stats for visitors and because the forums are anonymous, but in terms of viewing, I don't, you don't have to be registered to view the forums. That way they get indexed. It's really crazy how much indexing occurs. So each of these are daily page views, you know, seven, 8,000, the crawlers were like, I don't understand why the crawlers, I guess re-indexing it put 8,000 page views from crawlers on that particular day, but logged in users 539 on November 5th and 3,000 anonymous users. One of the advantages though is as I do these write-ups, it's a good way for people to go, hey, here's the information I needed I searched for. How do I do this? Someone has a forum where they ask the same question and then there's a nice write-up or response on there and the same thing goes for XCP and G forums. Any of these forums is a good landing page for all of it. So that's kind of my rant on why I run all these. But the other things in my topics today is they only have a little while because I actually have, I have a consulting call to do at 9 a.m. So I have to stop before then to get ready for my consulting call. But I'm gonna do, let me see if this video will play. It looks like this one will play. I think I can add it to here. I'll do some, I need to- A very literal sense. This is all the servers where all the stuff is being rendered. This is my actual computer- This is the computer I'm actually working on. It's all gone through the wall over here. It all goes through the wall over here and the rubber you're seeing on the wall is called fully loaded vinyl. This is, maybe I'll do a bigger build video. I kind of did an overview of my office. This is why it's so quiet in here. So when I'm rendering video, I'm sitting where this is right here. This is what keeps it so quiet in my office. Being able to have everything that's between a insulated wall along with, though that machine's kind of worrying. The fully loaded vinyl along with your standard drywall and then some noise dampening on there. That's how it's so quiet in my office. But I've been working on updating the rack and getting that all set up properly. Where's it at? Bring that photo back up. There we go. So I'll do some updated videos on what's in here. I'm just cleaning it all up, making it look pretty. I've actually cleaned up some more of this wiring since then. But I know a lot of people always get excited when I talk about different parts that I use. So I'll do an updated video on that. And very soon, I'll be doing an updated video on, we built some new racks at my office. So I have to do, there'll be an updated video on that one pretty soon as well. I think I have, here we go. Let me see if I can play this. We've been tearing apart section by section each part of the office. We're actually waiting for the recycling place to come pick up all the stuff we pulled out of me. We got rid of so many old computers and everything else. We rewired, step by step, we've been rewiring and cleaning up. This is actually down at the bottom here. All the pieces left over, because this is by the back door of my office from building new cubicles and everything. So I did some filming because I can at my office for the things like, all the wiring we did. So I'll be talking about how we rewired it, what it looks like now. It's been like a few years, I think since I've done an office tour. And doing time-lapse of these are always fun to see it. So, but in the end, there's the rack we pulled out. So, there's some of our new cubicles back there. And we still got a vacuum back there. Yep, we got rid of the old racks that I've had since literally 2006. It's one I got in 2006 or 2007. One of those years is when I got, that would have been my second building. My first building was from 2004. I used to have a TV electronics repair. I don't know, is anyone interested in timeline of all the different businesses I owned and things I did to, I've got 20 years of running a business now. So, well, yeah, almost 19 years. It was 19 years ago in September that I started. So I'm coming up on 20 years of being in business. There's a lot of fun history for all the things. Oh, man. Oh, and for those wondering, I talked about it in my last week. Yes, we did go to Buddy's Pizza to get Detroit style pizza. I know that comes up for those of you that follow my afternoon blog Thursdays is the pizza stuff. So, fun things. But yeah, all the rack updates and server updates and everything else, I'll do as soon as we're finished because we're getting closer and closer. There's been so much stuff. It's one of those things there. I let it go too long and wasn't pushing for cleanup as hard as I should at the office. So I am. Yeah. Lessons learned. Yeah, I thought about that too. I remember that biz on the strip mall, not sure if this is the same office space. Yes, my office is still located in a strip mall Let me, I think we can do, there we go. Let's go pull it up in maps. So if we do this, and I think we can drag this here, you can have a street view. Hey, look, that's my building right there. So yes, it's in a strip mall. This is a pretty recent photo. Try to figure out, see this was in, oh, this is November of 20th, this is a year old photo. I know by the employees' cars that are there at the time. So yeah, that's where my business is right now. Small entrance sales area. Yeah, hello, so early today. Yeah, early today because it's Turkey Day Thanksgiving here. Hank, I wonder if I can find on Google a picture of one of my old buildings. We have more than one. So yeah, I guess the lessons learned is there too. In terms of, you know, there's some lessons to be learned or some that are kinda, I don't know. Because it's always a relevance thing of how relevant are they and are they still applicable to, hey, look, there's a, can you read it? Let's see if I can pull this up. It's blurry. I'm trying to see if there's a less blurry version. There we go. This is from 2007, Suburban Electronics. There's a sign that said computer repair. That's from a long time ago. That was one, this is my first building I had. So yes, I was a TV repair guy. And by the way, I worked in enterprise tech fixing servers and I was doing consulting doing that. And I had another set of employees as I had bought this that did TV, VCR and electronics repair in this building right here. So yeah, my history is kind of a lot of different things I've done. Not just your average, you know, computer repair. I fixed actually a lot of high-end audio equipment. That's what got me into fixing like tube amps. And we used to do some of the McIntosh equipment, really nice high-end rebuilds of things. All in this little building right here. It was a, you know, kind of a niche thing. You had, I had an audience for it even back then. You know, I was doing a board level repair before it was popular. And of course, this was 2007 or 2005 when I actually started doing that or four, I don't know. I'll actually look up, I have timelines and all this fun stuff. The, as far as lessons learned, that's always a hard one for me. Like I could tell you like, don't have a business partner who steals. But I don't know how to tell you to find a business partner that doesn't steal. Cause I had a business partner that stole from me and that was the only business partner I had. Would I have another business partner? Sure, but you know, and I still trust people. I've not been, I have been burned by employees over the years. That happens, but I've been in business for 19 years. That happens. I've been burned by a business partner before. That doesn't happen to everybody. And I don't think it would stop me from having another business partner again. So doing your due diligence. Yeah, I mean, I'm 20 years smarter than I was. So I would say, hey, do your due diligence on things. And I have my business technicality channel where I guess I talk more in general about lessons learned because I could tell you lessons from, you know, long ago of, hey, don't buy newspaper ads, but I don't think those really are relevant today. Everyone's going, well, that's an obvious answer. Well, it wasn't an obvious answer in 2005 when I was buying newspaper ads. So I would have to update my knowledge to try and make it more relevant to today's day and age of things. What else was in my list here of things? Or did I even, I think I mostly put it in Arata. Yeah, Rack Updates, Ohio Linux Fest, lots of Arata. I will talk about ubiquity though, because this is something that was weird. So we pull this up, because this is, let me see if it, okay, you can go here right to the download, so they changed some of that. So enjoy network application, looking at, I accept. Okay, so they have this still. But one of the things I noticed about the way ubiquity does things, so you can still get to the download page, but what the other thing that they've done is this is the more common landing page that they have now. And I want to show ubiquity in there, what feels desperate. So here's the, buy our console, and then here's our download. Okay, I want to download. Is this for your first time using? No, I'm an expert, what the hell, I'm a home user. No, I'm a manager's fighter, why not? Do you plan to adopt a unified security camera? So no, 500 plus, next. We strongly recommend using a unified council, and then you got to go look at this little, no, I prefer to use a console. What do you mean? Strongly before I use a unified OS console before I get to there. Oh, by the way, if you click yes, you still have another prompt of I am responsible, I am responsible, I understand, I understand self-hosting as advanced, then I can get to the download page. Download for Linux, which is this here. So they still have the old download page, but this is now higher when you're just searching for the unified controller download. I'm like, hmm, pick a set of unified councils. The problem is these won't do the things I need done at the scale I need them done at. So yeah, they're not a practical solution. These are too small, cloud keys are too small to run any of the sites we have that are large or the multi-tenancy of those sites can't be run. The dream router runs itself, the dream SE. So it's like, these are not practical solutions to it. And then their answer is, well, you just have to use our 2999 a month cloud council. Okay. I mean, I guess it's cool that they're offering it. Hostify offers theirs as well. So yeah. You're right, they have hidden the old download page. Yes, that's a, I don't really understand why they're doing it. I guess they're just trying to push their product more. I have to look because I seen Cody did a video on this and if Cody's still here and he wants to answer that question for me, so I'll be honest and have chance to watch your video yet Cody. But my question would be, are they actually gonna get around to doing VPN properly? I have my video about the weird way Unify does VPN. Are they gonna fix it? That's the real question I have. Are they going to make this better? Because they currently don't make it better. They make everything harder with VPNs. They don't do it like a normal firewall and I don't get it. Like it's like this, hold on. I have this vision to make it weird and hard for people to use our product when it comes to our firewalls. We wanna make it really easy to set up our switches. We wanna make it really simple to set up our UNVR system and they did a great job of that. They even did an amazing job on how you manage port management and VLANs, et cetera, et cetera. I'm like, look at all this amazing stuff. I love ubiquity. What about their switches? Or what about their firewalls? I'm like, oh yeah, sorry. They have a different vision that doesn't align with the worlds. I don't get it. They offer WireGuard, but how do they offer WireGuard? Did they do it in some weird way? That's the question I have. Is it normal WireGuard? So, never like the forced centralized management aspect. Do you have several VPNs in the customer sites where you monitor all the different switches you support? No, no, ubiquity can, ubiquity's transport layer is encrypted. So, I mean, the firewalls seem to be monitored and seem to have been forgotten about the moment. They're not forgotten. They just keep doing something weird with it. Like, just stop being weird. Why do you, I don't know, may I make some memes and do some dumpster posting on all the social medias on it? Because I don't understand why they have to, like, there's an easy way, guys. There's a reason firewall companies build configuration management tools into their firewall to allow the creation of a VPN. There's a reason for that. It's not like you're innovative by breaking that. That's not an innovative way to do it. I don't understand. So, that's something I just don't get, but hey, whatever. I mean, for the most part, though, I do like the ubiquity system. So, let me log into mine real quick. So, like, here's the ubiquity system. Here, I mean, from a management standpoint, please note there's, here's all my ubiquity devices, Tom's Basement, my Enwall HD, my 24 port. I mean, this is just simple. Look at how nice this is to manage, the menus work well. I can update and name things. I keep everything nice and organized. I can do a little mouseover and go like, hey, look at this, or figure out how many watts each port's using. And it has all the nice little features that you would expect. Really easy to read, easy to control, statistics, awesome. I can change settings on here. I can see all the settings. I can do an overview of the devices connected going, hey, here's my PopOS, which is LTS Tom. It's connected at 10 gig here. Like, it's easy to find information. Here's all the different cameras connected and which network are they on CamLand. I can rename and add things to devices here. Awesome. But why can't we do a firewall this nice? Like, why does the firewall have to be silly? I don't understand. I don't really get it. I also don't understand this here. By the way, when it, here, this part's correct. When it says Linux 1070, that pulls that from my browser. I don't know, I don't understand why that does that. When I first seen it, I never really thought much about it. I just assumed, oh, it's just running Linux. I don't know what this means. I realized that's my Chrome browser version and it's pulling this all from the Chrome browser. So, hey, whatever. If you're running the RC version, you don't need to see, they now get a WireGuard as an option under VPN server. But is it normal WireGuard is my question. Can it interact normally with WireGuard? That it's, because they, this is where, and why I made that video, because we have this feature, but do we have it in a normal way? Because before they're claimed that they had WireGuard, but it only worked with phones. So I'm like, well, what? Or like they had open VPN support. You can even connect open VPN from your Linux machine to your Unify Cloud system, or your Unify UDM system. But you had to do it via their cloud to generate the config file. Once you generated the config file, it connected directly. But why do I have to log in and register with your cloud tool to generate a config file? I don't know, right over my head. I, apparently they're playing, as someone will try to tell me, they're playing 4D chess time. You just don't get it. You're not smart enough. Okay. That's fine too. You wish their disaster recovery was better. Yeah. Yes, you can now use WireGuard client and configure clients from the UI. That's amazing. Now that I would be excited about. So maybe I'll update my Unify Dream Machine to the beta. So I can actually poke at that and see if I can get it working with WireGuard. That would be a step in the right direction. It's still not gonna work good for clients. It's gonna make home users happy. And the reason it's not gonna work well for clients is because it looks to be normal at WireGuard. Awesome. Because WireGuard is not what's usually used for the client configurations. Many clients, OpenVPN, you tie to a server like their Active Directory server with a PF sense and Active Directory authenticates all the people so they can log in via OpenVPN. So closer to a business solution, but yeah. Yeah, I'm with V3 and a release candidate, so it's even better. Well, I'm willing to talk about it if they actually do it right. That's my hope. It's my hope that they do it right. I would like to actually do something about it that wasn't, I don't like crapping on the product. My reason for crapping on products is to not crap on them, but to educate people on it. Because the number of people that contact us for consulting to try to get their unified dream machine to do something it wasn't ever properly designed to do is immense. It is the most disappointing thing we have to tell people. Even though I keep making videos about it, people and not people, businesses more specifically or other IT providers, hey, I put this in my clients and I can't get OpenVPN with multi-user setup. Yeah, that's because that's not a feature that's well supported on them. They're like, what? I'm like, yeah. I mean, so I do videos to kind of warn people prior to them buying something that won't fit their use case. But if it's your use case, use it. That's not really, you know, I'm not saying the product doesn't work. I'm saying the product has to have a use case to find it before you decide if it works or not. That's kind of my mini rant on that. I still like, I wish this was more useful, but I still think it's pretty cool that they have it at all. You just got to turn off the clients because showing the clients breaks this. It's kind of cool that you can't. I like that you can kind of, here, these are devices connected here, show all devices. There we go. And by the way, this scales in the worst way. If I switch, hold on a minute, move this, switch to my office. Can we, yeah, we can't even zoom out far enough for my office to see all the devices. So if we have everything out of my office and by the way, a lot of things are off. So not even everything's connected. Don't show all the clients. There we go. Now you can see the connections in the office of things. Production, by the way, it's still nameless, production rack aggravation. Then we have lab rack aggravation. I misspelled it once and forever, you know, I misspelled aggregation with aggravation. And I said, you know, yes, yes, that's what we're gonna keep it as. Well, let's see. Looks to be normal wire guard V3's release candidate. Now we just need any connect global protect to use wire guard. Dream products have a scope for use but people like to try and fudge it in. Yes. Wake on land in the office. We do not have wake on land in our office for any of the office computers. Not all of we did, but we don't. We have Steve has one. Yeah. We like these flex minis. Each person has one on their desk. So they go here and they're powered off this. Well, these three are powered off this. And the reason my staff has these in our office is so they can, when they're setting up or testing something, they can quickly flip between VLANs and go to one of the ports. Port management, green. Oh, yellow. So I actually know why they're called green and yellow. That's the color of the cable plugged into it. That's, I like their naming scheme. So I already know there's a green. I know I've seen this off. There's a green cable hanging out of this. I'm almost positive I'm right about that. But that's the fun stuff. You can, you know, they keep things organized. Well, they're a version of organization. So we also have so many VLANs. It's one of the probably the things I'll do an updated video on is just how many different VLANs we have now. And the reason why is it's not much plugged in this one right here. But yeah, most, we have so many. It's just all the different studio stuff. Pwnage, DVE lab, port tap, tunnel bear, wind lab one, wind lab two. We're always working on so many projects. So there's, and sometimes we create more and sometimes we redo some a little bit, but that's one thing hands down ubiquity kills it on is how quickly with all these different switches I have, and I'm not that big of a network, we manage much, much larger networks ourselves, but being able to go in there into the networking, put this here and say, hey, let's create a network. I can just create one. It'll push it out to all of my switches within 30 seconds. I have it provisioned across my entire network. It's so easy to do creating these VLAN only networks. That's why we have so many of them. Like our project tunnel bear, we have studio stuff. It's just, it's really simple. I don't like that they put a pause button here. That's kind of weird, but nonetheless, it makes my life easy. That this is stuff ubiquity kills it on. Like I don't think anyone else has such a simple system for doing that. So Dominion configured VLAN purport as well, didn't know that. Yeah, there's a series of people who always tell me you can't, and I'm like, no, you can, but I think it won't do something like Q and Q, but I'm like, okay, if you need Q and Q, I'm sorry that this $35 switch won't do the extra enhanced feature. They also don't have spanning tree. So I'm sorry that the $30 switch doesn't have spanning tree. Buy a more expensive one. If your use case is, and this is where things get weird sometimes talking to people, they come up with a list of, I needed to do OSPF and all this other stuff, but I only need to cost $30. So I'm like, I don't have a solution for you buy something used. It's kind of like, what do you expect out of a switch that's inexpensive as these? So good morning, Brett. Happy Thanksgiving, absolutely. Hey, Tom, back on PF Sense again, but running into a VM, running in a VM server, I'm not having, and I'm not hacking the problems anymore. I think the VM server hit info, save so hackers can see if it's working great now. Okay, good. Whatever is all that meant, I'm happy it's working. Imagine I would do that all the switches manually. Yeah, people who run lots of the variety and mismatch networks probably have that problem. I certainly don't have that problem. So, yeah, layer three routing in a Flex Mini. Best requests I've seen. Oh, yeah, people seem to expect it. Yeah, that's true too. People, they just expect the weirdest things. I'm like, at some point, dude, it's a $30 switch. I am thrilled it works as well as it does. I think it's awesome that Ubiquiti has made a switch this cheap. I mean, come on. It's just, some people also really don't like the fact that it has to use the controller software because they hope it would cost $30 and have a web interface. And I'm like, I, well, that's a great thought. But not a realistic thought. So, I like though that you can click on this, go to ports, and then bring up the port management for the switches that uplink this. So here's the down links to there. And then this goes to the production rack so we can then go here. Like, I like you can go through and trace this. These are just like great things that Ubiquiti's done. Like, these are ideal. Like, I like this stuff. I also like the fact that this is our 25 gig lab rack insights downloads. Let's go for a week. There we go. You can see when we're moving data across whatever data we're sliding across here one month. There we go. So they have, yeah, current connections. Most of these are at zero. Can you start by that? There we go. Trinity's our server. So there's where all the data is right there. Wow. TXM, Transmit Sum, RX Sum. So plenty of data moving across there. Tells you what's on it. I don't know, I just really like, this interface is just nice. I hands off to Ubiquiti. This is the part I love about, you know, the Ubiquiti equipment. It's just how easy all this is to use. Yeah, Trinity is, you know, a bad name for server because she dies in movies. True, true. I won't argue with you on that, but whatever. It comes back to life. Someone may notice too. My naming scheme has been revealed. There's APOC, and this one here. This one here. I, no, actually the one that died is not the one that died in movies. Our tank died, so we don't have tank anymore, but we have Dozer. Oh, this one's still called, this one's called, I should, I gotta rename it still. But this one's actually called Dozer. So the storage name is Dozer. By the way, I'm liking the new UI here. So if you haven't played with the latest version, this is the Bluefin. True to scale 22.12, aka Bluefin. So that's the Bluefin release candidate. It seems to be working pretty well. More and more testing with it, more things. I have the virtualization working, so there's Tom's Ubuntu server. This is the emulation in it, so we can, you know, I do know the password. Cool. So the virtualization seems to work. I haven't had a problem with it, but I still have the stupid problem with it, of it being unable to ping the server itself. Whoops. I don't know, I can just, I'll assure you it doesn't work. So there's that. It's all use case dependent for home user or home lab user set up once and then probably don't touch again for a year. I do like the VLANs being configured in one place. Yes. Ooh, where's Agent Smith naming? They're all Agent Smiths. That would just be confusing. I can't use the Agent Smith naming. But I will let people know this is a 10 minute warning. In 10 minutes, I gotta prepare for my next meeting. I'm doing some consulting. You know, if you're ever wondering what Tom does, consulting is a big piece of it. We consult with companies literally around the world and this company is in Europe that we're gonna be consulting with. So on storage consulting, building TrueNAS servers. So fun stuff. Agent Smith should be for pen testing. There's a good idea. So I should rebuild my pen testing boxes and call them, you know, anything that does penetration testing will just be the Agent Smith boxes, the Smith boxes. I like that. So yeah, naming things after a matrix can go a long way. Yeah, there's plenty of names. I, with the first matrix was amazing. The second two were okay. The fourth one, we'll just call that fan fiction that someone forced them to produce. I don't know. We won't speak of the fourth matrix. I know, I know I like Unify, but I kind of like Meekertick because I can learn a lot with this cheap little devices. Meekertick are neat. You pay with your time of learning their, as people, and I've seen this posted in our forums, like your Latvian logic of it, like they just have weird ways of doing it. But if you're gonna support that ecosystem and you wanna take the time to learn their weirdness, then rock out. Animatrix was good. I should rewatch it. I have not rewatched the Animatrix in a while. So you're right though, that was good. Hello from New York. But Meekertick's got a lot of great little devices that great for the homelab, fit the affordability of it. So I got no complaints about them other than the complexity of managing them. People ask us occasionally for consulting on them and we're just not Meekertick experts. They usually want something really complicated. The problem is, and what they learn quickly is, oh, a Meekertick expert makes good money, so the consulting port's kinda high. It's not like I don't know anyone that does it. I may know a couple people that do it, but they're one usually backed up and busy. And it's like this with a lot of things. So like when people ask me for Linux consulting, ain't no problem, but it's gonna be like 350 an hour. You're like, why are Linux consultants 350 an hour? I'm like, because they're in high demand, that's just the going rate for a lot of consulting. Even my own consulting. I'm presently here in November, 2022, I'm 350 an hour for consulting with me. My advanced texts are 300 an hour. My general texts are 200 an hour. So when it comes to support, those are the factors you have to really think about of if you buy a product, if you're not gonna learn it yourself, you're running your business or whatever, how much is that support gonna cost? If the devices are less common or harder to support, the tech you end up paying will be more to have that knowledge transfer to get that supported. So, Mekrotik can do everything. They just make it so backwards. Yeah, that's why we've heard. Someone in my forums was actually posting about Mekrotik, there's a good write up. They have like a list, because that's what they do is Mekrotik support of all the quirkiness of all the different models and all the problems you run into with them. And that was, it was a great write up because I'm like, wow, that's a lot of good information that is not easy to find in one place. Let me see if I can find it. Oh, let's see. Yeah, I can probably throw this in here. There's a few good write ups of Mekrotik in my forum. I'll drop a link for people who wanna follow along. But because it's all the discussion around some of it and some of it has to do with different models and different problems with them. I think I linked to this right here. Here's people researching and talks about all the different problems with them again. As an experienced network engineer who is comfortable with everything, as you mentioned, P.F. Sense, and there's great posts in my forums that are really breaking down the good and the bad. I mean, good news, it's less expensive. Bad news, there's a lot. There's a lot to make sure you understand with it. So if you're willing to sit down and read through long forum posts who dive into those topics, you can save on money and pay with time. So those are, Mekrotik can do everything bad. Yeah, violate GPL. Everyone likes to violate GPL, don't they? It's just, that's just a given. A GPL violation? Who'da thunk it? There's any given moment, there's always a handful of them. We don't want them to be there, but there are reality of things. I drive a GPL violation. I haven't looked to see where Tesla's at on this, but I have a feeling I'm still driving a GPL violation. That's, par for the course, we'll just say. Oh, let's see. Oh, I got a nice email from ZenOrkisha. It says my backup operation is complete. Well, I had something in there. I was gonna show people, but nonetheless, I think that's all I really have. Is there any rapid-fire question for the last five minutes before I wander off to go do work on Thanksgiving and then go do, I don't know, whatever it is I do and hang out with people or something. Go visit family and all that happy stuff. Any, yes, Oliver knows. Yeah, the integrated backups in ZenOrkisha, are just so nice. We just turned on and Oliver's probably seen, there's a couple of big companies that signed some contracts. There's actually a university that just signed up with XCPNG. They bought the full support package. We always encourage all of our business clients to always buy the full-on, full-blown ZenOrkisha. You get the support, you get them. As a matter of fact, they found it, because they were coming from VMware, they said, wow, this is extremely reasonable. So they bought the support for each of their hosts. They bought a full version of ZenOrkisha. And the part where people sometimes don't realize is because the backups and everything are completely integrated, this gives you a great total cost of ownership of it because they had first only calculated their cost savings of switching from VMware to XCPNG, but they also were licensing backup software. So once you eliminate the licenses for backup software, combined with the licenses for VMware, what you end up paying with XCPNG is actually a whole lot cheaper, especially because of the number of backups they have. We have a couple of companies and the university that we just got to switch over, they're still into finalizing, so I don't know if they completely, we just did some initial consulting, and then they come back with us after we help them strategize for hardware and things like that. I don't know where they are in the process because they haven't contacted us again. They just bought some hours and they'll get used up later, but it's like a big total cost of ownership saving and it's just wild when you have like 50 or 60 VMs, you're like, oh, wow, I don't have to buy all these different licenses, I can just build backup schedules, have them notify me and everything else and gets your success, fail notices, and it just works so well. I mean, I post in the forums if you want, I see it works so well. The bugs I found do exist and the team at Bates has been great to actually fix them, so it works well because people spend time testing it, spend time poking at it, and yeah, it's a pretty outstanding system. Ooh, dedicated tool to migrate from VMware, that is awesome. That's really cool, so I like that. Have you used sync thing to run a batch file to kill a process? Sync thing synchronizes files so I don't understand how that would kill a process. Does XCG have anything for backup verification like beam, share backup? Yes, when you're doing backups, those grab any one of them, what you can do is a health check. So yes, they have the an Orcasha health check. I'm funny when I look it up my video comes up before their blog post, but here's their blog post on it, whoops. It's called health check, and it's a way to do the backups and have it run, do an auto restore check happening only on the weekend, despite nightly backup, but yes, there's a way to do it where it goes through. Does a health check by starting it, and you can pick a destination for where you want it to start at. So yes, it actually has that as a feature. Yeah, it's an awesome feature to be able to do that restore check. It's just really neat. If we do it, you can actually choose a completely different server for it. So please know, I didn't even choose other than the VM I'm backing up, but here's my lab pool, and here's my other one. I get to choose where I want it. So I can actually have a backup coming from my lab and back in testing on production or have something that's backed up on my production and have a secondary lab server where it does the test restore. Those two are separate from each other, and this is just a really cool feature because if you're setting up things like DR, you go, here's my DR plan, okay, cool. And if you're only ever testing on the server that did the backup, we know it will restore to the server, which seems pretty common because the server is running it currently, so it should restore, that's a good test. But even better is a test where we say, hey, when we do our scheduled health check of this particular virtual machine, it tries to restore on a completely separate system that would be our failover system in the case of emergency. So knowing not only that it will restore, but it will also restore to another virtual or another host that virtual machine can run on, that's a solid, well-rounded backup test. And I just think that's neat, so pretty cool. Can sync thing kill DB and then the sync does not sync? I have no idea what you're talking about because sync thing is a file synchronization tool, so it doesn't execute anything. That's sync thing synchronizes files between two source and destinations, so I don't know how that would work. I mean, it doesn't have a database connection, so yeah, 10 minute warning. I know, I know, cause I gotta go do the thing. I know what the topic is, we're talking about TrueNAS. Guess what Tom likes to talk about? TrueNAS, oh, my shirt does say unicorns are real, in case anyone's wondering. For Windows boxes, that's important. Yeah, I think Jason Segel nailed it here. Windows boxes for sure. You're such a fan of TrueNAS and PF Sense, why aren't you a fan of FreeBSD? Who said I wasn't a fan of FreeBSD? I don't run it on my desktop cause I need things to work. So it's about use cases. I think FreeBSD is amazing. I don't think it makes an amazing desktop and neither does a lot of other people. I have too many things that I know will break. My video editing is done in Linux. To my knowledge, there's no way to do my video editing with the tools I use, which is DaVinci Resolve in FreeBSD, so it's not that I don't like it. It's I don't wanna deal with the extra steps that I could possibly get together to make that work. So it has nothing to do with not liking FreeBSD. It comes down to always use cases. Cause you can technically say I don't like Windows, but boy, I still have to run Windows for things. I don't like it, but if it's the right tool for the job, then I use it. So it comes down to less about my opinion on those things and more about use case. So that's how I feel about it. I've always thought FreeBSD was pretty cool. It's just not my daily driver go-to. It's also probably, it's really, it's not dying, but it's becoming more niche. It's, you know, Trunascore runs on it, but there's a reason they were building Trunascale because it's kind of avoiding certain limitations. PF Sense will always run on it because the PF filter is native to BSD. People ask if PF Sense will get like ported to Linux. I'm like, no, the UI is just the UI. All the underlying tooling is FreeBSD based. There's not a parody in Linux with the FreeBSD tool. So there's not like a simple, hey, we're just gonna port this over. It would be dramatically more complicated than that. So I think Jason, yeah, Jason Slagel said the best. You really have to want it because I know Jason knows FreeBSD as well. I ran FreeBSD desktop for a bit. Really have to want it. Time is a finite resource. I have so much of it. It's sliced up into the pieces that I create. Tech content, run a business and spend time with friends and family. So something has to give to spend more time with FreeBSD. Yeah, and we know Travis likes Mac OS. Jason Slagel likes Mac OS as well. I don't know if you count those as FreeBSD people but we usually just categorize them as Mac OS people. Jason's definitely a Mac guy and so is that and so. Sync back and good sync and execute commands. I don't think you can, there's no dyno of it. Sync thing does not have any command execution. I can look real quick, but I feel confident there's no way to do it. I never tried. Sync thing is real time synchronization by the way. So when would it do such things as pull it up real quick? This will be the last thing I talk about. I'm gonna do an updated video on sync thing, but yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I don't see anything in here. Ignore pandas, file versioning, version path, clean up interval. I don't see any way to add execution of anything in here. So nope, to my knowledge, there's no way to do any type of execution. Does it do it on a particular system? No, under advance. Nope. Yeah, it's not a scripting engine. It doesn't have scripts or hooks in there for events. I mean, it's open source. You can code anything you want into it, but natively, no, it doesn't support execution of things, but it's a real time synchronization. So if I make a change to a document like right here, last change was yesterday. Here's like, hey, look, I updated the homelab show. Edited shows, oh, someone dragged something in there. Godzilla, I don't know why that got dragged in there. Anyways, that's probably been, yeah, do not restore because it's someone dragging and deleting it. Here's a template. I can restore the old version, but there's no hooks in here to make it do something more. Like these are manual actions of restore for versions, but there's nothing in there like a hook to make it grab it. Five free BST boxes. Okay, six minute warning now. Yeah. Sync thing is running on a Churnass scale machine. So go here. Sync thing works great in Churnass scale. I've had no problems with it at all. It's the one, as a matter of fact, I would say of the things I've tried, it works the best. It survived all the updates. I can reload it anytime I want. If you go to edit it, for example, alls I have to do is point one directory, the configurations in there, the data in the settings. So I can blow this away and repoint it at that directory. And just like magic, it will work. So sync thing is great. I should do an updated video on it because it's still one of my favorite synchronization tools. Yeah, if you want that functionality for database, use the native database replication. Yes, that would be the Jason's answer is the correct answer on that one there. But thanks everyone for joining. I have to go do business work. My consulting call starts in four minutes, which I have to go here in this same camera. So it's just doing the same thing, but for a private audience, that's basically what consulting is. Me still talking excitedly about whatever product for a private audience. That's my new definition of consulting. Feel free to go to my website. You can book me for consulting and have a private audience with me, right? Talk excitedly like I do on here for free. Thanks everyone for joining. Awesome. Maybe if I'm feeling real inspired, I'll do another live stream coming up this weekend. But as always, like subscribe and all that fun stuff. And as I said in the beginning, go check out Cody from MacTucom Networks. He has crossed 50,000 subscribers, so go check him out as well. He will probably be doing a live stream as well. He's in Canada, so it's not a holiday for them. It's just a U.S. holiday. All right, thanks everyone.