 Welcome to the homelab show number hundred and three Wow, oring Jay's homelab setup tools and updates for 2023 We had to skip a couple weeks, which really comes down to What vacation is for us? Hmm tearing apart your homelab inserting kubernetes So when we're not creating some content, we're still kind of working on some of the back-end stuff So we decided it's a fun show topic for today. How you doing today Jay? I'm doing pretty well I had almost two weeks off one week was a real vacation did none of that But then the week back I ended up getting like so glued to my homelab that I just had to have some time to Catch it up and get some things done. So I've gone over this before But I think it's always fun to get a little catch up on what's going on. Yeah, these want to talk about the Things we have in our lab because sometimes when you're starting with the blank slate people say How do we get in a homelab? I'm like pick a project. You're like and you're like, well, I don't know what projects I'm like, well, look at my projects. Look at Jay's projects and I might do something similar for mine This is actually now for me an interesting post merger version of our show. I if you didn't follow on my channel I merged the IT services side of my company with another one that frees me up to be More focused on the creative side so I can create more content more videos and dive deeper into that because running IT company is very very challenging. I am so happy not to be the president of that portion of the business I'm president of the media creation side of the business and I still do all the consulting So I'm still very hands-on doing work. I just don't do HR I don't deal with HR anymore or or master service agreements or all those other little business fun things like taxes I mean, I still have to deal with them, but not as directly. I should say so Ownership of all companies. Yep. But nonetheless, this is exciting for me for those of you didn't know that's I'm Tom for more systems And Tom from the other companies name is CNW are so I'm hoping to do more of this homelab stuff But we're gonna be talking about though a couple things in the news. I think that's probably worth mentioning I will at least for update side Xcp and g I Will probably do an updated video on it because with the 8.3 being in beta and everyone knows I'm in big Xcp and g fan So there's some really cool features that they just keep packing in on this I talked about some of the new backups and the backup mirroring they do and some of that I think I mentioned probably in the last homelab show They've done more with automation and this is a common question I said was the first question someone had asked on us, you know What about using things like terraform and ansible for your build pipelines and I don't actually have we have some customers using it But I'm not actually using it. But the good news is if you're into Xcp and g they've got more Automation tools built in with their API. So it's been really cool that they're Building those tools for those of you that do things like that, but Jay will talk about some of the pipelining because he's he's definitely He's at the goal I have of automation which I'm with his Ansible stuff the fact that you can give a system a host name and have it deploy is That is like Tom's goals here So as we as I build that way too I'll be talking about it just as Jay is as well because you can't have too much content on that like that is Building automation with ansible is high on my list of things. I want to sit down and get better at Yeah, it definitely transforms a lot of different things and it's surprising how well it how you know How well it works of pretty much everything? I mean there's always gonna few be a few outliers But for the most part, I'm pretty much ansible obsessed. I I think I work with it every day for Think that's been the case for at least five or six years It's crazy how much time I've spent on this just because I have that much fun with it So it's hard to you know, pull myself away from it. Yeah I'm kind of a quick video update me and Jay both have a lot of new tutorials out there I did one that I know a lot of people to ask for and it's the complexities of permissions in Churnass scale I've done it before in core, but they don't translate a hundred percent to the way things are done in scale Especially because scale has different apps in there So I've got a couple new videos you can find on my channel for helping you get your permissions at right with Churnass scale and Videos for setting up a file web-based file manager I just dropped that one yesterday on Churnass scale It kind of builds on a permissions video because I had to get the permissions video Done first before I could talk about loading apps because the app question is not often The app but how to get the app fully functional with share permissions and things like that So I've got permissions video once you learn that you can do things like hey web-based file manager Which also the web-based file manager solves the problem of another video I showed where why is it my SMB so slow over the VPN? There's technical reasons for it I have a video where I dive into that as well So that's gonna cut up on that and Jay's I gotta admit we were talking about this like is some of his latest tutorial series Jay is becoming the Authoritative source and of course I see someone mentioned that he also has a linoad video on Terraform and Ansible But the learn Linux TV channel is really got an amazing playlist now Because I started I'm I'm catching up on going through some of my friend stuff including Jay's to really sit and watch it Like I know I see him. He's released some videos all the time But you got a whole new one on our sink and some other stuff What are some other latest hits you got going on Jay? That is the latest because of the vacation and everything I haven't had a proper video out in a while. I probably have like 20 recorded that are pending But I am creating a video about my home lab that'll be out. I really do think it'll be this week I'm not a hundred percent sure but that is the goal this week. It's the furthest video along So it may as well be this one. It was recorded about a month ago So there's been some changes since then but that's always gonna be the case I feel like doing a video about my home lab is like doing a tutorial on a Rolling release distro, you know, it's always changing and you're covering it even though it's your thing that's changing but I guess the video is a snapshot and then Some of the things I'll talk about now are a little bit more up-to-date than the video You haven't seen yet, which is really weird But for the most part it is that way and then I could I figure I can go into more detail in other videos About whatever someone wants to have more information on because it's not super in-depth the video that's coming out But that's on purpose because that way. Oh, tell me about this tell me about that I can see what everyone's interested in and then that might become individual videos from there. I Think we just came up with the next shirt idea. My my home lab is a rolling release I mean, yeah, that is true. I mean, I didn't even wasn't even meaning to Actually unintentionally I think all of that's that's the one nice thing is, you know Why we love the home lab and why we did the home lab show even though me and Jay have background experience Actively working in a lot of the enterprise tech We love bringing it back down to the home lab and bringing more people into the fold because we're we're as excited about this as the people Just getting started, you know, I have not lost my enthusiasm for it And in fact, that's that you know roll back to the merger comment Why did if you want to know I did that a lot of it was good So I could spend more hands-on time because I don't I'm not ready to put a suit and tie on as the company grows That's not really I want my fingers on the keyboard Right, yeah, they're not my fingers are supposed to be typing HR emails When I was a manager at the previous company before I went on my own I was kind of the same way I mean, it was kind of like, you know, we have people for that. I'm like, yeah, but I like that I don't want to stop doing that. I'm in the trenches with my people. They're not in the trenches with me commanding them I'm there with them doing things. That's how I always liked it, but it also means you're creating more work for yourself I wouldn't have it any other way. Yeah Absolutely. All right. Where do we want to start on? We want to jump right into the your your what you're running your home lab today. This is this is interesting talk I want to just start quickly with how it got started because I kind of feel like, you know, that's always interesting Yeah, it's always different for everyone. So my home lab started gosh, it would have been 2010 I think her 2011 and It was just for the purposes of studying for certifications I just wanted the server to install a distro on or whatever, you know, practice whatever I'm going to practice Pretty much the same as a lot of people. I think a lot of people Either start a home lab because they have something they want to run or they want to learn something or both You know, it's different for everyone, but you know from there it kind of got it became more and more and more so at one point I created a Debian-based firewall slash router custom IP tables. No UI just straight command line Built it from there and then I will get into what I'm running now But you know, I achieved nine certifications. So at some point I'm like, well, I have all this equipment now That I used for learning this stuff. I in there's things I want to run at home I may as well just kind of start spinning up servers and then it started with a Believe it was a, you know, QEMU system all command line. No gooey. Just, you know, want to launch a VM Here's a template hit, you know, XML file all that and then later on You know more turnkey solutions But I'll talk a little bit about why some things might be more turnkey than others because I think that's more of a strategy and then from there it evolved and You know, that's just how it is for a lot of people They have a goal and everyone's goal is different but home lab is flexible So it solves lots of different goals different ways, but it also gives you hands-on experience with the tech, especially if And this is true for a lot of people when I was starting out, you know Your company might be running something you want to learn like I want to learn that can I can I work on that? No, you don't have the certification. I have that this person's more senior. They're gonna take over it But I want to learn. Yeah, but that person's gonna take over it. What like I want to learn How do I how do I work on something if you won't let me even see it because of bureaucracy or whatever? So then it's like home lab could be oppositional Well, you know what I'm gonna run that software at home And I'm gonna learn it so well that they're gonna be surprised at work when I come in one day And I I could talk on their level, you know that kind of thing It's always fun to see why people want to start a home lab, but home labs are awesome Which is why we have the podcast so yeah, and sometimes you got to be careful Don't bite off more you can chew it the first question I was asked to us just before the show started was you know about terraform ansible and Jenkins together and You know, I don't know particularly where that users at and their Understanding of any of those tools, but one of the things I want to point out is if you're going hey I want to start a home lab, but I'm not really super linux familiar. Let me jump on terraform Let me jump on these I see some people that go all the way to the extremes You got to kind of start with at least some level of competency on these where don't bite off more You can chew or you will probably find yourself more frustrated doing it And we have another podcast called your automation mindset and we do really pushed for using those tools for automation But you have to learn some of the linux command line first you have to get in some of the basics So I just want to reiterate that that this stuff is Vance is Jamie we talking about what some of the things he has You know Jay's linux career didn't start yesterday or even a year ago It's like he said several years of using it to get this way But we know we're definitely gonna bring all that knowledge to you as to how we set this up and we're trying to post More and more of it will eventually once Jay sanitizes the code enough and scrubbing. It's not easy He will have some of this deploy system publicly available on get up I know you have like a variation of it on there right now, or don't you it? Yeah, I do it's so old it's I completely Re-engineered it so if you were to look at the two you will see code similar between the two because it's something That I felt was written. Well, I'm gonna keep it But I would say I don't even I'm gonna guess to say 75 to 80% of that entire thing is different at this point Then the one that's there now, so I'm not gonna recommend anyone to view it We'll talk about what I'm actually talking about in a moment my Ansible solution in more detail, but I wouldn't go running over to get lab to look at it now because what you're gonna see is something That's very out of date and probably not You know a value now that I have something better Another thing I want to mention too is my recommendation is always to learn something the hard way, you know, I feel like You can't really appreciate the automation tool unless you know what it's automating You know because you could find a template you can read about it like terraform for example You could put put everything together, but do you really know what it's doing? I mean you do know what it's doing because you're learning terraform, but under the hood I feel like if you do it manually enough times you get more of an appreciation Because you see How the different services interact with each other in front of you and then when you go to automate it It's kind of like the end result now that I've learned it. I'm going to automate it not Automate it and then learn it. That's just not something I think is too effective Although it might work for someone, but I just don't think that's the way I would recommend doing it Just do it the hard way first and that Like in that'll pretty much tell you everything you need to know You'll also know your anxiety level and how much you can take like oh my god I need a break from this right because we all get frustrated and it's fine I get frustrated all the time and I complain to Tom. Oh my god Why won't this work and then a week later it does and then I can create a video about it Then people will see the video. Wow Jay knows everything. He just knows how to fix this problem like it's nothing Yeah, after having the problem for a very long time in dropping some f-bombs and just being completely Annoyed and then being to the point where I can't give up on trying to figure out I figure it out I think that's a mindset you adopt as you're doing this because there's gonna be some challenges But when you get something working, it just feels that much better and I think sometimes that Dopamine brush you get from that success and sometimes make homelab addictive What was the animation? Oh, you did the series on that was really complex. It was the oh We talked about the open stack and open shift open stack and open shift. Yeah, that was There was some frustrated discussions on that so despite Jay's Extensive Linux experience that that turned out to be a pretty formidable opponent to And people asking about a lot because oh, why don't you run open ships and open? You know in that or the open stack system and I'm like compared to XEP and G you're talking apples and oranges That is a very different animal. Well, they're it's very different use case too because proxmox and XEP and G is Right there with ESXi and in all those it's on that same layer You know when you get to open stack, that's a containerization system now open step I mean open stack is is the virtualization system, but open shift is the container system But it's you know open stack is more for people that want to create their own AWS Great, they're on their own cloud, you know, that's what they want to and they want to have Tenants on that cloud to share it with you want to you know Bill act me a certain amount of money a month to use your you know open stack or this company that company You're kind of like your own AWS at that point And I think that's one of the reasons why it's not as popular in homelab, but it's fun even though it's difficult You really do learn how Python interacts with everything and I think it's just it was a lot of fun Even if it was frustrating, but I think that's why we do it because we love learning it even if it's not always easy But I can't remember who said it But it was something like confusion is the best state for learning because when you're confused you want to find out Why is it like this? What do I need to do? Why am I confused? What am I missing here? And then that's when learning starts when you get frustrated you get confused That's when learning starts because that's when you solve problems And you'll remember the solution because of how hard you had to work to find the solution So if someone else runs into the problem, I know how to fix that. It's always a great feeling You know, I don't do things because they're easy I do things because I thought they'd be easy. That's usually how I get involved like I thought this looks easy Six hours later. This wasn't easy, but I'm I'm too buried into it to stop. I'm learning now You know, I had a weird issue the other day where I'm like, yeah, this project is gonna take forever and I may as well get it started And then I it was like ten minutes later. It's done. I'm like, what that was it really? Wow I procrastinated for nothing, but then the opposite is often true where you don't think it's gonna take that long and often does Maybe it's just opposites are there. So when it comes to the homelab So the way I'll go through it is I figured I'll start at the cable modem back, you know Because I think that kind of makes the most sense because what's the fire while you're running we need to know Exactly because I think the hard part here is that This isn't the visual guide to Jay's homelab because it's a podcast We don't show video because the number of people listening in their car for example is gonna be a lot more than people watching But there's gonna be a video if you guys want to see some of this, but I'm gonna do my best to describe what it is So you can kind of get a feel for it and I want to just mention I don't have the best homelab in the world. So this isn't like oh We're doing a video on Jay's homelab because his is the best. There's always somebody better always someone better So What's that there's always more RGB too. We're not the most RGB homelabs No, not not so much, but you know There's always someone better and in our when it comes to our listeners There's probably a thousand people with a better homelab But I feel like the value here is if you're just jumping onto the podcast This kind of gives you a feel for how things work together Which could be valuable to someone starting out if you already have a homelab and you're kind of a guru in this kind of thing You might still get some nuggets out of this that you know, that's smart. Maybe I'll I'll give that a shot So I think even though I'm not gonna say it's like the best homelab you'll ever see and there's definitely gonna be some things that need to be fixed It's it's still fun. And I think it's you know might inspire somebody who knows All right, so the firewall you're using is oh Rage it raise a cheek string. I had to make sure I had a little some hydration Maybe Pepsi isn't the right choice here, but so the basically the first thing I'll start with is The worst part of my entire homelab the thing I hate the most that Keeps me up at night. Okay. It doesn't keep me up at night, but it's Comcast You know, it's the only one that's offered here. So it's like I chose Comcast because you know, they're the bet. No, they're the only thing I could choose and I I have Comcast business because You know, they want to gouge my upload because I upload too much So, I mean, that's where it starts. I have Comcast business It's not something I'm bragging about some of the things I run are just you know, because it's what's available and Unfortunately Comcast is all that's there. I've had a number of issues with them, but They're also very expensive. They want to charge me six hundred dollars a month for one person. What? They're not charging me yet that yet. I'm fighting it long story. So that's the ISP So let's take the drama out now that I got Comcast out of the way because that's gonna be probably the most controversial thing And then we go to PF sense, which is what is directly connect the cable modem connects directly to the PF sense firewall. So And it's interesting because at one point I told myself I would never use PF sense because like I don't need a GUI I have an IP table script and all I got to do is copy this command here and put this there and I can do port forwarding and whatever I want to do and it worked fine, but then it got to a point where Okay, there's nothing left to learn that I need to know for my use case So maybe I will give PF sense a shot and just kind of simplify that I was on the fence about it and then you at Penguin Khan did a panel on it I'm like, okay, that's pretty cool And I ought to I just immediately saw some things that I could use it for that would I felt take it to the next level Especially when you get to V lands and things like that. It's a lot easier and that's why I made that decision So I don't cover PF sense on my channel because it's BSD based and I'm a Linux channel So if anyone wasn't sure why that is and some people might be saying what do you mean BSD and Linux are always talked about not always but often talked about among the same crowd of people but The thing is YouTube doesn't see it that way. That's the weird thing I make YouTube videos and if I do a BSD video or anything like that They're not going to show it to you you're going to email me and say, why don't you do a PF sense video? And then I'll be like, well, I did one last week. I didn't see it Why didn't I see it because YouTube decided that you shouldn't see it because it's outside of my wheelhouse even though technically the same There's overlap in the two communities to where the you know, same people exist in both. So YouTube doesn't know that so I'd stay laser focused on Linux because that's you know, unfortunately the way it has to be but I love Linux that's another story all together so PF sense I have PF sense is my firewall. I don't think that's a surprise for anyone that's been, you know, listening for a while it's served me pretty well and I don't have any complaints. I think it's pretty solid Yeah, the um I have no problems with the With PF sense or open sense for those of you that are going to probably That'll be the comments we see down below. Both are solid firewalls but my preference for PF sense is because of the reason that people don't like it that it has less frequent updates But I don't want my firewall constantly updating now. Some people may go but Tom open sense There's like an update all the time. I'm like, yeah, that's definitely not what I want So, but oh either way, I don't know of any particular problems with the Open sense one. So for those wondering, what about open sense? It's okay. If you want to use it knock yourself out I don't have a reason to tell you not to use it But I'll stick with the PF sense is what we run for our businesses That's what I run and you can still do a lot of integrations into it. It's definitely a slick system I've heard a lot of great things about open sense. I just don't have an opinion at all Good or bad. I just have zero opinion about it People might wonder why, you know, we don't test some of these things But I think they would everyone we have that but to go a bit more detail about that they'll think about it You know, it's one thing if system 76 sends me a laptop and I review it I just install all my apps on there. I use it for my daily driver stuff and see how it performs That's that's pretty easy to do A firewall is not easy I mean, we I have port forwards and all these different things like a massive amount of configuration and things it would take Probably a couple of months for me to replicate my setup onto open sense just to review it like Sure, I could review open sense as is out of the box This is how it works plug some things into it but I wouldn't feel that people are getting a good review because a good review comes from You know hammering it to death like making it cry and scream for mercy because you're just putting all this workload on it and I'm just never going to hit that because You know firewalls are just not something you could just easily swap out and sure there's ways to You know export a pf sense config and you know tweak the file and implement it into open sense But am I going to trust something that I kind of you know Just cluts around with and then implemented hoping for the best or I don't know So some of these things are hard to review But I do have respect for the product or the platform because a lot of people swear by it So there must be some value Okay, so after the pf sense true nas so I'm using switching you're using unify. We'll just leave it at that We don't need to go deep into it. Yes. I should have mentioned that. Um, yeah, so I'll say which switches are using Well, I should have I should have um, let's talk about that actually because I think that's that's better because Unify isn't I mean sometimes it's very controversial sometimes not depending on the weather You know how the gas prices rise and lower like the drama around you Unify raises and lowers like one minute everyone's swearing by it the next minute people hate it So, you know, I'm not going to say that unify is the best platform out there But it is for me because I've tried them all like at the time that I went with that I tried every router that microcenter sold and then eventually I bought there. I forgot the model their most expensive router at the time at microcenter It was like almost five hundred dollars for the stupid thing I'm like this one and I was doing this because wi-fi could barely get out of one room this house was just So disruptive the wi-fi that I would have to have like A router and every or an access point in every room and that doesn't make sense when you're not even that far away So nothing that I bought even that really expensive one would even penetrate like outside of a room So I just randomly try a I think it was a hundred and fifty dollars a unify access point So I returned the five hundred dollar router bought this hundred fifty dollar access point And it worked fine a whole house wi-fi through the walls. No problem No dead spots completely fixed everything plus I you know returned something that's five hundred dollars I put a lot of money back in my bank. So, you know for me, it's like, yeah It's not self-hosted, you know, you have or it kind of it can be because you can run the controller But there's still a cloud aspect there and I I'm not the craziest about that. I don't love it But it just works and it works so well, especially with the integration how they interact with each other So if I create a vlan, for example, I put it in pf sense. I add it to unify every device It's synchronized really well The having one control plane in the fact that you can locally host the controller for unify Just still puts them on top of it I'll I'll mention a runner up, but I don't trust them in security and that's going to be tp link It might be fun for your home lab But compared to the unify platform, I just don't think it's Really quite as good. Like it's the we copied unify. We reduced the price by 20 or something like that So it's you save a few dollars on the hardware, but you definitely don't get the same level of security engineering product updates So it's not bad. I mean tp links were functional But if there's going to be a problem with it in log4j was kind of like my test for that They took a lot longer to get that out versus unify was extremely on top of it So if there's another incident like log4j and your software is vulnerable I don't know how much I trust tp link to get the patch out there quickly Right Yeah, no, I mean that there's definitely some concerns. It's in I'm not going to say anything I'm running is, you know 100 perfect and there's just I mean it's perfect when it comes to coverage, right? But um, could there be a cve in unify? Absolutely. There could be one tomorrow It happens and no one's above this. No software vendor is above this It can happen anyone Um, and we gotta got to keep that in mind. Is it more likely with some than others? Sure add a cloud Aspect to it and you're automatically increasing the risk Yeah, you're increasing the potential the being able to self-host it makes it really nice It really it really does. Yep Yeah, definitely now trunas Trunas I like trunas. And so do you another thing that you got me into I'm running the og trunas not scale yet because um, it's kind of funny every now and then people tell me to try out Trunas scale and you've told me that but then in the same conversation It's like and you've mentioned this about previous versions, but the speed isn't that great compared and there's this It's like it's finally catching up telling me on this They they've finally caught up a lot of things. It's not It's not as smooth, but it's almost there. I feel like they've really come close their apps are getting better in scale So if you're starting out today go scale, but if you're not using the apps on it Then at that point it doesn't matter you can leave it at core Yeah, it's You know the trunas that I have is using legacy encryption. So at some point I gotta That's a in place challenge you have there it is. Yeah, but I'll solve that eventually. I'm solving a lot of different things in my home lab. Um, so Trunas, right? I use it Heavily like like crazily heavily everything's in there and I do mean everything because I'm mentioning it now because I'm gonna Keep coming back to trunas in the things that I use it for One one example of this is sink thing Where all of my devices sink via sink thing and I use a star topology I like to call it for sink thing because you know, a lot of people have everything sinking everything I don't like to do that. I like to have, you know, trunas is in the center That's where the main sink thing node is and every device doesn't they don't sink to each other They sink to it. They all sink to trunas. So all devices are sinking to one device They're sinking to trunas and the reason why I set it up that way is I couldn't be using two computers or four at the same time But my hands are only on one computer's keyboard at a time So I'm not going to have a different for the same file open on multiple computers and cause a conflict here I'm just gonna Close it open it somewhere else and it comes up I really like this because they have a single source of truth for sink thing and yeah Also with trunas the nas solution that it is which I should have mentioned. It's a nas solution by the way The snap I have snapshots now sink thing itself does a history you could set up where you could have the previous versions on there And I do have that but then trunas has snapshots daily of my sink things so I can go back to Previous days and pull files even if it ages out of sink things history I keep a bigger history in trunas so I could probably go and find something from 90 days ago if I needed to so and that system works very well because you know Like when you put the snapshot system of trunas Into your solution you could do some pretty amazing things like one of those is Retro pi which is the popular. I don't know if it's as popular now, but I still love it It's basically your raspberry pi os for retro gaming The save files sink via sink thing to all of my retro pies across the house if I'm playing a retro pi handheld It's connected to wi-fi via sink thing as I'm playing final fantasy whichever number I'm playing at the moment It'll be sinking the save file the sink thing and then I turn it off I go to my tv power up retro pi there play the same game has the same save file So I no matter which one I'm using it has the same save file So it's just stupid easy to set it up He just make sure everyone's sinking into the same directory It points to sink thing and then eventually you have your save files being backed up and I have a history of Save files going back 90 days so I can go back to you know Final Fantasy 6 when I was like level 10 and then later on when I hit level 99 and then anything in between I can I have like snapshots of my progress through my games even which is kind of fun And that's not something that you'll see on retro pi like I don't think it's in their documentation retro. You know retro pi and sink thing are separate projects Right, but you but you combine these or these things in your homeland together You could do things like this and I think that's kind of what makes this fun because you can oh I'm going to just have a you know You only have to lose a save file all your progress once in a in a game before you automate the hell out of it So that's kind of what happened to me Well and people asked me about what I used to back up and I say sink thing They said it's a synchronization tool not a backup tool. I said you're not wrong But to me I save a document. I don't know when my hard drive is going to die I know ssd's die Catastrophically it's not much warning they work until they stop that is usually the case now They don't stop often But because I don't know when the miracle runs going to come to a sudden halt and fling all my files to the bit bucket in the Sky I like that when I save something especially if that's something as important I will save it and sink thing goes look a change and immediately Backs it up to my backup locations. So anything that's important to me I'm using sink thing to back up. So documents that change updated, you know All the little notes if I take notes on a project, uh, I don't want to wait till that night or tomorrow morning to back that up because if my hard drive dies Sometime after I take these notes and maybe I put some API keys in the notes or something like that Like something, you know, I keep them encrypted by the way before anyone flames me But if I have some of those really detailed parameters on there, those are not easily reproduced And if I lose them all that would be a pain. So I think thing is definitely one of my favorite utilities I think we've done a podcast Episode on it. I will definitely be doing a new tutorial. I have old tutorials on it and those are correct But there's more features it has now. So there's not that my old ones are in Inaccurate they are still accurate I'll also be doing a true nast one because it works well on both true nast core and I use it on true nast scale Actually, I have several true nast scale boxes That have syncing on them to talk to all the different systems So i'm gonna do an updated video because I've only made it more someone commented on old forum posts from like three years ago I did and I've only they're like, are you still using syncing? I'm like even more today than when you asked this question three years ago And so is j I love the game syncing that he does with it It just it's just weird how how well that works too The only the only side effect is I have to wait like if I power it on I have to give it 30 seconds or something Just just to start syncing and the save files are so small. Anyway, I mean, they're just kilobytes So they even over wi-fi they come down very quickly. So just give it like 30 seconds and it's caught up So what else was I going to go over about true nast? Okay, so video editing it's it's the backbone of that too 10 gig ethernet. I'm editing directly off of it It's um, so all my video footage is recorded straight to it So as I hit the record button when I record a video it's going right into a data set straight into it You know the files are there and I pull them up on my desktop from the same Directory So the video editing thing is is I mean, it's pretty much that simple It's just it's just powerful and fast enough to where I it seems like it's local content Even though it's not which is pretty impressive. It's not necessarily true nas that makes that impressive although it is it's 10 gig ethernet, you know, it's it's just fast and it doesn't matter if you're using open media vaulted probably still be fast, but it's um The when I say it's the backbone of everything I do mean everything and then getting back to the sync thing one last time um You know it's syncing everything to everything but at the same time it's also syncing everything to a Synology so there's a clone like all my files There's an r sync job that just runs and make sure the synology has everything that the true nas has But then in addition to that true nas is also doing doing cloud syncs and going up to back plays And so I have that off-site backup as well So it's kind of hard for me to lose data because every computer has to die True nas has to die Synology has to die and back plays has to go down all at the same time Unless that happens. I'm fine and that could happen. Don't get me wrong. I mean However, many of those devices are using cloud flare of cloud flare has a problem It could take some of those down all at once But it's probably not very likely that that's going to happen stranger things have happened But it is what it is. So there is that whole system and I audit the heck out of this I test my backups like probably every other week. I'm I'm I'm probably the only person That does this without at least an outlook reminder or something in their email to tell them tell them to do it So I'm making sure my backups work and I'm you know, looking at my vms and everything So I know what's going where the only backup problem I ran into was with this podcast The other day I discovered I'm backing up every episode twice a big problem, right? I'm just a waste of data, but um, you know, it's better to have it twice than only to have it once But you know, that's what it is. So true nas is basically Truly a center for storage. It's taking snapshots. It's the backbone of sync thing for editing And it's copying things in various places as I sleep jobs are running to synchronize and back up. So Um, it's a very important part of my overall chain, which is also the reason why I'm still on the legacy encryption I haven't had a chance to move that off yet Yeah, if you you can do provided you're not using legacy encryption You can take a true nas core system and do an in-place upgrade to Without losing your data to true nas scale, but well, it's not only an upgrade It's just a it's a version change But they do call it an upgrade that is the actual words they use But of note your jails do not translate over you have jails in the free bsd system and in the Linux world they are using a very Customized version. I seen someone comment that they felt this kind of hacks together. It's definitely a very customized version of their app store Um, I think they're they've gotten a lot more mature with the product It definitely was way buggier when I first started and I was like, yeah apps are scary Uh, because they just don't seem to be completely reliable to Modern day, they've done a ton of tuning to make the apps actually work really well That's hence that earlier video I mentioned about the file browser tool works great Matter of fact, the parameters work great the the way it does storage is handled well for parameters and things like that I've even updated the tools. So they've definitely come a long way for stability and actually working I think a few major versions. I might give another shot. I'm just not in a hurry because mine works but Yeah, um Scale scale is getting updates, but so is cores core is not dead. It's not an abandoned product It's just not a product. They're going to be adding more Plugins for they're they're only working on base os enhancement. So they're updating versions of samba They're still adding functionality to it, but they're not adding more add-ons to it in a term of like jails and plugins yeah so I'm gonna Because this is like the next thing I'm going to talk about could there's several different places I could insert this but I'm going to just talk about it now and then I'll come back to it And what I want to talk about now is my internal ansible solution Which I call node forge is the name I came up with it. I actually just asked chat gbt what to call it and that's what it came back with Was it call it? node forge node forge. Okay, node forge. Yep. Yep on a forge node. Um, I like this I didn't I don't really like the name because node forge immediately makes you think it's node j s If you're if you know about the various things in our industry and that's That's probably an easy assumption to make but it has nothing to do with node j s It's node is in a node like in your cloud or your proxmox It's going to configure that for you even though it has an internal name I don't want to I mean it runs like an application of its own, but it's ansible Okay, it's 95 ansible code. It's just what I call it and I will be Releasing this publicly which I'll talk more about in a bit, but so node forge is using ansible pull primarily okay, and People might some people might face palm when they hear me say that but I I think it's just not realized how Ansible pull is and I will not use ansible without ansible pull I will not consider it. Um, and nothing against ansible. I love ansible But the way that most people set it up nothing wrong with this This is just how like pretty much every book will tell you how to do it You set up a control host, which is essentially an ansible server, but it's not really server It's just the machine that's Connecting via ssh to all of your other machines to configure them So if you spin up a web server you add it to your inventory file and it you know ssh goes in there and does what it has to do But what if you're a nine to five shop, for example, um, you you do no business after five I'm sure not a lot of businesses like that. And this is a home lab show so I'm not talking about business too much here, but What if you you shut your server off at night and and home for home labs I mean, that's even more important because if you're sleeping, why is your home lab on Turn it off save the power, right? But then ansible is going to complain when have a control host because can access server can access server Then your learning system is going off. Yeah, I know I shut the server down. I don't care So there's this there's ways to make ansible more stateful with The machines and the times that they should be on it just gets very complicated ansible pull on the other hand Pulls the configs from a repository and the machines run them local host So they only run when they're on there's going to be no errors when they're not on Because they're just not going to run at all But then the problem becomes but what if it never runs and how do you know Do you just manually go in and check every single one of them? And that's where healthchecks.io comes in It's not specific to ansible. You could use this for any bash grip, for example. It's just a um an HTTP code that gets presented to You know healthchecks.io to tell it that's something run So at the end of your script you just say you know hit healthchecks.io with this code for this particular computer And it knows that that one ran so I have it set for eight days if I don't If a machine hasn't you know checked in with ansible in eight days because it runs at least weekly minimum Then there's a problem. I need to go in there and check it So I have to have something kind of checking in to make sure that it didn't silently fail which is the downside of ansible pull but As we're going to talk about like my ansible pull solution is ansible pull on some major steroids This is not your this is not your um, I want to say grandmother's ansible pull But grandmothers might be using um salt stack or you know puppet for all I know But the situation with node forage my solution is it operates like an app So when I install it on a new node, let's just say I have a laptop or desktop a server I type um curl and then Yeah curl boots bootstrap slash deploy. Oh deploy slash bootstrap. It's muscle memory. I can't talk and then I pipe it to bash And that's it. I that's how I provision machine. There's nothing else to do It's a local bash script that served via apache to my local network can't get to it anywhere else So don't run that if you ever visit, you know, obviously don't run that command because I'll own your machine Believe it. I will majorly own your machine if you run that command on my network I will have my picture looking at you on the login screen if you run that command But essentially what it'll do is it runs the first provision But it also sets its own automation up to run Continually from that point forward so you only have to run it once and then it creates a A system d service file to in a timer to run again if a Job fails. It sets a timer for itself to try again later So this will help solve like rate limiting issues Like if you're I don't know github as an issue or something And you get a fail which can happen for no reason of your own just you know github's down or whatever is down It'll try again on its own. So if you get if I get a failure Okay, well, I'm going to see when it tries again if it still fails And it's going to come back with another failure or a success if I See a success and I got the error on my phone. For example, I know it's temporary It's no big deal and that kind of helps work around these smaller issues But again, it'll run it's run itself again if it had an error during its previous run Also, when I start up a server that hasn't been on in a while a couple of days, for example If it missed the time period that is supposed to have checked in It will rerun a full system audit So it has that logic to know I haven't ran in a while I need to run again Even if I don't commit something because it doesn't run Like for no reason other than once a week if I commit a change to the repository Then all my systems will take that change and apply it. But if I haven't made a change I don't want the cpu doing an audit every hour Just wasting cpu cycles and wasting tcp traffic. Why it's I didn't even change anything in the repository There's no value in in these systems doing this So they only run if I made a change or one week has passed and I haven't made a change Then it runs itself again. So it has that logic built in for for doing that and When it if you want it to run now on a system that's already, you know has this installed You type the word provision press enter it's done. It just checks in runs a full system audit You could add tags if you just want to you know, do anything workstation related Um, it's it's pretty stateful. And then there's different roles. There's a base role that everyone gets There's a desktop or a workstation role for you know computers like laptops There's a server role a kubernetes role an agios role There's a bunch of these and whatever role you put it in is defines what it becomes So if I install it on a laptop Even if it's just you know a boon to command line It'll build itself up to a fully working gnome It'll set my wallpaper keyboard shortcuts disable the alert sound that like I don't think anybody likes a gnome Oh my god that water dripping sound that air Oh my god, turn that off Well, I have it pulling based on the host name So if you give something a host name it'll build based on it So if you run your deploy if I'm correct about that, right? You are there's a and this is going to be something You'll see when I do a video on this because what I'm going to do is do a video on node for just show it It might be shown a little bit in the video that's coming out But I'll do an in depth one when I release it release it publicly, but there's a node assignments file Which is an ansible inventory. It's just called node assignments. It sounds cooler, but it's an ansible inventory So you you name it whatever you're going to name it So I have a naming scheme So if it's a name match then it applies the role based on the name So that means by Nagio server is not going to get a desktop config My desktop config is not going to get an Apache config for example. It's a desktop It knows a difference And it knows that based on the node assignments file which says you're a workstation If there is no match it just gets the base role and nothing gets done But if there is a match to one of the roles and it becomes that thing which is It's just amazing watching something where You have a command line no login screen It runs I reboot the machine and then there's my Gdm login screen with gnome and everything just Completely built from the ground All the way from just base command line And even arch Linux is supported here. So I this is the level I go to here It can build arch So it does all of this and then I have a system just like that And if I delete a system and then you know spin up a new one with the same name It gets the same config everything's in yet all the configs are outside of the server So the servers are disposable for example Plex Is a 16 gig proxmox vm 16 gig it maps via nfs And auto fs its share for movies which are on Plex And it it's um it works so well that It's automatically mounted anytime Plex goes to check for it I can kill that vm delete it doesn't matter because my movies aren't even there anyway I could just spin it up from a backup Restore it from a backup it reconnects to the nfs share nobody knows anything's different If I delete my navio server it comes right back up with all the hosts that it wants to monitor nothing needs to be done Um, I just like the fact that it's mostly hands-off. Yes, you have to run that one command It doesn't boot over pxc or anything. So I don't have pixie booting That's just going to magically do it from there. You have to install the os at least But after you do that though, then everything else from there is pretty much automatic Now one of the things I want to mention too, uh, I think probably the next one moving on might be like uptime kuma We talked about this last night This is one of those tools that I think was just you can't believe how well thought out it is And I'm always puzzled when people say what's an alternative for it I'm like, well every alternative I've seen is not near as good as uptime kuma Right It's not and this is you know, kind of funny how this started because I was literally at micro center last winter and Someone spotted me. They're like, yeah, I just watched your kubernetes video How's your cluster going and it's like oh gosh, here we go. It's going great But I don't use it yet Because the unfortunate side effect of content creation is I can create this awesome implementation But then I have to like go do other things and I might not have time to go back to it So I wasn't even running anything in production. I would always be Messing with kubernetes for tutorials and whatnot But as far as like using it for day-to-day, I wasn't until a couple of weeks ago Or I think it was last week when I implemented a lot of containers in production and Uptime kuma was I think the first one. Yeah, no, it was the first one. It was the first one I implemented So long time listeners listeners might remember that I went with uptime robot some time ago And the you know people mentioned uptime kuma back then and my line of thinking was yeah, I could but Uptime I mean uptime robot is cheap and I don't really want to maintain it. It's it's over there on their system Whatever I'll pay for it. I don't mind paying for some things if I don't really care about it I just want you know check the box. I need something like uptime robot But then I got an email, uh, you know basically saying the prices are going up And that was what why I went with uptime robot compared to other solutions and why people were recommending uptime robot For you know getting messages when something's down because it was cheaper now. It's not so It's like congratulations, whatever the corporate company is that that owns you you just made the Worst mistake and ruined any benefit your product had because that was one of the things they had going for it so I decided not to renew and I decided to implement uptime kuma because our listeners have been recommending it anyway. Oh my god, it's great Like it is so good and It's so weird how good it is because it's like so well designed That it just makes sense like I wanted to Oh, you have to expose it because if you know, it's uptime I want to check the uptime in the main website. It can't do that if it can't access the main website So I had to have some kind of means so I decided to implement a cloud flare tunnel I I have no idea how to do this. I haven't read the documentation or anything And I'm thinking well, where would I do that? Well, here's a section in uptime kuma in the settings This says reverse proxy. Maybe it's under there. I click on it. It says cloud flare tunnel. There's an api P box right here. Okay. I signed up for an account at cloud flare just to try this out Had a domain I extra I could just throw over there and I did Generated the api key popped in done. It was just that simple. I had nothing else to do I want to monitor a website. I hit the add button type the url hit okay, and it's there like I just it's just crazy how easy this is and It's just a great solution and Yeah, I mean I still stand by my original reason for not implementing it before but now Unfortunately, the game has changed and now uptime robot is not necessarily something I would recommend anymore I don't remember what the price increase was my whole thing was The price was where I was comfortable even so much as a dollar more is too much because at that point It's just too much. Um, I don't know. Was it like five dollars a month or something Uh ridiculously cheap, but at this point uptime kuma one So that's what I'm running and that's what alerts me In addition to nagios when something's having trouble Yep, I haven't monitoring my lab stuff and all my production stuff and I have um I don't think jay set this up yet But I have maintenance schedules because that we shut down some things that we're not using them So I put in those as maintenance schedules because they're I have VMs that automatically suspend and I you just you could build all those as maintenance schedules say hey Don't notify me when these systems go down because that's schedule maintenance and uh, but it will Um notify if they don't come back up during your come back up period. So it's so as functional as ever Um, it just it says those little details that they have in there. I think it's so nice And at the core of this is again true nas You know because true nas like I said is the center of everything and it is So I know some people don't agree with this setup But I'm gonna I will die in a hill for this To tell saying that this is a great way to do it even though some people may face palm it works so darn well Is in true nas I set up a data store Poor apps every single one of my containers has its own little um data What am I supposed to call this again a data set? I think it is I always put those terms confused You know, that's probably that's probably a video. I've been meaning to do explaining data sets z vials and Directories and why they're all different because data sets are technically separate file systems in the zfs land. So That makes sense. Yeah, there's there's some details. That's you remind me. I got to do that video Yeah, yeah, go to that video. Um, so so basically the way it's set up is there's a data set for every container And every container has an nfs share and this is where some of our listeners baseball And that's okay, you know, I never pretend that I'm doing it the best way but this works well for me So each of the containers will basically do a physical volume and physical volume claim if you use kubernetes You know what that means where it's basically saying I need a volume Give me a volume and and I'm instructing it to specifically use an nfs share with this name And what I do in true nas is I have like an hourly snapshot of each of those So Basically the containers are writing their config Directly to the nfs share. That's where all the files go And if I delete the container doesn't matter it comes back the files are still there in the in the store But if I make a boneheaded config change and I'm not even sure what the heck I did But I broke something it happens to all of us, right? We we we'd know we tell other people Never make more than one change at a time while we Simultaneously as homelab people make like 12 changes at the same time. We don't always practice what we preach But then it's like well, which one of those changes broke it I don't know delete the stupid thing and restore it from like earlier before during this morning before I messed with it And then the config is back to where I had it. So it's almost like Like a um stateful, you know Over time snapshot system here and it works very well, but on top of that everything's in get anyway So even if that you know, it's pulling down from get so even if that changes then you know And get I have all the configs there too But it's just so fun to go back to previous configs and see where where it was and do this individually for each container And sometimes it's just so much fun Because if you are ever bored you just i'm going to delete all my containers, you know Definitely not something you want to do but it is fun It's a guilty pleasure when you just delete all your containers and you watch them all come back one after another The app 404s or whatever because you know, you killed it, but then like a minute later Oh, it's back. Look, it's just like nothing ever happened because all my config is there And I always have that um, you know system in place if I make a mistake I can go back and and switch it back to the way it was And I I can't remember which of the containers it was but one of them I implemented recently Said if you use nfs for your stateful data, we will not support you So we'll just close the ticket you're in like why like like I understand nfs and samba are different the way that they interact is different The way they store data is different. There is a lot of difference there But at the end of the day it works and I stand by it. It works so well for me at least Obviously, there's other ways of doing this with other storage systems out there, but For me it works great. So I have already uptime kuma. That's the first one Smoke ping is another one that does network latency monitoring that I like so I have that on there too Um, I'm trying to think of what all else I have so I haven't moved plex over, but I'm thinking about it What's that you use mb instead of plex or no, I'm thinking about making plex the container I just okay just to kind of even simplify it more because I like having The yaml files to define the kubernetes services and you know the the things that I'm running Got it and deployments in general. I think it's just good to have it there But I'm not really so sold on it anyway as being a container But it's just one of those things another thing I've started using recently is heimdall if I'm saying that right um Which this one is kind of one of those home lab solutions Where some people love it and some people hate it like For example, what it is is a start page and there's a number of these dash She is another one where let's just say you want an icon for all of your apps and you want to click on it and go to it Honestly, if you know how to write html You could just set up an apache web server and write an html file with with just standard hyperlinks And that'll work just fine and you could put pictures on there if you want to be fancy So I don't feel like you're getting anything with these that you can't do yourself But it's fun to have it done for you to where you just have to give it a list of URLs You just upload an icon and then you have a dashboard with categories and One of the cool things that heimdall does is it has api support for some apps So it can actually show you stats on the icon for it But what I use it for is I just want to click on something get right into it You know, I don't really use bookmarks much So I kind of feel like it's doing the same thing as bookmarks used to do But a start page is novel for some people that maintain a lot of things in their home lab I have an icon for all the different things that maintain if I need to get right into something Then that's how I do it and heimdall recently implemented authentication, which is cool At one point it didn't have that so if you had a start page and it was publicly available It's publicly available. I mean everyone knows everything But now you can set up off authentication if you want to Put something in front of that if you choose to do so so I did That's that's what I'm using there for that So I just figured I would mention that project if anyone is looking for this kind of thing I feel like some people are like, man, I've been needing something like that forever That's just the ticket and other people are like, why is it going on above start page? That's the that's the variance here Yeah, um, and I think do you have a video yet on your home assistant setup? Um, I'm trying to remember I did a few but I never really got into home assistant on the channel So much because of the same youtube issue where yeah Yeah, are they gonna think that it's outside my audience scope and then not show it to people What I need to do is like put some Test videos out there to kind of see how it does and I really hate the fact that youtube is, you know Having such an impact on what I choose to make but the reality is if I put something out And there's no chance anybody's ever going to see it Then it's probably not worth my time because you know, I don't make videos just for my own enjoyment Hmm, although that would be something I'm another noting that you you've got a lot of automation in there Um, so definitely a home assistant is definitely one of those things that's Key to your homeland environment and automating. Oh Yeah, I do so many different things in there like I have The camera I turned it on via home assistant before we started recording The recording lights the recording pc all the tv's my speakers my monitor Is controlled by it all the lighting Pretty much anywhere in the house Except for old fashioned fluorescent lights a few different places, but all that's there like the thermostat Is managed by it. It's all my pets like they're like I have a lot of reptiles So they're they're basking lamps come on and off um on a schedule the outside yard light maps the sunrise sunset so As soon as it sunrise the lights off as soon as it's sunset the light comes back on So it automatically adjusts itself. We had this system where we had this Well, I don't even know what it was like a wheel You had to turn in a certain way to configure when the light comes off and I just Said no add an electrician come over and purge that and I just put a smart plug on it So I can have home assistant take care of it because I'm not trying to learn how to turn a metal plate Just to set the time for a light outside. I'm just going to over complicated the technical way and Automate it, but it's it's a lot of fun to automate with home assistant I'm trying to think I know I'm forgetting some of the things that I do in there because there's just so many different Configurations and adjustments. I even have like one where it asks What's your retro gaming flavor, right? If you want to play a game There's like it comes up. What's your retro gaming flavor? You have an icon for all the systems I'm in the mood for super nintendo So I click on it and then my tv comes on and my hdmi switcher switches to the Super nintendo and then I'm playing that From one button just because you know, that's the right way to do it. I mean besides who doesn't want an atari jaguar icon On their home assistant. I mean you have to have that that's a cool thing to have for sure Yeah, that is pretty neat Yeah, all right. We're coming towards the end. What's the last thing we got to cover to take your home lab here Well, um, I mean probably nothing that I could cover in a short amount of time I think that's that's a lot of it the video that I do will Be more in that one will be a little bit more in depth, but then also I'll put a you know a mention out there for joplin, which You can self host the cloud sync portion of that which is pretty cool. It's I just use it for notes I use to do is it's my proprietary guilty pleasure. It's not open source. Sorry, but I just like to do is to It helps make you track of my to-dos and as it's helped me with my productivity But joplin is open source and that's why I'm going to focus more on that And you you can pay for the cloud service or you can sync it to your own dropbox Or you can sit up the cloud you can host the cloud for joplin for yourself as well Oh, well, there's that too. So this is one of those things where it's like dirt cheap. I'm like fine I'll pay it But if it ever gets to be more expensive, I'll roll my own But I really like Joplin a lot like it's like it's weird like I know I'm a vim person I was doing all my notes in vim. I had a naming scheme and I would I just figured you're going to pry this Out of my cold dead hands. I like vim and I like these dot txt files all over my hard drive But at some point I you know joplin is like man, it's nice and everything's more organized fine I'll move all my text files into joplin and I haven't regretted it. So I've really enjoyed it and I'm going back to syncing one last time The joplin's plugins are synced by syncing and if you want to get really clever if you use app images You can have an app image folder on all of your computers And add an app image or update an app image and have it updated on everything just off a syncing thing alone so you literally have a Automatically updating application rollout system via app image and joplin's within that. So there you go There's another tip for someone that wants to over complicated application delivery mechanism. That's just really cool Yeah, and I seen someone ask this question and we've answered it before and if I'm not mistaken I don't know if you remember that but uh, so rock store. I think is a fork of another product I don't remember the name of it It's another nas product, but it's not running zfs. So I don't really compare it to true nas It's another linux based Nice, it's I mentioned it's a nice project. I've never used it, but I also Um, I shy away from some of the other ones because data integrity is so important So I was like, yeah, I stick with things that are zfs based With the exception of synology synology is my alternative non-zfs base But synology has a lot of really I've got a whole video comparing synology versus true nas Synology has a lot of killer features on it So I shy away from some of the other project nas projects because for me to really review it means I will use it And I will use it heavily and I'm not ready to move all my data even though I back it up Yeah, I just I don't know. I don't know if I want to trust the third party nas just yet So I might try it out at some point. I think it might be something You've been wanting to do some butter fs videos. I have on my party list, but um, I'm still behind on zfs videos I need to make Yeah, what one question I'll just answer as best I can at least from the chat room is you know, is joplin a Is is it better than ever note? Is it a good replacement? I think where this question might come from? I'm not exactly sure, but I think I've read somewhere where there's some issue with ever notes company or the project Yeah, I think they laid off everybody there they weren't from the popular Ever popular note program to they laid everybody off and I think the company's going away So, yeah, there's going to be a lot of questions I feel about people asking this and this is the first person that's asked us this that I know of But I feel like this is a question. We're going to get a lot because of this and Unfortunately, I never used ever note. So I have no idea if it's better. Um, it's just right Ever I'd looked at ever know and I didn't really feel it was for me. I just don't remember why it was a very long time To me it was a proprietary system and I've always been more keen on open source ones. I've been using joplin for a long time I really like I think we have a video Um, we I think we talked about note taking apps and joplin was on that list that we talked about on this Here I might do because I've used it long enough that I might talk about joplin as a independent app on my channel Maybe jay will do a video on it But the fact that you can self host or pay for their hosting either one's fine For their server, but yes. Oh and someone commented. I think they're actually correct about this There's ways to import from ever note into joplin. So My complaint my my only complaint. I think I have a joplin is I didn't like The interface with how it's laid out. I didn't I felt like you didn't get as much control But I found a work around that fixes it for me at least I forgot what the setting is called But inside the settings reset keyboard shortcuts. I set a keyboard shortcut to hide the sidebar now. They do have a Keyboard shortcut. I think by default that you have to do like Like gymnastics with your fingers to hit all these keys in a shortcut. That's just so uncomfortable So I set it to if I remember correctly windows key s It's this muscle memory at this point and it in the whole sidebar just goes away And when once I did that that's what made joplin usable for me because I felt like there's just too much ui I don't want to be distracted. I just want to write so when I set that shortcut that makes Like I think 70% of the ui just go away and you're just right there with your notes And that's what set it apart for me. So that would be my tip is to find that setting And find out what where to set that and set it to something easy like windows key s or something like that And um, that's that's pretty much the only thing I'd recommend changing Yeah, and joplin goes back to I use joplin I use it in an encrypted form and then I have that encrypted All those encrypted files synced with syncing so my joplin notes are ever present on all my devices that I've got it attached to Which is nice. I I sit down here in my studio Doing it Maybe I want to go sit on the back porch and because it's nice outside and all my notes are exactly there I could pick up where I left off the uh, it's kind of like chaining these things together joplin plus syncing plus true Nass means everywhere I have access to all my notes in a very uh synchronized fashion And that's where my video scripts are when I record my videos. I write them in joplin and that's where they are Yep, I do the same thing. It's me and j have very similar workflows on a lot of that Probably because we've worked together so much. We've we're always bouncing ideas off to optimize our workflows to ultimate efficiency Yeah, it it is that way. It's it's a lot of fun It's just trying to save time because we've got to get videos off the door Sometimes it it's funny like the things we're doing now I feel like if we did the same thing like five years ago when it comes to video production It would take us probably a hundred times longer And we would not be able to get a video out more than like once every three months But as you as you get better at this the things we're doing now It's like oh, we're gonna make a template and automate this part of the video process in that part and then it becomes easy So it's just kind of like homelab. We homelab our video workflow. I think yeah You know and I see some more discussion in the comments zfs handles Drives better than butter fs combined with like lvm One of the few people's that done a ton of tooling that i'm aware of and it's not open source tooling That's built on open source products. It's going to be Synology like they built the tooling to make that butter fs and everything work better But that's not the case for someone says can you do a video on showing how to use butter fs lvm and mdam raid and i'm like, yeah, they're I sound just deep in the rabbit hole of making that work. I don't know if I could make it work I could stack these things together, but I don't think it's a good idea It's like I would be putting so much effort to recreate what zf does zfs does naturally does better Does with more cash right features like it's like you you're cobbling something together. That's a Very cheap imitation of the professional thing. That's why there's not a lot of people doing it. It's like Zfs has been called frequently michael lukas has mentioned this in his books the billion dollar file system because there's over a billion dollars of research into this and most of it's all in the public domain So it's one of those You're the uphill battle of trying to create something better than zfs This is why I get uh told i'm part of a cult of zfs Which by the way, I have a shirt that says that if you want to buy one that's Because zfs is a cult with integrity We use what works and it's not that butter fs doesn't work I mean, I'm sure there's always oh it works for me just fine It does I I did do a video on it, but I just don't remember If I did lvm as well. I don't remember They don't recommend you they know if you don't recommend you can blend them. I don't think it's recommended that you do Well, it depends because I know you don't want butter fs to handle your raid So you create md adm raid right and then But I would think butter fs on top of lvm. I'm not really sure about this It's just one of those things I don't use it in production But I researched the heck out of it when I made the video and then afterwards it's like man It's been so long. I forgot a few things. I'm gonna have to watch my own video to refresh myself. I guess Yeah, it happens. It's like it's all those things like I get it I get their questions, but it's like once you realize how How much more advanced cfs is and it's open source and you can just download it and free it integrated It's on linux. It's on Um Bsd you're like, why would I try to reinvent the wheel that exists? Especially when this wheel is uh really really optimized I think the reason why is because we linux people we want something of our own We're we don't we won't admit this But we're jealous of the bsd community because they have this right and it's not that we don't have it We do But it's almost like we have it with an asterisk because there's a little few little great areas open zfs has largely solved all this But you know, we want something to brag about we want the file system That's going to rival zfs to where our platform has something too But you know, unfortunately linux community holds grudges and butter fs made the mistake of going 1.02 soon Even though it was just a number but everyone took it too literal and then you know, they made there's problems but You know at the same time if they would just fully open up zfs to the point where you know, it's There's no gray areas on linux. Then we also have something we could all share it and you know if If oracle wants to really show that they're a partner of open source and a champion of it will open source Zfs completely and then I will absolutely believe you and I hope they do but until then We have a pretty good file system in butter fs. Unfortunately not as good as zfs But it's still impressive of them by itself too. So I think we're just a little jealous and we just kind of want more Visibility into our file system because no one talks about our file system Yeah, so so hopefully that that's a long-winded answer to understanding some of the parameters to go into how we look at it. So So we don't go on forever. I think we're going to wrap it up here Look for jay's video subscribe to learn linux.tv. That's where you're going to find that video posted This channel's where I post all my videos, of course So Nonetheless, uh, we'll see you next time and keep filling out some feedback Oh, we you know what we didn't do and we'll mention it right here at the end just so people know That you need to send feedback at the home lab dot show So we are looking forward to listening to you and it's been a few weeks We're going to check the feedback and maybe we'll do another feedback episode next time So thank you very much for joining and uh, see you next time. See you around