 And welcome to Vlog Thursday, 255. I couldn't come up with anything clever for 255. I wanted to, it was on my to-do list. It was like, you know, I should come up with this clever idea of 255.255 something and then that knowledge fell out on my head of what I was going to do because I was so busy doing everything else. But that's all right. Today we're, we almost a full eight bits of show here. Absolutely, absolutely. Let me turn my phone off. There is a lot to think about. I've been so busy. Today has been a day of dealing with scope creep from projects and clients, wanting stuff done at the end of the year and them first, you just gotta, it's a challenge. And this is one of those training opportunities where Tom took the time to go through and answer some of the project tickets back and forth to try to narrow people down and land them on what it is they actually want. That's always fun. That is just a really hard to train for skill. It is something you're always getting better at and honing and narrowing down. So yeah, so there's that. Why would anyone dislike a video? Oh, because there's always people disliking videos. That's why there's just people, it is, I don't even, I don't get caught up in the controversy. People who apparently though, because I stay in those same social circles of other creators seem to be really upset about the dislike system being missing. I'm so indifferent to it, but whatever, that's a whatever thing to me. Yeah, whatever, it gives people something to do. That's, it's like a hobby for them of being upset that something that they like changed. And if I thought that's where the real problem was with YouTube, it has so many other problems that need to be addressed. Like this is busy work, it doesn't address any of the real issues with YouTube, especially just some of the terrible advertisements that show up on there and things like that. So yeah, speaking of Australia, this is my second live stream today. And my first one was exactly 12 hours ago with my friend from Australia, Nigel Runs Tech Tribe. And I joined their podcast at four in the morning. So I did the four a.m. podcast with two fellows from the UK, Pete Matheson. I find him on Twitter, he's another former MSP, also YouTube content creator. Nigel is the creator of the Tech Tribe and we did a fun stuff. So yes, just lots of fun, lots of fun. Hello from Quebec, Calgary, all kinds of stuff. The best thing about Dislike, it stops the person's channel from showing up in the random features. That's where things get really fuzzy. Even if you seem to dislike stuff, everything with YouTube is not definitive. Everything with YouTube is indicators of influence to the algorithm of what they think you wanna see, which is the bigger problem with YouTube. When they told us creators that the bell icon would give people notices, we made the assumption that the bell icon would give people notices because they said it that way. Turns out the bell icon we learned later was a way to indicate to the algorithm they liked your content and would probably like to be notified of new content that comes up, but would not necessarily notify that person. So like I said, the dislike button being missing. Yeah, so fun stuff. Oh man, good evening from Spain. I think I said Quebec, New Zealand here, lots of Melbourne, Australia. So we got people from all over the place. Athens, Athens, Greece more specifically. All right, what else do we have in here? Lot of stuff. Have you ever noticed that you get very different videos to add blocker on and off? Well, it really depends. You'll get different videos that are not your logged in. I have multiple YouTube accounts, like I have my personal one and I have my business one and other ones. And one of the things that's funny is I make sure because like my personal YouTube account is tied to my TV where all my subscriptions are when I watch YouTube with my Chromecast. I am careful that if someone says check this video out if I don't even know what the video is, I switch to one of the other accounts before I check it out so it doesn't goof up my suggested things. My YouTube knows I like to watch what I like to watch, therefore, it only suggests those things most of the time which I'm perfectly fine with. I don't get a bunch of dumb videos. I don't get a bunch of, we'll call them the scream gamers because I used to drive me nuts years ago when my kids, before they had their own YouTube account, they would just log in, have whatever was logged in with my YouTube account and then whatever YouTube game year that they would watch would just be suggested next to me. And I'm like, no, no, no, don't play any of that. I don't interested in that. So, yeah, exactly right here. So I don't ever get notified of the stream on time and I have subscribed and clicked the bell. Yep, there's a reason that we have forums where we have all the videos listed. We have a specific, we call it the, matter of fact, I pull it up so I can share it. This is the, if you go to my forums and this is easy enough to find, let me share this particular screen real quick here. Switch it out, share, screen, tab. In our forums, these are all my videos and it's under YouTube releases. So if you start at the forums and you go over to the YouTube releases, these are publicly, no sign up needed. I keep all my forms public for people that are going, I don't want to have to sign up, well, then don't. But a few people bug me, they wanted to not sign up but be able to post. I said, sorry, that just leads to garbage. If people are able to post without signing up, that's been a weird request and I'm gonna keep denying. Just throwing it out there for anyone that might want to ask. But this is where you can always find all my releases. And if you want, if you do sign up, there is a way you can just subscribe to this as a topic and it will email you each time there's a video. We set this up to make it as painless and smooth as possible for people that go, hey, I would like to be able just to get notified of things that are on here. And this seems like a pretty fair way to do it. Like I said, it's trying to keep things as simple as possible. Hopefully that makes sense. P of sense with hardware RAID. I've never tried it with hardware RAID. It probably would work. I don't know. I've done software RAID as a test a couple of times. There doesn't seem much of a demand for it. So, but yeah, it's cool. It's, I mean, saves you from the risk of hard drive failure which can happen. Got a brand new 24U rack just scrapped. So excited. Awesome. Congrats on the upgraded rack there. Never heard of framework laptop. Like the idea just got delivered today. So, is it interesting to an MSP business with the framework? So the framework laptop I think is pretty cool. I don't know that they can meet the demand. If you talk about us being, you know, if we have to buy a hundred laptops for a client because they're doing a refresh, I need to be able to get a hundred laptops. Can framework give me a hundred? Well, there's the question. Can framework do onsite support and replacement of these? Well, this is something we get with like Lenovo or Dell if we buy an extended warranty plan if needed because the client requests it. If they can't meet those demands, they're not gonna meet the business market that we're in. Doesn't mean I don't think it's a cool laptop. It just means that can they meet those requirements? That's just part of it. So, I don't know if it's really something specifically for the MSP space or not. Oh, let's see. Oh, my son, he's the dislike person. He said boo right away. We have zero UDM pros deployed to clients. So no, I don't have any experience with the memory leak on them. Another person from Australia, awesome. This is the, by the way, the concept of having a modular serviceable laptop is as old as building, when we had open computers versus proprietary ones, the Packard Bell computers in the 90s and Packard Bell and Compaq with their weird proprietary way of doing things and the open building that I did with things. We talked about an open laptop standard. People came up with open laptop standards. That was over 20 years ago. Every one of them has failed because they could ever meet the demand and profitability of compared to massively making the same machine. Now, I think framework looks interesting. Maybe they're finally where the manufacturing, technology has caught up with and it can be done. Awesome. Can they scale to business scale? I don't know. Will they get out of the niche consumer market? I don't know. But the niche consumer market is not a bad market. It's so big right now that maybe enough to sustain that product, which is great. So if they, you can say what a niche product was 20 years ago and a niche product is today in scale of technology, it could be like, oh, a niche product is only like two million units a year. And so that could be going two million units a year. Yeah, that's enough just to make a business out of. A niche product 20 years ago may have been only a thousand units or something like that. Just one as many people in the early days of computer, not everybody had a laptop in the 90s. Everyone has a laptop here in 2021. It's a pretty common thing for a lot of households to only have laptops. Well, you know, my friends who are not deeply into tech or have a gaming system, they just have a laptop at home because that's enough for them. In some of that laptop can be as simple as a Chromebook. So the market's way different now than it used to be. Oh, yes, Packard Bell. Ha, ha, yeah. Pretty much you can go to the nut lookup for compatibility for whatever software. Pretty much all of the UPS is supported now. So all your brand name ones I should say, I just bought a couple APCs. They seem to work fine. So, I don't know if I'm gonna do a full review on it, but I did buy the APC, which is one that's... Ugh, it's done without dropping it. It's actually so, it's a little heavy, but not super heavy because these are lithium ion APCs. These are available now, which is pretty cool. Oh, what was I gonna do next? Let's go and do this. I have a video I didn't really, some will get to TrueNAS in a second. I know some of you might be here for TrueNAS, but I have a video I didn't really shed. I don't know what I'm gonna do exactly, but at least we'll go ahead. There we go. This is a business topic, but I think a few people had asked me about it. So maybe it's something I'll do a video on. Yeah, APC make a solid system overall. So they, I don't, the Eaton makes a good one, APC. What's the other one? Eaton and APC are like the two big names that I see a lot of that have worked well. So, oh, bring back my gateway cow box. Yes. Hey, thank you for the donation. I bought two Yealink T48 phones, Vega VRI system-free PVX one chip so far. One Yealink has died. We actually have a lot of the Yealink cordless phones. We've had them for years. They've really, those ones specifically seem to have held up well. Triplight's the other one. Triplight, Eaton and APC are your really big names in that market space. And all the ones I've tested, it's, you know, UPS problems, the batteries go bad after X amount of years, but outside of that, we don't really have many clients that have UPS problems. That's why I don't think about them as much. They're not a product that I'm seeing die all the time. We're not like, oh man, no, don't tell me they have this brand one so we know it dies. I mean, we even have one of the school districts we work with has a whole bunch of cyber power ones, which I didn't know cyber powers as big as they are, but they've not had any problems with them. So they seem to work. I mean, like I said, they're not the same level of them, but I see a lot of them. I see them out there in the market and the ones I've come across haven't had a problem. So yeah, I've used, on the commercial side, I've used some of the eaten ones as well. Share screen. Let's share this, but hold on. All right, there we go. So I have a thing here that I can talk about a little bit. This is, some people had an interest in this and it was the accounting workflow. People are always asking what software we use because I like open source stuff. So what do you use for doing this? And essentially, this is how we ingress money. So I have a video I can do on this, a short one, just to explain what this is. That we have invoice ninja, how our payment methods go, that we're using Stripe. Is this of interest to the audience? I figure I'll ask because I have a few people on the live stream here, but this is just all the ways we process and flow money. And yes, we're still using KMI money for the functional processing of all of this, the transaction processing, if you will. So this is still, you know, how we do it. I still use an outside accounting firm. We still do profit and loss and category of transaction. You know, I don't mind diving into the business topics. I try to figure out how deeply in the business topics are interesting to people. Or is this something I should just throw up in a blog post for people that wanna reference and look at it. I mean, it's just a really simple flow chart for how we ingest money. As I call it, the money ingress process. So this is the money ingress and this is the transaction processing that goes to it. Pretty straightforward and simple. Nothing, like I said, nothing overly complicated here. So nonetheless. So consulting, AdSense, affiliate commissions, other income, bank accounts, Stripe, ACHP, PayPal. So let me know if this is something worth doing an entire video on or maybe I'll just do it and send people links to those interested in it. Yeah, I agree. This is one of those things about this topic in general too. Whoops. Is. I'm assuming your thing is interesting how others do it. That's kind of how I am too. I don't know. This is not necessarily something everybody does the same. So even if you started with something like this because you're new, at least you get some concept of what needs to happen. And then kind of narrow it down and go from there. That's why we do all of this. So I'm still at my office. I haven't moved to the new studio yet. So that's there. That's still a thing. Invoice Ninja is similar to the best way to go. Just looked at zeros, started at $5 a month. Yeah, we're still using Invoice Ninja. We're on version four, we're going to version five, but we self host. So it's been a little bit slower on my parks. I've been busy to finish the migration. So it's just a matter of setting up stuff. But yeah, I like the fact that I retain and manage all of my data, but I don't necessarily tell everyone that you need to use something and host it yourself. And even if you have the folks at Invoice Ninja host it, you can still download everything out on there. So yeah, oh good. I like hearing that these are helpful for sure. Any chance for a video of how to set VPN on an FK200? You set it up on a PF Sense device the same. It doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be a 2100, whatever NetGate device you're using, my VPN videos are relevant to. It doesn't have to be anything specific. So that's, yeah, that's hopefully makes sense. It's not, the VPN videos are not related to the model of it as long as they're related to the version of PF Sense you're running. Which really for the most part, even if you're using an older version of PF Sense or a new version and watch one of my older version videos, there's not substantial differences between what it looked like before. So hopefully that makes sense and it's helpful. But yeah, this is an important part I have in any of these topics is using an outside accounting form because this is a lot. Filing government, sending out tax papers, that's, yeah, that's the thing that you need to make sure you do properly that I really recommend using outside accounting firm for it. So this is a really important aspect of this is even though I'm the one downloading and using KMI money, which by the way, if you're not a Linux person, KMI money is Windows or Linux. It'll run on either one. So you can import those QIF or CSV files, whichever your bank supports and get them in KMI money for the processing of it. And they have a template for a profit and loss statement and they have a template for categorized transactions because these are the things that the accounting firm needs to do that. And this is just downloaded and processed once a month for me. So it's a pretty simple process. So, oh, let's see. Oh, what else do we have here? We should now pivot back over. I think I've done this before people get bored talking about accounting. It's not the most exciting thing. It's just important because if you are in business for yourself, you gotta make sure you're making money because that's a thing. But let's talk about a couple of things. There's something that I haven't seen anyone mention. So let me log in here. KMI money? KMI money, just so I can show people the site. This is the software I use and it's free. So I didn't even know, until this moment I didn't know they had Mac but I knew they had Windows support in there. So this is a free open source program for doing accounting. I really like it. It's been around for a while. I've been using it for years. It's actually, you know, this is what the, what things look like in it, net worth things. You can go, you can use it even more so than I do. They have charts and stuff like that. But I like it. Now this is ledger. This is not for billing or invoicing. I use invoice center for invoicing and billing. This is ledger management and processing of expenses and bank accounts. So making sure everything goes into ledger categories and expenses, income expenses and all that fun stuff. These are, there's a lot to it, but this is, I have years and years of transactions in it. And it's actually a really nice system for that that keeps track of all my different bank accounts. I really like it. It's a solid place. Put the website in there. Sure. It's just, for those of you for some reason that are just listening to this, it's kmymoney.org. Firefly, whoops. Versus Firefly. I've never used Firefly, so I have no reference. One of the things is that it's been a couple of times I looked at other ones like GNU Cash is the one a lot of people used to recommend. None of them did my banking right. This one just works. That's one of the reasons I've stuck with it. I've also been using it. I think since 2010. So right around there. So I've got years and years of data in it. And it works so well. I don't have a reason to use another system. That's a big piece of it. Like there's just nothing that's broken. So when I look at some of the other ones, I first usually will try to set up that software and try to download something like in the bank. And then if it doesn't work, yeah, it right away turns me off if it can't import a QIF file. This does all the categorization and everything really nice. It even has a matching system. So when I spend money at the same places, it automatically throws it into that ledger category based on rules. That's a really handy feature. Now it doesn't do it as good as a well set up QuickBooks system, but it can do it. So it's a nice setup. All right. Moving on to the next thing. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. There's some of that too. I'm always interested in true, if it ain't broken and you're not, there's something else, the big improvement, don't fix it. I'm always willing to look. So let me look real quick and Google the one you mentioned. I had not heard of it before, so I can't, at least it didn't, if I look at it, maybe it was something else before. Toot, toot, toot, toot. Let's see. I'm just gonna Google it real quick here. Open source finance manager, screenshots and info. Here it goes. I'm all looking at the same screen here. This is the other one that was just mentioned. Demo, is it web-based? Yes. Can my money's a local application? So neat that it's web-based, but do I wanna manage a web-based application for this? I mean, maybe, I don't know. I guess I'd have to see what's involved in getting it set up. So that would be the real question. Screenshots and info. Oh, I was like, I thought these were just icons. So where's the download? Demo, read more, donate. GitHub, maybe? High level, import. Installation, there we go. Okay, they got a Docker, self-hosted. Okay. Yeah, this is a lot more. KMyMoney is just a single standalone application. For my accounting, I don't need a web-based accounting system. It sounds like it adds some complexity. I don't know, maybe there's some reasons to do it, but I will hold off for now. It's, I don't really got, yeah. My accountant doesn't use it. I export the transactions to my accountant. They don't use KMyMoney. They have their own tools. I export a file and a CSV file for them with the matching transactions. So I can take all the transactions and dump them to a file. My accountant can take it from there. My accountant supports QuickBooks and they support, I forget the name of the software. They have some other commercial software they support. I think it's called Creative Solutions or something by Thomson Reuters. They use commercial common accounting software. You talk to your accountant about what's right for you. I don't really need to share it with anyone. That's at least one of the things that's for me, not an issue. All right, let's talk about this problem. Because this is a problem, right? Oh, we got many. I think probably the reason you get requests is because it's already got a Docker image available. It was probably why people are asking about it. It may be, I mean, if you're in a larger and accounting environment, it would make sense because KMyMoney is a standalone app. We don't have a team of accountants working on ledger here. If we did, obviously that might make sense, but we don't, so it makes a lot less sense. And it's just really me doing once a month processing of the QIF file. So 12 times a year, Thom downloads a QIF file out of the system and imports it in there. It's for the scale and scope of our company. I mean, it's a lot of transactions. It's thousands of transactions, but it's not that hard to process them. Let's see. Now on to this topic. Yes, we are on version U7. So that part's done. Do we have any errors in here? Nope, these are, everything looks like it's working. This is normal because I'm running some network scans that do some testing and auditing. So it has a failed login, which it should. But there is at least one thing appears to be broken. And that's this. Wah, wah, wah. So this did break into your NAS U7. So far it's the only problem I've had that I've noticed at all is, yeah, this broke. These are all working. These are my backups, my cloud sync tasks and things like that all work. There's nothing to transfer today, so that's fine. So all these other things are working fine. The replication tasks I didn't have any problems with. They're all working. All the VMs that run inside of here are working, but the charts are broken, but they're not broken in the way you might think. And this is where it gets a little weird. So if we go over here, we're gonna stop sharing. We're going to open up Firefox and log in. So let me go ahead and log into Firefox here. Get my password and let fun stuff and change the sharing features. So share screen, Firefox. All right, the only thing different was the browser now and here we go, look at that, we're rendering. So there is a bug in Chromium-based browsers that seem to stop this from working, but it's a Chromium problem or something. I mean, it's technically a TrueNAS problem because Chromium is quite the popular browser. So it's not like TrueNAS can really ignore it. So I guess they have some bug that causes this issue. So that's a minor issue, but issue nonetheless. Yeah, do I use FiberChannel or everything local? Everything's local on my TrueNAS. I don't use, everything's local right now. No FiberChannel connected to this. So this is 100% local storage. Currently we have about 240 terabytes free of storage right now. We're only using 13 terabytes. So I have to, I have to find some stuff to put on this, but yeah, this is all local. So we go here and we look at the status. They're all local disks, three groups of read, three groups of drives are all read Z to setups here. All right, yeah, we need to download some more Linux ISOs. So such is life. All right, what else was I gonna talk about with it? Oh, there's a weird thing that no one else has mentioned, but I thought this was interesting and let me log in. And this, I commented on this and no one responded to me in the YouTube, actually, let me just go ahead and back out. Well, no, I can do it in Firefox because everything's to render, but I gotta log back in and reshare it. Three dots, two, one, three, colon nine, one, two, three. So this is where, I didn't see this in the, okay, let me share it back out because this is where the confusion comes in. So share, screen. So the MinIO got updated. And this kind of created a problem because it actually broke the web login panel. So that was like, oh, that's interesting. Oh, and this is something I've heard many people tell me they've had trouble with Fiverr channel. I don't work with it. I just saw the systems we have haven't had it so it really hasn't been an issue, but certainly, yeah, something weird there about it. So yeah, I don't know what to say about it. So is there any speed bump with U7? Didn't notice one? Didn't see anything in the errata that makes me think there would be a performance bump. It's more of a maintenance fix, but having the new version of MinIO is kind of interesting though. Let me go ahead and get that. I gotta get the password for it. So we go here to services and MinIO is the S3 service. Take in, and it lets me configure buckets. I've been, this is the new interface for MinIO, which I thought was cool. This is the new version of MinIO. So if we go back over to dashboard, we're rocking version, what is this here? 202123. So they bumped the version of MinIO and I thought that was kind of cool, but it's like, okay, that's cool, but I didn't know they did it and I didn't see it in the last, I looked in U6 and U7 and unless I just don't know what I'm looking for, I didn't see a version bump in there. Matter of fact, I don't remember this even being available on U6. So that was like, huh, that's interesting now that they bumped it to the new version, but that did come with me having to set up a new certificate because the MinIO specifically implicitly checks if the site, if the certificate, even if it's self-signed, has the same common name in it. So whatever it's an opportunity to do a new MinIO setup video because you set it up differently now, but one problem still persists with this and users, if I create users here, one of the things that this will not do is persist across restarting the S3 service. So I can create the user here, that's not a problem. And then we'll say council admin diagnostics and hit save and there's the user. But if I start and stop MinIO, the user goes away. So it's not ideal for actually using the web dashboard. The only time I really use the web dashboard is one, make sure my credentials work. Two, to see if the buckets are there and what the usage is on those buckets, done. That's all I'm really using it for, not really anything else. But it does work, it does function. So that leaves that, we got that now. So it's cool. But I didn't see the version bump. What software do you use for documentation and inventory of your clients? We use our RMM to understand the inventory of what we manage. And then we use the Wiki to document. We're still using Wiki to document because I like owning all of my data and not having a third party maintain all of my data. Third party companies are, it's a good and bad. And I completely understand why so many people use like IT Glue. IT Glue is a really popular online service that will do all of your documentation management. It is great if I want to work with another MSP who is also an IT Glue user and we want to share a client and co-manage something together. IT Glue is really ideal for that. But now you're paying monthly for a third party in the cloud to hold all of your data and all of your documentation that they do in some ways have access to. Cause I mean, they may encrypt it at the back end but this still means people can actively share it because of the way they do the sharing in there. So should you use it? It's up to you. Ultimately for us, we don't really do documentation sharing right now. That's not something we have a need for. So we don't use things like IT Glue or the other popular competing one for IT Glue is HUDU, H-U-D-U. They're both popular products but they are subscription based services. So as long as you pay money and they have export tools, it's not like you're trying, I don't really know how well the export tools work but I know they exist. So as long as you're paying money to them they will maintain and hold on to all that documentation for you. That's one of the reasons we still just use a wiki for everything. And then we use Bitwarden for password management because I know that comes up. The user goes away after restarting the service that bad. Yes, it does go away. I mean, it's because of the what it was used for and let me explain a little bit more detail on that. If you go to, let's go ahead and share this screen instead. Pop this one out. No, go away screen. Let's close this and then we'll share this one here, share screen. I know it's in there. Dashboard, all right. Go to services S3. This is the S3 system here. Now it works with the user and secret key that you set up here, but that's it. If you set up more inside of MinIO then it wouldn't work. So that's where it's kind of a problem. But the good news is, and if you go over, let me think, I think we do this in plugins now. You can set MinIO up as a plugin so that I'm pretty sure it's in right there. So you can actually install it as its own plugin where you get full control over it as opposed to using it in there. So if you built MinIO in a jail and shared storage to it you get the full version where you can edit all the users and do all those common functions. But when you use the S3 service model inside of here you only get one user. It's not exactly the same. I don't think you get all the full MinIO command line options where you can manage all the buckets. So it's a nice service. It's got, if you want the full version of both open source, MinIO is an open source implementation of S3 emulation. So you get the full version. So with the full version of MIO loaded into jail on TrueNAS, yeah, you get everything so you can do what you want with it. Next cloud self-hosted, yeah, that's popular. The user goes after a reboot restarting the service bad. Yeah, that's, okay, answer that one. Can MinIO do, I think it does the read only option in there. So the users are just created in the container. Is there not way to use the systems? Not in the S3 container for TrueNAS. It is only usable if you set it up as a jail and load it separately. I have a, I think, let me look here. It's an older video but I'm positive about this. M-I-N-I-O, here we go. So yes, there is a, I thought I did two videos on MinIO. Let me look, they only seem to have one. I got a more dive into it type of thing here. I'll drop a link in the stream here. Obviously you could just Google and search my channel but yes, I have a video that covers MinIO, setting it up, how it works. So hopefully that makes sense. All right, other than that, other issues with this. None really. So U7 has been great. It's a maintenance release. The bigger, more exciting news that came out of the folks over at TrueNAS is that 13 is coming around. I think they have a launch date of roughly February of 2022. So that's exciting. They're still doing plenty of version, plenty of updates on Core. Core is still moving forward and going forward to get done. So that's pretty exciting there overall. I still like that they're doing that. I'm going to revisit TrueNAS scale soon when I get out from under some of the other projects I have. I just have too many of them to really dive into scale. I'm trying to narrow things down to a few less projects. So priorities, I know. Yeah, somewhere in between all of that. Lots of priority changes in projects and everything else that I got going on. Further announcements? Let me think here if I want to talk about other things or I'll wait longer. Maybe I'll wait longer for that. I did post it in a forum. So I guess I'll mention it here. And this is a fair statement right here. Core is still the primary product for single setups. Yes. And Core is also long time proven stable. So it's going to be a while before even myself because if I have an enterprise customer, which we do, and they even asked me the question when we just installed that large petabyte server because they're going to want another one soon. They're like, hey, should we be looking at scale? I'm like, not yet. I mean, it's a lot of data on there. I mean, don't get me wrong. They got it backed up and everything, but it's not just that. It's like, is there quirks with it? Is there bugs with it? Yeah, there's going to be. It's a new product. I would wait till it gets a little bit more mature along the progression. I'm going to be among the people testing it, but until it's a mature stable product, it's not something that I would go out and put my neck out on for a six-figure plus install. No, I don't really want anything. You try to go stable because you don't want to lose customers that keep spending that kind of money with you. So, yes. Minio version. You can just load it as a jail, Peter, and get going on that. Thank you very much for the donation. It's much appreciated. I didn't know. Let me look over here because I don't know if this looks... Oh, all right. Even scale release one is not really feature-complete. Lots of features need to be added to the next release in 2023. Yeah, I think there's going to be lots of little stuff. It's just, it's writing software that's as complicated as a NAS is just... There's a lot to it. So, that's just one of those things. Now, the last thing I'll leave you with, because I'm going to cut this off at five today, is yes, some of you that follow me in my own forums. I have posted we are migrating away from Enable and over to NinjaRMM. So, we did make that change and made it official today because we told Enable that we're leaving them. And so that's for those of you that follow me on the MSP side or the business forums, there's a forum post about that. More on that later when we finally get migrated over and I'll do a video on NinjaRMM and talk about why we left. It's not anything major. I don't think, by the way, there's necessarily a reason for everyone to move over, but I will be doing in the beginning of 2021 because that's when we'll be finally migrating or 2022. We'll migrate it over. I'll do a January video of all the software tools we're using because that's going to be the whole thing is making sure people, because they always say, what is all of the thing you're running? And if they look at a series of videos, they'll see it at different times or running different things. So, I'll bring it all up to date with what I'm running in 2022. I could do it now, but then it'll come up in 2022. But we're also polishing the rough edges of reintegrating how we're doing things because when you leave the enable platform because we got everything through the enable platform, we had to use a couple other components because Ninja is an RMM tool, so is enable, but Ninja doesn't have all the features baked in such as web filtering. So we had to choose different web filtering software for finalizing all those deals and things like that. TrueNAS scale is free for those wondering. So TrueNAS scale is a free product, TrueNAS core is a free product. So that part isn't changing. Now, this right here, more specifically like TrueChart said, true command is going to be the clustering system for 50 plus dissenter. There are fees that can, they have a free version of TrueChart. I don't know where they're at with it right now as they haven't looked. So I don't want to misquote anything. The people from TrueCharts may know here, they will be doing a, I think they still have a free version of True command, but True command is going to be part of their paid product for some of the features. So, and I haven't really, I haven't had a chance to do hot sauce to the day, kind of skipped over that. I haven't done it in the last couple of vlogs. I got to bring that back. So I'm excited to get in my new studio where I can just go and maybe have a quiet time. I don't know. I keep thinking somehow a new studio will solve some of my problems. So like of distraction, but I have a feeling it, I'm still just easily distracted by the way. Ooh, look, it's shiny. Ooh, look, let me click over here. Ah, let's see. What else? Is something in my inbox? Okay, nothing important. Well, lots of important, but nothing immediate. How's that immediate? It's the right way. I have too many things open. So many emails and so much stuff. Ah, okay. Self host is free for 50 plus discs for all added system, excluding system discs. That's, yeah, so all your ZFS pool discs. That's cool. And cluster true command is always subscription based. I tried true command when it was an early beta just to look at it. It's cool. I think it's neat. It's not something I think that the home users, I mean, it's something maybe they're interested in. It's not really targeted at that home lab audience. So definitely pretty cool. But yeah. Oh, my son messaging me. All right. If you want NAS on Linux and just go at the exports and Samba and Magic at TrueNAS take a while to get the same functionality you have on VSD. Oh no, I would say they have a lot of the functionality on the TrueNAS. The last time I tried TrueNAS scale, which is based on Debian, the functionality was very there. The performance wasn't quite there. So that was the problem I ran to. I've been told if I use the nightlies, it's even more performance based, which is exciting. I mean, that was one of my hangups, what switched me back to TrueNAS core was we're running all these different virtual machines. And as a storage target, we use XCPNG, we use TrueNAS as our storage target and the performance was not great. That was, if you're looking like my, do I have a shared screen? No, I closed it. If you're looking, for example, the way we structure data, all of our backups and everything go to our TrueNAS servers and are replicated among them. And so using them as a target and having them running scale, where as a target, they were slower, yeah, that was kind of a problem for us. We didn't want a performance hit. But that was when I tried the beta, it was still beta something, beta two, I think when I tried it, I think they're in release candidate now. So I wanna load it again, plus I rearranged all my systems so I have more systems to test here. So that's a, yeah, fun stuff, fun stuff. 10 more minutes, what's some of the other questions we have for episode 255 here? Got 143 people, wow, there's a lot of people on here. Go ahead and bash that like button before you leave here too. So that's always great. So let's see. Feature parity with core accept jails really is there. Apps are already more flexible than plugins. Yeah, that's the clustering case, so needs a bit of polish. So yeah, from a standpoint of just using like sharing and storage targets for VMs, that seemed to functionally all be there. It was just wasn't performing as well. So how's the onsite video coming along? Yeah, voiceover went, I just need to sit down and do it. I have a whole collection of video files for a couple of them now. I just need to sit down and process them all and put it together, fun times. But I did get a Pixel 6 Pro. So now that I have this, that was my latest exclusive. I didn't like my Pixel 4 as much, but I like my Pixel 6. I like it so much, I think it will do better for doing onsite videos. Actually, I plan to use this a lot for my doing onsite videos because the video quality is so good on it. I need to go out and do it. We have so many wiring projects that are huge that we're doing right now. I'm not documenting them very well, because I'm busy doing so many projects. As I said, we're switching RMM platforms and things like that. So we've got so much big projects internally that I haven't had a chance to do those other projects like go onsite for things, but I need to. And I switched my son for schools. I've been busy with kids stuff and building a studio in the basement. This is my rig for the phone. So I have a way to use it here. Yeah, it looks so cool. Scoot back so you can see it all. The usual vlogger rig that people like. I didn't dislike the Pixel 4, it just isn't, the video quality is better on the Pixel 6. So I didn't think the Pixel 4 was bad. My wife has it now. She, my wife needed a new phone. So that's why I needed a new phone too. It's just, you know, she gets my hand me downs. She doesn't care. She's not into tech like I am. She's happy she has a phone that works. So my Pixel 4, which by the way, I had to get replaced. I had one of the few Pixel, I don't know about few, but I was among the people with the Pixel 4 that had the weird battery issue that Google had a recall for. So they gave me a brand new one only three months ago because they extended the warranty on the battery. I thought that was cool that people like, oh no, there's a battery problem, but Google's like, we'll replace it for free. And I'm like, oh, great. That's all I want. Give me a new free phone. Let's see. Am I afraid the vlog counter might skip back to zero? That's definitely a concern. Let's find out what happens. We should start them over every 255. Just to confuse people. As long as consider offering, self hosting some client backups. Wasabi is a good deal, no complaints, but Dillich says I should analyze some time to time considering TrueNAS versus Synology. Synology is impractical to use for managing backups at any type of scale because you have to log into each Synology. I just did a video about Synology backup and I covered that aspect of it. So I wouldn't recommend Synology. And the same problem with TrueNAS. TrueNAS has a great storage target, but what are you gonna use to backup all the clients and what software are you gonna use? What it comes down to is, are you thinking about scalability? That's really, if you, it's hard to scale something when you have to log into every individual system and do it. If you look at a backup system and whether that's something like the enable backup system that we've used or we're looking at the Ninja RMM backup system right now, whatever backup system you use, it's like you need to find something that you can manage clients at scale. Someone will probably throw out their, and I've mentioned that before, like MSP360 has a backup offering and we don't use it anymore. We have a few clients and one offs using it, but that's another one that I thought was a pretty good system as well. So pick one that's more made to manage multiple clients unless you never plan to have more than a few clients and never plan to do anything more than manage them manually like that. So one more bug you, I have never seen, unless you have some hardware problem where it keeps going offline out of the blue, all the systems we have here though, are relatively well maintained newer systems. So we don't really have, well, I think that back one of them, one system is really old and it still works good. I don't recommend QNAP at all because of all the egregious security problems they've had with back doors. So I generally stay away from QNAP. So I don't, that's, that's as far as I go with QNAP. I don't recommend them due to security problems. Jeff had a video about backup yesterday. Jeff does some good videos. I didn't see that particular one, but cool. I don't know what he recommended. I didn't see it. Oh, let's see here. Has anyone heard of a firewall that filters up on traffic based on whether or not the destination if he was resolved from a DNS query, that's really challenging to do. So I don't know of any firewall that actually gets that accomplished. And it would break so many things that do DNS lookup, such as Windows update is an easy example. Windows update will go and contact IPs directly without doing DNS resolution. Yeah, trying to block C2 servers and is not easy. It's what everyone tries to do, but rarely succeeds. So matter of fact, it was some type of bug where, especially when people set up what it looks like valid URLs from and things like that. So, let's see. Let's see, what else do we have in here? Oh, his talk was on Glacier, but Glacier is not software to do it. That's just a destination. Unless you turned off DNS caching, that's where that gets a little bit more complicated is some things just reach out by IP. So, yeah, I've seen the concept before. I've seen people ask about it. I've never seen a firewall that truly can implement it. I think it's one of those solving the problem the wrong way type of things, like we're gonna try to figure out how not to get to a C2 server. Okay, and then if it actually became popular by any firewall, it would simply, you can some C2 servers, by the way, including the infamous SolarWinds incident. They used DNS, so there's a lot of times it wouldn't have worked, it's only on those instances when C2 servers used IP address. So it's only a limited subset of the attacks. That's just the reality of it. Endpoint protection, really solid systems. One of the reasons we use Sentinel-1 and Huntress is it looks at the endpoint level from a behavior analysis. By doing a behavior analysis, you get some false positives, but it helps us with security insist. I gotta do some videos on Sentinel-1 and Huntress. We've been using them for a while and we use the full version of Sentinel-1. When we do threat investigations and how we dive into that, I wanna do a video covering some of that, but yeah, it works nice. That's one of the reasons we use it. So, hey Pete, yes, I was doing it. I mentioned at the beginning of the show, I said, well, now it's 13 hours ago, but 12 hours ago I was doing a live stream with Pete Matheson and Nigel over there, the Behind the Geeks podcast at 4 a.m. And here I am later, still, well, I'm almost out of tea. I drink coffee in the morning and then I drink tea in the afternoon and then we do the live stream. But yeah, I have a feeling there's a point during today where I'm going to just nose dive and crash and fall asleep from being awake so long. So, I usually go to bed till around 11 or so, so yeah. What about some content on user management? I don't do AD user management in SSO, so I don't really know the value of me doing videos on it. I don't know what's interesting about that to do a video. I really, as a matter of fact, there are people who do Microsoft videos on AD authentication. They don't get any views because there's like next to no one that wants to watch that video. Absolutely. Do I think TrueNAS scale would be a viable option to replace a sand? Not today, right now in December of 2021, it's probably not viable yet. Interesting in both homelab. I don't think there's enough demand to get would watch a video. And I don't know what people want to know about AD user management, like create users. What's the, I don't understand what the question is on how to do it. Microsoft has well documented ways of managing it. What's the goal in the video? And that's what I always have to start with. What was it people want? I mean, I like to educate you on something or clear up a topic that maybe someone doesn't understand, but setting up users, build your groups, build your users, build them based on the roles they have. You have your accounting group, have your that group. This is all very well documented from Microsoft. So it becomes like, what's my value add to it besides reciting Microsoft documentation on how to set up users? So that's the bigger question to me. I don't mind doing it if I understand that and I understand what the knowledge gap people are trying to fill is. Oh, let's see, what else do we have? Lots of discussion. I do not recommend Samba AD, so no. I do AD authentication, but everything, including our TrueNAS servers, Bookstack servers, Grafana. And I'll disagree with Corey. I don't think your TrueNAS servers, your main login for your TrueNAS should be AD. But if you're doing it as a NAS, file storage, it should be. So, yes, we definitely use Duo 2FA. Dude, you know what? I think I've even got a video on Duo. Let me look. Probably doesn't have many views because everyone knows, Duo's, I actually, I've met Doug a couple of times. Nice, super nice guy, founder of Duo. Hey, look, I have a video on Duo authentication and how it works. So I will share it. So for those of you wondering, do I use Duo? Yeah, I even made a video on Duo. So there's a video on Duo. All you know about AD management is it sucks. Yeah, AD is what it is. Oh, man, best org structure, GPOs, it's all changing with Intune. And Intune's a moving target. It's, I don't know, I am so, I was working with a client on a SharePoint problem today and it's just so convoluted dealing with SharePoint. I was only doing it because they, I'm trying to nail down the scope of work. I'm not gonna be the functional person doing it. We have someone else that does that. But boy, is it just so convoluted reading through Microsoft's documentation on what the client wants to do. I'm like, it's like, ah, it's, I don't know. Microsoft just does everything. Like I think Microsoft likes creating busy work and not making things simple. So IT people can build clients more money. That's how they do us favors, I guess. I don't know. Oh, let's see. How do you structure your Bitwarden for sharing passwords? We use the enterprise version with the groups in there for the clients and have all the client names in it. Bitwarden has their setup on, Bitwarden has a whole documentation of it. Of course, Bitwarden's got some new features coming out. So I probably will do an updated Bitwarden video for that, but follow their documentation and we're doing like the Bitwarden best practices for stuff. What centralized authentication do you advise? That depends. Google is great for, I know a lot of businesses that are using Google for all their authentication. I use, I know most of our clients though, pretty much all of them, I think. I don't think anybody uses Octo in our list right now. We've interacted with people. There's a couple of them out there, but for the most part, everyone does use the Microsoft one because things will tie to that. Either tie it to your G Suite and use that for all your authentication or people tie it to that. The third party one-off ones, there's too many compatibility issues with it to really be good and effective in the enterprise unless you only use the things that those things integrate well with. So before deciding to dive into Linux administration, I looked up some of the AD videos. My takeaways, they're always studying, they were always also studying and had to read from Microsoft and made a video after. It's the problem too, it's a moving target. By the time I make the video, it's obsolete because Microsoft changed where they moved something. And because more things are moving towards Intune. So is it infinite content? Sure, if you love Microsoft, I don't love Microsoft that much. I think it's a very, it's the solution I deal with because I have to not because I want to. That's one of the reasons we use G Suite. So yeah, that's my feelings on that. SharePoint is the worst. It's so, when you look at the SharePoint documentation, you're just like, really, this is why is everything complicated on here? Like just moving, one of the client projects, let me find the message because I could share the page. This is, if you want to read through something long here, we're gonna go here and we're gonna click share. Share screen, Chrome tab. This is what the client needs done. They wanna change the SharePoint domain. Here's all the low impact steps, medium impact steps, high impact steps, add the new domain, which is fine. Then run PowerShell commands in order to get this all going. I'm just like, wow. I mean, this is not, not something this is huge, but there's just a lot going on here just to move a SharePoint domain. And like I said, Microsoft does have good documentation on this and it's a big part of their job. Microsoft changes products, they update the documentation. This is why it's hard to try to make videos on it as a project. I don't know, it's just kind of a lot. This is one of the reasons I'm always not the biggest fan of all of it. So G Suite is called Workspace Now. Yeah, well G Suite has been G Suite for a long time. They just, I don't know, whatever they're calling it in here in December of 2021. Have you heard anything Duo, anything with Duo OpenSense and what about password list solutions? I don't use OpenSense. So I don't know anything about Duo and OpenSense because I don't use OpenSense. We have zero clients with OpenSense that we manage. I did a review of it, I played with it. I shrugged my shoulders and said, it doesn't compel me to want to use it over PF Sense. So don't really know there. But thank you very much, William, for the donation. I don't understand why you'd want Duo with a firewall. That part is confusing to me, but I guess maybe having two-factor authentication like that makes somebody happy, I don't know. Oh, OpenVPN. I've never seen Duo integrated with OpenVPN, not aware of how to set that up. OpenVPN does support two-factor authentication though. So that is something you can have set up inside of OpenVPN. But it's not, I'm not saying it doesn't work in Duo, I'm not aware of how to make it work in Duo. My school had a misconfiguration and SharePoint. Yeah, that's one of the things when you make a product that's complicated and the fact that there's entire certifications on just one product because it's so complicated. And yeah, I mean, you can easily make a mistake and open things up to accident. So yes, I've seen my T guy list of admin-admin as well. Yeah, oh, that's, yes. Like the Windows registry, oh, that's a mess too. Because I need MS products, is that for all products? Yeah, it's, MS products is one of those ones. Like I said, if I didn't have to interact as much with Microsoft, I would do. So Duo works for all the Microsoft. Now that's where we use Duo is usually in for desktop login, Duo works with Microsoft. Like if you're using RDP and you want to use Duo for RDP, it works really well, their integration's nice. Middle of an Office 365 or migration for city government, migrating a forest has a root specs, 1980 and T domain, MS administrative tools are really poor and unintuitive. That is spoken like someone who really uses the tools too. Poor and unintuitive. That's the hallmark of Microsoft's tooling. It is 509 for me and I'm winding it down. So, oh, we've got stories like this too. At my shop, she left a new SharePoint and it's listed as her name experiment. No one can figure out how to change it because they tried multiple times. There are some weird things in there. Here's a weird piece of information in there. Well, for this pit of your client, we had to ask them this because if you cannot do it if you're multi-GEO and you can't do it if you've done it already in six months. So these are like prerequisites. You can only rename your SharePoint domain once every six months. That's interesting. That's just like a weird restriction to me. Like you can only do this once every six months guys because I don't know why. And it's also you can't rename it back. So if you move it, you can't ever reuse that old name either. So, it's so confusing. This weird problems, yeah, the weird problems you run into it. Does all my traffic go through network router if the two devices, no, if they're on the same switch and they're on the same subnet, it does not pass through your router. The subnet determines whether or not they hit the gateway. So if things are on the same subnet, they talk to each other. If they're on different subnets, that's when they reach out to the gateway to get to that other subnet. The gateway being your router, that's where the routing takes place. Thank you very much for the donation. Much appreciated there. You dumpster of lost files. That's actually what they should rename it. That's to be the new name for SharePoint. Dumpster of lost files. Yeah, it's definitely, like I said, we don't really use it any of that here. So we farm it out. Or we have internal people working on it. We have people internally, you know how to do the Office 365 administration and some of it, but this is where Scopal Work comes in. The client asked us today, they said they wanted to have like a whole, someone train them on best practices for SharePoint. And I was like, nope, that's where we have to, we'll bring in an outside consultant for that. That's not something we're gonna do internally. So yes, that's a whole different project there. But thank you everyone for joining. I've let this go a little after five. So I'm gonna get going. And this is a funny question based on the title. I use TrueNAS for my NAS. So farm M365 out to PAX 8. Yeah, but farming, yeah, you can. I mean, that's a different thing. So I don't really see Gluster for SMB enterprise, but maybe not so much that. So anyways, always good to see my friends from TrueCharts in here. I'm looking forward to getting started with TrueNAS scale. That's gonna be definitely fun. All on board for all of that. I will be doing videos once I get all the distractions of December down there. And Cody, if he's still watching, yes, Cody, I do plan on doing that. I need to do a bunch of wiring videos because I even have right here the, because someone will ask what tools did you use in that wiring video? So I even made sure I had the tools sitting on my desk. So I'll be talking about the updated tools we use and everything else related to it. So yes, I shared all my thoughts on the LTT videos on Linux over on learnlinux.tv. There's an entire hour long video of me sharing my thoughts on the LTT videos regarding Linux. Me and Jay did it. Follow me on Twitter. We've got all that posted. So all right, thank you all for joining and hit me up in a forum. Sit me up on Twitter. Tag me in things if you'd like. And yeah, like I said, Cody, my goal is to do a lot of them. I just got to get a cadence down and put them together because we're doing so much. The number of wires we're pulling right now and their projects is crazy. I'm just not good at documenting those projects. If anyone didn't know, Tom doesn't punch cable. Tom doesn't pull cable. It's not my thing. It's not what I'm doing. I supervise these projects, but I'm not the one functionally doing them. That's why I'm not on site. I just, we did the project, make the process happen and put everything together, but I'm not the functional person actually doing it. So that's why it's a little bit harder for me to film it all. But unless we are doing them and I will, there's a couple of big ones I do want to take some pictures of just cause they're cool and cover it from there. Oh, let's see. All right, I think that's it. Thanks everyone. Take care.