 And happy Sunday from my kitchen. I decided to do this in my kitchen slash living room because I don't always want to sit in my studio basement and it's snowing out. I love watching the snow. It's absolutely beautiful. So that's why I'm doing it up here. Change of environment. I actually come up here a lot just to answer my emails because that's one of those things that need to be done and it doesn't need to be done with all my big screens. I love the big screens for doing editing and when I have a lot of work to do. But sometimes that work is just sending emails, laptop. That's what I use for emails. I sit up here in the cooler months, which is like winter right now here in the Detroit area. Whenever possible, I sit outside and do my work. Which actually I'll share this with you. This is what it looks like right now. I took this picture just before the stream started. For anyone who wants to know what it looks like outside here in Detroit, this is my backyard. And I usually sit back there and that's my patio and that's where I'm typing up anything from like projects to emails. And so that's why I'm sitting up here. It's just change of pace. I actually, I still like last weekend, you can see I got a fire pit back there. I think you can see that, I don't know. Maybe it's not zoomed in enough, but that's why I listen to books is I sit outside in the winter and build a little fire, enjoy. I just want to be outside. It's my break from technology, but then that's why I do my reading. Which is usually audio books. So when I say I finished a book, it is extremely likely that the book was finished while sitting out there or go for walks. Nonetheless, enough about me. Oh, good lighting. I have a lot of windows. My kitchen has windows that are facing this way. And then this is another wall of windows that you can't really see it very well. But they go all the way up and they, cause I got tall ceilings. So this is like an entire wall and you see the light coming in. This is a door that goes out the backyard. So yeah, I have a lot of windows. That was, I, to me as many windows as they have, it's not enough. I just couldn't afford at the time to figure out how to buy the house I really wanted, which would be one giant piece of glass. Like, so there's the appearance that you're actually outside. That's my goal. I don't know that. I mean, this is a new house. I don't know that I'm going to move from this location. But if I did, it would be for somewhere with even more windows. As much as I like Linux, I do like windows as well. All right, enough jokes going on there. The first thing I want to talk about is I was debating with someone online. And let me find the post because maybe that helps for relevance. By the way, someone asked this and it is me. It is my account. This is my Reddit account. It goes by Lawrence Systems, my name. Oh, my channel name, if you will. And my last name is Lawrence. Someone asked if it was me or someone posing as me. And I don't outsource any, I try not to. I say that because in case there's a future version where I do currently outsource none of my socials, I do all of them. But someone was debating is what the topic is here and was like, hey, let's move to Discord instead of the forums. Now Reddit is controversial in some ways because they certainly have done some really dumb things. And as a platform, I mean, they've survived some of their stupid, but it's still a platform you don't own. This is one of the reasons I don't have my forums inside of Reddit and why so many companies have their own forums. But there's so many people hammering for Discord. When someone was bothered that I don't spend much time in my Discord, someone wanted to have a voice chat with me and didn't want to pay me, which I was completely misunderstanding. I'm like, I don't have time to help you for free. They want me to walk them through a setup of PF Sense. I said, no problem, I have a fee for that. Why would you charge for it? I'm like, well, that's a different topic. But nonetheless, other people try to encourage me to be on and put more information on Discord. I don't understand because it's such a walled garden. And that's the part that I was arguing with someone with I'll share this Reddit post for the community, for those interested. But what happens is you start building these walled garden places of data and then those companies get some VC money or try to figure out how to monetize it, hold it for ransom. They put a layer between you and your users. This is what Facebook does. This is what Twitter does. This is how they raise switching costs and make it hard to move away from these platforms. As Cori Doctorow has so famously now put it in a series of articles, they go through an instantification cycle. And Discord may be the new hotness and people may be complaining about places like Facebook and Twitter, rightfully so, because they've certainly on a different side of the instantification cycle. But what I really don't like is you have no control over your data. You don't completely control your own moderation and you get some convenience. That's what you're really trading. It's inconvenient for me to host my own forums. There's things I have to do to manage that and moderate that, that I don't have when I use those tools. But what I do have is a better connection with my audience. I have a place where I don't have to worry about the instantification cycle of these companies because I run my own forums and I push more people like the people at 45 Drives. Why are they running forums? For the same reason that I run forums, we had this discussion of where should we build our community? And building it on someone else's platform that's likely to screw you over in the end based on the history of all other platforms that keep going through the same instantification cycle. Am I wrong about Discord? Am I the old man yells that cloud because I don't like these new fangled things but I just don't understand. Like Discord to me is IRC. I think it's a great way to talk to people in real time but that's what it's good for. It's not good for the community building of, hey, let's post this technical problem and then someone will post a nice write-up and solution and then that is later indexed by the internet and referenced many times. How do you reference to something that was indexed in Discord? To my knowledge, there's no ability to do that and if I'm wrong, let me know. I don't, that's one of those things that have a harder time understanding is the search function. And for me to spend time in those forums, in Discord one, if you will, and people call them forums with Discord, even though they have threading, they're not forums, being able to find something that happened in the past is hard. Even though they have a search function and it's just not near as good, plus you have to use the search function inside of Discord. Like I said, this is me just kind of ranting a little bit. This is the forums I have. There's no reason to encourage people to go there. And by the way, if you want some statistics, my forums are now getting about 50,000 unique visitors a week, 50,000 unique. Now I don't have that many people signed up. I keep my forums completely open and it's just a place where, matter of fact, my employees have joked many times about solutions to problems and good write-ups on how to solve problems. They will frequently find in my forums and that's part of the purpose. I know people are gonna have the same questions over and over again. Matter of fact, the number of people asking questions on one, how do I set up my true NAS rate array? How do I set up VDevs? I have a pretty extensive write-up on there that has become a really popular post that also links to other people who have other forums to kind of consolidate all the different aspects on there. That particular post, I forget how many thousands of hits it gets a week, but it's one of the most popular ones on there, but this is great. Now, even though the post is two years old, it's as relevant as it was two years ago as it is today. The relevancy hasn't changed. This is why I push more people, plus you get to own your data. You get to own your audience. That is an important thing that I have a connection with the audience because if I wanted to make a modification and use different forum software, I can let everybody know that sign up for the forums. Hey, we're changing a link. We're moving a URL or the forums are going here if there was some reason to do that. I have a way to interact and engage with my audience without someone playing the middleman in between. And this is why, I don't know, I'm pushing for it. I just want to know if there's some giant counter argument someone has to change my mind. I'm always open to say I might be wrong, but I haven't found anyone to tell me I'm wrong on this particular topic. Yeah, one of my favorite came up again because I had screenshot it because it made me laugh so much. They were hurling a series of, when I told them my rate, this was a while ago, about two years ago, someone said, I'm going to put you on the people I never worked with and to which immediately I replied well, if you don't want to pay me we're never going to work together. And they told me I should take a Dale Carnegie course and to which I said, I've actually read the Dale Carnegie books and they called me more names. It was a fun back and forth because I said, I don't remember the part of the course where it says I should offer services for free. The person had done reply, but I watched your videos. I said, thank you. That's all I replied to and they said they watched my videos. I don't know why people assume I should be giving away. I mean, I give away everything for free as much as possible on YouTube. I see as much as possible. I pretty much like do entire tutorials top to bottom. Then I reply to comments and then I have forums where I interact with people. The only thing I don't do is offer one-on-one time for free other than when I do these live streams where I interact with a crowd of people. So yeah, I don't really understand. I mean they use Discord for games. Yeah, I use it for games. Yeah, my kids use it. And I think it's fun to talk to people on there and I've held, me and my creator friends, we use Discord to have our group discussion because it works well for us to chat with each other there and how we have like internal meetings when we wanna chat about once a month. It's a fun way to interact. Your forum is the best, easy to find answers, thank you. Yeah, Discord is open source by the way. I'm running a fully open source forum where I'm hosting the servers and everything. Top to bottom. Matter of fact, that's my next challenge is I have to upgrade it. It's getting so much traffic. I have to upgrade it to a much faster server. I'm trying to figure out where it's gonna land. I kinda wanna self-host it, but I think the bandwidth, I have to figure out, well, I might self-host it and move to a data center. And we have Kolo at CNWR. So it may move to the CNWR Kolo. Muted, it might be you. So far it seems like people can hear me. Move to True Church, True to Scale system because True Church people switch all their support to Discord. Yeah, there's another confusing one. Why they would do that? I don't get it. People never read the terms of condition. Are your forum stats available publicly? Ah, no, but I'm wondering how easy it would be. I don't have a way to make them public. When I give statistics on my forums, I'm actually pulling them from the raw logs that the Nginx server creates. So I'm taking the Nginx logs and using it there. I don't have Google tracking stats in there, but I did think about when I rebuild the server and build a new one, I might embed one of the local ones. And I think they have a way I can publicly share it. The only thing I would not share is all the IP addresses that hit, but I don't mind sharing like the stats for the forums. True NAS, I'm getting checks and mayors on one drive. I switched to a hot spare. The checks and mayors persist. Bad connections are sometimes the cause of checks and mayors, bad controllers, bad cabling. Those are all places to check. Yeah, everybody checks the box and complains when they're enforced. Well, what's even worse, well he is terms and conditions are subject to change at any given moment. That's probably, that's almost boilerplate. Here's our terms and conditions that we may alter at any moment and pull the rug out from under you just so you know. So that's why it's a pain to deal with these companies. Think you need to just find anyone, why you don't use them. Come to you for actually free advice and demand you suppose any platform is crazy. Yeah. And you mentioned a Tom GTP and the forums offer great access to that training data. I am pro forum. That's exactly something I am working on as Tom GPT. That is definitely a project I am working at. Sorry, I'm wiggling around in my chair to get comfortable. I'm sitting, I'm balanced on kitchen stools in a funny way because I sit weird. I am part of the 30, I'm part of 30 Discord servers. It's too much, yeah. I tell people, I mean, I belong to a ton of Discord servers. I join them and I immediately mute them. I will only accept people who at tag. Like if you want to tag me and say, hey Tom, can you look at this? I might reply. I don't mind when people tag me but that's the only way you're gonna get my attention. I don't got time to look at 20 different servers or 30 different servers that I belong to. I just don't really have the time at all to do that. It's hard because it's just a stream of text to me and I'm like, that doesn't, it's not as concise as forums are. I don't mind chatting with people and it's a fun place to go, hey, how's it going people? That's fine. If you had a venture capital you can afford to give away free services. You're, if you are a loan entrepreneur if you need to charge for value you provide. I give away a lot. But yeah, I mean at some point I do charge for things. We do have a monetization. That's one of the reasons there's very few ads which is gonna be a few more this year but I try to keep the ads on the channel to a minimum and I do that by people hiring me. There's a balance to be kept. Hello from the thumb, I can hear you just fine. Awesome, I've got probably a lot of comments. Giving stuff away is part of, oh. Yeah, oh, let's see. Yeah, you always agree. The boilerplate ULAs and the like they're actually enforced or legal. Yeah, there are stats at Discord URL about, are they public though? Hold on, let me see how much of this is. Yeah, there we go. If you do, you go to my forum URL and about, there's a little bit of information. I mean, I can share some of the internal stats. So if we go over here, I'll go to admin and I'll only make sure nothing admin is showing that I don't want to show. There we go. View on stream error, let me throw this in here. Yeah, but my forums, like October was a really crazy month logged in users, 4,779 anonymous users 127,000 anonymous users and crawlers, 36,000 a net was in, this is broken down what, weekly or trying to figure out the date range, October 23rd. I think this is, yeah, this is all broke down quarterly here. Oh, this is an entire quarter. It doesn't sum up that, but you kind of get the idea of some of the stats that the forums go through. There's a lot of people hitting the forums, which is great. So definitely, it's interesting to see all the stats that come out of it. This is when PF Sense changed your license and I did a topic about that and the PF Sense was what drove so many people to it, wanting to talk about it and discuss it. But interesting for sure. Are you planning on doing an updated video for the series XCPNG? Have you noticed many other YouTubers are using Proxmox, which I've been learning. Those seem to be people using XCPNG. Yeah, I'm gonna do an updated Getting Started With video that should be pretty popular. That's one of my next long-term projects that I've just started it. It's gonna be an entire long video. I say, I can only go this long because then I'm out of the frame. It's gonna be this long, where I go how to get started with XCPNG. There's not as many YouTubers talking about it. That'll slowly change because I think a lot of the VMware people will end up with XCPNG instead of Proxmox. But we'll see. I know why Proxmox is so popular in the home lab, but there's already a ton of businesses that we consult with. A lot of very large companies using XCPNG and those integrated backups are a pretty huge piece of it. Am I planning on reviewing servers from HP or Dell? Not really. It just doesn't fit my channel that much. Patrick from Serve the Home is so good at it. You kind of niche into your content and server reviews is not my favorite thing to do. And it's Patrick's favorite thing to do. That's why he does it so well. I'm kind of mixed on it. Server reviews, I love the software that runs on servers, but it's kind of like when you watch some of the gaming channels or not exactly gaming, but someone like Gamers Nexus, they cover a lot of in-depth on the hardware because he's got quite the passion for it. I lack kind of the passion for the latest motherboard or the latest processor from AMD. So I don't cover those as much. Yeah, Jim's Garage is great too. J series, Jim's Garage series, absolutely. Both of them good content creators. Please advise how you keep open VPN client session up on PF Sense. I've got client assistant disconnected a login to PF Sense, mainly bring up the session. I mean, it shouldn't time out unless there's a drop. It will keep, as long as the machine is on, it should stay running. People complain if you charge $200 to ask you 15 minutes, hey, yeah, that took you 15 minutes complete and they don't think about what it took to learn it. Nope. Yeah, there was a circle of stupid with the, some of the arguments I heard from other people, I'm not saying that gate was in the right, they weren't, and that's why they fixed it, but the other side is the circular arguments people had about the license made no sense to me. A process to change IP schemes. I mean, really, you just change them. I don't know what the process would be. The process in PF Sense is turn off DHCP server, change the IP address, update the IP range in DHCP server, turn on DHCP server. How many videos do you see breaking my Proxmox from lab and fixing it on purpose? I haven't seen any. I just started getting CP and G so far. I like it more than Proxmox. The ECI has more sense, it allows for better infrastructure as code. And it's a scalability thing. That's why businesses like the way XP and G works because you can orchestrate things at scale was an orchestra. That's its entire purpose. That's what it's been doing for years for Citrix. Citrix has screwed up the community so bad, they, well, they destroyed the community and XP and G picked up the slack. I think Jason mentioned tweaking. So here's the thing. If you're running 10 gig, there's very, very little, there's not really any tweaking to do. The Jumbo frames is probably gonna give you a 5% gain. 5% is 5%, man, but is it worth tuning your system to get 5% by setting up Jumbo frames? I don't feel it is. I don't feel it's worth it. Most of your saturation problems don't have to do with the 10 gig connection. It's the hardware attached to it. It's the same thing with people wanting to go 25 gig. And Jeff from Kraft Computing, he built the 100 gig connection. But as he said, his challenge was never saturating 100 gig. It was getting the other devices to get the data across that 100 gig. The hard drives, even if you have a lot of them, quickly become the bottleneck. Something I had a hard time finding was best practice instead of XP and G backups, had to fumble through it a bit, feel official docs, don't explain nuances very well. I've done two videos on DR recovery with XP and G. If I'm, if there's something I'm missing in those videos, post in my forums to tell me what you would like to see in a new video. But I've done a pretty exciting, I did one not that long ago, sometime mid 2023, I think. If you go through my XP and G playlist, you'll find one about backups and disaster recovery with XP and G. I'm a little confused about how the Proxmox backup server works and because it's a separate product. XP and G is completely integrated into XP and G. There's no agent to run on any of the VMs. And I don't, someone tell me, does the Proxmox backup server do the validation where it can boot up a VM and validate that it boots automatically and let you know? I don't know. If it does that, let me know. To my knowledge, it's not a feature. But if you do not cover the latest Epic processor with 256 cores, how will you know if it's enough cores for PF sense? Yeah, that one. My i5 470 key running Proxmox just fine. One, they'll do the silly spec routers. Yes, I have a hundred gig at home, but max speed I've ever, I used to give you 16 to 20. Yeah, that's the thing it's, you have to build out quite the machine for it. I've never been a big fan of Hyper-V, but hey, you know, to each their own, if you are insisting you'd like to use it, have at it. You know, I'm kind of surprised we got this far without anyone asking me what was, what was in the thumbnail of this. I can, I thought that would become a topic before or now, but I can share some pictures. There we go, we'll share this tab and bring it up. I'm working on this review. Do you have a recommendation for a 16 port SFP plus fish? Currently have a Meeker Tic one, but Rautarest has drive me crazy, budget is 300. Meeker Tic makes the cheapest ones, you just got to pay with your time and deal with the quirkiness of it. There's not really many companies that make anything competitively priced to Meeker Tic. Unifies are close competitor. Yeah, I'm not a big fan of all the Omada stuff. Their TP-Link is not great on security. I don't even know if they have a 16 port, I haven't really watched your product line, but I lean towards Unify for simplicity. I mean, me and Jason Slagold talked on the last Home Lab show about buying used commodity equipment. I mean, there's some of it out there. It's a matter of hunting it down and finding it, you have to deal with whatever interface comes with those. The reason I push Unify a lot is because I know it's easy for people to use and it's reasonably priced. Not verify, does the Proximax server have a built in boot up the VM type of verification? Like it doesn't, will it go through an entire boot and let you know that that VM booted? Not just verify that it backed up, but actually boot that up. I had watched those vids and they were a big help, but I'll head over to the forums and talk more about the parts missing. Sure. Can I use Unify aggregation switch to ask eight SFP ports? Yes. Open sense appliance. Nope. When my home network was using Unify Protect app, my phone, I can load camera feeds, it works great, but I'm off network. I can load the phone camera, it works great, but when I'm off network, when on my home network, it works great. You may have to do some ports to open up. I'm not sure. If you tie it to the cloud, it should do the streams. Perfectly fine. Do you have a good recommendation or managed switch to learn on? All depends what you wanna learn. I mean, Cisco is probably one of the easier ones to not easier, well-documented. I'm not gonna just try and tell people Cisco's easy because that's not my job to tell you whether or not something's easy. Because what may be easy for me or easy for a network engineer, I don't know where you're at on your knowledge and journey into networking. But at least if you did something like Cisco, you can go through, even if you don't take the test, you can find documentation and even older books that are relatively inexpensive that will teach you Cisco networking. And part of the understanding to get your Cisco certification is going to have a fundamental understanding of networking and going through a older Cisco switch that maybe you find on the internet for a reasonable price somewhere like eBay might be an easy way to start. This is a good point. I think Switch OS isn't bad on Meeker Tick. I don't love it, but it's better than Router OS. That's the new NetGate 4200, someone got it right. So finally, yes, that's exactly what that is. Do you deploy anything else in Unify besides anything else Unify besides Unify networking? Just these switches and the access points. GNS 3 is definitely another option. I haven't used it, but I know a lot of people like it. I've always had access to hardware throughout my career. And my career started before GNS 3 existed. So to my knowledge, GNS 3 didn't exist in the 90s or at least I wasn't aware of it. So my networking journey started in the 1990s. So I've not used GNS 3, but it works. You know, I talked about this the other day, people love OpenSense. And someone said I was just spitting in their eye. I don't know what to say other than I'll pull up the post so people can see it. I'll just throw a link here for people that like OpenSense because they're gonna be mad. And I think it's funny because someone says just because you keep saying that they're insecure improving it, Tom, doesn't mean it actually matters, which I thought it was weird, but OpenSense is behind unsecurity. They are slow to get things done and that they're still not on the latest version of OpenSSL. And there's been some vulnerabilities. And I pointed this out, people like, well, just because they had vulnerabilities doesn't make them bad. And I'm like, well, okay, I care about the security of my firewall. Useful makes you happy. I'm just pointing out why I don't use it. You don't have to listen to me. I will just point out the fact that they're constantly chasing behind unsecurity and they don't contribute really anything, almost nothing upstream. They wait for Nekate to fix problems in BSD. So I just use the people who are fixing all the problems. You think SwitchOS is garbage. Learn RouterOS for your switches is far better to tweak. I don't think most people need to do that level of tweaking though. That's the thing. If you're just looking to set some VLANs up, I bet it's faster, especially if you're newer at it, setting them up in SwitchOS than it is RouterOS. Hey, you miss your systems? I recently set up InvoiceNinja and Docker. Are you usually using that as well? Yes, I still use InvoiceNinja. This is a big misconception right here. PF Sense or OpenSense for that matter will never move to Linux. I can say that with good confidence because if you didn't know what the PF stood for, it is the packet filter system that is natively built into the PF Sense system and the FreeBSD kernel. So there is not any path to moving that because they're too intertwined. Matter of fact, Nekate has the Tinsir product which is based on Linux. If they had a way to port PF Sense to Linux, they would have built the whole Tinsir system on there. So is it limiting them? I don't know that it's limiting, but it may be, there's a time in the future that people will probably go, yeah, BSD may be shrinking and it is. BSD is not on the grow versus Linux is. I would not, BSD is not dead, it's far from it. It has a pretty active user base, but it isn't, it's one of those things where the iPhone's obviously popular, right? People are aware of the iPhone. Every year, iPhone sells less phones than their competitor. So iPhone's market share has actually been shrinking over time, but here's another statistic. iPhone sells more iPhones every year than they did previous year. Why are they shrinking that? Well, they're shrinking in market share, but they're still growing, but the other thing, their competitor, if you will, the other side of that ecosystem that works in a similar space is growing at a faster rate than them, so they seem smaller. So there's actually a lot of people still participating in BSD, but it is not anywhere on the scale that Linux is. So that's the difference. You can do USB pass through, you just have to do it from the command line, that's all. That's the one thing. It's not high on their priority because it's more about, this is why Proxbox is more popular with the homelab peoples because passing things through, very homelabish. Passing them through in the enterprise environment, we have like one of my clients has 30 hosts and he has them in one giant resource pool and he has these 30 hosts in a few racks. They never need to pass anything through. They need the VMs to be able to move to any one of these hosts at any given time so they never think about pass through. That's how a lot of our commercial clients, and I've mentioned before, one of the larger ones we had consulted on was over 2,000 virtual machines that are all managed in Zenarkasha. They're not passing thing through either. So this is where ICP and G, they're listening to the community. They're just quicker to get large enterprise features out before they get the smaller ones. There are those, I think that they said this is on the list, it's USB pass through. Oh, let's see here. Where did I go? I think I got a couple of other pictures somewhere. There we go. But yeah, that is the, that is a Nekgate 4200 versus the Nekgate 4100 for those wondering. I did try Mekrotik as routers and no touching again. Ah, yes. You know, I never really spend any time researching them but USB over IP, that's kind of, that's be an interesting option. I run my, I run my home assistant and everything on a Raspberry Pi 4 with one of the adapters on it. So that's how I get around needing pass through. I just don't run home assistant in a virtual machine. I thought about it. I just like it on dedicated hardware. That way my home assistant is 100% available while I reboot, update or do anything else. It's not, it's not an all in that path of problems I might have. Have you played much at OpenVPN data channel offload? Yeah, I played around with it. It's not bad. It seems to work. I don't, didn't, I think the only bug in it is it doesn't give me the, well, I think they may have fixed that now. That one point it couldn't track the amount of data sent when you're using the data channel offload channel. I believe we're using it at my office right now for my, I believe the OpenVPN connections at my office are all set to data channel offload. I suggest a PCI USB pass through card and pass through the entire one through XCPNG. That is a complete solution that works as well. Just pass the entire card through. Remember to use HomeLab guys off to control enterprises and need to try somewhere. Yeah, I mean, I get it. And that's why they do understand that about the HomeLab community. They just have such a demand. Like the XCPNG people have been handed the golden goose. The demand for their product has substantially gone up first at the announcement of VMware being acquired was about a year, year and a half ago. Whenever that got announced in the beginning is when the demand started and then it's kind of skyrocketed from there and VMware's latest shenanigans have pushed it even further. So they're dealing with like the demand of the large enterprise communities because people in the large enterprise communities go, hey, I'd buy a license if you did this and this. And that drives some of the innovation around these things is that kind of, oh, you'll buy 200 server licenses. If we do this, okay. Cause some of the companies we consult with, I mean, they're buying licenses from XCPNG. This is where people, when I would kind of laugh as well. This was the dumb argument about the OpenSense and PNSense one. I'm not getting my free firewall from those folks that not get anymore. I'm going to OpenSense. I want my free firewall from another company. Oh, good. That will absolutely show those folks and I get it. There's a community reason to do it, but you have to think about at some point how these projects are funded because the history of firewalls in the open source community is long. I've been using them for years. I started my first one I used is probably around 99 or 2000. There was actually, it was based on a, they had Mandreva. It was weird because it wasn't based on the normal red hat stuff that the early stuff was, but these all just kind of fell apart. And the reason why they never had models of business around them where they could sustain the project. And I always look at that from OpenSource is I love OpenSource, but I go, what is the sustainability of this? Like this project, will it be here tomorrow? Can I build things on top of it because it has a path forward? And that's something you really always have to consider is what is that company's economic model? What's their path forward? How do they monetize it? Because a group of volunteers is hard to manage over time. And I'm impressed when projects are able to pull it off, but it's always one of those things. How long can they continue to pull it off unless they have some monetization model around it? I never heard of XTP and GNTIL recently. We only had five VMs running on Hyper-V, but it feels like it gets, I get laughed at for using Hyper-V. I think Microsoft is going to at some point force people because they got, if I'm not mistaken, they made a bunch of licensing changes after server 2019 to the way they license Hyper-V. And I think the writing's on the wall. Microsoft's gonna either A, raise the rates at which they charge for it, goof with the licensing, and their goal is eventually to get you, their target for you is come to our Azure cloud or we can extract money out of your pockets. We can charge you exuberant amounts of money for limited CPU resources. And once you get really embedded with our stuff, we'll turn the knob up some more and complete the enchantification cycle of our cloud circle jerk. I use VMware Workstation Pro on my workstation running Linux VMs. Yeah. Do you feel home labbers should enable IPv6 on their networks? You know, something really made me laugh. And I think it was, I was listening to the Art of Network Engineering podcast and he said something along the lines of Nat's a security feature. Because if it wasn't for Nat, tons of these people would publicly expose things with IPv6. I kind of chuckled because I don't think they're wrong. I don't, I almost made a post about it not being the year of IPv6, not like any other year because I'm trying to remember when IPv6, the first time I went to a talk on IPv6, how many years ago it was? I feel like it was 2004. The last time I went to a talk on IPv6, I don't know, not the last time, the first time. I've been to a few talks. Matter of fact, there was a group that met and every year in January, they did, it's the year of IPv6 talk and it would give a status update on it, but they would have lots of musings of why it's still not implemented. And I'm still here in 2024 with IPv6 turned off on my network and everything's working. I will continue turning IPv6 off on my networks until things stop working. And of course, I have a few people that follow me on Twitter. There's a person who's a pro IPv6 Twitter user and I anger them a lot and it amuses me. So sometimes I reword their memes. They'll make a meme that is pro IPv6. I'll just take the meme template and make it anti IPv6. Sorry, because it amuses me. Yeah. Any preference for keyboard? Kind of, but I've already forgot the name of it. I like the clicky tactile keyboards, but I'm not a keyboard expert. I have an employee. There are actually a couple of people at work that are really into keyboards. So I talked to them about it and they told me which one to buy and then I quit thinking about it again. Imagine how much better everything would be without NAT though. I imagine how much of a bigger security disaster we'd have. Maybe I'm sounding a little negative. Maybe I've dealt with too many security disasters and I'm becoming a bitter old technician. I'm not bitter. I feel like IPv6 will never really be the main thing or probably newer, better protocol that supersedes. Yeah. I think there'll be something new that comes out that replaces both and that's the future. Oh, did you see the Cisco A embedded firewall? What can it do? How can it make the easier workflow? It really, so what you do is I just shared this on LinkedIn. So why not pull it up? Because I think this is gonna be amusing. This is timely and relevant. What did someone say about it? Anyone comment on it? Share this tab. Share of S&P 500 companies mentioning AI and their calls. It was really going up over the last year. It's finally going down. So we have 2012, 2014, 2018, 2020, 2022 into 2023. It peaks and now we're on our way down. So we're gonna see what Q1 of 2024 looks like. But I have a feeling we're gonna continue this slope down for people stop mentioning AI. I mean, it's wonderful for your stock price. I wanna get to the practical side of AI where we actually do something other than slap a sticker that says AI on it. Yeah, what does it do? Is it useful? Is it functional? Is it hallucinating and breaking things in new and creative ways? Or is it actually providing value? I don't think AI is a solution for everything. I think there's certainly things I use it for that I love using it for. AI, well, a tool with AI in the name, it's called Taja, T-A-G-A dot AI. Well, watch this video after the video's over and then build indexes and timestamps for all the things I talked about. That's pretty cool. That's a wonderful use of AI. I pay money for that, literally. I signed up and pay the company money so it can make chapters of my ramblings during live streams for like an hour or two hours, however long you're for. And someone said it's expensive. They're like, oh, it's like 20 bucks a month. And I was like, I can't hire a person for $20 a month to watch all of my live streams, which I do one or two a week of. That's a lot of live streams for someone to watch and make an index of. For 20 bucks a month, it will make an index of them. There's a good use of AI. Firewalls, I don't know. We're hardcore, just run VMs and QME scripts. Yeah, if you have a way to manage it. Oh, yeah, we don't talk about what happened IPv5. AI is a new blockchain. Yeah. You mean we finally decided collectively that maybe using massive amounts of compute power to solve arbitrary math problems to grant someone some money, wasn't a great idea? When using a router 1G connection into supporting switch, support two and a half gig, does this allow the down connection between device and different VLANs the same? When using a router with a 1G connection into a switch that supports two and a half gig, is this at all slow down the connections between? Yeah, well, they can't exceed 1G. So the physical layer connection speed, if it's 1G, every VLAN within it can't exceed the physical layer connection speed. What do you think about creating VLANs for small businesses environments besides separating cams and visitor PCs? Does it make any sense? Yeah, no, it does. Put the random crap over here, the guest network over here and have a great day. Also don't do, here's a fun consulting project. If you don't do security properly because you do things IP based with your security, such as your Amazon server, instead of having proper auth, maybe you decided to have your Amazon server accessible from your company's IP address and then you have a guest network that goes out the company's IP address and then you fire someone who then parks in the parking lot and starts pilfering your Amazon. That's a scenario. It's very realistic because it happened. Interesting consulting project. How are people getting in our network? Your network, that's how they're getting in. That's why you couldn't find them in the logs very easily because you're doing IP authentication and your guest network is open. AI would get it log searching and parsing for threat intelligence. AI can be helpful in that. There's a good talk about how it's helpful and how it can hurt. People have gray noise. If you look for a gray noise talk done in December of 2023 on the Risky Business Podcast. We'd like to see some AI integration of Secured Onion reach out to Doug Burke. Doug Burke is the head of the Security Onion project. It would tell you if a firewall location, if it's secure or if a similar rule exists. I mean, you should know if the rule exists before you create it. I mean, that's not really, I don't really need AI to do that. I should have something that's like, yo, you already made this rule. Duplicate rule. That's not something I need AI for. I figured we can probably do a if then statement. If rule already exists, let me know. In telling me if it's secure, whoops. The AI people didn't want me talking about them. Actually, I'm using a Mac and I forget that the back button is sliding the fingers across. There you go. The AI system, fun stuff. AI kills transmission, NSA disconnect. Oh, these are all fun. What do you think about the FCC possibly making all the ISPs move to a symmetrical connection? Maybe, I like the idea. I don't think it's gonna happen, but it's not needed for most people though. I mean, I like that I have a fast upload. I have a faster than usual upload because our ISP supports that. I think that's good, but not everybody needs an upload. The same as I do. I mean, not at the speed. I like that I can upload at 100, which I know is not fast to some people and maybe it's fast to other people. That's gonna be a different answer. But I upload YouTube videos. So I care about my upload, but most people, I'm the only one who cares about the upload in my entire house. Hello from Sweden. But comment on this, because someone had asked this question and I figured this is a good time for you to talk about it, because now that the AI chat has died down a bit, the NuttGate 4200, now someone was complaining, which I thought was kind of funny. They were talking about the 4100 not being that old, but being discontinued. The problem is this is cheaper, more power efficient with a new processor. So they didn't end of life, and this is where people get a little confused. They didn't end of life the 4100. It's still relevant. It still gets updates. They just end of sale it because it's a more expensive product. They were able to get this product cheaper than the 4100 because of the parts it was built with. And they don't wanna just swap the parts it's built with to a different chip because then that wouldn't make any sense. So you make it a different model number in the same category from 4100 to 4200. And it comes in at a better price point of 549. I'll have my review done pretty soon on this. And that's not true. You don't, if I'm downloading something at one gig, I don't have 10 meg of ACK going up. It doesn't work quite though. By the way, most of the time when people are downloading a streaming, streaming makes up the majority of it. And so much of that's over UDP for that reason. Hi Lawrence, you have a guide, how to set up open VMs, open VPN policy running using a privacy VPN. We do the same guy with Weigard, maybe in the future. I don't know when that future is gonna be. I wanna finish my XTP and G series first before I get back to that one. But that's, you know, one thing I am gonna work on is my long form content. I have been busy with running a business and everything else. I've sold that part of my company to CNWR. I have the time to complete the task of long form video. I seem to sit down and do it now. I've gotten so used to doing these short form ones. I got a really, it's a lot of different planning that goes into a long form video. There's a slight amount of dread I have seeing a video that's so many hours long that I have to edit. And yeah, so there's, it's not that I won't do it. The time it takes to do it is part of the challenge. But that is my goal. I really have been sitting down and reorganizing things so I can do these longer term videos because they're lacking right now and I need to get back to them. It looks like storage room 41, 41. Yeah, I'll figure all that out. That's gonna be in my review. When building servers, do you pair Debian? Yes, definitely Debian. SFP and extra with this model. Yeah, there's no SFP on this one. That's one thing that ended up not making it is an SFP module in the 4,200. It just has four, two and a half gigs. No SFPs. I believe the issue of most sized piece, Friday in symmetrical is the amount of upload channels Modem only has like eight, 32 down channels. I'm not sure it's that. Do you have any pets? No. I like puppies, but I used to have lots of pets. I don't have any anymore. One of my friends is trying to, there's Brett in the background. So my friend's trying to get me some puppies but I don't need any puppies. But I like puppies. Would you have ever used open WTNX86 as your primary router in your homelab over a long period of time? Would you recommend it? Because PF Sense exists and has more features? No. I don't think open WRT is bad. I just don't have, I was gonna run it. I, when I looked into it, I just, it's missing some of the features. I can't really use it as my primary routers. It doesn't seem to have enough ability. And because PF Sense exists, I don't have this excitement about open WRT. I don't think it's a bad project, but it's really not a good project for me. Put the adorable dog up. Yes. Puppies are cute. I almost made that the picture but I don't want people to think I'm giving away puppies. Although my friend is trying to, I mean, my friend has nine puppies. So he's definitely trying to get, he's trying to get rid of all the puppies. Recently got the VP for 2420 Barber Chelly. I'm already running PF Sense on it. Any configuration I should make immediately. You have a video on configuring open VPN. I have plenty of videos on open VPN. So any of my PF Sense videos are gonna be accurate for whatever you're running your PF Sense on. Am I a gamer? What do I play? I'm not really a gamer. I played, last game I played was golf with friends because a few people at work play it. Sometimes I play Tetris. So Tetris, Super Mario, the old one, like the old Tetris game, I like that game. I don't play games much at all. I've tried. I've been playing on PlayStation actually. It's called, it takes two, that game's fun. But no, I'm not much of a gamer. I just learned some vendors that sell new hard drives actually have cleared the smart data counters. Is there any we tell this we've done? No, there's not. Because if they're doing that, there's not a way that I know of to tell how they're doing that. Building a TrueNASa HL15 is the best way to lay out a RAID. Two RAIDs E2 is seven disks each or a RAID Z3 with 15 drives. You're gonna get better performance out of the two RAIDs E2. If you want performance, go two RAIDs E2. If you go 15 drives wide, it's gonna take a lot longer to resilver. So something that taken into consideration is resilvertime will probably be a lot worse with that many drives. You know, that's why I forgot to mention that I'll be at Codemash next week. So excited for Codemash. Any specific talks you're going to? I don't know. I haven't picked out which talks I'm going to. Recommend Scribble and Gartik Phone with bigger groups, way too much fun. You know, I don't really have that many friends that play games as part of the problem. I, maybe I just don't know, but most of the people I know don't play games either. So I'm kind of in this, like I used to play a lot of games. I was big years ago, everything from Unreal. I actually did play The Witcher. That was a game I put a lot of hours into because I thought it was great, but I don't, a lot of games don't captivate me. Maybe I'm looking at some of the wrong games. I really, the Division and then the Division II, I love both of them. If they made a Division III, I think there's talk about it. I would go and play the Division III, but they didn't. So here we are. I don't like the last Doom at all. I like the old school Doom. I liked every, I've liked all the Dooms and played them. I did buy the very last one. I got bored with it pretty quickly. I didn't finish it because I just, I don't mind starting a game and not finishing it because if I'm not engaged with the game, I'm perfectly fine to drop it. I'm not bothered. I don't force myself to finish it. I go, this isn't fun to me. And if I'm going to take time from doing something else, I'm going to make sure I'm doing something fun. Bored games in the browser. Oh, there's hot sauce at Codemash. That's awesome. So I'm excited for that. I won't do too much hot sauce. I don't do too much hot sauce when I'm traveling. I've considered Diablo. I liked, I did like Diablo. I did play that quite a bit. Yeah, hit and miss. I talked to Jeff quite a bit and I've been on his live stream a couple of times, but scheduling live streams, Jeff is in a completely different time zone. So figuring out the exact timing can be a little bit more challenging. I would say within the next two weeks, I'll have my review of the HL15 done. I have a lot to say about it. I've been using it for a lot of things. I'm using it because I'm, I've been putting off doing this because it's a big project. I need to shuffle about, I don't know, 30 terabytes of data around and get it moved somewhere else. And I'm using the HL15 as it. So I'm making a video about my data shuffling because I have to rebuild another server and the only way to rebuild it is to shuffle all the data off of it, rebuild it, reload it and load it back. I ran into a challenge because I got to move all the S3 data and that's one of the trickier ones to move. So there's, I'm making a video about this whole process to kind of talk about it. I have everything backed up and I could do it under duress, but I'm trying to do it in a more organized fashion. So once I have that video done and I'm using the HL15 for part of it, I will have a review of, hey, here's an HL15, by the way, here's an HL15 that I moved 30 terabytes data on and off of a couple of times to show its workload and show it held up. So my HL15's been running since December and it's in use doing stuff. And I think that's a, it makes for a more interesting video in my opinion when I have data and workloads that are running on it. Been hooked on Slay the Spire for a few months. It's really easy to zone out and easy to learn, hard to master. Slay the Spire. I'm gonna look that one up now because the name intrigues me. Huh, looks like something, it looks, is it multiplayer? That's what really matters. Looks like I'll share it on the screen so people can see. Looks novel. Fused a card game and roguelikes together to make it. So I'm gonna message my son right now and ask him if he ever played this. Ever played this. I'll let him know someone in my live stream suggested it. Oh, single player only? Yeah. That could be, I like, if I find a game I do try to lean towards if possible multiplayer games because I'll play with my son. My son plays games all the time but he plays a lot of monster hunter and I forget the other games he plays. My daughter's a gamer too. Both my kids game. There is no way to do this. There's not, well, technically, technically if you wanted to move data with the ACLs intact, you could join both of them to a Windows server. So if they were both joined to a Windows server domain, Active Directory, you would be able to copy things and the permissions I think would move over. I've never had anyone, it's just too time consuming so most people just copy the data and rebuild their permissions. So, but the way I would assume you would do it would be to have them both tied to the same domain so you could do a data move and have all the permissions be preserved. Quick question. I want to hear from the expert. I went with TrueNAS Core just for iSCSI and SMB. I have four VDVs, six wide, Z2 running, ATT-Tier Brace, rated drives. Yeah, that sounds good. Those are good. Four VDVs, six wide. You're gonna get good performance out of that. The problem with moving ACLs is there's no common language besides when they're tied to the same system. There's no common language between a TrueNAS and a Synology to say here, user Tom owns these files and user Marcus owns these files and user whatever owns these files. That's the common language they have to speak is something like attached to an Active Directory server that gives them a common user base. What performance do you get and do you use DaVinci Resolve to edit? I can get probably, with the system I have now, I gotta look at just how fast. I think it's like, it's close to saturating a 10 gig. It's probably seven gigs with the setup I have because it's not a particularly fast machine. The system I'm using, let me start closing some of these, I'll log in, but I have a TrueNAS Mini R and it doesn't have the fastest processor in it. So that's why there's some limitations it has because this only has that Intel Atom processor in it, the Atom C300. So that's not a fast processor, but I think people know that already. So this probably limits me a bit, but I'm fine with that. It's not that big of a deal. It gets the job. It's not bothering my editing at all. And by the way, my media is created at 4K 60. So the media I'm creating is pretty big at 4K 60 and editing it and on a 10 gig connection. This is the other thing that people get confused about. It's not even when I'm editing, it's not even saturating it. It's not even using all of the bandwidth that it's capable of most of the time. Maybe when it first reads the file and I'm doing some scrubbing, but during the editing, there's not much activity once it's, a lot of it just gets loaded in cache. It's a mix of spinning rust. My archives are on spinning rust, but I reference my archives a lot. But yeah, I've got enough spinning rust that it works out. Cause if you look at the system itself, there's a RAID Z1 with eight drives is my spinning rust. So that's eight spinning rust drives are fast enough, a little slower on the rights, but the reads are fast enough. Just bought my HL15 was planning on using it to move my current truness field into that and fell into the trap of just buying all the new stuff and using it all in the spare. Yeah, that's the whole thing. What's the share of companies mentioning cryptocurrency and their board meetings answered none? Oh yeah, referencing my chart earlier about mentioning AI. Yeah, the crypto hype has really died down a lot. Well, no, no, let's correct this. The number of companies in their board meetings mentioning how much they paid in ransomware over crypto is still not zero. So the amount of money paid out to ransomware and threat actors via crypto, definitely not zero. Which gets, because this is regulated by the SEC and you have to disclose your breaches. Yes, it gets mentioned in the board meetings. Free AP, realm SSD, ACLs, everything needs to join the Linux AD domain unless already built the set of servers need your IP AD running first. Yeah, question. I'm running an Epic 256 gig RAM 3G124 for Rome. I really wanted to do D-Doop on Ice-Cuzzie. However, 260 terabyte pool size I figured. Do you have things that would actually benefit from D-Doop? That's the thing is how much D-Doop is only beneficial if you have truly duplicate blocks because it does it at the block level. Do you have absolutely duplicated data that would benefit from that? Yeah, run multiple games already installed via Ice-Cuzzie. I mean, it should work. You can even accelerate it faster because you can add dedicated special VDevs for D-Doop now for the D-Doop lookup tables. It comes down to how many blocks can be D-Dooped. That's the question. Test it out. That sounds like a fast enough system to get it done. I am reaching towards the end because I've actually got a few other videos I might get done today or I might go play in the snow. I'm looking outside because it's still snowing. I do like playing in the snow. You don't need as much memory as 512 gigs party a bit. It all depends on how big the D-Doop tables are. There's probably some calculation for how large the D-Doop tables get, but that's what drives it is not the size of the data, it's the size of the D-Doop tables. What is the best way to move data from Synology to TrueNAS scale without ACLs? I assume move one mirrored drive into a TrueNAS box? No, not at all. You would use something like R-Sync. R-Sync is probably the easiest way to get data from two different NAS devices. I've done a video on R-Sync and Synology, so I've done a recent video talking about that. Yeah, someone else right away, R-Sync. R-Sync is the way. There's a reason R-Sync exists. It's very popular for this exact use case of getting data from where it is to where you want it to be. And yeah, it just works. Total commander, why haven't seen that name in a while? I don't know, you can get all the errors. R-Sync has been, I've been using R-Sync forever. I don't even know how long. It feels like forever. I used to have a backup server that I designed myself to backup client data for them in 2006. I think I used R-Sync and then under Windows boxes, I had a Sigwin system set up so it would do a reverse over SSH back to my servers for backup. Oh, it was an intricate system I built years and years ago. It was fun, but it didn't scale and I eventually went to a commercial solution. Well, I've went through a dozen commercial solutions over the years, but nonetheless, this is where I'm gonna wind it down, folks. Thank you all for joining. I'm gonna go get to work on a few other projects that I wanna get going. And loved hearing from all of you, loved that all of you came and participated on this and I'll see you next time.