 So I learned I can click the go live button without being on there. So that's that's interesting nonetheless. Welcome to blog. There's a number 326 true NAS tech talk security and live Q&A. I just have been tightly needs a little bit more generic because they they're not always that specific. And I actually really like all the interactions and feedback and things like that. People who email blog Thursday at large systems.com I've been getting more emails. Well, this was a light week in terms of emails. So the emails came in but not too many. But nonetheless, I like doing some Q&A and some questions and all that fun stuff. So we'll dive into that first. One thing I'm going to try to make notes on and be consistent on is I'm dragging this over here. Where is Tom going to be and when and I will bring this up. We talked about it last time. If you jump to the end, like the last 15 minutes of the blog, I talked about MSP Geek Con. I don't have any other public events that I can think of where I will be. But nonetheless, this is still there are still tickets available. There's 37 days left if you are someone interested and go into MSP Geek Con. It's a pretty cool event and I will be there and I guess now I wasn't originally speaking but now I am. So they will panelist a little bit different. So I got an invite to be on one of the panels so they will probably update that. But nonetheless, it's a cool event. It's driven by other IT professionals, specifically around the MSP space. But it is led by IT professionals. It is put together by IT professionals. So it's not like the vendor led conferences, which is something I'm excited about. That is something that comes up is a lot of the for those of you that work in the IT space. So there's all kinds of events, but they're extremely vendor led events as in you get sales pitched to a bit much and not as much fun to get sales. Does this listen to sales pitches? I want to go interact with all the other people. This is one of the reasons I like forums so much. But let's jump over to a question someone asked. And this is going to be related to today's topic because I put sure and ask because TrueNAS is today's topic, but someone said recently I ran across another YouTube channel and in the process of setting up to install apps on their scale and saw they manually created folders in the shell. How do you feel about this? Any negative effect? No, you can create folders to put things in the shell. I'm partial because data sets are very flexible and offer you some extra features. I'm partial to landing the apps within TrueNAS to a data set. So when you're setting up any apps, if those apps and will, I think this one goes to its own data set. So let's go ahead and edit this one. I'll take a look here. And it goes to Mount Dozer TrueChurch fresh RSS. I probably have that as its own data set. If I had to guess, I know TrueChurch is its own data set. And hey, look, fresh RSS is a data set as well. It's generally how I do it. I was going to point out sometimes, Tom, when he's experimenting things, it would be inconsistent. But fresh RSS is something I actually use all the time for my news feeds. But I create a data set for each one. That's my preference. You can do it differently, though. The advantage, though, to do it as a data set. Let's say I have a bunch of folders, but I only care about backing up the data on a more frequent basis of one of those folders. Well, the data set replication of ZFS, where you want to replicate in something ZFS, you want to replicate a data set, is going to be not subfolder based. It is based on the data set. So putting each thing in its own data set makes the most sense to me. It also makes it easy to clone that data set somewhere else. So that data set's going to get too big to live where it is. And maybe I have another pool I can clone it to, et cetera. The flexibility in my preferred method is going to be a data set for each app that you're running. That's my answer for that one. It's definitely, I would say, the way to go to doing it. Hopefully that clears up. But it will work the other way. Kenny, Lauren shared one of the reasons I started a deep dive in IT. Thank you for helping me get into career. Awesome. Congratulations on that. Should our team use VertManager instead of Heavy, XC, PNG, or Proxmox? I don't know. What should your team use? It all comes onto your use case. I'm partial tech CPNG because of its large scalability. But I mean, I don't think virtual box is a bad choice either. So we go all the way the other way. Let's throw virtual box. It's easy to manage. It runs on your desktop. If you only have one virtual machine to run, I've seen a lot of companies. I've seen companies throw virtual box on a server to run some app, you know, or server, if you will, before Hyper-V. So Hyper-V wasn't an option. So it comes onto your use case. I'm no expert at all in VertManager. I haven't used it. So I'm building TrueNAS with a Ryzen 5. What does the STUG recommend for XC, PNG, storage? Only need two terabytes usable. I don't really keep up on the prices of them. Our business installations are going to be enterprise stuff. For if it's an enterprise install, I mean, go with some of the, like even the ones I have in mine, my system here, what drives are in these? I'll see you and make sure I got the right screen shared. Managed to this. I think these are all Microns in here. Yeah, Micron 52110. So that's what I'm using in here. These are nice. But I mean, I don't keep up with some of the consumer ones to see what's out there. Hey, yeah, that's right. We didn't change it. I got to change the brand. We'll throw the Lawrence Systems logo. I think the HomeLab logo, it still applies. I'm here talking with a lot of people who are HomeLabs, so for sure. Separating compute from storage, dedicated switch for the storage network. It doesn't have to be a dedicated switch or storage network, dedicated VLAN on that switch is a good idea. The system and the way, I've got my rack review video or I show how our rack is set up, but let me pull up the office here. So if you look at our rack here and we look at the ports and pull up the port manager, you see I have certain ports. Not that one. These ones, which ones are they? These are dedicated to storage. So we have a storage VLAN. And that storage VLAN is on these. So you don't have to have a dedicated switch for that, but it should, your storage, if you have a dedicated storage network, it should be a separate network from the other things. I'm not sure how it looks. I gotta update things. I'll update these later. Forgot to update the stuff at the office. I'll do it after hours. There's people working right now. Data storage is a service. I don't know how you would, unless you're going to scale up to the back plays level, I don't know how you would compete in the data storage market. I mean, if you have a niche of clients and there's some relationship you have with those clients where they would rather trust you with their storage, sure. But I mean, there's so many companies offering storage out there, unless you've innovated in some way different than the way that the current offerings are. Like Wasabi entered the market later. Wasabi, if you've listened to their engineering team, they've done some interesting things in the storage space to make storage more cost effective. So they're able to scale up their product differently. So Wasabi did something different. If you have an idea to do something different, but just saying, I'm going to offer storage, I don't know what the, unless you either A, have access to ample amounts of storage that you don't have to pay for. And I don't know how scalable that usually is. I don't know how, I guess I'd have to know the angle you're trying to go for. Just saying I'm offering storage and offering it for the same price as some of the other competitors would probably be pretty hard. Well, unless you don't go with things like geo redundancy or having a big data center, you have it somewhere low cost. So there's lots of things to think about in that place. So I was not that I'm saying it can't be done, I'm saying just a lot of thought has to go into it. EdgeRider 12 and QNAP files on NAS take 10 seconds to open for Windows. Got to be a long path name bug. I don't know, I don't use QNAP to know what particular bugs. I usually only highlight the security bugs that come with QNAP. Can you elaborate a bit on the recent breaking update of QNAP to start the new app so new QNAPs are common? Reinstall in many cases. Yeah. That's an interesting one. It's a race to TP-Zero. I don't know, is that Jason or Brett commenting on that? So the problem with Truecharts is going to be, let me find it, so I'll share the tab, but I pulled this up and I don't know really what to do about this. There's not, what you're running into is this. So Truecharts is kind of cool. I have Truecharts set up on one of my systems and it's another app catalog. The problem with it is, and it's not, you can really, it's challenging. When you take this system and we'll bring it over to, yeah, this system, because it's got the catalog in here. The problem with the way this was all done is lots of reinvention going on here. It seems odd to me because Portainer exists. If you're not familiar with Portainer, it's just a easy way to handle Docker containers with a web UI. Like this exists, it works well, it's documented, you can use your common Docker commands to get things deployed. What they're trying to do by orchestrating Docker with Kubernetes and the integrations that are over in the app world here in TrueNAS scale are much more difficult. And it takes a lot of engineering. So when you have first their own stuff and the bugs that people have been complaining about within here of building TrueNAS scale with these images and still one of the silly problems that is in here is gonna be like this right here. Enable this host pass safety check. This is kind of annoying because some apps that they offer, the only way to get them to work would be to check that, but they warn you that it's not supported. So I'm like, some apps, then what's the supported way? Because I have somewhere in here, I think there's now, let's see what we have. Yeah, here's Plex, an official app. How do I get the data into Plex if I have to check the host path check in order to get it to work when you're telling me that's not supported but the app is like this. So there's a lot of challenges in it. So there's no easy answers for this. And then here comes TrueCharts, a third party offering catalogs for TrueNAS scale. And now you have another problem. Their updates may not be 100% aligned with the development of the TrueNAS scale products. So TrueNAS scale updates may break TrueCharts. Then we have TrueCharts doing updates to redo how they wanna do things. And I'm like, it honestly, Wendell did a whole video about running a virtual machine, throwing portainer on it and just using everything in portainer and calling it great because it's such an easier way to handle things. But so while we watched the development of TrueNAS, we're scale specifically, the app portion is always going to be for the foreseeable future where there's always a lot of turmoil. So it's not as much that I can really expand on it beyond that. Kubernetes is hard. Read the debrief when Reddit went down. It wasn't like about a couple of weeks back, maybe close to a month ago. Once again, Kubernetes is hard. In orchestrating all this can be very challenging. So it's gonna happen. That's the best way I can describe it. Let's see. Oh, that was your email from two weeks ago that I read? Or I'm not sure which email we're talking about. I have a lot of them. I see someone in similar a name. But maybe you eat, oh, okay. Oh, TrueNAS scale and their attitude, yeah. The attitude question, which I didn't really know how to respond. But it's gonna be one of those things that it just, it's hard doing it that way. There's a reason portainer and things like that. So that's, yeah. There's a reason portainer exists and other ways to do it, but they've chose this path. I think it's got a good future, but the here and now is gonna be a rough go. Speaking of which, let's comment and swing over to this real quick. Because I do have, when you look installed apps, the only thing I use from TrueCharts at all is Fresh RSS. I wanted to try it, ended up liking it. But back to one of the reasons it has its own dataset is in case anything breaks. People get upset when their NAS breaks, but they're not realizing, and I'm probably not fine. Actually, I know I'm not following the way TrueCharts probably wants to do this. But if you look, fresh RSS back up to TrueCharts. You notice how this is set to constantly be backing up? That's because I know it might break. I separated my storage of the data that's important to me in Fresh RSS from the application that may break with an update. So I don't worry about it because I can just grab the data and it's just, it's a Docker container. I can load Fresh RSS. I have a portainer system as well. I can load Fresh RSS in there and point it at the same dataset and go, here you go. It's all set, I don't know. I guess it broke over here. I run it over here now. This is one of the reasons it's important to, we talk about this a lot, me and Jay do, about how you build your applications, understanding how they're built, so you can have a repeatable build process that way if the underlying thing breaks because of an update, you can redo that build process in a predictable way and you always separate your compute and application side from the data storage. You can have it all in one physical machine when we're talking about from a concept of, hey, the data lives in this dataset called Fresh RSS that gets backed up off of this NAS. That way if this NAS goes away, I have all my data and the app can just be reloaded. By the way, Fresh RSS, I think I've talked about it before. I'm gonna do a dedicated video to it because I just love this app. It's how I read all the news. It's just solid for keeping up with everything without having to go to everyone's site. You can click in like right here. This is Reddit R SysAdmin, which I don't know why I subscribed to it. It's so much of it I could ignore because it's like, I predicted everyone's problem is urgent till I call back. Reddit R SysAdmin is really more complaints than SysAdmin stuff, but that's what gets the engagement. All right. But it's just a nice way to jump around in here and go, all right, here, Microsoft Box with print screen first time in decades, fun. Present Sensing Privacy setting, interesting. These aren't that interesting of articles. We'll click them as red then we can go to all of my unread articles that I have here. And if I need to find anything, Fresh RSS is just awesome for that. I have some subreddits. I was playing around with the social media in it. That doesn't work very good. You can use knitter to poll Twitter if you wanna follow certain people. But yeah, I'm gonna do a video pretty soon on it because the YouTube algorithm is goofy for getting you your subscriptions properly. But if I wanna know what's going on with Dave's garage, I can click right here. If I wanna see the latest from Computerphile or Craft Computing or Crosstalk Solutions, boom. You just go here. I can see each one of their updates and I don't have to go there. I know Jeff had a new video today. And so I can see description of the video. Like if you're not using Fresh RSS, it will put you back to the way a lot of news aggregations should work. I really recommend Fresh RSS. But when I do the video, I'll also make sure that I put all of my feeds in there so you can have everything I'm doing. The only thing you can't have is my Reddit. But let me show you something though. And let me see if I have this in my notes here. If not, I will have it. So I think it's, you just go right to, so if you're logged into Reddit, you can own, you can pull your Reddit as RSS. There's a page you land on for it. I'll have it. I'll make sure it's in the notes. I always forget where it is. Oh, there it is. It's under where it says RSS feeds. Basically, if you go to Reddit slash, and I'll throw us a link for people who's curious, Reddit press slash feeds, that'll take you right to your own RSS feeds. And this is really helpful for being able to like subscribe to Reddit to drive Fresh RSS. So my Reddit subscriptions, which I'll make a list of them and dump them in there, what I currently use for my Reddit subscriptions combined with Fresh RSS means I don't have to go to Reddit. But if I see something cross posted in Reddit, I find interesting, and I think I should subscribe to that subreddit. They're all tech subreddits. I will just throw that back into something I subscribe to in my Reddit. And then from there, it pulls to Fresh RSS. So I've got a whole process I've been using for a while. And it might be helpful to people for how you keep up with the news without having a bunch of noise and garbage and distractions in there. The YouTube ones are kind of obvious because you can just add, you go into subscriptions and you can just add something from YouTube. I also have multi-Reddits set up in here. So those are, I'll dump all this out when I do a video on there because it'll be a short video about using this, but I'll have a page with all my links in there. So if you wanna start, instead of going, what site should I put in there? You can start pulling all the same ones I have already, which is kind of cool because you can take any of these and sort them out or add an RSS feed and group them all together. It's nice for sites that don't update frequently, but you're interested when they do so you don't get lost in there. That's one of the reasons I have these set up like this. And of course, from that, you can always, when you're looking at the new sites, if you only want to see things from a certain area, like I only want to see the latest from Krebs, there's all the Krebs stuff that's in there. He doesn't post very often, but when he does, you're like, okay, I can jump right to it. And then you can put an asterisk or star and save all these for later. Or like when someone had asked me the other day about this, like someone had a post I didn't understand, but someone says, oh, I didn't see a certain digital make the news. And I'm like, I did. It was covered in several spots. They just closed data breach. Like here's all the times it was covered from February, from April 3rd, April 8th, 9th. And it made probably the show notes if I had to guess of this is the show notes for level one texts. So it's like, it makes it easy to find that data in case you missed something later that you marked as red. I know someone had a questionnaire I wanted to answer. It was about gray log. Yes, the gray log video is coming along. I should have that done soon. Can you filter out things? Probably. I usually don't filter out things. I choose, I simply only put things in Fresh RSS I want. There's probably a way to filter things out. I think there is some advanced filtering options somewhere in here. So let's go to the subscription management, description, feed, category, filter actions. There we go. Maybe. I don't see anything like regex filtering in here. CSS, cookie, set the user agent, proxy feed, timeout. Yeah, I don't see anything in there that would, I guess it turns out kind of filtering you're looking for. Let's see. Gray log though. That is, maybe on the settings on every source feed. I don't know, I don't know what you're trying to do though. Like you can search for words or tags here and things like that, but I don't, I guess it depends what kind of filtering. I usually just, if there's a key word, I look for it because I have it keeping all these articles. Even, I just have, well, it's just keeping all these links for, I don't know, a lot of them. I think I keep like 90 days worth in here. That's kind of an up to you thing. I could probably increase it. It really doesn't take much because it's just storing text in a database. So it's not like it's a lot of data because I'm not downloading the full article. It's just partials. And, you know, it gets the, it doesn't, for example, pull in any Reddit comments. It just pulls in the first part of the Reddit. And I decided whether or not I want that to be a full, you know, if I want to read the full thing or not, I can go to the link or I can jump right to the comments on something. But yeah, I guess I don't know what you'd want filtered would be the question. There's probably some add-ons. It's an open source project and it does have a plugin architecture. So you could probably add more things on there. And by the way, a lot of news sites, you could get RSS feeds maybe for a topic of them. So it depends on the news site you're pulling, but yeah, some of them, you could take actually a larger news site but a lot of them have an RSS for a category. So you can take a generic news site but maybe they have a technology category and you can just pull the RSS feed of that category if you want. It's another way to handle it as well. I am working on a gray log video that hopefully will be done soon. It's gonna cover gray log five Docker and how to configure all that. So any plans to do one? Yeah, I might do a new one because there's some changes. They're not dramatic but there's definitely some changes I can walk people through on a new video. It's on my to-do list. That one's gonna be a little while before I get around to it. It's always one of those ones that start, it always has a lot of controversy around it because people always have their own opinion of the way certain things should be done. But it's probably worth revisiting. It's one advantage doing PF sense videos and one of the reasons I've avoided doing some of the true NAS charts things is because the problem with all this shares to have instead, the problem with all the true NAS charts things is things are changing constantly. So if I do a whole video on something and there's buttons that are no longer there or a new button to solve a workaround gets added, the video becomes irrelevant too quick. So I've been slow to do it. I need to do a permissions video because that's a common question people have is how to set up the permissions. But the one thing for sure is just that, yeah, the whole church thing is like a moving target. Now they did add in true NAS, they're working on their own now. This was posted and it's been updated. So they have their own catalogs of apps. And let me see if I have, this one has it. Here's just the apps from true NAS, not true charts. So here's the official apps catalog from them. And if you go over and look at managed catalogs, they do this automatically when you, along the way, when you update it, I added the enterprise because I'm curious to see anything in there, but you have charts and community. So you actually have two of them now because they want to add more. So they're getting into the, you know, they're offering some of the apps themselves probably because of the same problem people asked about true charts breaking things. So does fresh RSS blockchain changes doesn't need to be, does it record changes? No, I don't think so. Like if someone changes the RSS feed, I don't think it logs that. Like if a news article got updated or changed, I think that's what you're asking. I don't think so. Maybe there's a way to do it, but I've not had a use case for it. So I've never looked for it. I guess I don't understand the use case, is it to understand if a news article changed? But something that hasn't changed. Let's jump over to this because this is on my topic of things I'm aggravated about. So I posted this on March 13th of 2023. And this, for anyone who wants to read my writing in my posts, we'll throw this in here. I'll answer this question with a question. I don't understand what you're asking. You're asking why VMware machines are slower than Docker. Virtualized machines have to virtualize an entire OS, any hypervisor that will virtualize OS. Docker shares the kernel so it doesn't have as much to run. It's not trying to, Docker's not trying to emulate an entire operating system. It's a shared kernel with applications basically sandbox and limited within Docker. So that's usually why Docker spins up really fast. I should say the actual raw speed of how fast a database will run in Docker versus virtual machine becomes an entire other consideration there. But the problem I'm running into is the way TrueNAS scale. And I don't recall this happening with core, but I don't have time to reload and do these tests back and forth. But the bug still persists after the last update. And it's basically partly a problem, the fact that I have an Intel Atom processor. So this is my Intel Atom C3758. This is what ships in the TrueNAS IX systems boxes. So this is a current processor currently shipping in that the TrueNAS rack mount mini. And if you have a encrypted drive dataset, the problem you're running to and I walked through the whole process here. That's why I threw it in there. It really goes slow. It's like 73 megs a second when it's reading data. Oddly, it can write it fast, but it can't read it fast. So if we're reading data, it reads really, really slow off encrypted datasets. And it's because it's only going to a single thread when it does it. And I've done this testing and it's actually easy to demonstrate inside of this. So this is just, this is net data running inside my TrueNAS box. And if we start migrating files back and forth, let me pull my little file migration thing over here. And if I do things in a, let's see, we go archive, grab a file and copy it over. So we grab these two files real quick. What you're gonna watch is how fast they transfer because this is non-encrypted. So with the non-encrypted here, we are able to achieve three gigs, not bad. That's uncached random files that I grabbed. So we're transferring pretty fast here. So we're about three gigabits. Now, here's a fun thing. I'm gonna go take those same files and copy them again, because now they're cached. So you got those files in cache and we're gonna copy, paste, and they're gonna go even faster. We're gonna see, let's see, 3.6. There's probably a peak in there somewhere if even faster, there we go. 5.7 gigs, almost doubling the speed, 5.47 gigabits, no problem. But if I do this and I do this on an encrypted data, let me create the file. I gotta create a new file in my encrypted area. Make sure nothing's in cache. I'm just, you know, DD, grabbing some random data and throwing it in there. Now watch what happens when I copy this file. So it created the file and now we'll copy it. I'm pasting it and you can watch what happens. This is an encrypted data set and boom, we are in slow motion mode. We're 0.6 gigabits, point, often encrypted. That's pretty substantial. And if we look as to the why, let's actually let this finish, because then we're gonna zoom in and we'll talk about the why this happens like this. Almost done. All right, file copied. Let this catch up. So it's, there's, you wanna zoom in. And if you haven't used net data, net data's awesome for gathering data like this. So here's our tiny little transfer. And if we jump down here to CPU, what do you see? This is CPU zero. This is the file transfer or CPU zero. CPU one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. We seem to have a single thread problem. So I'm able to, the file creation was over here. You notice the file creation is multi-threaded. So it spread the load across these threads when I create the file. But when you read the file back, it's single threaded. Now, how fast or how much of an impact is going to completely be based on the processor's single thread performance. So this may not affect you. You may have a really fast processor and no, the atom processor's not that fast. So it's, when you're reading from it, single core, it just, it shouldn't be doing single core. Now the weird part is sometimes it doesn't do single core. And that's the part I haven't figured out. Like there's sometimes it'll read. If I write a file from my system and copy it over and then copy it back, I guess it goes in the cache but it actually uses all the cores to send it back to me. So it's kind of strange. That's why I did the write up for it. But this is only with encrypted data sets. The same system is able to transfer pretty steady off the drives at over three gig while it's not encrypted. So I'm gonna jump back to the questions after my rant. Good afternoon. So the whole reason I started watching Tom is, watching Tom is not my garage, business went all cloud, PF Sensex, CBT and TrueNAS, old hardware rack, good times. Awesome. Ever use Hudu? Yes, Hudu's pretty cool. It's a good platform. I wish and I wish versus, I wish I had access to developers that could write this is what I actually wanna finish that sentence with. I wish there was an open source document management platform like Hudu. I don't know of anything that's that good. I know other things exist, but I've not seen anything as full featured as Hudu is. And maybe one day, one something like it'll exist. In the short term, Hudu's a popular platform. It is proprietary. It's based on Linux. I believe they use Docker on the backend, but it's a good system for people looking for an IT documentation management system. Greetings from WA, Seattle. Single core speed issues with encryption related tasks. Yes. Single cores, when there's a new random file created and you need that file copied back, if it's not cached, it only delivers off of an encrypted data set at single core. Also performance problems and hiccups and aggravation I was having when doing videos. I had, because I inked everything by default, all my videos encrypted. Why not? It was never an issue when I used TrueNAS core. This issue was after scale, but it wouldn't happen all the time because most of the time from a video creation standpoint, you read these files and once my editing tools read them, they get cached. So what I thought was my video editing tool having caching problems when it was first loading up, turns out was TrueNAS having caching problems and single thread performance. So it's an interesting problem. I'm running crypto DSNZFS, but it's a private home set, a privacy most important thing. Still read a full gig of speech from a two-way mirror. You knew it, yes. The CPU does have the AES and I, but it doesn't make any difference because if I'm not mistaken, it's not leveraging that. Well, maybe it is, I don't know. It's my understanding from discussions I read outside of the TrueNAS world, it's the way Linux handles encryption with ZFS. I can't validate that. I've seen developers saying that, but they weren't talking specifically about TrueNAS scale. They were talking about, in general, the challenges you have with slower processors and Linux and ZFS encryption that don't exist in BSD because BSD does it differently. I don't remember this being a problem when this used to run TrueNAS core. So yeah, but I just don't know. TrueNAS is not ever gonna get NTFS. NTFS is awful. I don't know why you'd want NTFS to work. No, there's no warnings. It's just single threads back. There's not an error message because it doesn't error. It does exactly what it's supposed to do. It gives me the file. It just gives me the file using a single thread. I did confirm that this happens on a faster machine but it's unnoticeable on a faster NAS scale machine I have. Part of it is the fact that this is an add-on processor that doesn't have incredibly good single core performance. So it's more of a that problem than anything else. Yeah, if you look, there's a way to re-initialize the packages. I should probably do a video because it's such a frequently looked up thing. It's either A, you broke DNS, people break DNS. That means you can't get package updates or B, the package update got corrupted. There's a way to fix that. If you search their forums, there's several posts that tell you exactly how to do it. This is a funny question. What certifications do your customers ask about? None, doesn't come up. People really think this comes up a lot and they just, I mean, for as many clients as we have, it is rare that it's come up. The funniest time it's ever come up though is a engineering company. And I was kind of put on the spot and it turned out to be a great story. So the owner, they were really fed up with two previous IT companies that were kind of disaster IT. But during the conversation, we talked about this, this, and this, do my little spiel of why we should be the IT person and how we can help them when we are looking over hardware they had, et cetera. And at the end of it, they said, all this sounds good. What are your certifications, Tom, that you have? I paused. So what are, is there ones you're looking for and specific? He goes, well, you know, the Microsoft and Cisco usual ones. I was like, well, I said, I'll be honest. I've been working in this industry since 1995. I don't have any certs. He goes, I like you. He goes, I was about to throw you out if you started rambling out about how great certs are. I go, really? He goes, yeah, he goes, that's all the other guys could brag about. Every time we were complained about, they didn't respond to something for two days. They would tell us how they have all these certified engineers and certified this and they have their Microsoft partner. And it was just kind of funny because he says, I'm so sick of people that I don't care if you're certified. Can you do the damn job? He goes, because the last few people had more credentials than I do. And he goes, they couldn't do the job. I started laughing, but it's so rarely ever comes up in business. Have you been using, have you tried GLPI? What is this? I'm Googling it. Oh, open source service management features. Manage hardware, software, data centers, link assets, help desks. Interesting, I haven't seen this before. We use snipe IT. This looks a lot more extensive because it's got so much more stuff in there. Project management, rules, restrictions, groups, log history, configuration. This has like a community edition, latest documentation, so it looks cool. IT management, powered by open source, help desks, financial project administration, manage hardware, software and data centers, link assets, inventory, hardware data centers, IP impact, SIM cards, dashboards. Interesting, manage software, hardware manages transmits, manage inventory. So it looks a little bit more extensive than snipe IT, but snipe IT is really nice. Don't you need NTFS for AD support? No. Do you plan to examine Unrayed 6.12 with ZFS? No, not on my to-do list. I don't really feel like buying a license for Unrayed. It doesn't fill any gaps that I have with Trudass. I know a lot of people like it, but by the way, this is something that is going to be, like the argument people have almost always for using Unrayed is going, I wanna be able to expand the drives whenever I want. Well, ZFS doesn't let you do that. It's a ZFS thing. So Unrayed with ZFS is gonna create the problem that you liked Unrayed for back to, oh, I guess this isn't the best idea. So a lot of people who, their use case is that, is gonna break it. So yeah, packet fence has been around a while. Chris from Crosstalk just recently talked about packet fence. Matter of fact, hold on here. Let me go over to my YouTube. Let me go over to Crosstalk Solutions. There's his latest video talking about packet fence. There you go. So yeah, Chris did a video on it. Packet fence has been around for a minute. So it's a neat product. I have not used it. I don't have any, I don't have enough experience to do any tutorials on it. Oh, but nonetheless, I am curious about something though. This has me, I like Wendell a lot. And from level one texts, he's lots of fun. Let's start closing all this stuff that I have open. And do this. All right, let's tabs open now. Model, give an access to a dot matrix printer. What could possibly go wrong? I don't know what he's up to. He's connected chat GPT, I'm assuming just a large language model. So I don't know what Wendell's up to, but it looks fun. I'm just going to throw that out there. So plus one for GLPI, we get a lot of value from it. Yeah, it sounds like a neat tool. Maybe I'll take a look at it. Seems interesting. Oddly, I didn't get any new emails. I'm going to wind this down here in a minute because I got stuff to do. So I'll go till 4.30, gives us 12 more minutes. Ah, yes, the office room's full of matrix printers. Fun times indeed. Lots of stuff. Too many people Twittering. But I think it's all I had for really the topics today was talking about Shurnass. I thought about, I don't know if this is a good video topic, maybe I'll ask some of you. Basically, the question of, with using net data for troubleshooting, I thought about, do I do a video showing how I use net data to understand the problem with Shurnass? It gives people something to think about in terms of this. And I love net data, and I like excuses to talk about it because it's such a cool project. This was just invaluable in figuring out, like, hey, look at this slow transfer problem I'm having. Five gigs here, but 0.6 here. So I don't know if that's a good video topic or not. I will probably do an update on Shurnass. I mean, update to the latest Shurnass scale, but it's not that major of an update. The bigger challenge, of course, is all in the application problems people are having with it. Between Tom and Wendell, it's about 50% of the tech YouTubers I watch. Yeah, Wendell's great. I like chatting with Wendell any time I get a chance. He's just full of knowledge, and he's a very helpful individual. His videos are always great. With PSS Plus, did you lose static mappings when you updated? Not at all. Static mappings all work perfectly fine when I updated. No issues at all. I did see there's a new version of PF Blocker. I didn't see what's new about it. I updated that the other day, too. But yeah, I have everything registered, so I didn't have any issues. All my registrations are still there. Didn't update loss time mapping. No idea why. As a matter of fact, for all the updates we did, I've never seen that. Someone asked this question. You're asking about VRP and PF Sense. So common address, let's zoom it in to make sure people read. Common address resolution protocol was created by OpenBDCVoters as a free, open source redundancy solution for sharing IP address on a group of devices. Similar solutions already existed, such as virtual, router, redundancy protocol. However, Cisco claims is covered by a patent. So I guess that's why they used a different one. So is that the question you were asking or the answer you were looking for? I'm not sure which. Art of server, point my bits, serve the home and others need to get together, a homelab convention like LTE or homelabbers and SMB instead of hardcore gamers. Yeah, that could happen at some point. I imagine we do the homelab meetup, the self-hosters we would call ourselves or something because you're right, the other communities are way more leaning towards games. And it's not that there's no one who games that's also a homelabber, but there's as a different niche of people who are focused on self-hosting things. My Unify AC Pro will not adopt my two PF Sense. I don't know why that would be. There's not anything in PF Sense by default provided you allow it internet access that would do it. But someone had posted in my forums about a problem they were having, but they failed to admit they had blocked ports and set up SSL inspection and that was what was causing things that didn't have certificates not to get out of some type of comment like that. And I'm like, you really have to disclose what you changed because normally it would work. But if you started changing settings, those settings might be the why. Like a person tried to block everything with PF Blocker and they were trying to figure out how to get something working because every time they turned on PF Blocker, everything stopped. I'm like, you got to start turning off rules and reading through the logs. That's still a common problem as much as I try to reply to everybody in forums. I say, where's the logs? Sometimes it's the reply. And it's weird how I get deniered on that. Like I'm having a problem with IP sec dropping. Got some logs? That was the week ago. Person didn't reply. New install, no changes. Where are you trying to adopt it to? That would be the next question. LTS, first move, reset to defaults. Yep, I joke that that's a lot of my consulting work is resetting things to default. But if it's new install, no changes, where are you trying to adopt it to so we could determine where the choke point is? I mean, is the controller on your network? Is it external in the cloud? Is it on someone else's network? Are they blocking you? And I don't know if we'd be able to troubleshoot all this in here. Forum posts are better for more in-depth troubleshooting. Oh, and I don't know how this works yet. Speaking of that, let me do something real quick here. All right, I'll sort that out. Within my forums, they added a new feature that I turned on, but I don't know exactly how it works yet. I don't know if I'll regret it. I like forum posts for having the more in-depth discussion on things because people can get details and post things in there and post all the details so you can get help with whatever it is you need help with. But they added a chat feature inside of here. I turned it on and I don't know if I have the restriction set to only staff, but I don't know how that works in discourse. So that's been in my to-do list is to figure out how the chat works. So if I'm online, I don't mind chatting with people, but I don't want it to notify me all the time. But yeah, my forums are actually really, I didn't realize how active they are until I started pulling some of the analytics data. And I'm like, okay, they're really busy. And because of that, there's some, I wanna make sure I'm adding features. Matter of fact, there was this one. Oh yeah, it's funny because you can see like this here, the TrueNAS versus Synology, there's just a lot of activity in some of this, has got a lot of views. But I try to post in my forums a lot of detail, like this is the chart. So here's like a comparison feature all broke down right here. Unfortunately, it's not wide enough. So I did the firewall video. I put that in a Google Docs because it was easier. But nonetheless, it's got a lot of good info I can put together with all the links where you can find things. And I have to put my stupid face on there so people will click on it. Oh, let's see. Any other questions? We got four minutes left. Any other questions for the last four minutes before Tom wanders off to go do the next thing I'm supposed to do? I have only a few more work things to do. I was just happy to get out on my motorcycle yesterday. So that was the thing. I'm actually gonna go get some exercise today. Bicycle riding today. Motorcycling yesterday, but it was actually pretty muddy out. So I didn't get to, I didn't get to go everywhere I wanted to go because it was so swampy. I didn't wanna, my bike sucks getting out of the mud. It's heavy. And I didn't feel like getting all muddy. I'll play in a mud to an extent, but not when it's that deep. Oh, let's see here. Motorcycling aftermath. I mean, I've got all kinds of, probably have at least, I don't know, somewhere I got some probably muddier photos. I definitely have these. Sometimes I crash. Yeah, lifting this bike up after I crash it is always fun. It's good exercise. This is actually up north. They have all the oil rig things. So. That's why I do when I'm not doing tech things. I go disappear on a motorcycle. Sometimes I ride my bicycle too. That's when I wanna get exercise. I'll do that. If I have any, this is the bike I ride. Oh yeah, sometimes I also have a pedal bike, a moped and an electric scooter. So yes. But this is the bike I go riding on when I, when I want some exercise. Yeah, recumbent bikes are fun. Yeah, I take my, actually maybe I'll go here today. This is, this is one of the parks. You know, there's nice little paths around the swamps and stuff. It's always kind of cool. Oh, the old Honda. Yeah, I was riding that. I rode that to work the other day. I picture that somewhere. Here's a picture of my Honda. If I take motorcycle, Google will find it. I don't know if they're on pictures of it up here before. Somewhere. There we go. Yeah, that's a 1972 Honda. So. Ha ha ha ha ha. XCPNJBG is sequential. Is sequential rights correct? I asked where to make a decision for Trudas e-bows. Sequential. Yes. The writing would be sequential from reading the backups on there. So that sounds, that sounds like the right answer. Sequential rights. Oh, there we go. So the, I do take the Honda out in the middle of nowhere too. This is actually part of a big hill climb I did with it. So it may be only 90 CCs, but I was excited. You can't really tell how steep that is going down. But you get the idea. I've climbed to an elevation on my really old Honda. I take this thing all over the place because it's just kind of fun. So now you know my hobbies. Most of them are tech, but every now and then I put an audio book on and go for a ride. And Zen Orgisha, can you restore a backup while a backup job is ongoing? Yes, I did look you. So the tasks are all independent of each other. So if you want to run a backup at the same time you are doing them, it just, each one's its own job. So if we throw this in here, I just did a new video on backups. So I cover all of them, but let's see. Let's look at this one. All right, so if we want to do Delta backup testing demo, so we can run this right now and we'd see the job running over here. So here's the job backup test demo running. While this is running, if we want to do a restore job, obviously I can't restore something that doesn't exist, but let's grab one of the, actually, let's grab this here and restore the April 6th to the here. We're just gonna restore this lab template. Now you'll see more jobs running. So each one's a separate task. You can run them all simultaneously. It depends on the resources you have available, of course. The speed of your setup is going to directly dictate how many of these before there's a problem. But yeah, they're all separate jobs so they can absolutely run like that. I was having lots of my TrueNAS NFS share into Proxmox so I had a virtualized Proxmox backup server and then add NFS shares as a data store. Turns out Proxmox backup server is amazing. Okay, I've not used it. So do you use Ninja backup for endpoint? Not much, we're looking at it still, but right now not much. We have, I think we have one client using it. They've done a lot of rewriting and it's gotten a lot better. It just wasn't, it felt like it wasn't really complete and they did a lot to update the product. So they've actually, and I've talked to the product people over there. They're great. They're doing a lot of innovation on it and things are happening. So I have a tech problem I can't solve because there's no documentation for it. Can you make a video on how to solve my problem? Of course. Yeah, of course. Hey, this is the challenge with some of these things. Like people like, hey Tom, make a video about this product that's in the market that doesn't have good documentation. I'm like, yeah, how am I supposed to learn it? Old 9CC was used a long time ago by our post office, Silver Mail, when I did that. If you look up Australia Posti Bike. So these are, I've been debating about this, but the Australian Postal Bikes, they call them the Posti Bikes are actually custom ones because they're, they made them later. They're 110 CCs instead of 90 and they're 12 volt electrical systems. But yeah, the Posti Bikes, as they're called, are pretty popular. There's actually one that got imported into the United States, not far from me. He's asking a lot of money for it, but I've debated about buying it because I kind of want one. So I just haven't decided if that's what I want to do. Do you install XCPNG and software RAID? Yes, the servers we're using all have standard software RAID. Working for Major Biotail, what we use for backup and reserving, looking in to move to Acronis. Acronis isn't bad. Acronis isn't a bad backup. Currently, we're using MSP360, but I'm not gonna lie, we're really eyeing Veeam. My friend's company is all in on Veeam, they love it and we've been looking at it, going, okay, Veeam looks good too. But Acronis, my only complaint I had about Acronis was I thought their dashboard was a little bit cluttered. Last I looked at it, but I mean, the product worked. Yeah, NS Travis has just made a lot of great progress in their backups in the last year, lots of it. Can I do a conversation on my bike? No. I mean, I guess bicycle maybe, but you get a lot of wind noise. If you're using software RAID, how do you manage for disc failures? Syslog, you just, I mean, they don't have anything native, but you can share this tab. Gray log, you put things in gray log and we have a disc failure notice in gray log. So if one of our XC, all of our syslog for XC PNG gets piped into gray log. And if that syslog, which also has your RAID status in there has a disc failure, it triggers gray log to let me know. So that's the, that way it works. Maybe one day I'll do a Veeam video. It's not, it's, I don't know the product yet. So until I learn the product, I can't do a video on the product. Conversion of a 90 CC, 110, 12-volt motor and electrical system. Yeah, it's, there's not an easy conversion because the generator, the stator and everything, the whole thing was architected. The old Hondas and 90 CCs, the ones in the 50s, 60s and 70s were all six-fold electrical. So yeah, do you host for customers on XC PNG at all? We don't do any hosting, so no, but it's, we don't do it, we currently do no hosting. That's not a service we offer. We don't have our own data center. So therefore we're not hosting any customer applications. So it's more of a, we don't do a hosting answer than it is a, not hosting an XC PNG. I'm using it right now. My, this, literally if you go all the video up. So I have a video that says at, it's the ASRock Ryzen 9. If you type in Ryzen 9 XC PNG, you'll probably find this video. But I, we set this up with a pair of MVMEs and software rate, works fine. It's quite fast. Matter of fact, we can share this. If you go to born stop video slash XC PNG, you will, you will get to the playlist with all the XC PNG videos. Software rate, is it ZFS or MD RAID? I'm using MD RAID on it. It'll, it supports ZFS as well, but these are the boot drives. The boot drives do not support it. The boot drives are mirrored. And so there's set up an MD RAID, I take the extra not used by the OS and use it for local storage. So if you look at the local storage available on this system, storage, Labyrinth local, this is the extra storage and this is on an MVME. Well, a pair of them, more specifically. And you can see MD name, local host. That's because it's a RAID array. I started the blog early, so it's not pizza. As a PC adapter, multiple space for four MVE drives, including fun, have you tried this? Bifurcation is the enemy. It's the headache you'll have. They make those devices. It depends on how many PCI lanes you have in how the bifurcation works. And if your motherboard supports it, if you get one that doesn't need bifurcation, it can do its own, but it will split the lanes because you can't get, depending on the slot, each was at two lanes per MVME. So you've run out of PCI lanes and when you start sharing them, you start losing performance. You won't get the full MVME performance on a lot of the ones that have four because there's not enough PCI lanes going through that slot to do that. So you can, but I don't install it on a Sadatom. Do you, or if any of your customers use Starlink? Yes, I don't know what the topic would be about though. Look, Elon internet, like it's Starlink works. Chris from Crosstalk did some videos on it. It's functioning, but I don't know, I don't know what else to say about it. Like I don't have any commentary on it. We have clients using it. It's what's available to them because they only have a single provider and their secondary provider is Starlink. Yeah, I think Jeff Kearling, he's did some videos on Starlink as well. I can't add anything to it. There's nothing original I have to say about it. And I didn't feel like buying one just to have it. I don't even have a use case for it. Like it's a functioning internet thing, but I don't have any other, like I don't have a need for it here. Because we've been using fresh tests longer than we've been, than the Ninja ticketing. And I think there's still things we can't do with Ninja ticketing that we do in fresh desk. MVME, PCI-Gen3, X1, L2-R, cause fancy for two-way spinning state of mirror. It's not quite a joke. I did the math, but it might as well be a joke. Yeah. Yeah, they're adding more features to the Ninja ticketing, but there's just things that can't do that fresh test can. We have people like submitting forms. I don't think there's any that I know of at least. I don't think there's any way to do it. So we have different forms on here for support or hiring us. This is on our website. And so this actually ends up in our fresh desk. That's how we funnel all the data to one place. Cause you kind of kind of consolidate the data. You can't have it everywhere. Our job is heavily data management. So, all right. Well, I'm going to bounce out of here and your company's using some Starlink to replace Verizon hotspots. Yeah. Like I said, I haven't really kept up with it. I don't use it, so I don't have a lot of opinion on it. Do we use Splashtop for remote control? Connectwise control integrated is better. Splashtop's okay, but it's not. Once you've used Connectwise, Connectwise control, it's just good. It's pretty much like the industry top of the line good for remote desktop apps, for controlling systems. So everything else is like any product you say it's gonna compare to, do use that. And because we already have licensing for Connectwise control, I keep renewing the licenses for it. So it just works that good. That's why everybody uses it. But all right, I'm gonna let everyone go. I'm gonna go do some other stuff. Thank you for joining. See you all next week. And see you in the comments, the forums or wherever else. Later.