 And welcome to the homelab show live episode 92. This is exciting. How you doing Jay? I'm doing pretty well How are you good? We're ready to do some live Q&A, which always kind of happens generally But we're gonna get more specific. We have feedback at the homelab show I do have my email open So if some new emails come in while the show Throughout the show will answer them But we're gonna do is we want to catch up on a couple things as I know Jay wants to talk about proxmox Which a lot of you are probably fans of and the new dark mode. They have which I don't care what technology they change They have dark mode and that matters Yeah And what's weird about dark mode is I never I was never one of those people that absolutely adored it I thought it was cool. I liked it And I just kind of just switched over to it and I didn't really prefer it But then after a while like I think it was yesterday. I tried switching Papa West back to you know light mode I'm like, how did I ever? Like last through this because it was blinding to my eyes And I don't think I ever noticed it because I never really Used dark mode as much until I did and then after a while it's like going back to it is how did we survive this? It's crazy. Yeah, when once you're used to it. You're like, I don't want it to go back No, it's easier on the ice at least for me. So That's definitely something. Yep. Now before we get any further Let's mention that we do have a sponsor and that is the we'll call them for now for the people understander the same people It's just been transitioned to name the Akamai Linode Linode Akamai if you just look for the load It's still directs there. It's still the same. It's still the same people Akamai did buy Linode So we're gonna change it up Just letting people know that we thank them for being a sponsor to show if you're looking for a place So host your stuff that might be better off in a cloud You can use the Akamai cloud is it is Akamai cloud is what they're calling it, right? Akamai connected cloud is the Akamai But we've been in touch with them and the thing is they totally get it like The name changed they understand it's not going to be next day They also Understand and this is the this is true the number of videos I've pre-recorded already where I have said Linode is the sponsor and there's one I'm editing now and they you know They understand so Linode Akamai connected cloud is one in the same, but you know, it's it's a new name Yeah So this is a weird sponsor I read because we wanted to address that it's really the same as a matter of fact Our contacts are the same That's actually we you know everything when it changes in the industry. It's met with cautious optimism Me and Jay are we skeptics of things but they have proven that they want to continue on with the sponsorship So we think them for sponsoring the show and the weirdest ad read I've done There probably is but I feel like the transparency here is You know that we can be this honest about our feelings here. I mean that says a lot actually so that's that's a really important Aspect me and G care a lot about us who sponsors it. We we get Lots of crazy offers matter of fact, I'd actually recommend people watch There's a video done by the fairly large tech youtuber MKBHD. He said I said yes to everything in my inbox That's a funny video because I've seen the weirdest things come through my inbox And of course so is he so he just said yes and let them send them all the random and when you're at the scale He's at compared to the scale me and Jay right you get some really weird sponsors. We'll just throw it out there Yeah, stuff that we could say yes to and be strange But and I like that he started out. He didn't have a casket. I think was the first thing He said I'll review that crazy. I've never had anything like that But I mean one thing that I get constantly and I Almost considered it because it was like a I forgot who made it I honestly don't remember the company anymore, but it was like a $400 Computer chair. It was actually really nice and I'm thinking Why because I'm not gonna make a video about a chair. That's not going to get traction Nobody's really interested in that in my channel, but they seem to think that there's a Linux match to a chair Not really. It's not really a thing My chair might be comfortable. I'm hacking chairs. Don't they they wanted a full review of this chair And I'm like, yes, I'm gonna review a chair and how do you review a chair? I mean just have a camera pan around the chair and show yourself like collapsing into the seat I mean this just I don't even know how that would work. Yeah, we get a lot of these It's jewelry companies for example. I don't know anything about jewelry. I really don't so I wouldn't be able to speak about that So there's a lot of these definitely a lot so yep Alright, let's swing it back over to what today's topic is and the first thing we're me and you're gonna do is just talk about some updates And then we're definitely going to be talking about Some quit taking some questions from you and we just have some that we're sending already So that'll kind of kick this off as well But what else besides dark mode got updated in Proxmox. I think that's probably worth Bring is probably the biggest thing and I mean there's a lot of different things But a lot of but usually what happens when you have these point releases is that they've updated a lot so you can't really say that there's not a lot to get excited for because it's not like they were just on Vacation the whole time and only had a few days to develop it. I mean they're working really hard on this so a big part of this is catching up everything to a newer Linux kernel and newer Libraries they even go and they've done this before newer kernels than what Debbie normally ships, which is Seems to always be the case nowadays and then they have a six-point something kernel I think it's six point two that you can upgrade to separately And that's just optional if you need that it's not something most people I think would need to do unless there's a feature there But the doubt when it comes to usability improvements, I think dark mode is probably going to be the biggest thing That said I've had a chance to try this out the upgrade went smooth It was literally just you know go to the update section and hit the button and then come back So that was pretty smooth dark mode is okay. I'm not gonna say it's the best I'm not gonna say it's unusable and there's just some Tweaks that I think are needed because it just seems like the font is just very jagged against the Background if you're using the tag feature where you have little circles next to the VM At least on my end. There's not enough anti-aliasing there. So it kind of looks like a you know, spiky circle in a way So it's it's good. It's just I Think it just needs a little bit more work, but it's good enough for me to keep enabled though So I don't want to say like everyone's gonna absolutely hate it and I'm not saying it's terrible in every sense But it's not the best, but you know, it's a start and I think it's a step in the right direction But other than that, it's catching up. I mean, I'm looking at QEMU 7.2 Lexi 5.0.2 so they're updating a lot of the back-end things so you could notice some improvements in performance potentially That could happen. So there's a lot of improvements. It's just this is going to be the most forward-facing improvement of all of them Yeah, um, I don't use proxmox still so I'll leave It's like the team proxmox team xcp even though I love both even though I could say that all day long and people are like, which one do which one's the best It's like everybody has to know the best But you use whatever resonates the most with you. I'm actually surprised it didn't Go towards xcp and G because I've had a number of years managing Citrix virtualization for That platform, which is where that came from kind of the before xcp and G I see someone asked a question. I want to confirm the answer Can you go from seven point three to seven point four from the command line or okay? Do you can it is at the end of the day is just you know apt update aptest upgrade But when you hit the button inside the GUI, it's doing that's what it's doing It just opens up a window with that's like a terminal window inside of okay browser window and that's all it does It just basically does that so yeah The back end of xcp and G is just yum update So there that's one nice thing even now xcp and G is a little different because they don't include any Repositories for their base OS other than theirs like it doesn't it only pulls from xcp and G repositories Correct me if I'm wrong about proxmox pulls from proxmox plus Debian. Is that correct? Yeah, if you could flip it a little bit because it's usually Debian first and then everything else comes second I'm like it's the other way around with xcp. So it's the Inverse of that because okay, you can literally install Proxmox on a Debian system You can install Debian from Debian media get your server set up And then you can literally install proxmox on top of it to convert it into a proxmox server So it's Debian first and then proxmox later whereas xcp is xcp and G first and then sent to a second It's the opposite right Looking at do you have the feedback part pulled up line 186? I am pulling that up right now Okay, I'll read this one because I don't mind answering it When people mention a three two one backup rule. I always get hung up on number two I have three copies one of them physically distinct, but they are all on HD SDs of some kind I don't really mind burning two magnetic discs or for or I don't really want to be burning M Desk four terabyte of data is the two mediums rule still relevant in today's world um, I Would probably say that's not Easy to do anymore. It depends. It really comes down to data But I mean keeping it on a like when you have a ton of data and telling especially like a home user Or even maybe the home that people here to use like oh, you need to put on a different medium You shouldn't have it on you're having two separate NASA's awesome I think that's adequate for your two onsites, but saying you should keep one of them on tape Locally it's it's not reasonable the type the amount of data a lot of people have it's hard enough getting two NASA's But saying another medium type and trying to put it on some type of archival tape or you know any years past I would have burned a DVD it was what I used to do with a lot of this stuff But that's you know, that's not as easy to do It's also way harder to synchronize it unless you go with one of these really expensive. Are they called LTO to tape drives? But I would say if you have them on two Separate machines with different credentials would be a big piece of that This is something where we see this a lot from where debriefing attacks is they use the same set of credentials for all their NASA systems For example, this is a bigger flaw. So you can substitute I would say here in modern times having two separate Areas you store them? Let's just say two different if you have two different has to school But either way not using the same credentials across those NASA's So one doesn't have the ability to delete the other or one of them gets cracked someone goes Hey, this password works everywhere. That is actually I'd say a really solid protection and probably could be substituted for the Rule and I've seen them back the 321 rule Both ways that not they say to you two copies But I've seen it missing a lot more often when it says two mediums because it's it's not as practical as maybe it used to be In the early days when my data fit on a single CD not even DVD because there wasn't that many documents or data It was easy. That is now especially when me and Jay talk about videos We certainly aren't backing up all of our videos with two copies. It's like an LTO drive that we have that's It's yeah, we're not the Linus has talked about the challenges of doing that That's why he's bought more NAS servers to spread this across at his scale So it's more common. I think to see that and when we deal with the enterprise space That's definitely what we're doing They usually you know put put it in different they'll have a couple copies on site Sometimes redundant NASA's on site and then another copy off site to another data center But they're rarely we're we're seeing more and more people buy larger and larger like 45 drive systems Where they're just for an extra copy of the data They're not always the top-line system tying to their Virtualization target or a main company storage to me because people ask sometimes like 45 guys doesn't have redundant motherboards I'm like, yeah, we sell a ton of them just for backups We just sold a company 300 terabytes of 45 drive service for backups just to have another copy That's was there because they didn't know where to put all the extra data They wanted to have on site they keep it off site, but you know how long it takes to get 300 terabytes back They did the man before I've actually had to do that once. Oh, yeah, I do I actually know how long it takes to copy down a terabyte actually so but I admit mostly agreement I think the Response to this depends on how you define the number two Because my I think the issue is that the older definition of the second part doesn't fit anymore today And I could even argue it didn't fit back then I like to define it as two different places not two different mediums. I think that really makes more sense. Yeah, because if you think about it, I have several laptops and I'm a couple desktops that have sync thing installed So I have a copy of everything on every computer now. I'm not going to Have a second sync thing or a second I mean, I have like six or seven computers that have all the same files And even if I deleted something and it was past the history There's probably a computer I haven't turned on in a couple of months That has the original file and as long as I make sure it doesn't connect to Wi-Fi Then it doesn't get the instruction to delete anything, but at the end of the day I mean if you have to lose a hard drive on six or seven systems I think you have number two like more than covered at this point There's really no point to go any further than that but even back then There's a lot of misunderstandings because someone might Have an external hard drive and also burn DVDs back in the day as their number two There's two different mediums but they may not know that the shelf life of data on a hard drive starts to be lost after one year and Then I think the average was 17 months for a DVD R to retain its data So at this point the person would have that box checked and have two completely invalid backups after a couple of years So even back then it was kind of sketchy. I think you have to take data retention into account I'm sure that's probably why tape is coming up But I would argue as far as I know Flash drives are the new tape because if I wanted to back up Let's just say an entire year's worth of YouTube uploads I could do that on a $20 flash drive for Micro Center and done I don't have to think about anything else that I could put that in a safe somewhere And then that piece I could check the box for number two for that with that so but degradation is still a thing even on a flash drive over time There is the chance that the Membrane if you will to describe it when they push the ones and zeros into those spots that that could not fade over time So that could be I don't know that I thought it was eternal. I mean no eternal on flash I thought it was reading is the easy part writing Writing is the hard part, but there's some fear and I just don't know exactly how founded this is but it applies to make medium To basically there's a drift where that differential Voltage where it reads it could drift more towards neutral and therefore you wouldn't be able to read in the future Steve Gibson actually talked a lot about this at where spin right one of the advantages it can have even on flash drives can be repushing those bits back through and Refreshing them once in a while. This is one of the arguments for keeping a lot of this and avoiding bit rot because it literally those bits can just kind of Wander you think about the the scale that these drives are working at and then the tiny tiny nature of it And there's not an easy way to say what does this look like in ten years? Like you can read write many times, but what about just sitting we learned some of the very first DVDs that came out and CDs Specifically one they were expensive to one of the things we learned is the medium would oxidize There was a whole bunch of I remember we used to sell the first cheaper Rewriteable ones the ink based ones and it turns out the ink would go bad in them So they would become unreadable after time there were short batch of them This is like in the early 2000s. It was an issue. So yeah, it's it's really interesting Challenges of what does archival look like I think at this point I mean a good thing to bring up is something like back plays b2 or equivalent because then you know, that doesn't mean But one of them could easily be that and then if you have versioned backups locally And then you have something off-site is their problem But you're also testing your backups because I feel like that doesn't get enough focus. It's Don't get me wrong. You really do need to focus on long-term retention But don't let that supersede looking into testing your backups because if you have your backups and they're useless So maybe you'll plug that flash drive in every now and then maybe you'll download something from a couple files from back plays to see if you Could read those files or you know restore a VM disk you've backed up to make sure it even boots or whatever it is You do but you have to do something just assuming the data is going to be there But what is just not something you ever want to assume? Yeah, untested backups are just wishful thinking I wanted to question that was a little bit earlier in here Which was someone asking said they have a 50 megabit internet and they're talking about a naked 1100 and They talked about suricata. I would not run suricata on a neck 8 1100 I've mentioned this before when I've talked about the neck 8 hardware The 1100 and even a little bit the 2100 they're gonna be a little bit underpowered to run Things like suricata on there. They can I don't think it's gonna be a great experience So if you were if you're thinking about running suricata, don't run it on that small of a device Go a little bit further up on that Yep Not that All right, how I can catch up on the other questions. They had that one held Yeah, I didn't even know we had any new ones in the spreadsheet. I'm just trouble in the spreadsheet So yeah, which is always good to see for sure But one of the next things I'm gonna mention Because I started an argument on Twitter apparently and I'm doing a video on this but we're we're gonna go through Some of the firewalls I'll be talking about and why this is this is where people really got in a debate I like doing the firewall comparison videos. It's been a while since I've done one I'll so I'll be doing that and one of the things that I try to limit it to is Firewalls I've actually had some experience with or at least worked with throughout vendors so I can give you my take But I don't mind hearing from you and one of the big ones and this will probably start the first debate here It's gonna be whether or not we cover or I cover Open sense because I just don't see it. I'm not saying there's no commercial usage of it We just don't see it as much and I don't have a problem with the product I think it's good, but PF sense versus open sense seems to be this Polarizing thing and it's as polarizing as people who want to talk about what their favorite distro is. It's Definitely started some arguments on Twitter. So China decide if that what so if I include it I don't have much experience with it. So I don't know how much value it adds But I know some of the same audience here likes to hear my thoughts and some of those firewall videos too So there's also opportunity for people to offer some feedback before I make this video The Twitter feedback was 99% good and 1% people telling me I can't believe you're not listing open sense It's my favorite firewall and I'm like it can be your favorite firewall. I'm not trying to change anyone's mind I'm just offering some of my experience I've had with these firewalls and I haven't had a good or bad experience with open sense I've had mostly no experience with it other than people trying to align There's a lot of people comment at my forum. So you're trying to align the Tutorial I did with doing it open sense and they go Tom Why don't you do it open sense? So I don't have to try to figure out where these buttons are I'm like, I don't have the incentive to Learn a different product because it doesn't offer anything so compelling that is different I did learn something I didn't know from one of the commenters So this is at least interesting to people they have under paid version a dashboard You can get for all of your open-senses as long as they're all on a paid version So there's that as an option I guess but I don't know that makes it different But nonetheless, I like hearing from some of you on some of these questions You can hit me up in the forums in this view if you're listening to this after the live show Tweet at me on Twitter. I don't mind DMs for discussions for things like this too, but I made that list public I'll probably repost it again today because I've actually expanded the number of firewalls matter of fact Here's the current list of ones because I've at least worked with them We got PF since our a rista untangle untangle became a rista edge is the new name But we call it there USG UDM pro UDM pro SC I guess I could probably throw the dream wall on there because they're all the same essentially I threw 48 so fos. I don't have much experience with but I'm going to defer to because I did talk with Christian lempa He's a friend of the channel. He runs that digital life And he's got some so fos videos of referring to he really likes that particular firewall I know other friends. I have like it. I just don't have any experience with it But I'll at least mention the features it has on there and I threw in there for Just because of the other side the business side to Maraki on there I know that's not anything homelab people are interested in but people always ask me What do I think of Maraki at least put the features it has on there I'm gonna add a few of my thoughts on Maraki as well. We actually have clients using it So it's something I've had experience with we don't recommend it What at least I can tell you what it can or can't do. I also did leave meeker tick off there for Lack of experience with them and any experience. I've had is They're complex the documentation is not great So I and the features saying it doesn't and saying it does it well are I'm not clear on so I'm just kind of leaving it off There and then I started to see the other things Palo Alto Now once you get into the Palo Alto's and a lot of these other ones That was that pan OS that they run the tricky part of even putting those on a list becomes They all kind of have the same features. They all check all these boxes. They all have these high-end things I don't have any experience with them. So I can't tell you Dear implementation is really what you're asking like hey, they can all support this feature But which one does it well which one has good support? I don't have any idea I don't even know how to quantify that if I haven't worked with the Palo Alto firewall if I haven't worked with a fully licensed with all the confusion around it sometimes like a whole Cisco fire power set up with all their Bells and whistles on there. I don't know and you'll get you you can watch the debates over and read it Some people like it. Some people don't it all comes down to support. So Someone mentioned checkpoint. I have not seen a checkpoint in a wild in years I've our friend mutual friend of the show here, Tony used to manage checkpoint firewalls But even he he was at a love-hate relationship with them himself so But that's one person's opinion from five only Tony was a manager of them in 2014 So I bet the company is different from 2014. So there's kind of these are some of the tricky parts for doing them So I'm kind of I'm narrowing it down an experience to which ones I've used. I also see people talking about bios bios and From netgate TNSR. I don't use either one of those. I think they're good firewalls I think they're very popular in a data center. They're command line driven. They don't have web interfaces They're people who are familiar with them. Love them. That's awesome. They tell me in singing or praises I know a lot of people had a lot of success with the TNSR. I think it's how they call it the one from netgate I know a lot of people like bios say I know people that use it in a data center like casual people I know but that's not enough to give me an explanation of is it a good firewall to use and it's probably goes outside of scope of homeland people so I Could completely agree, but I think there's another aspect to this too because when you have a YouTuber unlike us that has like a huge team and a building and they I mean these things are easier because For me if I wanted to check out open sense, I do want to check it out by the way I'm actually interested in this but to give it a fair shake What I feel like I'd have to do is replace pf sense with it you test it out But that's not easy like I'm good if I do this I'm gonna be dealing with Every system alerting my phone that it's down and then I'm gonna have to make you know do a one-to-one Settings for all the VLANs and everything which I can absolutely do that That's you know my skill set absolutely meets that requirement, but when I have to do all of that When other videos are not going to be as much work Then that's kind of gonna be a situation where if I go that direction Then I think YouTube is gonna go a week without videos one week completely because that time I just can't upload anything because that Project will encompass everything that I'm doing so I want to do all of these things but Practicality fits in here because one thing I do plan on doing when I get bigger Is I want to have a networking lab or even just a lab like I could just swap the the router the firewall Whatever in the lab and that it's fine because it's what it's for But all I have is a production network. I don't have anything else right now So that's something to keep in mind and it's interesting. I've had someone Asked me on Twitter once like this new think pad. Can you review it? And I'm thinking I would love to I would I would Review the heck out of that, but no matter how many times I at Lenovo on Twitter. They don't care They're not looking at my channel. I've never been able to get anyone to Return any form of communication. So and I can't afford to just randomly buy a computer Believe me, I want to check out the think pad 13 I think it's the X 13 s which is the arm think pad if I can get Linux working on that it'd be so fun That'd be a great video, but it's also $1,300 So if Lenovo is not sending it that I can't review it much in the same way when it comes to time I may not have time to switch my entire production network to open sense just for one video Even though I absolutely want to do it. I have to have a balance between difficulty and I'm saying yes to everything. I think that's always the challenge Yeah, it's it's a challenge when you have like myself just a ton of complicated rules reinterpreting those rules over into proxmox isn't easy and one of things I'm going to be very clear about is my bias towards pf sense not just because I've created Videos or tutorials isn't my bias whereas someone someone insisted online I was a reseller and I said you can check their site I'm not but I do like the product because I know it very well and unless another firewall offers a Compelling reason to use it like oh pf sense has this big gap in this gap. I need something to fill this gap How am I going to fill this gap? Okay, then we can swap it for something else, but that gap It doesn't exist for me. So most of people haven't outside of really I can't find any compelling reason people were just calling one person went to just calling me names on Twitter Which is perfect the absolute exact use for Twitter I think to call someone names and I said calling me names doesn't make a compelling argument that I should use open sense Well, like that's like I don't understand There there kind of has to be like a push towards it for me to take the time to be complicated The other side of it is one of my favorite comments on my videos and Jay You've probably got a comment like this or two was all you do is our TFM and make videos about it I'm like yes, that's actually a wonderful thing and I do that and I'm not bothered by that. I don't even take it as an insult I'm happy that pf sense has such a good manual This is something lacking in why people ask for videos on lots of other ones is because they can't find good documentation Something a project isn't just about the features of the firewall or let's go bigger a lot of homeland projects a big drive For those projects is going to be is there good documentation to get that project set up and running if that project does not have good Documentation that's sometimes the other reason we have people clamoring Please make documentation for it Tom and I'm like it's hard for me to make documentation in the form of a video But I don't even have starting documentation to read from to start creating the video Jay has run into this with a couple projects Well when we were talking about the cloud in it stuff how there's a lack of documentation Yeah, people ask for videos But it also made it harder for Jay to make the video because there's just missing and there's gaps in some of it So that's kind of a driving factor in that's where I'm gonna leave the firewall topic Oh, also by the way, I threw a link for those of you that don't want to go look on my Twitter Which is public but to the public version of the document of where it's at with all the firewall stuff on there So but nonetheless that documentation. I'm trying to figure out how to word that into a feature list of having really good documentation I think it's just a verbal thing. I say I can voucher that sense having good documentation I feel like when people make comments like that they are Severely not getting the point because what I think everyone needs to understand is everyone learns differently And not only that there's learning disabilities and there's different levels of retention Every single human being has a different capacity when it comes to learning they learn faster They learn slower one person might have challenges when it comes to learning that another individual may not Experience so when you tell someone to read the manual you are telling them Everyone learns the same way and everyone can learn by reading and the thing is I don't know if I've mentioned this on the air But I'm just gonna say it. I don't learn well by reading. I could write books. I love to write I love to What you know make videos obviously, but when I'm reading the manuals I have to read a bunch of times until I understand even though there's nothing wrong with the way that it's written It's written clear. It's concise the doc even when the documentation is good. I look at I'm like I don't get it I have to keep reading and trying and it's not until I get my fingers on the keyboard And I start going through that I actually get it So when someone in the past told me to read the manual, I'm like, yeah If I could if I could learn that way that'd be great, but that's just not how I learned So when we look at the manual and then understand and do the work to understand it And then we try to you know tell our audience about it in plain English so that they can understand it better I do feel that there's a subset of the audience that might be thinking, you know I have trouble reading or understanding this but this video I can learn by watching this video better than I can learn by reading The manual and I also feel like there's a big driving force there as far as why our channels are popular So I think there's a lot of people that feel that way So I don't really like this generalization that some people Have with like putting everyone in the same box read the manual I mean if that if that worked 100% of the time our channels would not exist We would not have a platform nobody would watch us because Everybody would learn for the manual there be no purpose for our channels to exist But the very fact that our channels are popular is proof that not everyone learns the same way. So there you go There's there's another it's I'll answer was not only a question. It's a comment That someone used chat GPT based our recommendations They're new to homelab and they're happy because it worked the it fixed the problem. They have a samba. So it's amazing I read that too and I I I was just thinking about how how great that is because I used that for Ansible syntax once and I Googled like crazy because is one of those situations where you have to have the correct search terms Which is always the case but sometimes Google thinks it knows more than you about what you are looking for and it's completely Off the grid and you have to know no no Google. I'm trying to find this and it's just hard But just ask chat GPT. I found the answer in like five minutes when I spent an hour on Google and couldn't even figure it out So there's definitely a lot of value there for sure Yep, so The next thing I'll bring up is the speaking of this I Could be wrong, but I'm working with them directly talking to them and I'm working on a new video for gray log so Get your questions ready for that and feel free to let's send some feedback But I'll be doing an updated gray log five because they made some changes But what I want to do and something I want to start doing going forward here and Jay's probably with me on this I'm gonna start creating I actually had one of my friends he created a script to install gray log for you to make it easier But I'm not just going to say use the magic I'm going to walk through the script in my video of why this script works What you may want to change for your custom of your installation so you understand what this script does There's nothing weird in it. It's not in any complicated. It's all just done. It's gonna be some Docker Docker deploy, but it's a good way to get started and it's also the reason it's a little bit trickier It's because I wanted to make sure we're implementing open search right because there was a fork between elastic and open search If you want to read about that That's an interesting I don't know who's who's right because it's been a little while since I read on it So I don't want to complete anything but there's some drama between open search and Elastic search and they have chose to go that you can still use elastic and gray log, but you can use Open search as well I wanted to go the open search path because that seems where gray log is going with it It's all open source and gray logs open source and gray log is a highly recommended one of my favorite log Aggregation tools it is absolutely free to use in your home lab because it's open source You can just download it to problem is just downloading it is a little harder now because they don't offer like an OVA file But with this script it'll be easy It'll be something I want to give away for free on my channel and I want to start doing this more often I build some of these I'm not the best at building them But I do have people like Jay or in this case my friend Phil built the script because we were chatting about stuff And maybe we can get Phil on as a guest sometime because he is a wealth of information He's he's one of just amazing Linux people. I know out there So he does some cool stuff. He's a great great person. Yeah, he's just his knowledge is like the how like Yeah, I know some people might think this about me, but I think this about him I'm like, how did he learn all of this and how is he retaining all of this information? And this is I mean if you think I Remember a lot about these things like he eclipses me on some of these things in ways that you will not believe like He he can tell you every different direction of SSL and how every single thing traverses While he's doing a pull request for fixing the problem as he's explaining it to you and I'm not kidding He has a yes, I have literally texted him I'm like I have this problem and then he'll respond back with what the heck are they doing? Hold on and then he texts me back again. He's like, yeah, I just submitted a pull request Here's what's going on and they'll if they accept a request it'll fix it. I'm like, wow, okay That was pretty cool. Yeah, and Phil works for the Linux Foundation doing this So he's he's being very effective in his role to say Yep of note we did I'll one less slightly off topic side note But Phil was testing out chat GPT because of all the hype and then he was I think upon it was taken He was complaining because he coded better than chat GPT So he was able to write more efficient code or something and it just made me laugh because I'm like I would have been happy with the code that worked because it was a pretty It was a complicated thing. You did not ask it to do something basic And right we definitely laughed on that And by the way, I broke my gray log So I think it probably happened if it if unattended upgrades rolled it over to the new version It's just a theory. I need to look at it But I'm also kind of thinking maybe I just want to delete it and start it over So I might want to take a look at that script to just so I can make sure it over to you Yeah, compare my what I did with that I'm just debating between trying to fix it because I do want to know what went wrong But I also want it to work. So there's that balance, you know, yeah And what went wrong is if you upgraded mango improperly as I did That's what goes wrong Well, maybe that's what happened to me because all I know is that it there's just Yeah, I could start I could start the process, but there's nothing listening on the port. It's like it's running But there's nothing listening. It's like weird. It's like in this halfway in between states So, yeah fun times Yep, so great log going from four to five is hard I don't know how I'll I don't think they've done a good script for that So at least something I'll put as a comment is a challenge and the reason why is you have to export the settings from mango And then re-import them and I don't think they have any automated script for that so I'm just gonna you can just reload great log five fresh and Most of your config you can copy over Then you can take if you're using any of the parsers you can just re you can export your parsers and re-import them But I also may look I may reach back out to the great log people and see if they have directly or if someone there could Write it as I said look guys. I'll do a video for you on it Can you guys write a script that just dumps great log for and lets me import it to great log five They said it's been on a feature request like as a function inside their system, but they've not actually written it So it'd be kind of cool if they did because I you know one of the things I really like about we'll go back to a pfSense as an easy example TrueNAS could be an example of this as well because TrueNAS is even From core to scale you can do this you can grab your config file in pfSense and Reload a brand new pfSense and just pop that config file in and everything just lines up So you're never worried about it's one single config file same thing for TrueNAS And TrueNAS goes a step further because if I had to restore on my TrueNAS core machines core to core works But I can also export from core reload the machine and then load scale fresh If I wanted to import the config scale did they didn't do the reverse But they do have the ability to take a config from core and import it into scale Which is nice that they have they have a conversion tool for it built in it detects that it's a Different to download and I wish more companies would do that when you have a bunch of preferences set up inside there That are I get why they store it in Mongo as a database It's a good database to store it in for that use case because they use open search for elastic for the heavy lift of parsing logs But the configuration say storm all in Mongo. It makes sense instead of a flat file except I wish it was a way to Get them out. This is actually how Unify works Same thing they use Mongo just to store all your config data And they do have an import to go between versions now There's a whole crazy path if you haven't updated your Unify in forever that is a different problem But if you keep up incrementally with major versions, you're fine and it will incrementally upgrade that so That's kind of my little rant on all of that At least one person in the chat room feels like the documentation with gray log could be better I don't remember enough to confirm or deny that but I will say for whatever reason Probably could just be because of because of how I learned like I just said, I mean I just watched Tom's video That's how I implemented mine. So, you know that then I was also in what my interaction with gray log This is one of those times where I really took gray log apart to figure out how it worked And then I realized they didn't have documented the flow the ingress and Process by each component of gray log of where your data flows through so one of the things I did when my gray log video which actually caught the attention of the gray log people was I actually created a document that a flow chart of where the data lands and One of the different menus that you can land on that it goes through because it does kind of ping-pong around and each One has an option to apply certain rules or triggers to it. So it matters how you do it There's actually more than one way depending on your use case. So It's it's not documented as well as it could be and this is the problem gray log was once again Born as an open source project got really big. They have a business model behind it but there it's hard writing documentation and I think that's where people kind of overlook the fact that The team at netgate really does a good job of keeping their documentation up to date matter of fact They do good at changing when there's as new versions of PF sense of come out the documentation matches very fast This is a challenge they're having heavily at Trinash right now Their changes are far exceeding the documentation So some of the documentation needs updated information to where things that have changed with versions of Trinash scale Scales documentation still in it. They admit it. They're hiding it. They're like, yeah, we're working on it and That's how it's going This is a big part of the open source project is the usability factor comes from the documentation I think we just need to double down on the fact that Every now and then we should mention, you know, if you're trying to get into open source And contribute and you don't feel like your coding skills are as good as you want them to be even though they're your coding skills are probably fine Let's be honest, but even if you're not into coding at all You could just learn the whole process of working with an open source project by, you know actually contributing to the documentation and And we're not some people might read that as it's better than nothing You may as well do the documentation thing if you can't do anything else. That's not what we're saying Documentation is important. It's extremely valuable and you are doing a major service for the community And it's extremely appreciated and don't under don't, you know Devalue that type of thing if you want to help out a project As many times as we see bad documentation We don't mean bad like the person is just doing bad things We mean like they you know developers are not always writers. It's just the way it is not everyone has every skill set So if you have a skill set that maybe someone else doesn't possess you could contribute that if you have the time so Yeah, I mean just try to if you're if you want to be involved. That's a great way to do it I absolutely agree with that It should not be diminished like you're creating great value You can create documentation for open source projects and you be sucked it's it's actually a good way to make friends with a lot of developers and Pro tip if you are someone creating a lot of documentation, but you also run into a feature request If you they already like you because you're creating documentation There's a lot more likely to put that feature request at the top of the pile and just don't it out there Are you saying that like screaming on a bug report and yelling at the developers and Complaining that it hasn't been fixed in two months and just yelling at them doesn't work Oh my gosh, neither is complaining about it in YouTube comments and neither does complaining about on Twitter It turns out all of those oh or read it So any social platform complaining about these things is definitely not the way to get the developers to fix it No, that's that's actually a good way to activate oppositional defiance Yeah, it really is because they're like oh these complain about this bug Because the developer knows you could just go here go there and you're like yeah anyways Yeah, the way it is. I mean everyone scratches their own itch at the end of the day That's usually why things get fixed because as soon as a developer runs into it is what it is But um, then again if you're contributing back I mean you're part of that community you can even if nothing else You could even just understand what the underlying issue is just because it seems like a an easy thing to fix That's usually not it's actually pretty challenging a lot of time so But anyway, yeah, just write documentation. We we would love that you did that if you did it um The last question I have here that I wanted to put I wanted to say this one for last because this is let us know And send us the feedback on this because I like this person This is an email that came in j that the title was or subject line was just thank you um They talk about managing data and being in the industry for a while But I think this is kind of a fun topic and this is definitely a Veronica topic. Maybe uh A trip down memory lane with linux talking about some of the History of linux now both of us have been doing this for a while And I think Veronica seems also well versed on a lot of the history of linux I think that's just kind of a you know, how do we get here? I think that's kind of related to homelab. It's it it dives into Some of the bases. I mean who doesn't remember loading Well, I say who doesn't remember some of these people We're not born when I was trying to figure it out how to get my mouse working with x server on my four floppy drive Five five floppy disks over the red hat It's so true though I feel like Veronica does a better job than I do when it comes to historical things I think she's really into that so among all the other things that she does well Um, so but the thing is yeah, that'd be a great um great fit. Um for sure So maybe we'll do an episode on that. I think that this is a fun like let's walk through the history of linux I feel like that's something I should know backwards and forwards, but at the end of the day, you know, we're all human Right. I I learn it and then if I don't think about it, you know every month then You know, I guess my hard drive has data retention issues or shelf life issues in my brain because after a while If I don't use the data it just starts to fade. So maybe that's uh proof that we are in a simulation Okay, that's a whole different subject. I want to do but all things considered I I think having more guests would be a lot of fun for sure Yep, and I think that history lane uh thing makes I I think there's just some fun in Having that as a topic. Let us know leave your comments down below if you're watching this on youtube Hit us up at feedback at the home lab dot show Uh, if you just want to email us we like hearing from you and uh, that's it. Thank you Thank you