 Welcome to the Home Lab Show episode 116 with an updated title of 45 Drives HL-15, the Home Lab 15 server. I had originally misread something from Jay. We're talking about several things, and I said, oh, we're going to talk about all those things in this one. Okay, I'm going to strap in for a long episode here. Jay's like, no, no, those are separate episodes. So if some of you had the sneak peek, and I'll share with you here so you don't have to dig for it, we are in the future going to be talking about the Houston Command Center by 45 Drives, and of course Raspberry Pi 5. So those are not topics that are ready, but Jay is ready to talk about the Home Lab 15. And I have a few thoughts I want to share in it. So this is the, I've not released, and actually I didn't look, have you released your Home Lab 15 video yet? I have not. Okay, those are coming from both of us. I know I could say for myself I hadn't done it yet. I just didn't want to speak for Jay until I confirmed. I didn't look at what he released in the last couple of days. I haven't released anything in about a week because it's just been crazy, but I figure I'll have it out fairly soon. I think it's about 75 to 80% filmed right now. So it's going to happen probably pretty quick, but quick to me means like within the next couple of weeks. I'll also be speaking in Raleigh next week. So we won't have the podcast next week. And I, if the video is not done before the end of the week, then it won't be out to the week after that. So I guess we'll see where it lands. Yeah, that's the content challenge of lining up when we have physical events we got to be at because I'm going to be at Codemash the next couple of days as well. So I'm going to post a few photos of things I've been working on, but I don't really have a video to get out just yet. So think of note, there is not a sponsor read for this show, but we still love hearing from you. So feedback at the Home Lab.show. Don't forget about that. I'm trying to make sure I announced it at the beginning of the show. And yeah, let's get started on this Home Lab 15 discussion. I think it's a good topic because me and you, we talked a little bit about this, but I'm like, save it for the show. We want to share Tom's thoughts and Jay's thoughts because I think we're close on things, but there's differences we have on some thoughts around the Home Lab 15. Right. So I had one sent in for a review. So I'm preparing that video. So I had a chance to check it out. I'm still checking it out. Review is not done. But enough of it's done to where I know pretty much what it's going to be and I already know how I feel about it. But first of all, let's just talk about what it is in the first place. So 45 Drives is a company that's come up a number of times. I personally have never worked with them before. I've had some discussions with them before. This is the first time I'm actually working with them on anything. So that's pretty cool. They have a new division, 45 Home Lab. And my understanding is the whole point is to target, well, the Home Lab. That's in the name and that's what they're targeting. And at first that's a really interesting thing because when it comes to Home Labbers, there's such a wide range. I mean, we have people that'll, rightfully so, this is great. They'll go on eBay, they'll buy an off-least server for 100 bucks, 150 bucks and that's going to be their server. And they help keep things out of the landfill. So that's definitely a good thing. But you also have people that want something that's, you know, middle of the road, maybe something newer, more power efficient. And then you have people with an endless budget. But before that you have people that want, you know, something that's on the high end. So there's all these different things. I mean, you have some people running everything on Raspberry Pi. So there's quite a range here. So a division of 45 drives to target the Home Lab is pretty cool because I just want to see what they're going to do with that. Right now we have the HL15, the Home Lab 15. And well, what is it? Is it a chassis or is it a server? The answer is yes. Yes. It's both solutions as an option. You can get this bare bones with very little in there. It doesn't differ much. And one might do my review. One of the things I'm going to talk about is how it differs from some of the 45 drives. Like I've been busy, we were just racking another XL60 for a client. We sold, one particular client, we sold a few of these XL60s too. In their, I'm in familiar territory. It is still the same 45 drives, really high quality, the way they do the steel and everything else. I mean, it's a premium product. But they've also made a few different things that she, I'm hoping that maybe the new versions of the XL60 will have. There's the way they actually, I like the way the slide on the top of the HL15 is better than the way the slide is on an XL60. And I'm going to do, right now I don't have an XL60 at my office, but I think I have enough pictures of the one we just had that I'll show and talk about the way the lid comes on off. And some of the little details like that. But as far as like the boards themselves are the same, like the way the backplane works on it. It's the same, whether you're buying an HL15, which is going to be not cheap, but I think that chassis is right around just under $1,000 for the chassis, right? It's $799, if I remember correctly, for the lower end, which is just the chassis. No matter what, you get the backplane. It lets you hot swap drives. It's really cool. We'll talk more about that. But you get the backplane and the chassis, no matter what. The first option is just that, the chassis. And the backplane. Second option, they throw in a power supply with the cables. So if you want a power supply with it, you could do that. And then the third option is like the Porsche offering, where it's fully built out. Motherboard, processor, RAM, a boot drive. They don't put other hard drives in, but the reason why it's called HL15 is because HomeLab, HL15, meaning 15 drives. So you can put 15 drives in there. That's not counting the boot drive, NVMe drive that's attached to the motherboard. So you get 15 drives in it. So that's why it's called the HL15. So already we have to draw a line in the sand that if you're someone that is buying off lease servers on eBay, this is not for you. Thank you, by the way, but this product is not, you're not the audience for this product. This is for people that want a very premium product. I price-checked the motherboard. I think it was Amazon. I don't remember, off the top of my head. The motherboard alone, the one that they actually put in this unit is $800 retail when I looked it up. So when I say that the fully built option is around $2,000, we can guess that $800 of that is somewhere around there. It's the motherboard alone, and then it has the Intel Xeon. I think it's the 3204. I really should have wrote that down before I started recording, but it has six cores, no hyperthreading. So already it's like a very specific audience. So if you want to set up like a NAS, for example, then it's perfect for that. If you want to set up a virtualization server, it could be perfect for that. But if you don't have use for 15 drives in your virtualization server, it might be overkill for that. So it might not be the best fit for that, unless you want a combination storage and virtualization server, then it would be perfect for that. But I'll leave that up to you guys. So if you want to build your own, there's an option. If you want it fully built, there's also an option. But the case, you're talking about lifting the top cover off. I mean, I don't lift the top cover off a server very often, but when I do, I prefer it to be easy and nice. But I really hope they don't make it any better, because if they do, then I'll be attaching and taking the cover off over and over again, because my ADHD, well, oh my God, this is great, because it lifts up. It doesn't slide. It slides over, then it leans up, which is really cool. So if they make it any better, I'm just going to be moving the cover on and off repeatedly. But it's nice. I mean, when you have to get into the chassis for whatever reason, it's really nice. And the build quality reminds me of the Thelio, surprisingly, because the metal that they put in here is really thick. You could tell it's custom. There's no other case like this. It's very original. And the case being made of this metal, I think it's the same metal as Thelio. I'm not an expert on that part of it, but it feels equally solid. Like this thing could probably, you could probably defend yourself with this server. It's so durable. But the way they put together, you have 16 gauge cold roll steel. They actually fabricate this themselves. They directly manufacture this. This is not, there's a company called Protocase. That's part of 45 Drives. So they have the physical manufacturing side. They manufacture a few more than cases. It's not a dedicated production facility for that. They have some other one-off type of things they do. It is powder coated. So you get this really nice feel. So, you know, I don't know for sure with the specs on Thelio, but I'm going to guess they did something similar where they use a really high quality steel. They have screws in it, not rivets. And that's one of the things that makes it nice for swapping out face plates and things like that. It's all screwed together. So if you need to swap something, you're not dealing with something that has a bunch of pop riveted things in place. Even when you have to swap a motherboard or anything else in there, it's everything because of that really heavy gauge steel. You don't feel like this cheap thing that you're going to strip out a screw or anything like that. You can crank down the screws with confidence that you're not going to mess with this really good high quality steel case. This is something that our friend Wendell, who did his review, brought up is, this is a case that you bought today, but you also will swap the motherboard in a few years from now and then swap the motherboard again a few years from now because as much as everyone tries to tell me it's the end of the three and a half inch drive, it's not, they keep getting bigger. And for people that really have high demand storage needs, this is definitely 15 drives. I've got it currently running TrueNAS on mine. And it's part of a drive shuffle project. That's the reason I haven't done my review because one, my review, I think is going to be more fun because I've moved to like 30 terabytes of data on and off of it a couple of times. Because it's now going through. I'm having to do this data shuffle thing to rebuild my lab at our Southgate office. And I think this is going to end up not in my actual, well, it's all, I don't know where you draw the dividing line between my home lab and my office lab. It's a really weird question because I have the same thing. Like it's like, is it business related or is it home network related? Yes, it is both of them at the same time always. So it's kind of difficult. But yeah, the struggle is real. Yeah, that's the whole thing. So it's probably going to end up in either the Toledo, our Toledo office lab or our Southgate office lab. That's where its final home is going to be once I'm done shuffling everything around. But it's performed great. It hasn't been a problem. So my review is going to include not just like the physical dimensions, but also some of the testing I had with it. It's actually, it's really well keeping up with our other 45 drives equipment that we have, which does include several machines we bought from 45 drives. It's because that's something I admire about them is this is the same hardware we like the XL 60. We didn't get that. That's not a sponsored video I did with them, which people said they were. I'm like, no, no, I can show you the invoice. We paid over $50,000 for each one of the XL 60s we bought. We bought them for client projects and sold them to clients and did the install. And I even took it apart to an extent to do the review. And yeah, the tear down of it, you'll see is the HL 15 same fabrication plant. They didn't send it off somewhere cheaper. They maintain that quality. So it's the $50,000 server just stripped down. We don't have 60 drive bays in it. We only have 15, but that's still pretty good. Yep. I just wanted to address a comment from the chat room, though. Basically asking, is this a 45 drives infomercial? I should have mentioned at the beginning of the episode, it's not sponsored by 45 drives. They don't even know we're doing this video. They never did not announce the podcast. I mean, I might ask someone from there to be on the podcast someday just to kind of chat about some of the processes maybe, but they had no idea we're going to do this, but we're looking for a topic and it's like, well, I've been evaluating it for a review and I'm far enough along to talk about it. So we don't really do the infomercial thing, but when we're excited about something, it kind of sound like that because we obviously, if we're into something, we're going to check it out regardless whether or not we have YouTube channel or not. And since we do, then guess what we're going to do? We're going to talk about it. But in my case, it comes at a great time because my server, my current TrueNest server is kind of long in the tooth now. So I just thought it'd be nice to see, compare the performance of this compared to that because I've had some performance issues lately. I'm not really sure that they're due to the old server, but I guess we'll find out. I just think it's a really awesome product, but I think, again, it's for the high end. So if you're on a budget, you might have to save up a little bit. Someone in the chat room also mentioned that it's not such a bad price, considering it's new with the warranty, I agree. But that doesn't mean someone can magically afford it just because there's a reason for it. And I priced out the parts and everything, but it's basically for someone who wants to build something new with the warranty. And the fact that we have something for the homelab is pretty cool. It seems like the homelab market is maturing a lot. It used to be like this buzz term that was kind of like maybe mentioned in convention sometimes, and then it got a little bit more popular. Plex made it blow up. And then next thing you know, there's a product for homelab people. Well, and I think I'll adjust the elephant in the room, but I'm going to dance around this judiciously here. All these media streaming companies have become cumulatively, well, they've all become horrible, but they've also cumulatively become more expensive what people used to pay for cable TV, which is now revising people's desire to have control over their media and even maybe house it in their homelab and things like that. So I think there's a lot of drive for this type of product. They call it the homelab 15, but we're seeing more and more people and Cory Doctorow had a really good article on it that says if buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing. And I'll let you read into that what you want, but it's a good article if you read it recently posted. And I think this is what's driving larger, more solid storage options that people are looking for. What can I have? What can I have myself? What can I host? And you can buy my friends over at Two Guys Tech and also Jeff Geerling have both had a lot of content around this about how to take media that you own. You've purchased DVDs, Blu-rays, et cetera, and create a within the rights that you can do so, create a media library and have all of that data somewhere because you'd like to serve it up via insert name of your favorite one because that's become one of those polarizing things. Plex was the first popular one, but of course there's MB, there's Jellyfin. There's a couple others that people mentioned. I don't keep up with latest trends and media servers. It's not my specialty because I got, I got flamed in my last live stream a little bit for using MB. They're like, why'd you use it? I said, because I loaded it and it worked and working was my goal. I didn't have time to research the best one. I researched the one that worked that so my wife could watch the show she wanted to watch. Yes, people ask me the same thing. You know, what was, what the choice of Plex and Plex has had some scrutiny over the years for various decisions that they've made that I won't get into. But for me, I think if people realized how little TV I watch, they'd understand why this isn't a big priority when it comes to the Plex. If I get some time to watch TV, that's amazing. I might binge something and then not watch TV again for like five months. It's, it's crazy. So it's kind of like at the low end of the importance level for me. So I wanted to check out the other stuff, but why? You know, it's like I'm barely going to use it anyway. But eventually I think I will. It's just a matter of time. You know, Plex is one of those companies that it's only a matter of time, maybe before, you know, they, they fall out of favor. It's already almost happened several times, but it does work. And until it stops working, then I guess I have no reason to change. But when I do, I will definitely consider the suggestions that have been coming in. Absolutely. Now software, we should probably talk a little bit about software and what to run on your. I was just about to mention that too. So it's interesting because the, you could tell a lot from a default installation of the operating system on hardware. If you look in between the lines, I could tell that they get it. Here's why. They didn't put a lot of work, in my opinion, into the default Rocky Linux 8 install that it comes with if you buy the fully specced out version. And I think the reason for that is because they know that homelab people are far more likely to want to just wipe it and put their own image on there, or maybe use some kind of automation system to provision the server. So they're probably not wanting to put a lot of work into something that people might just remove and install something else anyway. And there's no rule about what you should put on here. But again, it comes with Rocky Linux 8. You might be wondering why 8 and not 9, because Rocky Linux 8 is not the newest version. The reason is because it also ships with Houston, which we'll cover in another episode. But basically what that is, is a set of modules that are installed on top of cockpit. Cockpit is something you can install on pretty much any Linux server. It's usually something like apt install cockpit or DNF install cockpit. And then you start the service. It's cockpit.socket specifically. You start that. And then cockpit is at 9090, port 9090. Now Houston, the Houston command center, as it's called, is cockpit. Because when you install it, it installs cockpit. It's not like they recompile everything. You install cockpit. And then they're modules. And some of their modules add things like ZFS support. That cockpit itself doesn't have. They also have some modules that cockpit does have. But then they've added a feature to it. So, and it's open source. So you can install the Houston command center on other servers. You don't have to buy one of theirs to use this. You could just download it and install it if you want to. The problem, though, is that it supports Rocky Linux 8 and Ubuntu 2004. And you have to be running one of those two. Now, unfortunately, I think that really lowers the usefulness of it. Because, you know, especially in homelab, we're probably going to be running the latest LTS. I'm sure there's people that are still running Ubuntu 2004 Rocky Linux 8. But cockpit itself can be installed on virtually any distribution, any server. So Houston is a little bit more limiting. So I hope that opens up a bit more. But I like the fact that it comes with more features. Again, we'll cover that in its own episode. So I don't want to go too into detail there. But you can use it as is. If Houston is enough for you, you could just use that. You could set up your file shares through it. You can set up ZFS through it. There's all kinds of things you could do there. If that doesn't float your boat, then you could install something else. Open Media Vault, TrueNAS. If you want to set up a NAS system. But even though this is for those of you sitting up in NAS system, you don't have to. You could set up Proxmox on it if you want to. XCPNG, NextCloud. Actually, it'd make a perfect NextCloud server come to think about it with all those drives. I mean, you'd have a lot of storage for NextCloud. So that's actually a pretty good use case there that I just realized as we're talking live on the air. NextCloud server. I might see someone ask about Snapshield. And Snapshield is interesting. It is one of the tools that 45 Drives has that does require that you're running Linux underneath. It's not going to work with specifically if you had TrueNAS. But Snapshield is not included with it. I don't know what they plan to do. I have a video on Snapshield if you want to check it out where I interview the people at 45 Drives about it. But it is still a specific and really new product they have. I think it's really cool. But it's not free for one thing. And it doesn't require... This is a question someone had if it actually requires 45 Drives hardware. And it doesn't. It's a specific Linux tool that Watch for Beat uses. Watch video. They cover all the technical details on the back end. But essentially, they set up monitoring to watch the SMB traffic. And if a user suddenly starts changing things at a pattern not seen before, such as when ransomware attacks and someone tries to encrypt a bunch of files or touch a bunch of files, it locks that particular user out. So that's a really cool product they're making. I see product because it's actually not part of their open source project. But that particular thing, it does not ship at all with any of their hardware. It's a separate thing you load on their systems. And if you load Houston, for example, on your server, not something that they've made, you'll have sections in there, a couple of them that won't work because there's a couple modules that if you install them, they're 45 Drive specific. But if you ignore those modules, then Houston gives you a lot of benefit, especially ZFS, because that's just awesome to be able to manage that through essentially Cockpit, which I'm sure a lot of people are using Cockpit anyway. So you could think of Houston as Cockpit plus plus or Cockpit with free DLC on top because it gives you extra features. Best analogy I could come up with. But if you want to run something else, it's the next 86 motherboard with a Xeon processor. If you buy the spec out version, unless you put something else in there, 32 gigs of VCC RAM. So you have that a one terabyte NVMe boot drive. So just load whatever you want to load on there for your operating system. And I'm trying true NAS right now. I'm not 100% sure I'm going in that direction, but I think I might. And I'm just playing around with this, setting up file shares and just having fun because I think regardless of what it is I'll sit in for review. It's so nice to just sit down with something and just get your hands on it and just play around with it. It's one of the best parts of the job actually. If only review videos on YouTube weren't the lowest earning bad revenue videos of all. Basically like one of them I made $19 profit. $19, just $19 profit. But I still love doing these reviews because it's not about the money, it's about the fun. It's about technology and how passionate we are about it. So getting something sent in, even if I have to send it back, it's like I got to play around with it. And it's just so fun playing around with the first offering from 45 Drives and the name of 45 HomeLab is what they're calling this division and having something that's for us that's not a Raspberry Pi device because we've had plenty of HomeLab products but most of them are Raspberry Pi kits. This is an x86 kit for HomeLab, which is pretty cool. But then again, if you have a small business no one's telling you that you can't run this in your small business it's enterprise quality. So you may as well if you want to. Yeah, there's a lot of flexibility in here and I do like a lot of the Houston stuff. It makes ZFS a lot easier to manage. I like the chassis management you can get with it. But I did mention I was running TrueNAS. Me and Jay, we actually chatted about this last night when we were just talking about some setup stuff. One of the reasons for TrueNAS and one of the reasons I'm so into TrueNAS I guess you could say is simplicity of management. It's not that I don't know how to build scripts that would do replication from the command line. It's that I need stuff that I have a other team that doesn't all have the same level of skills I have and not to mention the XL60s that we installed for a client. That client is actually quite adept at TrueNAS. They know the platform very well. They can manage it very well. And for example, when they build out a new data set and they want to replicate it to their other XL60 for backups that's arbitrarily easy inside of a TrueNAS system. That is not as easy to set up scripts and everything to do it. So I'm kind of lean towards that. I'm hoping and it just takes time because there's only a limited number of things you're developing teams can do. They're dead in Kings a lot of time to Houston but it's not one of those you're gonna see every feature to come in full parity with the TrueNAS features that you have. TrueNAS has been one of those projects that's been working forever. TrueNAS has been around for a super long time. I mean, I have to look up just a long history of how many years that project's been around. I mean, long before it was called FreeNAS and I've been using it myself for like seven or eight years maybe longer. I started at like version eight. So I have to look when version eight was released and then I'm still using it today and even larger scale than I was when I was using it in version eight. So one of the reasons why I always stick to the same software is probably one of the reasons you do the same because when you have content to record like we do, you know, you have eight hours on a work day and you have a video you want to do and you decide you're gonna do it and you want to get it out the door then that like resetting like, like trying a new NAS software and then setting up everything from scratch is not conducive to getting something done that day. So, you know, we put a lot of work into these things but it's just switching over to something especially when it's the backend of your editing system. You can't edit if your system's down if you have it set up that way if you're not editing local data, I do it over 10 gig. So that's a big thing. But now that I have a new studio here, I do plan on setting up a lab and I will have time to try these different NAS operating systems and maybe move to one if true NAS isn't gonna always be the thing because now I'm equipped to do it. I just need to source a good desk to have all the stuff onto that's not this one. So I don't have like, because normally I have to just clear my desk to record because I build my servers right here and then I just put everything on the floor, record and make my office look nice. But in this new studio, I'll be able to check out more things because I'll have a corner that's dedicated to just fumbling around with hardware and things. So I could be more efficient. And I'm looking forward to trying out other things like maybe given, I'm gonna give Houston a good run. I'm not done with it just because I'm not running it on this server. I'm going to be checking it out. And that's yeah, I'm still gonna be evaluating it even further. And I think if I do switch to another storage OS, then that would be a good episode just to talk about what the decision-making process was and why I went the direction that I did. But for right now, I'm hitting the easy button. It's probably going to be true at least for now. If I get a bunch of content out, then I could reevaluate that. But that's the fun of HomeLab and I get to benefit from that too. Sometimes you just want to try something new. And who knows, maybe Flex will be on the chopping block at some point if they do something stupid. But they've already done a few things that have annoyed people, but you never know, it's just there's so much software we could be running. And that's part of the fun is just talking about like, what are you running? And what are you running? And how did you set it up and get some ideas? And trying out the HL15 is a really big part of that. It's just a lot of fun to see what runs on it, run some tests on it, and just have some fun with hardware. Yeah. And by the way, for those curious, because I looked it up, the FreeNAS 8. I remember the first one I touched was FreeNAS 8, 2011. That's when that was released. So I am, that's only 12 years. It doesn't sound like long. It doesn't feel like I've been using it for that long, but I think you were the one that sold me on both. Because I think when we met, my NAS was just straight Debian with Samba and NFS config files manually edited. I think so. And my router was also Debian, custom with IP tables rules for the routing and just hand everything, no GUI, nothing. And then I'm thinking, I don't need anything because I just have everything scripted and I don't need a GUI. But then when I saw some of the things that, you know, TrueNAS, then FreeNAS is able to do and how it's able to be efficient at certain things and same with PF sense. And I'm like, okay, fine. I'll put a GUI on my servers. I did so kicking and screaming, but I've been using them ever since. So I'm not regretting it. It's a solid system. Yep, it really is. And then maybe TrueNAS scale will be something I'll try when it stabilizes because we've gone back and forth as we talk about this off camera. It's not that we are just trying to focus on TrueNAS scale to insult it or anything. It's not like that. There's a few rough edges we want to see ironed out and TrueNAS core is tried and true, but I'm sure I'll probably switch to scale at some point. And when I do, that opens up TrueNAS to be a topic on the channel because TrueNAS scale is Linux. TrueNAS core is not. So if I'm using the Linux TrueNAS, then guess what I can do? It's a Linux channel. I can start covering it. So that could be something you'll see this year. Yeah, that's a topic coming because there's more changes coming to TrueNAS that I get why they're doing it, but unfortunately, there's stuff broken and there's a discussion going on in my forums this morning about the deprecation of more things. I'm aware of it. People are like, hey, you have another video. And I said, the reason I have another video is not because I don't know about the deprecation. I covered the deprecation. The problem is the solution isn't there yet. So they deprecated it for good reasons because there's security problems with it. And that's specifically right now around S3 is a new controversy, but I haven't tested to see if all the bugs are gone from the new application deployment they have for MinIO. It was really buggy when I tested it. Last test I really set up was around November. I know there's been updates since then that allegedly fixed the problems. I think I retweeted that, but I haven't really had time to sit down and test it. It's not something I use very often because MinIO specifically, I might do an updated video on there. By the way, there's a really good MinIO install script from the folks at 45 Drive. Check out their GitHub. They have a setup script for it because running it in a container is where the problem comes in. That's the way TrueNAS has chosen to do it. But if you want to install MinIO natively, it actually is great to install natively and there's a lot of good features for it. And what MinIO is, is an S3 emulation layer. I think it's great if you have something that has storage target for S3, awesome. And we have a couple of niche use cases where I do that. One of them oddly being Synology. Synology likes dropping things on S3 buckets for cloud backup. You can actually set your TrueNAS, maybe at an offsite location. You can set it up to receive S3. Now I'm doing it over a VPN, so I'm not worried that I'm using an outdated version. It's also filtered over to only use the, it's only allowed to talk to the machines that are the Synologies that are sending data to it. So I've mitigated the risks, but of course I want the risk gone by having a modern version. The problem is they have some certificate install problems. So there's plenty more video topics for team me to do. I got to do some more, like Jay said, you got to sit down and build it out, test it, find the bugs, put it into a, even I call it pseudo-production, because I'll actually lab this out because we have enough equipment to do this and I'll see if it works and figure out what the hang-ups are with it. Is it stable? Yep, that's how my system works. I have production and I have staging. Staging is just what I call things that might possibly enter production, maybe, and they're being evaluated and I have a number of things that are installed that way. And then I go in Ansible and I change the branch to production and then everyone graduates to production if they made it. But kind of a similar system here, just having a network that's kind of separate just to play around and then you have your production network that's got a lot more control over it. So it's kind of like a business network that's also a chaotic network where things come and go constantly because I'm evaluating things but then you have the things that stay and those are production, I suppose. Yeah. I'll make note because someone brought it up. When it comes to Ceph, I think Ceph is amazing but it's not the solution for everything and the reason why is the complexity of setting it up and the complexity of maintaining it. This is where, you know, actually my friend Dave Skaraj is just talking about Kubernetes or sorry, Jim Skaraj. He does the Kubernetes update video and I thought it was fun showing the challenges of updating Kubernetes and talking about all the little quirks with it. It's not about setting stuff up. It's about managing it and maintaining it over time because you want to maintain an integrity. How are you going to maintain it? And please don't tell me you're just never going to update it once you figure out how it works because that is unfortunately where a lot of things are. We don't need more of that. So I think Ceph is great but you have to have a plan around it. You have to be willing to dedicate the time and Ceph is, you know, there's instructions on it but it's not as easy as TrueNAS. So when I look at the landscape of who will be using it, it's the same reason we don't all write things in assembly language. That's for the people who really want to write something truly optimized and take the time in our assembly language. That's not going to be for the general public. So if you have looked at the challenge of Ceph and you go, oh no, this ain't challenging to me because I am fluent in setting this up, awesome, great, use it. There's not a reason I can tell you not to use it but if you're going, I need to read step-by-step instructions. I don't really know any of these commands mean but if I copy and paste them, it seems to work. And then it's like when you stand up that big house of cards, it's like going to fall over at any moment. You're like, don't sneeze. Now I'm going to put all my important data on this. That's where, and then I'll just panic call everybody when it falls over and post to everybody's forums. Make sure you understand these things. Ceph is a beautiful system but its beauty comes at the cost of, there's some complexity in it. Yep, I want to address a comment I thought would be fun. Someone asked about evaluating new things and trying not to mess up your existing system. And this is an interesting question because this was something that I ran into, especially during the beginning times of the channel. It was really annoying reviewing a distribution. I would have to wipe my current computer. I only had one computer. I have to wipe the computer, install the distribution on it, load all my stuff on it, and copy my files over there, run it for a week, review it, and then get another distribution, do the same thing for that one. I didn't even know what it was like to have the same install for longer than, I think a month was my record or something like that. But eventually, I didn't know Ansible yet. I don't remember if it was out back then. I can't remember. But anyway, I wrote a bash script, which is really long. Just one command after another apt install and a big wall of packages. I think everyone who's starting out has probably done this or probably will. And then later on, I could just use that bash script just to reload everything. And that bash script then became a chef installation, set up a puppet setup, and then later has converted over to Ansible. And but at some point after I started the channel, I decided to get a cheaper used computer from, I think, the flea market or something and just use that as my guinea pig machine. I think it's best if you're creating content or evaluating things to just get a separate device if you can. I didn't have the money to do so at first, but later I did. But if you could find something that's cheap or used or resale market or something and you want to do that, even if you don't plan on creating content, if you just want to evaluate software just because you want to, without messing up your system, I vote just try to get a second system. It doesn't have to be the most powerful thing on the planet. It could be like a old desktop or something. As long as it runs and has at least two gigs of RAM, preferably four, I think you should at least be able to run something on it. And then from there, you just upgrade, hand me down, computers can replace that one. And then you'll have a test machine. But I think that's really the only way to do it is either that or just automate everything. Yeah, the other thing too is, this is what makes Raspberry Pi so popular is because they're in a reasonably priced range for people to acquire. Matter of fact, I'm sure there's a, I didn't check out, it might be an interesting option. There's still, my Raspberry Pi 4 is fine. I have a couple of them and run my projects perfectly fine. I don't have an interest, other than maybe for reviewing it, but my interest in going to the five, I'm not resource constrained. I'm running my home assistant on a Pi. It runs wonderfully. It runs all of my home automation stuff. It even has actions tied into my camera. And it's not overheating. It's not like pushed to the limit. The CPU is not sitting at 100% all the time. I'm not going to replace it with a five. It's going to be a lot faster if you did though, just saying. It's going to be a lot faster, but there's literally nothing slow about it. I hit the button and all my lights came on and I hit record and here we are live. And by the way, my entire studio is controlled by my Raspberry Pi. Yeah. No, I hear you on that. At first, I will talk about the Raspberry Pi 5 in another episode. At first, I kind of thought it was a very minor upgrade when I just read some of the headlines, but when I really dived in, because I mean, the same number of cores and same ports and everything, and I'm like, okay. But then when I looked into it and I watched Jeff Gehrling's video on it, he just went through all the differences. I'm like, okay. It's definitely not a minor upgrade. It's a big deal. So, and there's still some debate over the rock chips versus that, but yeah, we'll be talking about it. But I think you would see at least a performance increase, even if it's not slow, it'll still be a little bit faster. But I guess if it's doing, I mean, as it is with HomeLab, if it works, I guess just use it as is. Yep. But if you do want to upgrade, I think you'll, maybe when the Raspberry Pi 6 comes out, you'll upgrade it to that. Yeah. All right. Well, I think we've reached the end here. You got anything more, Jay? I have a ton, but I don't have a... It's for another episode. ...all of hours. So, yeah. It's for another episode. We'll dive into those things later. Thank you all for joining us. This was a lot of fun. We thank 45 Drives for, they sent this to us. We said it's not sponsored by them or anything. But we're excited because you keep an eye on them, they're participating in the community. Check out the 45 Drives GitHub, because you don't have to buy an HL15 to use some of the cool scripts they have. I haven't mentioned they have a Minio script. Just check out the 45... Type in 45 Drives GitHub, or I'll leave a link in the show notes as well to it. There's actually a lot of cool things that they have there that you can play with. And yeah, just want to give them a shout out for that. I love companies that give back to the community. That was probably the reason you find some of this engagement from other channels on this topic. But hey, thanks again, and we'll see you in the next episode. Yep. See you later.