 time here for more and systems and while the systems that we may be running work off of a binary ones and zeros the decision is less binary about what software to run on them and The words that I use always when people say what should I load on my server starts with it depends And I know that's not the answer a lot of people want to hear but at least I like to talk about the details of what it depends on to help you make an informed decision when you're Building out your server and today we're going to be talking about the 45 drives Houston command center because that came up a few times in the 45 drives review video Which I'll leave a link to below about when would you run that as opposed to just some you know Dedicated NAS appliance software what would be the advantage of one or the other and of course it depends on your use case And we're gonna talk about a couple of those use cases Before we dive into those details if you'd like to learn more about me my company head over to Lawrence systems dot com If you'd like to hire sure project there's a hires button right at the top if you want to support this channel in other ways There's affiliate links down below to get you deals and discounts on products and services that we talk about on this channel now let's start with what is 45 drives Houston and It's a combination of things here. They based it off of and it's not hidden It's the cockpit system now I've have another video where I talk about Linux web interfaces and what cockpit is which is a really cool web interface for Linux in short and 45 drives took and did some customization to it and I have this pulled up on our github page because I then loaded a bunch of VM and Then we can see what it looks like over here Then this is the actual 45 drive server and you may notice they look the same Yes, you do not have to have a 45 drives server in order to use the Houston command center It's actually really cool. Just open source project and there's gonna be a few minor differences We'll get to later in a video from when you run it on a 45 drive system only because you have extra extra hardware access I'll show what that looks like. I showed it in the review with a 45 drive system But for the most part, you know, it's the same software except for those couple extra modules Now, why would you want to run something other than a NASA client software for something? That is clearly designed to be a NASA storage, which is that particular box right there behind me Which is the Q30 Storinator now NAS softwares great and it really does Focus down to a purpose if you want to do NFS shares ice because he shares samba shares and really focus the purpose of it There are plenty of NAS software Tools out there that create that appliance environment where it's strictly this but that also means you don't want to go off script And what I mean by off script is what if you have some custom implementations? What if you have a lot of other services that you want to load on there that aren't natively available or? Completely built in to that NAS appliance. That's where you start looking at things like the 45 drives Houston because it's a custom solution it's just based on a bunch to and it allows the ease of management that you get from a NAS appliance by having the You know ability to manage all the hard drives in there and set up the ZFS pools without having to do everything from the command line And I know the purists or say you should just learn the command line But honestly if you're a developer and you don't spend a lot of time setting up ZFS There's a lot of options there and I believe there's ZFS manager is probably one of the easiest tools I've seen to make managing ZFS on Linux really really easy without having to know a lot of little ins and outs because ZFS for all of its power Comes great complexity and you know that making that a little bit easier to manage is important Now let's take a look at each of these systems and talk about the Houston command center They have done a lot of work to it lately including adding and actually I don't think I have a password this one This one's just here we go. So this system right here is the one running and I have the ZFS module loaded I you know follow the instructions on the 45 drives get hub and pulled in their Customized version of cockpit have it all configured and I you know have this ZFS file sharing now There's no pulls on this system because this is just running inside of a VM, but I just want to show yes It works. Yes, you can load it including this new thing They just released which is really cool having the benchmarks built in so you can go and go You know what would be the max throw put this particular system would have max IOPS or do a performance spectrum I thought those really cool that they added this and I'll be leaving a link to of course the 45 drives Video YouTube page where they have a lot of good videos on not just the Houston system But a lot of other things they talk about storage servers and some of the things they specialize in and of course I like them a lot because they're a big open source company now back to the topic over here Yes, you can just run this yourself without a 45 drive server And that's kind of my point you can easily test this out But if you are going to buy a 45 drive server and you like to see the extras That's what this is in the Houston system. For example, this lines up with the way they laid out the drives So first time you click on it it pauses a little bit of load But this is actually the layout so you can see which drive is in which bay when you're setting it up and back to that This system has 30 drives in it and don't worry about the degraded. That's me I was goofing with things and including when you're goofing with things such as replacing drives And you accidentally goof one up because I did that and but clear disc airs offline disc replace test This is really handy to be able to manage There's 30 drives here and set up the configuration figure out which one's faulted and be able to manage it Big reason. I really like the whole cockpit system and then the add-ons that 45 drives Yeah, and talking about the customized solution So this is based on a bun two and obviously a bun two being that it's a popular Linux distribution you can really start putting a lot more into it to build out your own stack and Who would build out something really elaborate? Maybe Wendell from level one text and I'm going to bring this up because Me and Wendell were talking and he had this right up on her forums at level one tech forums And it's a in-depth when you were talking about going off script Something that you wouldn't normally get out of a standard nasa appliance and someone may point out that well You can kind of customize nasa appliances and try to get some of these things in there But it's not quite the same and Wendell did a good job with this right up for all the extras He's done so far, which I'm probably going to be applying to my 45 drive server as well This is something he'd set up on there and it's just you know some of those extra details As a matter of fact he also has a write-up in here setting up the samba so the volume shadow copies work properly That's a really cool thing now have set up with ZFS auto snapshots and these are all extra just standard Linux things you can do on here One of the other particular interesting things is being able to configure the nick with our DMA for Extremely fast SMB transfers. This is actually a pretty cool configuration as well And that's still not supported on all nasa environments Kind of it's a fairly up-to-date protocol to be able to really get the peak performance when you're talking 10 and 25 gig and Beyond when you're talking about really fast transfers and if you're setting us up for multi-path and video editing Yeah, that might be a good thing that you're looking at there Wendell also talks about land cash and steam cash But anyways Kind of the reason I wanted to bring this up is one there's been a lot more development on the Houston OS So if you were looked at before and thought there was not much to it check out what they've been doing and they've been essentially like a code sprint here just really Pushing a lot more forward over on the 45 drive side and it's all publicly available So whether you want a 45 drive server or not. Hey, cool. It's completely available for you to start testing now The final thing I'll say is it the custom solution thing That is a real big question a lot of people come up with when they really want to dive deep in learning And that's where I kind of will steer people away on that it depends they're going. Hey, I want to load podman I want to start learning Docker I want to learn all these other things and I don't have time waiting for you know All these features to catch up to the latest version that you may not find in the appliance world I still steer people towards any type of NASA appliance software when you're talking about, you know You need a dedicated single purpose easy to manage in your environment But when you want to really build those custom solutions This is pretty cool to load this on top because it lives nicely with everything else that you may have on there Separate web interfaces that you load and bind to it So you can load the cockpit for that side of the management But then still have all of your other services bound on there for things to run and it's you know Kind of where I go with when answering this question When say when would you use this or what would you look at this and of course? I know there's undoubtedly some Linux purists who's maybe not quite as aligned with me I like to make systems easier and more accessible for people as long as that does not compromise or come at the cost of a less secure system and Obviously with cockpit. It's secure. It's well done, but it shouldn't be publicly exposed So don't publicly expose this but hopefully you weren't doing that with your NASA appliance either But either way this is something I want to bring up leave links down below to all the stuff I talked about of course to the write-up that Wendell did if you want to start playing with it Customizing it to spin up a Linux VM spin up a Linux machine on there You can load it and if you have a 45 drive server. Hey, they'll ship it with their all configured with their fancy hardware stuff I'll also leave links to the store need a review that I did a couple weeks ago. Yes, we're still using it Yes, there's more plans and more things coming for it looking in the future and Thanks, and thank you for making it to the end of this video if you enjoyed this content Please give it a thumbs up if you like to see more content from this channel Hit the subscribe button and the bell icon to hire a sure project head over to Lawrence systems calm and click on The hires button right at the top to help this channel out in other ways There's a join button here for YouTube and a patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated For deals discounts and offers check out our affiliate links and descriptions of all of our videos including a link to our shirt store We have a wide variety of shirts and new designs come out. 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