606: Nix's Magic Cookbook

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:14):
Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
And my name is Brent.
Hello, gentlemen. Well, coming up on the show today, we just got back from Planet
Nix, and boy, do we have stories to share, guests joining us,
and insights from our week at Planet Nix.
Then we'll round out the show with some great boosts, some picks, and a lot more.

(00:37):
So before we get into all that shenanigans, I want to say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual...
My name is Wes.
Hello, Mumble Room.
Hey, Chris. Hey, Wes, and hello, Brent.
Nice to have you there. JupyterBroadcasting.com slash mumble if you want to
get in on that action when we're live on Sundays.
And a big good morning to our friends at TailScale. TailScale.com slash unplugged.

(00:59):
That's where you want to go.
TailScale.com slash unplugged to support the show and try it for free on 100
devices, three accounts, no credit card required, not a limited time thing.
I mean, you must be on the free plan, Wes, right? Indeed.
Yeah, it's great. And then what we did is we all started on the free plan,
and we love it because you get a flat mesh network that is protected by.

(01:20):
And it's very quick to set up and get going. I mean, if you've got five minutes,
you can probably get it running on three machines.
I'm not kidding, was the easiest thing to get running on FreeBSD of all the things I tried.
And it's true for Nix, too. It's like a one-liner in Nix, and you've got Tailscale working.
So we all love it for our personal home labs and our networks.

(01:41):
And then we started using it here at Jupyter Broadcasting.
And I think that's true for a lot of our listeners out there because it is an
enterprise-grade system.
I mean, there are just tons of companies out there, ones you've heard of,
that are using Tailscale for their back-end infrastructure.
And you can bridge what would be otherwise very complex networks,
like multiple providers, multiple data centers, VPSs, on-premises,

(02:02):
mobile devices. You can bridge all of that into one flat mesh network.
That's why companies like Duolingo and Hugging Face and Instacart love it.
So try it out for yourself.
Get it for 100 devices for free when you go to tailscale.com slash unplugged.
Well, we're back in town. Last week was our eBPF special. while we were away,

(02:23):
hard at work, covering and capturing all of Planet Nix.
And I felt like we kind of found a pretty good groove for our Planet Nix and
scale coverage, don't you think? I think we, you know, we didn't overdo it.
There was a lot to take care of. Yeah. I think we went to more talk.
Yeah. Maybe put together. Did you enjoy the trip? Okay. I did, yeah. It was, you know.

(03:04):
Yeah, that was great.
True.
Yeah, a million years ago.
Or wants to know more. Yeah, that's true.

(03:25):
Yeah, you heard from the man himself.
Brandon, Greg.
Observability, performance, tracing, you know what?
I was reflecting on the trip.
There were some tough moments for sure. I don't think I'd rather do it with anybody else.
We as a unit have really got this work.
How hard drives don't like it when you yell at them.
And a big shout out to my wife.
Adia, who does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to the bookings,
figuring out where we can stay.

(03:46):
And all the logistics there. Brandon, you're a big world traveler.
I think we've got a good, tight little group now for covering these things.
Yeah, I think we have a pretty good routine going.
And we got, you know, we do an Airbnb and I'll hang out and that gives us a
little bit of downtime together between all of the extra coverage that we do during the day.
And we like, we didn't even have to this time talk about who was going to do what.

(04:09):
We just kind of know our place and our positions and who's going to handle what part.
And like a huge thanks to listener Jeff or producer Jeff, I should say,
who just helped us throughout the entire process. So thank you, Jeff.
Absolutely.
Thank you guys. Always fun.
And it was nice to be able to have Jeff there with us because he's always down to help in whatever way.

(04:30):
It does do some networking stuff still to this day.
I was really glad that we had kind of figured, we kind of settled into a routine
because it meant every night we got the clips processed and.
You know, labelled and collected.
So we're finally at that point now where we have pretty much everything sorted by the time we get home.
And then there's just a little bit of, you know, final polish to put on things.

(04:51):
And, you know, before too long, in the same decade, it made its way over to
Linux in the form of TCP DOM.
And already you're seeing this thing, right, where you can kind of use user
space to help better observe what's going on in your system.
But they also made it possible for us to end up in Pasadena and bring you all the information.
And they didn't ask us to cover it in any particular way. They just facilitated us to get down there.

(05:12):
And they, you know, worked with us whenever we had questions or wanted to know
who was who. And I think they're really going to be something special going down the road.
What you have, right, is this complexity of Nix.
Yeah, and that's how the implementation works. And Flox is all about simplifying it for developers.
And so you get reproducible.
You get portable dev environments that are powered by Nix.
You don't have to have the learning curve.

(05:32):
The point is it's like a very limited, restricted bytecode that can only do
certain things relevant to.
At first, filtering packets.
And that lets you make sure that the company is crazy, you can't go into infinite
loops, all kinds of other nice things. You have to optimize it.
So Flox lets you manage and share environments effortlessly with people that
already have an existing workflow.
Packet and anything else that you need to focus on building great software and

(05:54):
then the machine executes and ultimately that's how you tell like do I accept
the packet or do I drop the packet,
but at first it was a you know a very limited I think I had like a two registers
to use super limited thing,
but eBPF extended BPF was introduced in Linux 3.18 and of course they got an
eye on you know so BPF have been around for a while there have been various

(06:16):
developments so we're super grateful for.
Their support so.
Check them out at flux.dev.
See how they're bringing the magic I think of NICs to everybody.
A big thank you to everyone. At Flox, we're making it possible for this episode.
It had some of those register limitations. So they upgraded to 64-bit registers,
added more instructions.
Now, Flox kept a pretty serious kernel.
Which is a big part of it that lets you analyze the PDF programs to make sure

(06:36):
they're safe. No infinite loops. They don't do invalid memory. We're fine with that.
We're there to work, too. Gosh darn it.
Right. It's because it's like you're loading something from userspace into the
kernel. That's a big security concern.
It is about 6 a.m.
So you want to make sure that you have that.
And it's Thursday.
And Planet Nick starts at 9.15.
A.m. But you've got to do the L.A. travel math and the getting your registration sorted.

(06:58):
So really, we're probably out of here about 8.30. So I'm going to go take my really awkward shower.
So that was kind of like the raw stuff. And then I'll be fresh and ready for
all the people. How exciting.
Oh my gosh. So I think I'm the biggest Airbnb critic on the planet.
Because I've never really stayed at an Airbnb I've liked.
And it's always in part because of the shower situation.
Their products have a bunch of EVPF stuff for Kubernetes offerings.

(07:23):
And this one was no exception. Plus, we got better compilers out in the public hall.
Or compile once run everywhere so like compilers have better support to be able
to make you can compile your BPF program and not have to worry about as much
necessarily depending on what you're doing with it about how compatible it will
be with the kernel where you compiled it versus where you're running it,

(07:48):
right,
this has been so successful that's not why we were there newer versions of D-Trace on Linux We.
Got the bodies cleaned and the stank off of us.
They're basically just some extra user space stuff that uses EBPF and other
kernel primitives under the hood.
It's just about time for the kickoff of Planet Nix. We've got our seats,
and Brent brought a gigantic backpack. How much food is in there versus gear?

(08:12):
One important thing with the extended product is they were also able to make
the instruction set be more sympathetic to modern hardware.
Wait, you didn't bring us food up.
And they implemented just-in-time compilation as well.
Now, Wes, do you have something to take notes with over there?
Really fast. I have my phone.
And I have log-seek. I have my phone.
And I have log-seek. All right, and I've got the audio. I'll take the audio
notes, West takes the text notes.

(08:34):
And Brent will do the snack.
If you do that, there's no guarantees.
And it works pretty well. That's kind of on the tin.
But there is some stable interfaces that you can use, which is nice.
So, the other important point to know is there's kind of various things it can do.
There's XDP, which is Express Data Path, which intercepts packets,
basically, like the earliest point that you can.

(08:55):
You have limitations on what you can do, but it can be super level and performing.
And so you can see this sometimes maybe on the DDoS attacks where.
We're getting flood-up traffic that you have.
Maybe you can identify various ways that you can program in here.
You show up just at the end of the talk, you can catch them in the room.
Hey, could you step outside for a few minutes and do a chat with us?
That kind of thing. So we're both trying to take in as much information.

(09:16):
Yeah, that's the idea. It doesn't do as much of the very general and powerful,
but, you know, full-featured Linux kernel networking.
There was a moment where Ron from
Floss talked about why Planet Nix and thought I'd share that with you.
A journey into Planet Nix. So this is a little sneak peek. I don't know if we
have any magic to gather fans out here.
Yeah, one way to say it's limited context, but maximum.
I'm kind of a geek on it. We're going to do something. You'll see.

(09:37):
Okay, so then you can also do various types of K-prones.
But otherwise, Planet Nix.
So Nix, obviously, it's Nix.
The other fact is that for years we've been trying to reinstate Pluto as a planet.
It hasn't been really successful.
You can hook almost any kernel function.
It's called Nix, right?
That's why it'll go call Nix Nix.
You can ask him later about that. There's no clear definition of what you're going to get.
You have to go look at the function you're hooking into. It's all going to be
dependent on that. You've got no kernel internals.

(09:59):
The thing is, we're starting a mission to try and reinstate Pluto as a planet. But a lot of them.
Yeah.
And then eventually have a real moon for a real planet called Nix.
That's why we call it Planet Nix.
I can get behind that.
I think Pluto deserves it.
So that's where a lot of some of the power comes from, right?
But that may or may not be stable. There's no guarantee about it being stable across Coral versions.
It's one of our biggest risks.
It changes any time. People can update the signatures. That's one of the things

(10:20):
that's been happening in the Rust discussion.
It's still a planet.
The kernel, many developers expect to be able to make a change like that.
Maybe that's where we can find it.
Because they have one big code
base, they can update it everywhere and be able to do it in a factory.
There was also an analogy made that I thought was pretty good.
Ron calls Nix kind of like his mom's veggie gulag. And this is how he explains Nix to his family.
The way I like to think about NICS to folks that are non-NICS initiated or maybe

(10:40):
not super technical is like veggie goulash.
So I have very mixed background in my heritage. So I had a great grandmother
from Poland, and she would make this amazing veggie goulash.
She sadly passed away a long time ago.
But the recipe lived on.
But everybody has these kinds of recipes that they kind of pass from person to person in the family.

(11:03):
It's ink on paper.
It tells you what ingredients you need it tells you how to put it in maybe it
tells you Fahrenheit or Celsius and you do the conversion yourself and at the
end of the day it never comes off as the same thing because recipes are not reproducible.
Here's a big but and how I like to think about Nick's I like to say hey mom,
imagine you had a magic cookbook,

(11:25):
imagine that magic cookbook was written by our great grandmother and again it
had all those recipes but when she wrote down two tomatoes one zucchini you
know little paprika or whatever it is that magic cookbook actually materialized,
that exact tomato that was grown in the exact soil with the exact acidity that

(11:46):
she had in her backyard or at the farmer's market and that showed up in your
kitchen when you were starting to cook that veggie goulash what.
Do you think,

(12:37):
And I think one of the insights and takeaways I had from Planet Nix this year
was what you just described is becoming more and more something that the software
industry is expected to provide to the enterprise.
The enterprise wants to know exactly what's in this.
They want to know if it complies with certain requirements.
And they want to be able to reproduce it and move it around every single time.

(13:00):
These tools, make sure you check all the regular system monitoring tools first,
because we'll see as a theme, like, you know, your H-tops and B-tops and all kinds of things.
Kind of get a broad look, and you can see some specifics.
Whereas you can make broad... And this is where Ron's chat with Kelsey Hightower came in.
Kelsey was on the show just a couple of weeks ago.
Kind of teasing what he talked about. Like one thing like disk latency or something

(13:22):
specific to the file system.
And he went in further detail about his discovery when he finally had a little
bit of time to read the Nix white paper.
Kind of what you think about Nix and maybe having kind of a frank conversation about it.
Yeah, I read the Knicks paper last year, and I was like, look at this,
in my view, this buried treasure.
And it feels like there was a fork in the road a couple of decades ago where

(13:46):
this problem was definitely apparent.
Back then, I was a big user of systems like Red Hat.
I started my career on FreeBSD.
And there was this situation of how do you get more than one thing on a system
without them overriding each other or fighting each other?
Then I spent the rest of my career putting one app per VM because no one solved
the problem 10 years later that just came to think you did then we got tools

(14:09):
like RVM in the Ruby community because your gem files would literally fight
with each other and you taught them to behave I also worked on tools like Virtual
N in the Python community,
and then Docker came out and I think Docker leaned into the reality was that
no one had solved this problem because every programming language also came

(14:30):
with their own package manager and ways of doing things.
And then Golang came out and it was like, forget libc altogether.
Build static binaries and we just skipped that entire step. And in many ways
it felt like Docker had won.
Not just because it figured out reproducible software.

(14:50):
So you can filter out a business system, but I think it's especially useful
on a system you think should be relatively quiet.
It's non-deterministic. people do all kind of weird things because the focus
went from operating systems to applications.
And Docker became the perfect format for people to get that done and distribute it to each other.
And so I read next paper after going through this whole journey.

(15:12):
It's like, where were you?
Two decades ago, when I was at that fork in the road.
Maybe we would have went in a different way.
And so a lot of my initial feedback has been.
This ain't usable for that.
When you show, it's like showing people Vim for the first time when all they know is Microsoft Word.
Yeah.
How do I get out of this thing?

(15:33):
I do. So a few years ago.
Why'd you turn off your computers? I was admin in the DPS box.
I wasn't totally in charge of it.
And I did that before, right? To get out of Vim, I had shame.
I just turned the whole thing off. Turned my computer back on.
I was like, I'm out of there.
I noticed some of the statistics first.
That felt sort of fair.
The metrics were a little long.
That felt like a fair analogy.
And I went on and I started just kind of doing regular updates and poking around

(15:53):
at the system. And I noticed that I wasn't able to actually update the data.
Now, you got to your point specifically around the bomb or the bill of materials
and how maybe Nix could improve software distribution even if we stuck with Docker.
And so the hands-on approach is like.
How could you make Docker better if you had something like Nix in the middle?

(16:13):
So if you've never used Docker before.
There's this Docker file. If you look at these Docker files.
It's like a big-ass bash script, the way most people do things, right?
So this was maybe closer to when I really started playing with these tools.
Download all the NPM modules just in case I need one.
And so they were already available.
And then you shipped this four-terabyte thing to servers. You like a repeatable software.

(16:37):
And then you spend half your time scanning, looking for vulnerabilities.
And then that led me to look at some weird file paths.
We're right back to where we were 20 years ago. And I also started, I did an exec snoop.
And that showed similar file paths running on them. They just packaged it in
another artifact this time.
And so people have worked on slinging technologies where.
You know, you try to start the app, look at the system calls.

(16:59):
Run an S-Trace, and figure out exactly what it needs.
You run it into production, and you find out you miss one. So we've been doing
a lot of reverse engineering, and I was like, what if we were able to do this differently?
So after the whole SolarWinds debacle.
There has been a rising interest in secure software supply chain.
And I think now people are open to a different approach. I think people are

(17:21):
a little tired of the brute force.
And so the premise of Nix is that we can be a little bit more exact.
So instead of generating an SBOM after you built the application through reverse engineering.
What if it could be way more explicit up front?
So that's been appealing to
me. So I've been looking at how do we take the current situation we're in.
Especially the one that's baked in containers.

(17:41):
And then can Nix add value to that scenario.
That seems like a pretty realistic goal.
Yeah, all kinds of stuff, file system-specific stuff. They've got things for,
you know, looking at network connections, TCP connections.
They've got stuff for monitoring databases. It's broad.

(18:10):
Definitely useful, yeah.
And of course, he was asked one spicy question.
And that was if you could only choose one.
Nix or Docker, which would you choose?
Like you mentioned Docker, obviously, Nix or Docker. You had to choose one. Right.
And the more, you know, depending on...
There's like a church of Nix out there.
See exactly where they're looking to modify the purpose. I have to say.
Kelsey was like, I'm super excited about talking. I'm like, I feel this is going

(18:34):
to be different. I'm like, hell yeah, that's going to be different.
It's a limited subset of C that does the BPS stuff.
If I had to choose one, I'm choosing Docker. And you would say, why would I do that?
But there's a bunch of Python utilities around it to wrap it.
Most people that are writing code, your whole number one objective is in the packaging.
Or to try to preserve specific things once you identify a particular problem or threat.
So if you're a developer, you look at all the things that you can ship to.

(18:56):
Heroku, Cloud Run, Lambda, IBM.
And then you got to work on a team of other people.
And the hardest thing I've seen in technology is to get global consensus.
We agree on something. ip addresses dns linux as a distribution that stuff takes
decades sometimes and so the docker ecosystem is rich why is it rich is it a

(19:20):
better packaging tool the next no do people know it yes,
that cute little well did something people identify with it so when you say
docker a lot of people understand what that means you're probably going to have
a docker file that move the needle in terms of at least knowing how to rebuild software.
There's still a lot of companies, maybe you work for some of them,

(19:42):
they pride themselves that only one person knows how to build certain software
on a specific laptop and no one
touches that laptop because it's the only thing that can build a thing.
And for a lot of people, Docker moved the needle for them. And the ecosystem's
rich. There's Docker registries, there's metadata, there's all of these things.
So if I had to choose only one, it would probably be Docker.

(20:04):
So what would you take away from that what makes docker work it's not one versus
the other it's just this usability curve,
it meets people where they are then shows them
what's next and i've been a part of a lot of technology movements that just
focused on here's the next thing it's like so what do i do now to go from where
i am to that and you're like i don't know man delete everything you have and

(20:26):
start the right way just doesn't work right but i'm hoping that the two can
find some synergies where it's pragmatic.
And I do think Nix inside of a Dockerfile for a lot of people will solve the
reproducible build problem without giving up the distribution and ease of use
for other platform problem.
And I think that's probably where you're going to get a lot of new people learning

(20:48):
about this technology for the first time. So when you see them, welcome them.
I think it was a good dose of reality to start the whole event,
right? That's the keynote. That's the, hey, here's your reality.
This is the state of the market.
Yeah, so there are tools that you can just run like we've been talking about,
but how did those tools come to be?

(21:09):
Well, that's where some of those abstractions and a framework comes in that
allows basically embedding C code directly within Python scripts.
And then BCC's tools also sort of handle. Okay, well, the first talk is done.
Kelsey Hightower and Ron had a great chat. You know, we're shifting things around
a little bit. I think it's sort of for there to be some scheduling issues.
It handles loading it into the kernel for you and attaching it to the right hooks.

(21:31):
Not too bad it started a little bit late really and it was a good chat i think
the room was pretty engaged lots of questions so the next thing that i'm looking
at is actually being hosted by an employee of anthropic the folks behind cloud,
onepassword.com.
Slash unplugged that's the number one then password slash unplugged all lowercase

(21:54):
go check it out this probably would have bought me another 10 years in it and
and this is how i So your end users always.
I mean, actually, literally.
Always, without exception, only work on company-owned devices and only use apps
that have been approved by IT.
He uses XTP. And so there's a simple C program that has a function called XTPDropAll.

(22:14):
I would love for that to be true. So the next obvious question is,
then how do you keep your company's data?
And so we get like a little data summary of the packet info,
which we're not going to care about.
All we're going to do is return XTPDrop, which is a magic value that tells the call.
Hey, just dropped this.
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(22:35):
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(22:57):
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and healthy, and every app is visible.
That's the power of 1Password. So go to 1Password.com slash unplugged.
Secure every app, device, and identity, even the unmanaged ones. Eat like contractors.

(23:19):
This would have changed the game for me. Go check it out. Support the show.
Go to 1Password.com slash unplugged.
It's all lowercase. They got a bunch of information up there.
It's a really great opportunity.
Check it out.
OnePassword.com.
I can't stop it, but I do have a sneaky console here.
What I really appreciated was Kelsey gave kind of the overall perspective of

(23:41):
how we should see the planet in Nix.
And then Anish, specifically from Anthropic, gave how to implement this.
Yeah, so like that wasn't that much work. This is just an Ubuntu 24-04 box.
I'm a proud digs user for almost a decade now since college.
My claim to fame is that I wrote the original implementation of Override Adders,
which we all use every day, back when it was four lines of code.

(24:02):
But for my career, I've been in the industry almost the same time,
and I've been really focused on developer experience and developer tooling.
Previously, I was at Lyft, leading their languages team for six and a half years.
And since about a year ago, I'm at Anthropic, which is an AI safety research company.
We make products like Claude, as well as we do AI safety research,
such as building a Claude. and have to worry about messing up my implementation

(24:24):
in a way that's going to crash the box.
And at Anthropic, I'm on the builds and deploys team.
I had high hopes for this talk because you know they got scale, right?
And they're solving problems that some of us have never even thought about.
And so in reality.
You want to do some sort of filtering. And he's kind of still new.
So he was coming in and discovering some of the issues they're having scaling.

(24:44):
Oh, is this one I want to block?
I got to Anthropic a year ago. They told me we use industry-centered tools.
Obviously a lot of Python.
Because it's an AI shop. we're using kubernetes and at the time the main point to show that.
Was that this bcc framework.
That image was 35 gigabytes large uncompressed tools but
normally when people talk about a large docker image they're talking like because
a couple hundred megabytes is big like a couple gigabytes is enormous and this

(25:06):
is basically another level like the closest thing to dtrace there's good reasons
for it if you don't want to use the email libraries will monomorphize their
kernels for different hardware architectures of accelerators you have researchers
adding things that they needed one time and maybe didn't remove since then um
there's good reasons for it um but,
There was also just some inefficiency in the build that hadn't been cleaned
up. When I got there, I pretty quickly cut out about 20% of it.

(25:29):
You basically get a nice targeted little scripting language to write tracing
programs that use the trace points.
We were seeing four-minute times to pull anything, which is really painful.
It's all meant that the rebuild times were almost an hour.
There are some other options.
There's a program called Ply
that I haven't tried, but it's also nice that BPF trace is quite popular.
We talked about XDP.

(25:51):
There's the Kprobe stuff. But a few months into my tenure, we had a new,
very high-priority initiative that require compiled software where people are
going to be changing this multiple times a day.
So you can do bpftrace-l or the BCC tools has TP list, which is also just a solid trace point.
It also shows you can do other users-based stuff, but we're not going to talk about that today.
We're going to talk about Nix Sidecar, which is a thing I built to address this,

(26:12):
and then we'll give some closing thoughts at the end.
We have the full link for the talk in the show notes with the time code.
And it's fascinating just when you realize the scale they're dealing with and
the limitations that they had to struggle with across, you know,
hundreds of thousands of servers.
So here's sort of like.
And he had to build some software to make it all work.

(26:32):
Dirty buffer. It tells you you get a dev device, you get a sector and a size.
And so, you know, those are the things you can work with. And then it has a
name and you just tell it that you want to trace that thing.
So this came up because, you know, we talked a little bit about BCC having file
system specific tools. Like, oh, I want to watch for slow operations from ButterFS, say.
Especially really competitive AI companies that you know are moving fast.

(26:54):
I suppose I should step up or someone should step up and add these,
but there isn't yet a BcacheFS version of these tools, right?
Obviously, probably what you want to do is just fork the existing ButterFS one
and modify it and make it work right for BcacheFS.
But if you want to be ad hoc about it, BPF Trace can handle this too.
So, I did tplist and then grepped that for things that said bcachefs.

(27:25):
So, here's just like a list of some of what the trace points look like.
I never knew that.
And so these would all be things that Kent or team have put in explicitly so

(27:46):
that there's a way to easily and with low overhead watch these things.
Right. And again, not an issue for me, but when you're talking hundreds of systems,
so you can't do certain tasks in parallel, it's a killer.
There's a lot of BPF terms. So here's one that stood out.

(28:08):
Copy GC, wait. and bcashfs is
a copy on write file system and it does this bucket based allocation and
so it has what's called a copying garbage collector so as
you're copying files it'll handle moving things around so
that it can then like get good bucket allocation and
defragment things on the fly that kind of thing so copy
gc wait is a trace point that tells you when

(28:30):
you're when bcashfs is waiting for copy gc
to complete so it can be a reason that your
file system is being slow or not responding especially if you're moving or copying
files around so you can see on your screen uh just a little tiny script yeah
sudo bpf trace dash e and then you pass it a little string and we tell it we

(28:51):
want to use the trace point bcash yeah they got in trouble i guess with aws just so much.
Bandwidth and that gives you an.
Idea of the scale when aws is knocking on the door saying hey
you're extracts you're using too much number from that
you don't have to do that and then all it does is print what device
we're waiting on and how much we're waiting yeah and
so it's you know i don't know 10 lines of code and you

(29:12):
get it and then
so on my system i'm just doing it on you know one rudifest disk so i knew which
disk it would be it was just kind of interesting to see like i went around and
i dd'd some big files and copied them around and i could see like oh yeah right

(29:33):
the operation completes and then immediately the print tells me that oh we waited that much.
So, like, it turns out that like this, there's actually probably a fair amount

(29:54):
of situations where single trace points just on their own might be something
you want to look at, right?
So other ones for BcacheFS, write buffer flush, that's an important event,
or journal writes, you might be wanting to know stuff about how the journal works.
But you can also use the scripting language and the fact that eBPF supports
basic data structures like maps and histograms to make more complicated combined programs.

(30:18):
So I had an LLM, I fed it the output of that TP list stuff that told it the
available trace points and what the structures looked like. So I knew how to
write the right code for it.
And BPF trace makes it easy to have stuff that runs at an interval, right?
So you can set up all the traces and then every five seconds it can print out

(30:38):
a little summary that it's done.
And so each time it traces it can update a variable and then it can calculate latencies or deltas.
So i made this is a quick one that it did that looks at that right buffer flush trace point,
and it samples it over every five seconds and then it tells you how many flushes happened,
how many buffers were flushed how many were skipped how many were fast path

(30:59):
flushes and then the total amount of data that was flushed so just like a quick
way to get you know an accurate little like every five second little printout,
it's one of the more performant ways to do it yeah.

(31:20):
So then to kind of further stress just how far this whole having an ai help me out would go,
uh i got i had an idea i did ultimately tone it back a bit but basically like
what if i wanted to monitor some of the mesh network traffic that was going
on there's a lot of options for that but can this do this too?
And so it built me a little script that you give it an interface and you bring

(31:41):
it all together and they're moving way faster.
And so the infrastructure goes from a bottleneck that's holding up the product
and product development in an incredibly competitive space to now facilitating
product rollout and product development and testing.
It's a massive shift. The IT infrastructure went from a holdup to a facilitator with these changes.

(32:03):
Yeah, right. And so the combination of the built-ins at eBPF and then the built-ins
into BPF trace, which has some of the stuff to do nice histogram display and
stuff from their print command.
It's, you know, this is a little bit longer. Some of it's kind of because there's
a print statement for each thing we're printing.
It's like five different things we're measuring, right? So it takes up some
space on the screen, but like it's a single page of code here.

(32:26):
So it's not crazy to start trying to understand it.
Another talk that we wanted to attend was the creator of Nix.
Elko Dostras had a bit of, I guess, an announcement and a demo to give on configurable
flakes. And he had our attention.
And so under the hood, it is tracing something called NetDev Start Transmit.
So I submitted this stock proposal
and it got accepted. So then I actually had to go and implement it.

(32:48):
It filters on interface name from that data.
But as proof that it actually works. I mean, I should say this is very work
in progress. and there are a lot of rough edges and certainly the design needs
to be figured out completely.
And then it also does a trace point for SID packets with NetDev transmit.

(33:08):
And then it grabs the start time if it exists for its thread identity.
And then it can compute how long it took to send from that. And then that's
where it can use the histogram stuff to print out a nice little thing now that it's tracking latency.
And then it has another trace point to use NetDev received and flags to them on the comment line.

(33:29):
And now you can. So here I have a little flake.
Explain this to me, Wes, why this is a significant development.
The fact that you can now pass arguments to a flake and whatnot.
Now it does mean, right, like you can't use it if you don't have trace points you care about.
And so you have to start understanding some kernel internals and like what trace

(33:52):
points might matter and what they mean.
But if you have a specific problem, or a mystery on your system that you're
trying to look into and you're willing to try to chase down hypotheses using
these tools, I think you could get pretty far. That's for sure.

(34:15):
Yeah, a lot of them.

(34:38):
There's also user space tracing you can do. So if you set it up right,
you can trace like JVM events or Ruby things or Python stuff.
And so you have products now too that'll use things like open telemetry or other tracing standards.
And you can have a trace then that can have both the kernel side via the eppf
stuff and the user space stuff without necessarily having to do as much custom

(35:00):
observability implementation in the code base because they can kind of do more dynamic.
And you might be able to then see stuff right where like oh there was a problem
on the kernel layer and then that's why we started seeing increased latency
in the application layer,
and but you don't know you can use that there's a lot of open source products
or open core things and there's just a lot of sort of primitives in one layer

(35:23):
above primitives that are probably already on the kernel I.
Don't think it's intended to be this it has to go this way but it's presented as,
I got the sense we're going to try this. This is an idea. This is our approach.
If this works, maybe people want to adopt it. Maybe something else will work.

(35:44):
But to me, it was just interesting to see this, like you said,
answer this kind of original complaint. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, it's been around for long enough now that it's well packaged in most distros.

(36:08):
Well maybe we can add a trace point to firefox to keep track at least yeah,

(36:30):
hey i just got set up with them and it was in fact very easy.
That's fantastic yeah yeah i love that,

(36:52):
oh boy,
sure the configuration uh-huh,

(37:15):
but use the flake for other right you get a great message a little display,
yeah that's what i'm thinking,

(38:01):
Oh, that's nice. Okay.
Mm-hmm.
Oh, hoo.

(38:37):
We have the full talk with the time code because they're like eight-hour streams.
We have the time code linked in the show notes.
And if this fascinates you, it's worth it to just look at the demo that Elko
gives. Yeah, he kind of...
Day one, we packed a lot in.

(38:58):
It is officially the end of day one of planet nix in fact we just got done visiting
the flocks after party dinner and i think one thing really stood out to everybody
we talked to they're super excited this is happening almost to the point where
they had a hard time absorbing day one.
Yeah i think so we were trying to pry out some details right like what are you

(39:21):
most excited for what were the things that like you know really got you keyed
up cool i think everyone was just I love success stories like this.
Vibin' hard on Nick's murdery.
So it's hard to soak it all in.
And you had to have a little pizza and maybe a beer or something.
Something to drink to, you know, relax and... Sink into it. Yeah,
exactly. Figure out what your next flake you're going to make is.

(39:41):
I think, too, it was like just the final chance, everybody finally getting the
chance to talk to someone else about something that they're interested and excited
about that is Nick's, right? because usually a lot of the people here are the
only person in the room that knows Nix.
And so even when they're at work, they don't really get to share in that.
And here, everybody knows the language and they get to talk about it,

(40:02):
much like it was when I went to the early Linux Fest.
Yeah, right. You don't have to assume like, oh, you've got the NT experience.
You don't have to explain what Linux is. And here, you don't have to explain
what Nix is or compare it and make a bunch of bad analogies to other tools.
I also really like seeing a lot of the folks who gave talks today were here tonight.

(40:23):
And you could tell that maybe the question that you have or have a question,
have a comment or like conversation starter that doesn't make sense to ask in
a room full of hundreds of people might make sense to ask while you're both having a bite to eat.
And you could see those kinds of connections or different folks working in different
companies all using necks in different ways, sharing tips and tricks.

(40:45):
Yeah, and that's what's great is you just get right to the problem-solving yeah
What do you do? Oh, yeah? Oh you solve this?
Oh, how'd you do that? And that's that's every conversation at dinner. It's pretty great.
Hopefully day two is also just as great.
So you've wanted to get in on the boosting fun, or maybe even stack some sats,

(41:05):
but you know there's a lot of crap, grift and scams in crypto,
so you've just avoided the whole thing. Your instincts are right.
99% of all of it is just crap. There's a term for it, but since we're in polite company, I won't use it.
So let me tell you how I do it, the services and systems I use.

(41:26):
I've been following this industry since before.
It was an industry about 14 years. and I've really landed on just a couple of really safe paths.
The number one thing you need to look out for is Bitcoin only.
Wherever you're getting your sats, Bitcoin only. Don't mess with anything else.
If you think about it from just a technology platform.
Every stupid crypto is its own platform.

(41:47):
It needs its own nodes and its own software kit, everything.
So the more coins you support, the more just vulnerability surface area you
have, complexity you have, orchestration you have. Just go with Bitcoin only.
It's deep enough and complex enough that a company should focus on it.
And that's why I like River.
JupiterBroadcasting.com slash River is our link. That'll get you some sats and us some sats.

(42:11):
What I like about them is they are U.S., Bitcoin only, proof of reserves.
They have zero-fee recurring buys. They have free automatic withdrawal self-custody.
They give you all the tax information you need. They support Lightning.
And they have a bunch of great security features and they have a 3.8% Bitcoin interest on cash.

(42:32):
And it's a great way to safely buy sats and then send them to a lightning wall.
That's river at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash river.
If you're in Canada, I think the Bitcoin well is fantastic.
I've met with these companies. I have used these companies.
I am a customer of these companies and I have sat on video calls and had them
answer all of my questions.

(42:53):
Bitcoin well.com slash Jupiter. This is great in Canada and in the US.
They're really slick because they do custody first. Everything is self custody.
They never even hold your book. It doesn't fit every activity.
So it's sort of a general use in spring of time.
You buy it and it goes to your wallet or your Lightning wallet.
That's really slick. And it's great for a self custody setup.
And when you think about some of the properties of Bitcoin, the self hosting

(43:14):
and self custody is one of the most powerful aspects.
That's Bitcoin well.com slash Jupiter.
If you're outside the U.S. and Canada, if you can, I would use Strike,
another Bitcoin-only company, really solid infrastructure, run by great people.
I've got a dual monitor set up in the sort of main office.
Strike is an app, and it's available in 110 countries.
Just a single.
You buy the stats, and they're on the Lightning Network, and you send them over

(43:36):
to a podcasting app or your own wallet.
Sort of desk.
This is not a paid spot.
I'm just trying to make it clear to you how I do it. That's for the casual work
where I want to do stuff but with the TV on.
You know, sometimes there are very attractive looking companies out there,
like things like Coinbase that really try to lure you in or Crypto.com. Don't use those.
You're never going to hear me plug those or mention those on the show.

(43:58):
It's River at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash River. It's Bitcoinwell,
bitcoinwell.com slash Jupiter, or it's the Strike app.
I have no affiliate link for them, but I still recommend them.
And I just want to give you that tip because if you want to get it on the boosting
and support the show, those are safe, easy, cheap ways to do it.

(44:18):
I think probably strike is the cheapest of the batch and then river and then Bitcoin will.
That's my hot tip. Thanks for listening to my PSA.
Well, day two went pretty quickly, but we did get a recap from the night before.
Here we go. It's day two of Planet Nix, and the vibe is a little more serious.

(44:38):
It's a little more focused. It's a little bit more let's get things done.
In fact, just in our walk-in, we're hearing people that are here with their
laptops, and they're ready to take the plunge.
But I think some of us perhaps stayed up a little too late watching Star Trek.
Too late? I mean, isn't that tradition? Wes and I stay up later than everyone
else, and then we have our, like, moments together. there.

(44:59):
But Wes, you seem to be doing all right. Maybe you paced yourself?
I did. Yeah. I think, you know, I only had one or two beers,
had some pizza last night.
So, uh, and despite yesterday's enterprise being on, we managed to go to bed before midnight.
It is a great episode. It is a great episode. And then I woke up in the morning
before you boys and it was paused and I finished the episode.

(45:21):
We wrote down our time.
I do think that'll be in one of my future.
Oh, good. You You should. You should finish that one. So we're going to do the first talk.
One of the things we'll be doing in the first talk of the day is we'll be saying
hello to the crowd, introducing the podcast.
And then it's talk after talk. And we're going to try to cram in a few interviews.
This one's a busy one. What if I want a chain display together?
We are not famous people. We are not celebrities of any kind,

(45:44):
except for when we go to Nix events and Linux events.
So I had a chance to introduce the team to the crowd. But most of us,
I think probably most of them are probably familiar with this and we're listening
to the shows already. So hello, everybody.
Um, and one of the folks that we wanted to grab was Ross from Phlox because,
well, we always enjoy chatting with him just even off air, but he had a great

(46:05):
analogy in one of these sidebar conversations. And I was like,
you know what, boys, we got to go back and get that on mic.
Returning to the show at Planet Nix. Ross, thank you for joining me.
Thanks for having me. I have just like a couple of questions for you.
Number one is you gave me a great analogy yesterday, and I'm wondering if you
could repeat it for the audience now that we have a microphone.

(46:26):
And it was the selling seats to people that are already sitting down. Oh, yeah.
We're trying to figure out in the Phlox and Nix ecosystem what that barrier to entry is.
And more often than not, what I'm finding is that people are just like,
it's not the right moment.
And you're like, no, hey, we have this amazing thing for you.
It's going to change the way you do everything. And they're like,
I don't want to change the way I do everything right now.

(46:48):
And I've started to realize that what we're doing is we're selling chairs.
We're selling really comfortable chairs. And it's like, it's got a cup holder
and it's got a back pillow and it's got a seatbelt to keep you safe and a heater
and an air conditioner and all these things. And that's what we're selling.
And people are like, nah, I already stuffed this pillow behind here and I bungee
corded my drink to the side and I'm good.
I'm good. Don't bother me right now. I'm already sitting down.

(47:09):
I'm already sitting down. Exactly.
And we're like, no, but this chair is amazing. And they're like,
you know what? Catch me on the way back from the bathroom.
Yeah, you're right.
That's good. Maybe I'll try it then. Maybe I'll try it then.
Maybe I'll stand up and you'll get a moment there and I'll sit down in your
new chair and I'll probably find something that I don't quite love about it
because I'd already figured out my old chair.
Yeah. You know? Yeah. And that's when somebody's already comfortable. It's a tough sell.
It is. It is. And especially when you're doing something really disruptive like Nix.

(47:33):
Yeah. You're saying, I'm going to change the way you deal with all your software.
Right. I mean, that's not a tiny thing to ask somebody to do.
That's a huge thing to ask somebody to do. And so you have to be really clear
about what are the benefits.
What are the reasons.
What's driving you over that hill.
And that means it is broadly used, too.
What is filling your bladder enough to make you stand up and go and then come

(47:55):
back and sit down in a different chair? That's great.
Okay, so then something else that I noticed is yesterday you had, which is day one.
As we record, you had to talk about Nix in the Wild. Yes.
And so I sent you an example.
I guess I didn't really understand this last time.
You actually have people doing surveys of actual customers, asking them questions
of how it's going. You're actually collecting data of Nix in the wild.

(48:17):
Well, you might say it like that. I would say we collect stories.
So this is an interview process. Kind of probably similar to what you do a lot
is we'll find somebody who's using Nix in the wild, and we'll say,
are you willing to tell us your story?
We invite them onto a call with us. They talk for 45 minutes.
We ask them basic questions.
What are you using it for? How did you find it?
What is your process?

(48:38):
And all these things. And under that, there's rules.
And then we write an article.
What I want to do in the future is even more than that.
I want to have more data in these articles. I want to have more code snippets
in these articles and more guidance, more quotations.
And then I'd love to do some analysis. We have maybe eight or nine of them now.
But when we have like 30.
We can start to do some pattern matching. The things we've already figured out
are really interesting.

(49:00):
We figured out that generally Nix happens in a nucleus at a company and starts growing from there.
We found that generally it's not the first thing people choose.
They see it, and they go, oh, that sounds like exactly what I want,
but I am not willing to confront that yet.
And then they go and they try a few other things.
They attempt to circumnavigate the problem in 10 different ways,
and then they come back and go, all right, take a deep breath.

(49:21):
Let's climb this mountain.
And so we find that that's a pattern that's interesting.
But, you know, you can do specific reports that you want to watch.
You can do specific IPs, host names, TCP states.
I guess what I thought was interesting, though, is you're probably getting stories
after story of how people are solving problems with Nix. And I think one of
the things that I'm discovering this year in particular is a lot of people here

(49:42):
are a little bit more willing to talk about how they're using Nix in production.
And there hasn't been a lot of that. So I love the idea of publicly sharing these stories.
Maybe there's something you're trying to hunt for. You find it here,
and then you can go do the TCP dump to capture the traffic.
People are solving it. And even maybe some of the code they use to fix those
problems. That could really help people just solve the same issue.
Absolutely. I mean, if you look at the Nix community this year versus last year,

(50:02):
it's notably different.
Well, you kind of hinted at this a bit.
The level of conversations one higher. The things that people are asking about.
The things that people are trying to solve, are one level more sophisticated. We're starting to see.
I think, people having real production use cases. I agree. People who've gotten
to day 1000, and they're like, okay, here's the day 1000 experience.

(50:25):
And it's not what I thought it was gonna be.
More vibrant and more interesting and more challenging, but also more valuable.
Yeah, and you're not hearing people say, we got to this point,
and now we're sick of it, we're bailing.
What you're hearing is, we're going to continue to use it, we're going to go even further.
Yeah, they're like, we're waist deep, we're in it. Thank you, Ross.
So think of all those things like CYSTL.
Well, we always love chatting with Ross and getting an update every year.

(50:47):
But we also got to see one of our favorite listeners, Olympia Mike,
was there taking in the Nix, but also showcasing one of his newest Nix projects.
Man, this is wild, right? If you think about, I was thinking about this in the room.
We went from the summer of immutability, and I was like, what are these guys
talking about, this Nix thing?

(51:07):
And now we're sitting here, what, two, three years later, at Planet Nix,
you know, which is just wild. Are you blaming us for your trajectory?
Yeah, 100%. Okay, got it. I think I had a slide dedicated to blaming you guys
for my discovery of NixOS.
So what are you doing with NixOS these days? So, oh, boy.
Well, I'm doing a bunch of stuff. So I just got done finishing my talk on building

(51:29):
a Chromebook replacement with NixOS.
Yeah, and they kind of make the case here too.
I almost named it NixOS for your mom. You know, because the idea is like setting
up NixOS for a general user, basic user use. But like NixOS for your mom.
I'm not going to hand-tune all your dynamic web workers.
So you decided on a different name? Yeah.
So basically, you know.

(51:49):
People that want a Chromebook-like experience, but without the creepy Google
stuff, right? They just want it to be automatic. They just want everything to work.
They want everything to be one-click install.
And so, yeah, that's why I've built that with NixOS and I've been deploying
it out there in the real world for friends, family, and local people.
And yeah, so I give a talk on how I did that and hopefully get more eyes on the project.

(52:11):
Tell us a little bit more about why you built this, because it sounds like you
have a project in which you're giving back to the community,
and that was kind of the thrust to use Nix to make your job a little easier. Yeah, absolutely.
So if you were to look at a heat map of Linux users, there's probably a giant
red spot in Olympia, Washington.
And that's because for the past five years, I've been getting donation computers

(52:34):
from people, people that are just, I have this old laptop sitting in my closet,
don't know what to do with it, and they give it to me.
And I've even buddied up with school districts and companies that are getting rid of old hardware.
And so they know that I'm a safe place to bring it because I securely wipe everything
before anything goes out.

(52:54):
And some people want data off their drives or whatever.
So what I do is I take these machines and I Linux them up and donate them back out to the community.
And what I was doing was doing Linux Mint because Linux Mint is,
you know, love it or hate it, it is definitely the most friendly environment

(53:15):
and UI for somebody coming from Windows.
And overall that worked great, but I noticed there were some issues with Linux
Mint, people not doing updates, a little package confusion stuff.
And so what I thought was, what if I built this in Nix and was able to like
rebuild Linux Mint, you know, in Nix with all the upgrades that I wanted to do. And I did.

(53:38):
You said you basically built your own distribution, but I would imagine Nix
enabled you to do that in a way that you would have never considered doing without it. Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, yeah. Linux from scratch or even, you know, back in the day,
before I discovered Nix, how I did this was basically like Arch.
Shell scripts like install arch and then run this script sounds scary

(53:59):
already it sounds scary already yeah yeah sure enough and yeah it never bit
me sure i'm lying yeah it sounds like a little bit of pain points but also just
you mentioned you're now taking care of 400 to 500 laptop yeah so i have uh
there's probably four at least four to five hundred of these i call them nix books,
out there in the world and uh and and many of them are in my house as well so

(54:22):
i have my kids My parents, they're all using Nixbook.
And it's just, it's fantastic.
It really is that perfect zero maintenance.
Open it up and it just works. All the updates are done for you.
You just never need to worry about anything.
And it's just that all the guarantees and the security that you get with Nix
for a general user. I mean, it kind of is perfect.

(54:47):
It was great to see Olympia Mike. He had a great talk. and we wanted to wrap
it up with Ron, who we started this adventure with Ron, who is co-founder of
Phlox and of course the chair of the NixOS Foundation.
And we wanted to check in with him a day after things just to see how it had gone for him.
And now that he's just attending regular old scale, what's it been like just

(55:09):
with the average folks who are coming for a general Linux convention?
How do you feel the first Planet Nix went? I mean, I think it was incredible.
Yeah. I can only speak for myself for just the energy in the
room but seeing over 300 people standing room
only on two tracks yeah workshops talks
all that i think that was incredible you know what i noticed and i
wonder if you picked up on this is it felt like both in

(55:32):
terms of talks and in terms of attendees people were talking about how they
use nyx at work more out in the open like we're using it here we're replacing
this with nyx did you see more of that did you hear more of that this year i
100 did and And I think that was the thing when we intentionally really tried
to communicate with Planet Nix.
It's going to be a bit different. It's going to be a bit more Nix beginners, Nix at work doing that.

(55:56):
And I think it was received so well that that's kind of the ecosystem that showed up here, right?
We have a good mix of advanced contributors, but also a good mix of folks that
finally felt really comfortable being able to talk about, hey,
I just want to bring it in. I'm not an expert. What do I do?
And I love those conversations. Yeah, because you walk away with like real solutions.

(56:17):
Like, oh, that's how you fix that. Like there's been a couple of conversations.
Where people just had breakthroughs. Like, oh, that's how you're doing that?
Oh, what a brilliant idea. Because there's always a lot of ways to solve problems.
Exactly, exactly. And I think it's, look, I mean, think about it.
We're a pretty tight-knit community. We're a pretty extreme technical community.
It must be, and it probably is, kind of scary to come in and say,

(56:39):
hey, how do I do this thing for a commercial reason, right? open source,
commercial, that already has a little bit of friction.
So when you're like, all I want it to do is to solve a problem.
Apple, at Anthropic, at, you know, take name of presenter that attended this year.
I think it's kind of scary, and I'm really happy to see that folks were talking about it.

(57:00):
I think it means that we kind of removed the barriers a bit and opened our arms
a bit wider for folks like that.
So putting your Phlox hat on, we're standing right here at the Phlox booth in
the scale side of the event in the Expo Hall.
What's the average scale attendee interest been in Phlox and the solving problems
that Phlox solves? I mean, I think we're seeing the transition,

(57:21):
right? We're seeing kind of that.
We were here two years ago, actually at a Nix booth, right? Because we hosted
the first Nix booth ever at scale two years ago.
And folks were coming by and being like, what's Nix?
Now, folks are coming by and being like, oh, you're that, are you that thing
that bridges all the gaps that I currently have with containers?
And they're coming to us with a, hey, I want to, I've started to use this instead

(57:44):
of homebrew, or I've, you know, this has improved my life over here.
So that's a really amazing feeling, right?
You're kind of, folks are starting to that discovery phase and the excitement
phase, both about Nix and about Phlox.
And I'm seeing a lot of scale attendees who are not specifically from the Nix
ecosystem come up, recognize, mention already being, you know,

(58:06):
looking into it, which is always a more lovely deep conversation.
It's such a great opportunity because the conversations are so high bandwidth.
So you just get so much more context.
You know, that's something that I really appreciated about us being here is
I feel like we just understand a lot more about what people are working on and
what's really kind of on front of people's mind right now and what they're thinking of.
Like there's just the bandwidth you get in these conversations.

(58:28):
It's so much richer than the online communications. I almost wish we could do it more than once a year.
I do too. I think that would be lovely. I mean, the fact that we can,
you know, user, a person, an attendee shows up and it's like, here's my problems.
Show me how you solve them for me. And what we do
is like crack open a laptop and you know
the person leaves with like a holy cow i think i think i got this licked i can

(58:52):
i can solve this yes yeah yeah it's hard to get not in person not face to face
and yeah and that's incredible well ron thank you thank you for bringing us
down here and thanks for putting on a great event we really enjoyed it we're
gonna do it again next year with you guys so i'm excited all right.
I hope so you know because before we went down i was like oh is it worth it
you know we could probably do a lot of this just remotely but man is it so worth

(59:13):
it just things to figure out the context you get the insights all of that is
just is really super worth it and you agree,

(59:40):
Brent, I wonder if you noticed this too, but it feels like there is an ecosystem
assembling here with different vendors providing solutions built on top of Nix.
That's been kind of fascinating to watch too.
Yeah, it seemed really exciting that the ecosystem is maturing,
even from what we saw last year.
And Chris, you mentioned this quickly, that it seems like the corporate world

(01:00:00):
is now okay to share what they're doing with Nix.
And we heard sort of in the hush hush that there's a lot of businesses who are
household names, really,
that are using Nix and maybe aren't willing to talk about it right now,
but are being sort of convinced to talk about all the really neat things they're
doing with Nix and NixOS.
So I thought, at least from a perspective of going from last year to this year

(01:00:25):
and seeing where that trend is going, I think we're in for a good time here.
Now you heard some of our biggest takeaways from Planet Nix.
We, of course, have so many more, and it's a treat if you're in person to grab
those, but we also have a little treat from our community.
So the first one was we had a little invitation by System76,

(01:00:46):
longtime friends of the show, to do a little laser tag.
And this was not planned. They just invited us last minute.
And Chris, were you up for this at first?
I mean, I was in full Let's Watch MacGyver mode.
So, you know, you think about it. You start your day 7 a.m.-ish,
which means you're really up 5.30.

(01:01:07):
And, you know, you're eating breakfast and you're getting out the door at 7
a.m. And so to get through this, plus all of the, you know, walking around all
day long and doing interviews, I thought, well, what we'll do is we'll have a super chill evening.
We'll get like some sandwiches and we'll watch the first episode of MacGyver.
And to make this possible, we were trying streaming, but the Airbnb connection was a bit spotty.

(01:01:32):
So Wes facilitated by quickly standing up a local jellyfin instance.
I agree. I think lesson learned. And Wes, being a long-time,
perhaps lifetime MacGyver fan, of course had the means and necessary access
to get us the MacGyver files.
So we had ourselves a night planned. And I was pretty committed to this idea.

(01:01:55):
You might say it's what carried me through the day, perhaps.
It was my shining star, my light at the end of the tunnel, to get through the hard day.
And we, no joke, we get home and we start talking about dinner.
And, you know, Wes has got the laptop running and we get a text message from Emma from System76.
And she's like, guys, you got to come out. You got to play laser tag with us.

(01:02:17):
And I'm like, no way, not going to happen.
We just are about to get our lazy on. And then like the next message from Emma
is like, tell Chris it'll be a lot of fun and he should do it.
She knew I was going to say something.
Yeah, yeah. So we're like, all right, let's do this. So we pile up in the rental

(01:02:37):
car that we had and we set off to the laser tag place.
Ironically, we beat them there because they were delayed by an ambulance.
So we started warming up by playing some air hockey, you know,
and I had surprisingly good luck at the air hockey for some reason.
I don't know what my deal was with that. That was about the extent of my luck for the night.
Then the System 76 crew showed up and Carl and team, most of the team were there,

(01:02:59):
no part of the team. And we were kind of concerned because they play laser tag
on the regular at this massive facility in Denver.
I had never played until this moment.
Neither did I. And my wife, Hadiyah, who was with us, had never played.
So we were total beginners going up against a crew that plays on the regular.

(01:03:22):
And it showed in our first round. We didn't do great in our first round.
And you could tell the System 76 crew thought they had us.
They were feeling pretty, pretty good.
And I'll be honest, I was a little nervous. But what I realized as the games
progressed is the boys just needed to get their laser feet at first.
And once the preceding games got on, I discovered that my two co-hosts are absolute

(01:03:48):
psychopath killers that not only can work as a team, as one killer brain,
but also work independently.
And they're absolute murderers. And I'll tell you, quite honestly, audience,
before we went into this trip, I figured, you know, in a hypothetical situation
where we're all walking around packing heat and we got into some sort of,
like, Old West gun showdown, I thought I'd be the one there,
you know, crouching down in a car shooting while the boys, you know,

(01:04:10):
went and got help or something.
No disparagement, man. But I didn't figure you'd be the ones that would be doing
the killing. I thought that duty would fall upon me.
Of course, I've thought of this. However, now that we've played laser tag,
I realized I'll be the one running for help and you two will be the one doing the murder.
And I'm totally safe. You got my back. I was surprised.
And ultimately, it meant that our team came out victorious.

(01:04:32):
And we beat the seasoned laser tag System 76 crew.
You know, going into this, System76 made some big promises to try to lure us
out. What was some of them?
I do believe some launch keyboards were promised, right?
They were for the top performers. And, well, Wes was the number one top performer

(01:04:53):
across all rounds that we played. And your dear Brent was number two.
Killer. I just like laser. And shooting people, apparently.
And turns out I placed number two.
Yeah, yeah.
And the other thing they suggested was the loser would show up on someone's

(01:05:14):
podcast and admit that they had lost.
I don't see them in the mumble room. Do you see them in the mumble room?
I don't think they're here today.
That's okay. They're probably still hurting from their loss.
They're thinking, how did those lazy podcasters beat us, us Denver hikers?
That's probably what they're thinking. Everybody hikes in Denver, right?
I think so. It was a lot of fun. And we really enjoyed our time seeing them.

(01:05:37):
They also made it to our meetup, which was a blowout success.
Thank you, everybody. We had well over 100 people make it.
We told the restaurant there would be 40, and there was a bit more than that.
And so they quickly opened up
another wing for us, and we had an overflow room, and it was really nice.

(01:05:58):
Anish from Anthropic made it. Carl from System76. Noah from the Ask Noah program.
Of course, Alex from Self-Hosted made it.
Olympia Mike was there. Cessna Mike was there.
Yep. Yep. Hell 9000. Yeah, yeah, I got to meet Hell 9000. It was really great
to put some names to faces. Those meetups are always really good for that.

(01:06:18):
And they said, we're welcome back. Even though we blew it out, they said, don't worry.
Don't worry. We'll make it work for you next time. So maybe we'll do it there
again. They were super accommodating, even though we way, way overwhelmed them.
But we had so much fun. And it went on for hours. And then the next morning,
we had, you know, conference hard, right? And we've covered all of that.
But because we're pros at this now, we had scheduled ourselves a little bit of downtime.

(01:06:44):
So that way we could enjoy the fact that we were in Pasadena,
California, while the weather's nice.
But what do you do? What do you do with your free time? You got your boys there,
but everywhere you go, it's traffic.
And the tourist thing would be to go to the beach.
And our first thought was, well, maybe we could just do something to torture
PJ, you know, take him to some really touristy thing he hates.

(01:07:09):
Yeah. But, you know, we threw a couple ideas at him to just kind of see how
he'd respond. And he was like, cool with everything.
He's like everything. He just he just rolled with the punches.
So that wasn't going to work.
But since now Jeff, myself, and my wife were all awake, but you boys were still
sleeping, well, I have to be honest, we started scheming.

(01:08:06):
That's right. We loaded Brent up into the car, Brent and Wes,
and only kind of hinted what we were doing.
And out of all the things that were available to us, Jeff's mom's house was
pretty close to our location.
So we thought, let's go down there. We know that Jeff's had this van parked
there that he's been trying to get Brent to buy for ages, but we don't truly know the state of it.

(01:08:28):
We think it's in good condition, but it'd be really good to get our eyes on
it. And then, hey, wouldn't it be fun if we just for a couple of hours tried
to get this bus, which is a van, parked there for six years,
if we could get this thing running again? Wouldn't that just be a fun adventure?
And sure enough, as we're pulling up, we're like, hey, Brent,
look at this van. Brent, check this van out.

(01:08:52):
I was so clueless at that point. Because I, you know, how this typically goes
when we get together is we just have some free time.
Someone makes some crazy decision about where we go.
And then I just, I don't know, Wes, you and I are pretty agreeable.
We just tag along for whatever crazy adventure is going to happen.
And I had zero until the moment we pulled up to this thing. Zero idea this is what we were going to do.

(01:09:13):
And then it all just hit me. Hole lay. This is the van that Jeff's been sending
me photos about for the last two years, trying to convince me to take this thing
off his grandfather's hands out of the driveway.
And this, I mean, Chris, this is your fault. I'm completely blaming you because
for years now you've been saying, hey, Brent, you know what you should do?

(01:09:34):
I can't do it because I got kids and a big, huge rake, but I'm going to live
vicariously through you.
And you should buy this little, I don't know, a van or some kind of camper of
some sort and just tour around the continent just on your own time.
And so this has been years in the making. You've been razzing me about this.
And like some of the first bang bus songs are just like continuing that trend

(01:09:54):
of just convincing Brent he should live a different lifestyle.
And sure enough, when we pulled up, it was like, oh, it's on. It is on.
Yeah, what we saw was a 1990s Dodge B250 camper van built in Canada and modified
into a camper van in Canada, interestingly enough.

(01:10:14):
And it had been sitting, so it's rusted, but it had real potential.
And we are kind of like the Avengers team.
We came together. Wes did the audio recording.
Brent and I started going through the RV features of the van.
And we kind of quickly came to realization that, you know, it wouldn't be too
hard to see if this thing's functional.
And so PJ came in clutch because we needed a little electrical work.

(01:10:37):
Since the thing had sat for five or six years, the battery was beyond dead.
We couldn't jump it. We couldn't charge it.
But we needed to know if the motor turned. And so Jeff breaks out the old drone battery.
I mean, I'm talking like something that fits in the palm of your hand and starts wiring it up to the van.
This is what we've been waiting for. What do you want to do,
Wanda? Bubble, bubble, worries. Go ahead. Okay, turning on. Do it.

(01:10:59):
Crank it. That's way more power. Crank it.
There we go, it's smoking, but we got it. Yeah. Okay, kill it,
Brent, kill it. We're good.
So I think we're looking, it's dead now, Brent. I think we're looking at a voltage
issue. Yeah, it's battery, battery's dead. But it turned, though. Yeah.
Yeah, so the starters not get enough power. That's cool. That's cool.
It's already warm. Just a little bit. Dude, it was smoking, yeah.
Well, that's the wire that, yeah.

(01:11:21):
That's all we needed to really find out for sure. Thank you.
Yeah, that's great. That's good news. So the starter's in perfect condition
if we can get enough voltage to it.
So we could run to one of the auto stores and pick up a battery.
And we did just that. Because the thing is, it was like in pristine condition
under the hood. The oil, it was just changed before it was parked.

(01:11:46):
Brand new transmission fluid. Brand new transmission fluid in there.
And so we knew it now would turn.
And I think PJ was like, oh, we could just call it good there.
And I'm like, now that we know, let's go get a battery. And so sure enough, we load up in the rental.
We go get ourselves a $180 California battery because this thing's big old V8
with a starter that just requires a ridiculous amount of power.

(01:12:09):
And we put a little bit of starter juice right down into the mouth of the engine,
right into the carburetor, so that way it's got some fresh juice to start with.
And we roll the dice to see if it starts.
What do I need? We're going to crank it. You ready? Yeah, crank it.
What do you need me for? I'm just letting you know.
It's good. Are you ready, Brent? A bit airy in here, Mike. Fuck up.

(01:12:33):
Yeah, you're gonna get a lot of dirt. If it turns, it's gonna blow a lot.
The doghouse is open inside, so it's right at Brent's legs. Like,
right at his knees. We can put it back on. Are we ready? Yeah, we're ready.
Here we go. Sounds good.
Yes! Yes!

(01:12:55):
Give him some gas, but give him a little gas. Yeah!
Yeah, keep it going because we're going to start getting the shit gas now.
Yeah, it's good. It's good. Breathing.
Woohoo!
I did get a little dirty because it blew all over me because,
like, the engine's in the cab, which makes no sense to me. Yeah,

(01:13:18):
well, that's why it's got a doghouse.
It's sweet. You can just touch it while you're driving down the road.
Well, yeah, you got to go to the duct and everything.
You want to go okay we're starting to get a little belt squeak but not bad yeah
well yeah right like i mean star
trek they got an engine room you just got your engine room in your cab.
Yeah right there in the cockpit it's actually pretty handy so the whole story

(01:13:40):
is in this week's episode of the launch and there's a lot more to it weekly
launch.rocks brent joins angela and i and we go into the full story but long
story short because it ran so good and it can it actually smoothed out as it continued to run,
and the engine only has 60,000 miles on it, Brent decided to pull the trigger and pick it up.

(01:14:01):
So, uh, now we have to actually get back down there and get the thing on the road.
Tires are in rough shape. So it's going to need new tires.
You know, it's, it's probably going to get about somewhere between 10 and 15 miles per gallon.
It's got to get, you know, title and licensed. It's got a few repairs.
Brent's going to have some woodwork to do, but the bones are in really good shape, Brentley.

(01:14:22):
This is crazy. This is not what I had on my list.
You know my agenda for going to scale planet nix and like hanging out with you guys,
i didn't expect to come back with like a new lifestyle
and a new set of wheels but i gotta
say that was super fun to work on this thing with you guys we
had a great time uh wes thank you for sneaky grabbing a bunch of audio it's

(01:14:46):
reliving that moment when it just first started up is like yeah that's gonna
stick with me for a while but chris you and i have well i think a big project
coming up where we're going to head back down and really get this thing going,
put new tires on it and make sure it actually rolls because we didn't actually
get the chance to try that part of it and somehow get this thing back up to Canada.

(01:15:10):
And Jeff's going to join us too. So early May, is that what we decided?
May 1st, I booked the trip and we're going to fly down to LAX.
And then with Jeff's help, we're going to get back to his mom's house.
And we're going to try to get this thing on the road as fast and feasible as
possible and we're going to be doing shows, we're going to be doing LUP and
other shows from the road, from the van,

(01:15:34):
which is going to be interesting because the interior needs some work It may or may not work out.
We're going to find a.
Well, and you, you know, you get it. Basically, if the bones are in good shape,
the other stuff we can figure out.
So our thinking is if we can get it from L.A.
To Sacramento, where we'll have Jeff chasing us, then it's likely we have a

(01:15:57):
pretty good shot, at least a 50 percent shot of getting from Sacramento back up to Seattle.
We shall see. And we will not have it after we leave Jeff's house in Sacramento.
We will have no chase car. So we will be just on our own and we'll have to be
stopping and taking time to do episodes and shows from the van. It's going to be wild.
And of course, we could always use the help and support because not only was

(01:16:19):
this episode incredibly expensive to produce, but this wild trip is going to be crazy.
So if you'd like to help the boost, boost in with some BangBus support.
I got a specific clip for those of you who boost in. We have.
And another BangBus boost clip.

(01:16:40):
Yeah that's right so,
yeah we're looking forward to it i think it's going to be i think it's going to be really great,
and uh we'll have details on all of that in the future and
you'll know you'll know when we're on the road the van's right there it's gonna
be great friend will be giving out tours and talking about the wood he rebuilt

(01:17:02):
and where the batteries are at and you know we're pulling people in there Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah. And you know we're stuffing as much Linux into this thing as possible.
Maybe we build in a Linux Reaper system.
A Home Assistant system is just absolutely going to happen, right,
Brent? Full Linux in your bag.
Yeah. Bring it on. Bring it on.
All right.

(01:17:23):
We do have some boosts to get into that help make this episode possible.
And our baller booster this week is The Dude Abides.
Coming in with a fantastic 100,000 sets!

(01:17:50):
The Dude Abide writes, welcome back. Thank you, dude.
Really appreciate that. That means more than ever this week.
That is a great time for a baller boost like that. Thank you very much.
Appreciate that. And you are our top supporter for episode 606.

(01:18:13):
Also a great boost. That's cool.
Oh, all subsequent kernels...

(01:18:35):
I mean, it feels like we're getting there with the six series.
You know how Linus gets once the number starts getting too high.
So it could be happening.
Would he go with seven forever? Well, he could if he was Linus for a day.

(01:19:26):
Thank you and i think that's a it's a good uh play you're you're kind of like hedging with ladybird,
oh good,
yeah yeah that's a great set of boost adversaries thank you very much and uh
i agree with you thanks for the boost now.
Andrew sent in two boosts the first one here 29,402 sats.

(01:19:53):
Short time, first time, but you have a new Linux convert. Windows hardware requirements got me good.
And now Nexus giving me quite a head spin, but wow, is it an awesome one.
Thanks for all the good work and cheers to many more invaluable episodes.
P.S. Get the map, Wes, because this is a zip code boost.

(01:20:14):
Did you bring the map, Wes?
Does.
Have extra stains I noticed.
First time booster and a Linux convert Andrew you're killing it love it it's
good to hear alright Wes so we gotta convert this,

(01:20:39):
Ideally with Star Trek. Oh, there you go. I see Andrew also liked the deep dive,
but he says we don't have to overdo it. I think that's good feedback. Thank you.
All right. Where's he at, Wes? Where's he at? Charleston, South Carolina.
Hey, I want to go there sometime.
I would love to do a North Carolina, South Carolina thing.
Yeah. Does that mean there's vinegar in the meetup? Why not? Okay. All right.

(01:21:01):
Hey, speaking of somebody we got to see at Planet Nix and scale,
it is Gene Bean, and He comes in with 36,510 sats. That's right.
He says, if you're going to use Gentoo, don't cut corners. Oh, gosh, we got him going.
Just as Nick's BSD wasn't free BSD, sidestepping what makes Gentoo unique defeats its purpose.

(01:21:24):
The point of a Gentoo challenge is to learn about the stuff other distros hide.
That knowledge is incredibly helpful when switching back to any mainstream distro.
I agree. I can't argue with that. I agree.
I think he's right about that. He did love the rust coverage in the kernel.
And he asked, we asked if people are liking the deep dives. He said he enjoyed
the EBPF deep dive. I wouldn't want it every episode, but once a month, maybe a quarter.

(01:21:46):
This particular one was well done. I really enjoyed it. Keep up the good work.
Okay. I think that's where we're starting to see a theme. It's like,
yeah, from time to time, don't mind those deep dives.
Just got to buckle up. Right. And then he wraps it up with Brent, Chris, and Wes.
This, which was 25,400 sats, should cover the beer or cider that I wanted to
get each of you during scale. as a thanks for all you do to keep this community informed.
It was great getting to chat with you all while we were there,

(01:22:08):
and I'm seriously looking forward to hearing your coverage of the event.
Well, Jade, being having lunch with you was a highlight of our event, so it was nice to see you.
Hey, thank you. I think we will.

(01:22:31):
Well, flyover friend sent in a McRove ducks.
JB Bang Bus, huh? Well, okay, go ahead and earmark this boost to help fund the interior cameras.
I'll watch, but I'll be weird.
Yeah, I like over flyover. I'm thinking cameras for sure. I mean,

(01:22:52):
on the outside. I don't know about the inside.
That's true oh oh god you're right okay here we go,
yeah you know and uh i like some people go to interesting places with the name
but of course the real story behind the name of the bang bus is that we just like alliteration a lot,

(01:23:24):
that's a good point that's a good point All right. Sire comes in with 20,000 sats.
Beer boost. Sorry, I couldn't do the benchmarks on FreeBSD. Okay.
I'm keeping an eye on the release notes, though, to see when my Goopoo will become supported.
Totally fair, Sire. That seems totally fair.

(01:23:46):
And ZackAttack came in with another 20,000 sets.
It has been too long since I boosted in.
I remember you guys talked about note-taking apps, and I recently switched from
Obsidian with SyncThing to Joplin with Tailscale and Nextcloud.
While I don't like the way they format files, I do like how it handles syncing across devices.

(01:24:11):
Made onboarding laptops that I tend to wipe and reinstall the OS on every quarter a lot easier.
Also, on the Rust in the kernel coverage, I like hearing it.
I can tell you guys spend a lot of time looking into the topics and give a good fair take on it.
Would be curious on what you guys think about the latest Firefox controversy,
and if it's going to cause you to jump web browsers.

(01:24:34):
Also, big shout out to everyone from Michigan.
Shout out Michigan! again we did talk a little firefox in our live stream members
show today uh and uh i think we're gonna keep watching it and we'll probably
do further coverage in the show it's a good question,
that's true that is true thank you zach attack good to hear from you and it's

(01:24:54):
great to hear from shy fox who comes in with 20 000 sets i'm on the wrong coast
to join y'all so instead here's to a good time p.s my first computer was a pentium
one that we won in a department store raffle,
Oh, what an era.
I wonder if that one had a fan on it. Some of the Pentiums that first shipped

(01:25:15):
didn't have fans, even though they needed them.
And so if you got a really early Pentium 1 system, you might have,
because you have to understand the 486 and 386 systems, while some of them started
having cooling, till the very end of the 486 one, they're still selling some
of them without active cooling. If you can believe a CPU.
But the Pentium 1s was a little bit tougher. That's a great boost.
Thank you, Shy Fox. Good to hear from you.

(01:25:53):
Thank you, Tomato. We did. Nice to hear from you.
Amitra Hat sent in 4,500 sats.
Longtime listener, core contributor, and first-time booster.
Hey! Thank you on both accounts.
Just wanted to say the eBPF deep dive was excellent, and I'd like to hear more of those such episodes.

(01:26:15):
All right.
That's great. This is really good feedback. The boys can attest,
before we started getting these messages, I was telling them maybe we don't do that again.
And I was like, oh, this is not looking good. But so far, now that we've actually
collected the messages and time has come in and they've rolled in,

(01:26:36):
I'm feeling like, yeah, we'll do it at a certain cadence, but we'll do it from time to time.
Thank you also for the membership support.
Night62 came in with 12,100 sats.
First off, I love the deep dive episodes. Please keep them coming.
All right, it's another vote for a deep dive, boys.

(01:26:58):
But I can understand they may not appeal to everyone. Second,
I just got back from Scale22x, which was awesome, primarily because the really
great people I met and got to talk with, many of which were from the JB community.
Shout out to producer Jeff, tech dev, Eric Kenji, Carl George,
Kyle from Bazite, and Noel from UBlue and Aurora.
It was also great to meet and hang with the JB crew, Chris, Hadea,

(01:27:19):
Brent, Wes, and Alex. Thank you all for making my first scale so great.
That's so sweet.
And I'm glad you got a chance to say hi to folks. That's always what,
you know, it can be a little, I know, nerve-wracking your first time to actually say hi.
But once you start doing it, it's smooth. And people there are so easy to talk
to. You'll be surprised.
That's all what makes the meetup magic. I agree. I agree.

(01:28:03):
You're of the two-y you're of the two-y huh love it,
Okay, so that right there, it's funny he said that, because before you read
that sentence, I was auto-completing in my head. The benchmark should be,
is it better than a web app? That should be the benchmark.

(01:28:26):
Yeah. I'm going to write that down. We'll talk about it after the show.
A TUI challenge could be fun. I'd be probably more inclined to do it,
if folks in the audience.
That's the challenges we like the most, is when you guys also do some of them
with us. You could also...
Yeah, something we can start looking at to see if it's feasible.

(01:28:48):
It's a great boost. We're going to write it down and talk about it. Thank you, Bean.
DistroStrew boosted in what looks like a binary boost here, 10,101.
Scale was great. I had been struggling with some Nix configs around Thunderbird,
and I figured chatting with the Nix geniuses would set me right.
They were also a little stumped, so I spent an hour with the engineer at the Thunderbird booth.

(01:29:12):
Long story short, I learned a lot. filed issues on both projects, and a pull request.
I could not make the JB meetup, but it was certainly nice to see you all.
That sounds like a great trip experience. Little hands-on, little FaceTime,
and working across projects.
I heard a few other folks that did that too. I had one problem,
I went to this booth, and I went and talked to people at the other booth.
Might not have solved your problem that day, but got the channels opened.

(01:29:37):
Yeah. Thank you for the boost. Routed Mood comes in with 18,000 two sets.
Just wanted to say, I enjoyed the technical deep dive at episode 605,
Live Long and Prosper. Well, thank you, sir. It's good to hear from you,
and you're doing a great job.
Can I just say, I think you guys are all trolling me with this deep dive stuff.
I mean, you just came out with that clip, Chris, and you know how much I hate the deep dive thing.

(01:30:02):
You think it's me? You think it's me?
I think you're all colluding. You're all colluding to just get me to...
Yep. Still hate it.

(01:30:44):
That is awesome. Thank you. That's the idea, and we really appreciate it,
especially this week. Thank you.
Thank you very much, WH. Nice to hear from you.
We also have a boost here from Magnolia Mayhem, another Spaceballs boost.
No message on this one, just a bunch of plaid.

(01:31:06):
Well, that's great. Thank you for the value. Thank you, everybody who boosted.
We got a bunch below the 2,000-sat cutoff for on-air.
Oh, we got one? We want to pull one up? Yeah. All right.
All right, you got it, buddy.

(01:31:27):
I hate you all.
Thank you, everybody who supported episode 606. We had 48 of you stream those
sats as you listened, and collectively, you did a nice lift there.
You stacked 102,434 sats. When you combine that with everybody who boosted live
or boosted last week's episode, we stacked a pretty handsome collective 564,906 sats.

(01:31:57):
We really appreciate it. Production costs were extremely high for this episode,
but we really gained a lot of great insights.
It's going to help inform coverage for years to come.
Thank you, everybody who supports the show directly with a boost.
It's a peer-to-peer network all using open-source technology.
Your message goes directly to us, and we collate it and put it into our show notes.
You can get SaaS from River, from Strike, from Bitcoin Well,

(01:32:20):
and then boost them into the show. We really appreciate it. It's a great way
to support each individual production.
Or you can set your support on Autopilot by becoming a member,
one of our core contributors.
And we have a link for that at linuxunplugged.com. And big shout-out to our
members. you've got a hulk of a member special show for you in the bootleg this week.
We hope you enjoy it. It's a big boy.

(01:32:44):
Now, our picks this week were inspired
by our stay at the Airbnb because I thought I was being real clever.
And this is the first time I've ever done this. I packed an Apple TV.
We have a spare one here. Well, it's not spare. It's one that's hooked up here
at the studio that's used lightly. When people are over or whatever it might
be, we fire up the old Apple TV.
And it's handy because it's signed into my stuff, like my Jellyfin server and

(01:33:07):
my friend's Plex servers. And it's also on my tail net. So it gets access to everything.
So I thought, hey, I'll be a smart guy. and I'll just bring the old Apple TV
because I know we're going to be watching Star Trek or whatever and it'll make it real easy.
We'll plug it in the HDMI of the Airbnb and we're good.
Well, I did just that, but of course, the genius that I am, I forgot the remote.

(01:33:28):
And we show up at the Airbnb, I'm like, oh, no big deal, we'll use a Wi-Fi app.
Well, it has to be on the Wi-Fi. So then we had to make a quick,
quick move and Brent suggested that I set up my phone to turn on the hotspot
and name it my home Wi-Fi.
The Apple TV joined that, and then we were able to control it and get on the
Airbnb Wi-Fi. But then we had the actual problem of how the hell do you control

(01:33:49):
an Apple TV when you don't have their little Apple TV remote and you don't have an iPhone?
And you found a Python library for Apple TV and AirPlay devices that lets you
control things that are iOS TV 15 and tvOS 15 and later.
It also supports apparently audio streaming via AirPlay to receivers like the
HomePod and the Airport Express.

(01:34:16):
Of course. And so you pulled that down, and you were using that sometimes to
control the Apple TV. Yeah, we all know.

(01:34:42):
Ultimately, there's a couple of.
Yeah. You remember whatever? Yeah. So, Pi ATV.

(01:35:08):
Wow. Yeah, in like the system tray area. Okay, okay. I don't,
Yeah.

(01:35:31):
It might work. Yeah. It may work. Yeah. If anybody has any other great ways
to control an Apple TV from Linux or Android that aren't loaded with ads or scans, I'd love to know.
Because that was like navigating a minefield in the Play Store.
Yes. Right. Thank you, Wes. Thank you. We try to remember to mention that.
We'll have a link to both of those in the show notes. Of course,

(01:35:54):
that's at linuxunplugged.com slash 606.
Also, just again, a big thank you to Phlox for getting us out to Planet Nix
and scale. We had a great time.
So many stories to continue to share and good connections we made too.
And I'm looking forward to next year already. And don't forget,
you can boost in to support Brent's Bang Bus efforts if you'd like,
but also your feedback on event coverage like this, because these are also tricky

(01:36:18):
episodes, sort of like the deep dives. They don't apply to everybody.
So we try to frame the coverage in a way that even if you're not a Daily Nix
user, you might still find informative.
And I'd love to know if we hit that note. So you can send us a boost with that
or go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact.
And I also invite you to join us live. Make it a Linux Tuesday on a Sunday.
Join us at noon. Nope. We now do it at 10 a.m. Pacific, which is noon Eastern.

(01:36:44):
Except for when we change it. But then we like to lock it in.
And if you just have a podcasting 2.0 app, you don't have to worry.
We try to mark it pending about 24 hours or so beforehand.
And we go live. Boom. Boom. It's just live right there in the app.
Yeah we do have time zones at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash

(01:37:04):
calendar also we have our mumble and matrix
info there we'd love to have you join us in those places as well but that's
really all you need to know other than the links which i already told you about
at uh unplugged.com slash 606 you know with the linux in front of it i think
that's it for us hope you enjoyed the episode thank you so much for joining
us on this week's episode we'll see you next tuesday as in sunday.

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