624: Tiny PC, Huge Problems

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:11):
Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
My name is Wes.
And my name is Brent.
Hello, gentlemen. Well, coming up on the show today, there might be more than
just a couple of things wrong with our home labs, but we do have a plan to fix them up.
Today, we'll talk about what needs a fixin' and then what hardware might just do the job.

(00:35):
Plus, we have two great self-hosted apps we've come across recently you didn't even know you needed.
and then we're going to round the show out with some great shout outs and boosts
and picks and more so before we go any further let's say time appropriate greetings
to our virtual lug hello mumble room hey chris hey wes and hello brent hello
mumble room thank you for joining us,

(00:56):
boys i gotta break format for a second.
Get out of here brent come on squeeze it.
Oh it's what's with the.
I'm a little i'm a little nervous is that all right is it okay yeah it is it's
kind of a big deal uh we have something exciting and I don't know I don't want
to blow it I don't want to blow it you know because this is something we've
been thinking about for a while we have an opportunity to bring on a new sponsor,

(01:22):
and this project was co-created by a listener of the show it's something we followed for years,
and it's it's tremendously good and the company is great too they're building
the company the right way you know they're not like hooked on that VC crack
right they're doing in a smart sensible way and so i'm i don't know i'm just i don't want to mess it up.
You got this.

(01:42):
You think so uh-huh.
Just be yourself.
All right i'll give it a go so let me tell you go ahead what is it don't.
Forget about the reverse code i believe.
You got a tip for me i think what oh that's it that's your that's your motivation you've.
Not royally messed it up previously i know this might be a big deal but i believe
in you i think you got this.
I feel like it's a big deal too because we're like the only podcast in the world

(02:03):
yeah we're at wow you know i know that's a big deal actually.
Okay now i'm feeling.
Nervous i know they're reaching a new stage and it's just it's super exciting all right okay thanks.
Guys you got that.
Check out defined.net slash unplugged. Go check out Nebula, and they have managed

(02:25):
Nebula from Defined Networking.
It's a decentralized VPN built the right way on the open source Nebula platform that we love.
And it is optimized for speed and efficiency where the nodes use less network
activity, less battery life, and it's using industry-leading encryption.
It's built on top of the noise protocol, which is super cool.

(02:48):
So that's what they're using to exchange keys, do the symmetric encryption.
And all of that's open source, independently audited.
And unlike traditional VPNs, you can host what are called the lighthouses,
if you like, or you can use their managed products. So you are in complete control.
They built this for Slack back in the day.

(03:08):
And it had to be great from the start because Slack has a global infrastructure, as you can imagine.
they're across so many different data
centers around the world and they need all of
that stuff to be able to communicate and they're dealing with corporate
private information so the requirements to get it right are astronomical could
break the company if they get it wrong kind of stuff so nebula has been engineered

(03:32):
for scale and performance from day one each host connects directly to each other
and then it queries lighthouse nodes for routing information.
Which you can host that yourself. That's a big deal.
And these lightweight queries, they hit all available lighthouses simultaneously,
so you have uninterrupted operation.
Even if one of your nodes is down, if you have five other nodes online or two

(03:53):
other nodes online, everything continues to hum right along.
So if you go over to define.net slash unplugged, you can check out Nebula and
manage Nebula for 100 hosts, absolutely free, no credit card required.
Nothing matches Nebula's level of resilience, speed, and scalability.
I am super thrilled that they're joining the Unplugged program because this

(04:16):
is a project we've been watching since like almost the day it was announced.
We very quickly brought the co-creator on to talk about it and have been tracking
their progress ever since.
I think you're going to love it. It redefines the VPN experience.
Check it out at defined.net slash unplugged. Support the show.

(04:38):
And it's great too because it's from the community. It's really something special.
Defined.net slash unplugged.
Do we have any last-minute housekeeping? I know you're going to be at the Knicks
event attached to DEFCON.
Yeah, that's right. Knicks Vegas. So if you go to DEFCON, reach out and see you there.
That's coming up real soon, West Payne.

(04:58):
That's right. Next month.
Wow. Are you flying?
Uh-huh.
You got a hotel?
I do.
You're already done then.
I know. Surprisingly organized.
Now you just need to get the presentation done.
That's right.
Okay. All right. That's it, right? That's all we have for the housekeeping, I think? All right.
All right. Let's do a home lab check-in. There's a lot that's been going on behind the scenes.

(05:19):
Brent got his home assistant up and running again in the van.
And he's actually been using some of the sensors to test different systems on the van. So I don't know.
Walk us through. You got the system going again. And how are you using it, Brent?
Yeah, we together got the system going. Oh, that feels like...
months ago now. And the idea is to have a permanent home assistant set up in

(05:42):
this crazy van that I somehow have in my possession that I'm putting lots of love into.
And I wanted to do some testing on the fridge that is from the nineties and is still in this thing.
And it's like this bizarre absorption fridge.
I don't have any experience with those kinds of things. that can run propane
and 12 volts and 120 volts. I just had so many mysteries.

(06:06):
And I thought, what a perfect use case to use Home Assistant to track how good this thing is.
Like, what does it do with temperatures? Can it get down to the right temperatures?
Can it keep it there, et cetera, et cetera?
It's worth noting that when you bring sensor data into Home Assistant,
like a temperature sensor, it automatically graphs, charts, and logs that for

(06:28):
you. So not only do you get real-time information, but you get historical data automatically.
So great.
And I'm, you know, compared to some who are listening very relatively new to
Home Assistant, I feel slightly ashamed about that. But I have a project and it's getting me there.
And I didn't realize this graphing was just built in.
So such a win for me because I could just plug a couple sensors in and just

(06:53):
get exactly what I needed right away.
I did randomly meet a stranger with almost an identical van who offered to purchase this fridge off me.
So I had extra incentive to be like, hey, this thing works really well.
But I wanted to make sure that I was tracking this stuff in a way that,
I don't know, I could provide a cool little graph of ambient temperature versus

(07:15):
this fridge temperature.
So having a little project like this is a perfect way to dive into Learning
Home Assistant. You know, there's, I'm probably using 2% of what it can do,
maybe less, but it's been super fun to get it up and running again.
I feel like the power system in the van can maybe handle it a bit more.

(07:36):
I was really quite nervous about that previously.
But I think I can say I now have a home assistant setup that is going to be
on full time 24 hours a day unless all my batteries die. So I think that's a big step for me.
Yes. Yes, welcome to the club.
Thank you. That's great. I feel like I have lots to learn.

(07:56):
I'm not a long-time member, but I'm just, you know.
Yeah, I'm so proud of you both recently getting Home Assistant going.
So that's the good news in the Home Lab.
Now, the bad news is you've got this project that's stalled out,
in part because we ran out of time while I was visiting.
And the idea is you want to create an off-site backup server that does essentially
server-to-server replication.
And I kind of want to hear more about that because I think it's still kind of

(08:19):
up in the air exactly how to solve that problem.
So tell us what you're trying to accomplish and then maybe we can kick around a few ideas.
Yeah, I have talked about this on the network before, on Self-Hosted.
I really just want to provide backups for my family and myself included that have an offsite option.
So my parents have a super stable home environment, super stable internet,

(08:40):
and we visit there a couple times a year.
So that's a perfect location, but it's like thousands and thousands of kilometers
away or miles, if you will.
And so it's a perfect spot for a little like
offsite backup at least for me and if
that's a service i can provide you know throw up a
machine that isn't uh an old laptop for their

(09:02):
own backups that would give me peace of mind being their main support
people and so i've had this dream if you'll put it because uh i haven't quite
got there of having two near identical systems at least identical from a software
perspective the hardware i thought oh having identical would be good too but
i'm just at this point using old parts that i have for the computer on my end,

(09:24):
and I bought what I'm hoping is a very stable platform to put on their end.
So that includes an H4, Odroid, H4 Plus, and a couple new hard drives,
20 terabytes that'll be mirrored.
And the idea is to just be able for my family to back up to the local computers
and those to just mirror to each other on a regular basis.

(09:46):
It seems simple on the surface. Okay.
So you want to mirror your data to that machine, but you also want to backup
data from how many computers of your parents?
Oh, they've got, you know, two, you know, one cell phone each and one laptop
each. And I think that's about it.
Cell phones.
Well, why not? Why should you not backup cell phone data? Like photos is mostly

(10:10):
the thing they care about, photos and videos.
Well, what I'm mapping in my head now is three different backup systems.
Because you have one to do the server-to-server replication,
you have one to back up the computers, and then a separate one to back up the
phones, right? I'm seeing this is three different systems you'd be managing.
Yeah, the dream seems simple until you start implementing, and then all of a
sudden it's like, oh, wait a second. This is multifaceted, isn't it?

(10:33):
I feel like the server-to-server is probably the easiest because that you could
just do like a ButterFS send-receive.
True.
And for the parents' backup, you do have some experience with,
which backup software was it that you were using? Was it Borg?
Yeah, I've got them set up currently with Borg, and I'm using Vorda as the main GUI interface.

(10:55):
And they have, well, my father especially, have been pretty cozy with that.
And it's been working well, and I don't think about it until I get on their
systems every couple months, and it just seems to be working, which is great.
So could that be just you set up borg backup on this new server and then reconfigure
their clients to use that to back up to this that.

(11:16):
Is at least for me at this point well tested well uh received on their part
and like the super stable simple part of this backup system.
Okay so desktops are solved what is your what is your thought on backing up
i assume they have two android devices yeah.
They have identical android devices and previously

(11:36):
backups have been done manually by my father who's a bit tech savvy and he's
using kd connect to uh just manually drag files he cares about he likes to sort
all his photos like sit down one sunday morning with a coffee and move photos
from both phones onto his laptop and then he just you know in vortigot just goes go and then.
That backs.

(11:56):
Up uh the android photos that are now on his laptop to the server so it's you know he's he's doing.
That manually but it's happening oh let's pause let's pause let's zoom in as
they say and double click what is it on the Android device they need backed up is it just photos I.
Mean I think we in modern times should have the ability to back up all of our

(12:21):
apps on Android but that is strangely difficult so if.
You had a minimal set.
Then I would.
Say just.
Photos and videos but.
Why not if you've got like notes and contact information in
Nextcloud already then it's just
a matter of the photos and there yes
you could use nextcloud obviously but it could be
a great opportunity for image it's pretty

(12:43):
straightforward to set up it does require some updates but it's pretty straightforward
to set up um the experience is really great for the end user because the app
is also a photo viewer that's really good great and fast uh but then there's
also fun things you can do like you could set up an image kiosk and a few other
ancillary containers or apps,
that let you view different albums in image on different devices.

(13:06):
So it could just be like on the computer, but it can also be on tablets. It can be on displays.
There's fun things you can do with the pictures once you get them in image.
Plus it also supports all the location information. It's private.
Yeah. So it's, and it just works in the background, right? They take a photo
and image uploads it when they're on wifi.
Image could totally work. I had sync thing recommended to me about a hundred
times to solve this problem.

(13:28):
It does seem like it's a popular one in the audience, but it seems to me kind
of like a blunt tool for the job, especially if you have everything else getting synced.
I think the easier workflow is you get the new phone. Unfortunately,
you set it up, you sign in or whatever the crap you got to do.
And then you just sync your stuff, right? I mean, it's just what,

(13:48):
I don't know, just seems to be.
I'd be interested in tips from the audience on utilities that would let you
do like an image backup or some kind of full backup to a Samba share or some kind of local NAS.
If the audience knows, boost in or email us and let us know.
I find it wild that this is not a standard thing. Wild. Once you get used to

(14:10):
Linux computers, like, come on, we don't have this?
This i mean it seems if you can get the hardware running
it seems like a pretty easy thing to at least get
the server to server backup going on your lan maybe
using like some sort of you know like a nebula vpn
or something to make that work so they're
talking to each other over that vpn on your lan and

(14:31):
then get that syncing while you're you know node to node right there so you
do the bulk of the syncing first then ship it off but i don't know about the
borg stuff like we'd have to talk more about that but I think that seems pretty
achievable if they've already got a workflow then later on it would just be
moving them over to image you could even do that later,
as a phase two staged rollout mm-hmm,

(14:53):
That might be it.
Yeah, I like the image idea. I hadn't even considered that. I think that is a wonderful idea.
The hardware is an upgrade to what they're currently using, which is an ancient
T61 laptop that my father used to use way back.
And yeah, that fan has been replaced several times. But it's still kicking.
Are you doing any jellyfin on this thing?

(15:13):
Not yet. Mostly because the hardware hasn't been up to the task.
And that's where I feel like.
This H4 is no problem.
That's where image wasn't really an option previously. either
but because of the hardware upgrade i feel
like it opens up a whole bunch of new options
so yeah why not have a jellyfin server they've got
a they have a dvd room it's like a secret room behind their tv from the previous

(15:36):
person who built this house who was a nerd so they literally like you take what
looks like a speaker off the wall and then they have a room back there and they
have just shelves of dvds that they bought in the past so maybe digitizing those
would be a great thing for them.
Yeah man yeah yeah.
So there's lots of possibility for sure.
Yeah that could be a great project honestly it's something you could just you

(15:58):
know you could set up a workflow and it sounds like your old man could sit there
and kind of do the actual ripping yeah 100 and.
Then i could benefit.
Okay so let me tell you what's going on in my
home lab i i have been very happy
with my home assistant yellow for years until
i started hanging around jeff and brent sorry no

(16:18):
you know i actually it's just over the years it does more
right it pulls in camera feeds it pulls in lots
of power metrics from my victron system it's you
know managing probably 300 devices and pulling
all of their metrics and their numbers and stuff like that it's connected
to probably half a dozen cloud services it
does a lot plus i have a bunch of sidecar applications i've

(16:41):
installed and this thing is built around
the pi 4 compute module it's got two
gigs of ram one terabyte of storage two usb
a ports and one usb c port and then they also build
in the silicon labs chip that has a zigbee 3o thread open thread and matter
support in there oh that is and it's a nice little machine it's nice yeah for

(17:02):
its job it's worked great and it comes in a nice translucent injected molded
case that has their logo on it it's cool because you can see some of the led shining through i.
Would imagine for you this thing just sips power too right that's important.
He dude like that's what's
really made me stick with this is if it's
just sitting there doing nothing it's like two watts it's

(17:26):
hard to even measure that oh wow you know and then maybe up to
six watts almost under load right so just a monster yeah about as much as a
light would pull an led light or something a big one so it's been really nice
but the two gigs of ram i'm generally running around 1.5 1.6 gigs of RAM usage
and so I like ESP home builds fail,

(17:48):
but what's really getting me,
Is as I've built more complicated dashboards, I noticed that the load times.
Just pulling them up?
Yeah. In the mobile app and on the tablets.
It's going to scrape a whole bunch of different data sources and has to get all the points.
And sometimes I need to get in quick and turn something off or check,
are we undervolting the entire rig right now because we just ran all this stuff?

(18:10):
And I'm just sitting there waiting for the page to load. So that's the killer for me.
And I just think I need to get on more robust hardware.
I didn't realize this was an issue because the hardware you gave me that was
just sitting around waiting for it to be your upgrade that's now in the van
is actually super performant and probably the perfect device for you to deploy for yourself.

(18:32):
Ironically, yes.
Thank you.
Yeah. And it's nice, too, because that's DC straight. But I've been kind of
looking around and I found three options.
I don't know what their power draw is. So it'd be like three options that I
would buy and test before I deployed.
But then, of course, I'm very interested to see what other folks are doing.
I do think I want something x86, although I'm not totally opposed to ARM for

(18:54):
Home Assistant OS. I will be using Home Assistant OS. Here's three options.
If I use my Home Assistant for more stuff, like also media hosting,
Ugreen has this device called the NAS Sync, and it is a tiny two-desktop-bay,
all-in-one Intel N100 quad-core system.

(19:17):
Whoa.
It's like the size of a book. It takes 2, 2.5. I think they're 2.5.
So you can get up to 76 terabytes of storage in this thing.
And it's the size of a USB disk enclosure, but it's an entire PC.
It's everything you need in there.
Up to 76 gigs of RAM, which is nice. It's 12th gen Intel N100.

(19:37):
It's a PC with the stuff. I mean, if you wanted something that was like a media
server, that was a really small, low-powered device.
I noticed it says user-friendly UGOS Pro. I assume you'd be keeping whatever that is on there.
I mean, if it's user-friendly, Wes, if it's user-friendly, why not?
I also noticed that it can hold hard drives, so it means you won't have hard

(20:00):
drives strapped to the side of your RV dinette cupboard.
Right. Thank you. So what I do now for storage is I have an O-Droid that does
have, I think it's just SATA ports, but yeah, there's nowhere to put them.
So they are, everything's kind of mounted to the inside of a dinette's booth, mounted to the wall.

(20:21):
And it would be nice to actually have them in enclosures. That could be nice
because they're just raw drives mounted to the wall.
I think this thing claims six watts for TDP. Yeah.
I want to test on that. But the N100 is a very efficient chip.
And around the 12th and 13th gen, they started getting really legit.
So that's why I kind of looked in that range.
Now, this next one wouldn't fit any drives, but it would have about the same

(20:45):
footprint as my current home assistant. Could be mounted on the sidewall.
Is a 12th gen Alder Lake N100 up to 3.4 gigahertz.
And it's called a mini PC stick. We've seen some of these before, and it's back.
This looks more like a USB adapter than it does a PC.
Right? Yeah, it looks like a dongle.
That's crazy.
I know.

(21:05):
Wow.
It really is something. It's eight gigs of RAM in this thing.
It's got one USB-C output, two USB-As. It has an Ethernet port.
It goes up to 65 watts USB-C PD, although I don't think that's its draw.
It looks like its draw is, you know, around the same as the other device.
It can drive a high-res 4K screen if you need to.

(21:27):
Yeah, dual screen support.
So what I thought, and this thing's $160. dollars so what
i i thought like if you wanted a linux media pc you could you could just attach
this to the back of your television and run it off of usb power it has an hdmi
out this is the kind of thing now where these are so small you could velcro

(21:50):
it to something and make a display does.
It feel like we're in the golden age of hardware when these kind of things are
available Because it's super performant, teeny tiny, and it hardly uses any
power. So like, what else do you really need?
Well, and what's great is we're getting in the price range of the Odroids, right?
And when you look at these Intel systems, they're really competitive with the ARM boxes now.

(22:11):
And the Raspberry Pis.
That's what I mean. But they have a lot of really nice features.
And compatibility.
And compatibility, and they're a little faster. But the one that really kind
of won me over for what I think I would use, Home Assistant,
if I want to build a box that lasts another six years, another five years,
whatever it's been, four years.
The GeekOM Air 12 mini PC.

(22:33):
It's a 13th-gen Intel N150, so it's even a little better on the power usage.
16 gigs of ddr5 5 12 gigabyte
mvme ssd so 16 gigs of ram 5 12 gig storage
also has an sd card slot which actually can be really handy and has a visa mount
built in so i you could use anything that supports visa mounts again attaching

(22:56):
to something 200 usd 200 usd and 150 huh yeah and with a max of 3.6 gigahertz and 16 gigs of RAM.
So I would go from 2 gigs of RAM to 16 gigs of RAM.
That's not bad.
Yeah. And I'd go from like a quad core 1.4 gigahertz to up to 3.6 of boost,

(23:17):
obviously. And it's 200 USD.
I kind of feel like you just buy all three, you'll figure out a way to use them all, right?
Beowulf HA cluster.
There is a real revolution happening with these mini PCs.
And B-Link was really early to it, but B-Link is getting fancier and fancier.
These manufacturing places in China have built up all this tooling to build

(23:42):
these small compact PCs and now they're just going wild.
It is incredible what you can find for under $200 if you don't need a crazy GPU.
That's essentially the dividing line now. And this thing here,
I don't know if Geeko makes good stuff or not, I can't vouch for it.
At $200 I could put Home Assistant OS on this and run it till this thing dies.

(24:09):
I just, maybe there's probably even better ideas out there. So I'd be really
open to other suggestions.
This thing's got, you know, it's got Ethernet, it's got Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2.
So that's all really handy to have in a Home Assistant box as well.
And then to have the N150 processor in there, which is, you know,
on a good day, about 10% faster than the N100 in multi-core performance.

(24:32):
I'll take that. That could be a really nice box, but I'd be curious to know
if others have a better suggestion because I'd love something a little cheaper
than 200 USD, but for something as important as Home Assistant,
I'd probably be willing to do it.
So that's sort of my conundrum is I've got to figure out which hardware to use.
Then I've got to migrate my Home Assistant installation, which would probably

(24:54):
be a backup and a restore.
And what I'm really worried about and wondering how this has worked for others
that have tried this is the last time I did this, I had to completely reset
up my Z-Wave and Zigbee networks, I think.
That sounds rough.
Yeah.
Yeah, at this point, that's a non-starter. So I would love to know.

(25:15):
I mean, at that point, it's like I'm redoing everything, basically.
So there's probably a way to manage that. I'd love to hear people's experiences
because I know I've read a couple of different guides but last time it didn't
work for me I'd love to know what people have done that's worked,
so even once I get the hardware I think I'm going to do the backup and restore
I'll install Home Assistant OS clean on the new hardware and then immediately

(25:37):
restore my installation Have.
You considered just a crazy raw image copy and see what happens?
I do note here that you said that your Home Assistant Yellow has a special,
you know, Silicon Labs module with ZigBee and thread and open thread and matter
built in, is this mean that anything you buy off the shelf is going to be downgraded in that sense?

(25:59):
You're going to have to figure out how to solve that problem.
I think I have okay radios there, external ones, but see what a lot of people
have said is we'll just move your controller to the new unit.
But the problem is with the yellow, my controller is built in.
I can't just move the controller.
Right, right.
I don't know.
So that's my conundrum, but I'll figure it out and report back.

(26:20):
Wes, you've been taking a little nibble at Nebula, speaking of Nebula.
Yeah, that's true. Actually, independent of the sponsor change,
I've been playing with this for the talk, the Mesh Networking NixOS module.
And I wanted to see about, you know, because we love Nebula,
haven't used it in a little bit.
I wanted to check in and see if I can get it working with the module and play

(26:41):
nice. And for that, I kind of had to re-familiarize myself. So a little Nebula
nibble check-in, perhaps.
I like it. Man, now I want to be at the talk. Are you going to get it recorded? Do you know?
I don't know, but let's hope so.
Okay.
Or I'll give you a private version.
What are you learning, Westpain, on location?
Yeah, well, I mean, so we now live in a world with 1,001 different Mesh VPNs

(27:04):
out there, which is pretty great for an end user.
But Nebula is especially fun because you kind of get to see how it all works
because you run it all yourself.
So you start off by making a signing authority, a CA cert and key that establishes
your root of trust for what you're doing. So it's all self-hosted in that sense, right?

(27:26):
And there is, again, the managed product, but I'm just talking about the open
source one for the most part here.
And from that, you can start signing for individual hosts.
And this is how you add new stuff to your network. So you have to do it yourself.
It's not dynamic. It's not managed by an API in this configuration.
So you have to have some signing set up. Obviously, you don't want to put the
secret key out everywhere.

(27:48):
That just lives on wherever you're doing and managing the signing.
And then go stamp out the stuff that you need for all the hosts that you have
now or you know about. And then if you want to automate this more,
totally can, but kind of on you.
There are some projects I've linked. There are various people who have Ansible
setups or Helm charts or like Python scripts on top of it. So there's a lot
of options there as well.

(28:08):
but the nice part is like you're in total control of what
things get added and when and you kind of have to know about
it and then it's a very simple little you know you specify
the ip what's cool is you get to pick the cider and
so it's really like your own internal network totally up
to however you want to manage it all under your control
you can fit it nicely in with whatever other networks you're

(28:29):
commonly on and then you can also define
various groups and then when you make the you know
establish and sign for the host you configure the groups for it as well and
this lets you do very nice and simple and easy filtering where you can just
say like oh right well only the stuff that is in the database group gets to
talk to the database server oh boy right like oh the admin group can talk to

(28:52):
all of these but the user group can talk to these could.
We use that so like i could have one nebula connection and we'd have like the
jb stuff where you guys can talk to that and i could have my own stuff.
I even saw someone wrote a Python script. I'm not recommending this,
but they, and I don't know if it's still running, but they were running a public
lighthouse where you could then use the Python script to upload the host you
wanted so it would all get set up correctly.

(29:14):
And then you would just make sure in your configs you had your own private group
so only your group from all the public stuff could get into it.
So it's pretty flexible.
Could we run a JB lighthouse just for the community? Is that like a thing that would be helpful?
If you use this sort of wrapper script, then yeah, in theory,
we can run our own copy of it.
That's not something people wanted. I wouldn't be.
I think they'd be fun.
Yeah, exactly.
But then after that, you know, it's like a Go app, so it's easy to build or

(29:36):
run pretty much anywhere, and then you just need to point it at a config and
have all of the key stuff.
So usually you make like a little bundle of a tarball or whatever for each host
that has all the stuff it needs, which is like the base cert from the certificate
authority, and then its individual stuff, and then like keys for the other hosts
that you want it to trust.
And so in your talk, you're kind of expanding on this idea of a NIC setup that

(30:01):
just automatically installs an application into the mesh network.
And so it's just, boom, it's when you launch it and get it running,
it's on the network immediately.
Yeah, it lives in its own network namespace and it talks through the mesh network.
And so this would just allow, you know, I'm working on a version that would
allow Nebula to play the same role that already works for Tailscale or Netbird.
And then so this would pop up and then as long as you had all the key infrastructure
there, it would pop onto your network and that's what it would know.

(30:23):
Well, that's so cool.
But it's fun. So that's like how it works and has worked for a long time.
and then you have lighthouses, right, which are the main thing that sits there
and lets people swap information about network addresses so you can do,
you know, bust through NATs and actually establish connections and all that.
Right.
They've now also added dedicated relays. So, in the Tailscale world,

(30:45):
you're probably familiar, they have, like, the derp relays, which is a fallback.
So, like, if you can't establish a proper peer-to-peer connection,
it'll automatically fall back to that.
Lighthouses can be relays for you already, but,
That's not really their job. So in like once you get a production network going,
there's now dedicated relays you can have. And you have, again,
this is an area where you get complete control.
So like you can put them where your pain points are in your network.

(31:09):
Oh.
Because it's there to be the, it will tunnel network traffic because it has a public address.
So you know where the tough spots are.
Yeah.
Ah.
Or if you do at least, then you can make sure there's one like geographically
at that point of presence or in this VPC or whatever you need.
I got you.
Okay.
So you can, you can place it. Yeah. Yeah, and also then you don't really have
to worry about somebody else running it and potentially watching what you're

(31:31):
doing or, you know, potentially getting legal requests to block certain types
of traffic or anything like that because you're running it yourself.
It's all going through things you control.
That's a nice nibble, Wes.
They've also got, let's see, you can SSH into it and get like a debugging console,
which is pretty neat. I've only really played with this a little bit.
They've also added a very basic but good enough support, I think, for Lighthouse DNS.

(31:56):
So now the host that the Lighthouse knows about, it can answer DNS requests for.
So if you pair that with a DNS server that can delegate a subdomain or something,
then you can have sort of automatic host discovery for the stuff on your Nebula.
I want that. I want that.
There's also, I don't know if it's shipped yet, but there's some docs pointing
out that they're working on

(32:16):
IPv6 support for having directly on your overlay. So that's pretty neat.
and then also there's now a nix os module.
So yes um.
If you want to run it there it looks like a pretty clean little setup too.
Speaking of that do you mind if i do an update please do after the show last
week wes set me aside and said here's what you need to do and showed me how

(32:39):
to clone the repo of the um they have essentially a image builder script you
can clone and make it's called.
Image dash template under the ublue os repo.
I'll link to to my version uh because it's pretty simple that i put up on my
github and so i pulled that down and there's a build.sh file in there that i
can modify like you were talking about last week and in there i put nebula and

(33:03):
i put nix well actually not nix did i i put the creation of slash nix yes.
And then runtime you uh use the determinate installer i believe.
And determinate installer is se linux aware and os tree aware so it goes real
smooth as long as you have a slash nix it just can't make.
That slash nix on its own.
Right. So I now have essentially my own tiny, tiny fork of Aurora that has Nebula and slash Nix created.

(33:29):
And now I have the Nix tooling and I have AUR and I have Ubuntu and I have Brew and I have Flatpak.
It's like, I'm feeling like the king of the world over here.
And with that, when I modify that build SH...
Anything that's in DNF or in copper, I can just install really quickly at build time.

(33:51):
And then, you know, you save it, you build the image, and then it's interesting.
It's, you build an image with this script using Ubuild, and then you essentially
deploy it with Podman and Boots, and then use Bootsy to...
Bootsy hooks up all the right boot bits for you.
And it gives you, like, options to say, yeah, activate this one,

(34:13):
and here's your next few images and here's which one's pending and it's it's
it's a decent clean easy to use command bootsees nice i like it and then i just
say yeah bless this one to be my active image and i reboot and boom i'm in my
own custom image and i installed determinate nix and i'm off to the races baby yeah.
So hopefully hopefully that means like you've got more packages available uh

(34:35):
and i don't know it's kind of fun to have your own sort of custom image.
Onepassword.com slash unplugged take the
first step to better security for your team by securing credentials and
protecting every application even unmanaged shadow
it go learn more at onepassword.com slash unplugged

(34:55):
that's the number one password.com slash unplugged
all lowercase okay if you're a security
it professional you know this problem already you have more and more assets
to protect as time goes on more devices more identities and more applications
and it becomes a mountain of security risks over time but fortunately you can

(35:16):
conquer that mountain of security risks with one password extended access management.
The reality is that when surveyed, over half of IT pros say securing their SaaS
apps is actually their biggest challenge now.
And I kind of get it. You know, you've got SaaS sprawl essentially happening,
and it creates this shadow IT where users sign up to things and use things because,

(35:36):
quote unquote, it makes their job easier or better.
So it's kind of understandable, but it's a hard problem to fix.
Thankfully, Trelica by 1Password can discover and secure access to all your
apps, managed or not. See, Trellica by 1Password inventories every app in use at your company.
Then, pre-populated app profiles assess SaaS risk, letting you manage access,

(36:01):
optimize spend, and enforce security best practices across every app your employees use.
Yes, even the shadow IT stuff. You can securely onboard and off-board employees
and meet compliance goals.
See, Trellica by 1Password provides a complete solution for SaaS access governance.
And it's just one of the ways extended access management helps teams strengthen

(36:22):
compliance and security.
You know 1Password and their award-winning password manager.
Now go check out extended access management and Trelica.
You can take the first steps to better security for your team by securing credentials
and protecting every application, even the unmanaged ones.
Go find out more and support the show. You go to 1Password.com slash unplugged.

(36:44):
That is the number 1Password.com slash unplugged.
While this self-hosted energy has me remembering that you teased you had a couple
app picks that were really interesting.
I've been looking for a great way for
us to save all the stories that we're all looking
at all three of us and then be able to collaboratively like

(37:07):
mark them up and take notes we've used a
couple of different systems over the years but we've kind of gone our
own separate ways as time has gone on we each have built our own
like workflow for this but in this quest
in this journey i have
come across link warden a self-hosted collaborative
bookmark manager to collect read annotate and fully

(37:28):
preserve what matters all in one
place so think pocket meets dego whatever it is we used to use meets notes with
highlights so it's obviously a self-hosted open source bookmark manager that's
the basics of it but it also it does snapshots of the site,

(37:49):
so it'll take a PDF, an image, it'll do an HTML archive,
so it can also archive things, so that way you don't have to suffer from link rot when you go back.
So it saves a copy of all of that in various different formats,
which you can then download separately,
which is really nice because it really only takes a couple of years and pretty
much our links start to expire, and I think that might sometimes punish us in

(38:11):
the Google results because we have so many show notes, and then three or four
years after a show's been out, an episode's been released.
several of the links 404 and that you know just yeah it also doesn't work for
us when we want to go back and recover old information no.
It's nice to be able to have a snapshot archive stuff and if it does highlights too that's.
Shared highlights so yeah so highlighting and annotating moving.

(38:32):
To this for the next show right.
I know right it also as you would expect has a reader view,
and they've begun integrating local ai tagging so you can run a local ai and
have it go through and This sounds silly, but I use this with,
I forget the name of it. It's not Hoarder anymore.
But I use that with that application, and it works fantastic for just tagging

(38:54):
it and sussing out automatic tags.
It can collaborate on link gathering. You can share collections of lists with various people.
It has a dashboard where you can pin your favorite stories.
It supports full text search and filtering.
The design is really nice and responsive. Of course, it has dark and light mode.
It has browser extensions so you can bookmark and preserve the page you're looking at.

(39:16):
It also supports importing from Pocket and several others, including just some basic export formats.
I feel like this is an application I didn't realize that I needed.
And just now I'm thinking, hmm, this might rise to the top of the to-do list.
It also looks like it is AGPL.

(39:37):
Yeah. Yeah, it's free. AGPL 3.0.
It has a couple other nice things I think you'd like too, Brent.
It has really good sorting, including supporting custom icons for different
categories, which just visually helps lay it out.
But you can put select RSS feeds into this if you want, and it can auto bookmark
and preserve those. Because remember, it's not just saving it.
It's also doing the JPEG snapshot, the PDF snapshot, the full HTML archiving.

(40:01):
I hear you saying this might help me with my open tabs problem.
Maybe, maybe. And if you're on, I don't think they have this for Android yet.
but if you're on ios there is a shortcut to just save the link you're currently
looking at right to link warden as well and uh there's a couple community projects
i think it's called link droid maybe that's the ones for android oh yeah okay
and then yeah there's a few browser extensions as well this.

(40:25):
Seems neat i'd used um buku in the past.
Right right but.
This kind of has some more of the stuff that's targeted like at the you know
buku's been pretty decent for like personal just sort of you know,
keeping, not forgetting things.
for the kind of work we're doing or other kinds of research,
maybe generating stuff that you're going to go feed into LLMs to ask about. This seems great.

(40:47):
Tracking stories for work, that kind of stuff.
Yeah, professional development.
The other thing, too, is the project has some momentum. I mean,
they had a release just 15 hours ago.
They have a live demo you can check out. They also, I think,
have a cloud product eventually if you don't want to deploy it yourself.
Also, 68 contributors. That's often something I look at for projects just to

(41:08):
see the health of it and how popular it is. Those are important things.
And like 68 is respectable.
Yeah, and they're doing funding on Open Collective, so they have all that information
up there, which is a great way for projects to go. So I'm very impressed with Link Warden.
You know, I've probably used it for a total of 12 hours so far,
but it was like one of these, oh, I got to tell the world about this.

(41:29):
This is better than any of the other ones I've used, specifically if you have
people you want to collaborate with, like a little small group of people or a team.
Just killer. So that's Linkward, and we'll put a link to that in the show notes. That was my find.
Wes, you came across something that, to me, sounded really useful,
but I'm not sure why I would use it. But I feel like one day I will call upon this.

(41:52):
Yeah, and it's a bit hard to wrap your head around at first because it's a lot of things, or could be.
It's called Neko, a self-hosted virtual browser that runs in Docker and uses WebRTC and,
So it's like a browser in browser that you stream, that you stream so you can interact with it.
But like the interface is streamed back to you via WebRTC.

(42:16):
Yeah, I guess the end result is it's actually pretty responsive.
Yeah, it's kind of surprisingly usable. I mean, you need a system that's hosting
it that like can keep up, you know, especially but WebRTC is,
you know, built to do a lot of this and they put in a lot of work, I think, to make it fast.
So in a lot of ways, like, okay, you can do it for a browser,

(42:37):
but it can also be, well, it can run anything that the Linux desktop can run, it turns out.
So this can also be sort of like a guacamole alternative, perhaps.
But, you know, it also could just be so much simpler because you can stream to multiple endpoints.
Yes. So you can also do RTMP out of this thing. So you can stream to YouTube or Twitch if you want.

(42:58):
Ah.
And multiple people can connect to it, right? So you can do stuff like a watch
party, or we could interactively all edit our docs for the show.
Yeah, so you could be the technical person in the friend group.
You could have them all watch a URL, and you go get a video stream going,
and now you're all watching.
I mean, that sounds awesome. You're all watching it together.
Interactive presentation, sure.

(43:18):
It can also be just one way, too. If you want a browser that isn't attached
to your remote system, spin it up in an IP space.
Or you want a full desktop browser on a mobile device for some reason.
Sure.
Or you want to embed a browser into an application i mean that's interesting
there's a lot when you think about it there's a lot of things there must be.
Some security uh ways of using this that would you know it's kind of like ultimate

(43:42):
sandboxing if you think of it that way.
Right well because you can have a remote persistent browser that's in some secure
system or some secure data center and then client machines and all the client
machines are doing is sending and receiving video data yeah.
I haven't tried this part yet but um,
apparently there's built-in audio support too so that's pretty great i mean
you need it for the watch party right but like just you could do a lot of stuff with that.

(44:04):
Well there you go who needs uh x11
remote applications anymore when you've got neko i'm kidding huh it's interesting
so neko itself has built-in live streaming support yeah that's neat i mean i
don't know what i would use that for but it could be like a well session broadcasting.

(44:25):
Broadcast room content using.
Rtmp Yeah.
You can also record it. You can use stuff like Nginx RTMP on top of it to be
able to just save that to a file.
So because you're streaming video, video playback is really nice and smooth.
Yeah, it's not just, as they say, sending images over WebSocket.
Right.

(44:45):
It's actually encoding video and then streaming that to you,
which is also stuff we've seen for things like, what, Moonlight?
That was another thing that...
Yeah, right. Right. But this makes it a little bit easier when it's just WebRTC,
because that's a web browser. There's so many ways you can ingest an RTMP stream.
Built on Go, which has good support for a lot of this stuff.
So yeah, you get like the power of web technology, modern browsers,

(45:07):
good support for this kind of stuff, and real video codecs too.
I mean, even tutorials, like live tutorials, this could be great for it.
Even inside just a company, right?
Screw Twitch and YouTube, just you got a group of people you're trying to do
a training session with.
It does have a very prominently cat butt based logo.
That is so you know watch out for that that is true that maybe makes.

(45:30):
Mileage may vary but it's a cute.
Cat i think brent yeah but there there is straight up cat butt right there you could argue.
It's an asterisk maybe.
It's a bold logo it's a bold logo you.
Don't forget it that's memorable is important.
The docker compose is 14 lines,
I mean, this is really simple stuff. Like everything, it wants port 880.

(45:55):
8080, I mean. They always want 8080, of course. Nothing else is using that.
And then there's some UDP ports that opens up for WebRTC as well. Oh, interesting.
You set the resolution of the remote host in the Docker Compose file.
Yeah, right now I think it configures like an X desktop. They say,
in theory, anything where they could take image snapshots that they then encode

(46:17):
into the video stream could be supported, but for now, that's all future potential.
It looks like there's also Nico Rooms, which is a room management software for this.
So that's pretty advanced.
Yeah, I have not tried that, but you could build a lot on top of this.
And the whole thing is Apache 2.0 licensed. I mean, it's pretty neat.

(46:40):
That's really a fun kind of idea. I don't, like you said, other than watch parties, I'm not sure.
maybe a live stream i mean i could have it could be i could be sending brent
a live capture of the dock that i'm looking at right now he could be seeing
my screen you know i mean i.
Am looking at the dock.
A guy like you brent you need a persistent web browser so one ultimate machine

(47:02):
you get him like go get a vps with like 64 gigs of ram you know because you're
gonna need a lot with all your tabs um maybe even more but then you could just
use this to pull that down to all the different machines right oh.
That would actually be sweet.
All right one ultimate tab browser to rule them all it.
Does make you think you could also maybe tie it in with things like uh video

(47:25):
ninja or other sort of obs technologies probably.
Oh for sure with obs yes you could totally pull it into obs and do screen capture
that way oh that's a good idea i like that westpain,
Unraid.net slash unplugged. Go unleash your hardware.
You know we're big home labbers and self-hosters, and Unraid is a powerful,

(47:48):
easy-to-use NAS operating system for those of you that want control,
flexibility, and efficiency in managing your own data, because Unraid allows
you to mix and match drives of any size so you can build which system you want
with the hardware you have right now with no restrictions.
It also now includes built-in support for TailScale, so you can check a box

(48:09):
and get on the TailScale network.
You can get secure remote access to your systems using multiple different methods
like Cloudflare Tunnels and, of course, Nebula as well.
And there are thousands of applications you can stack on top of Unraid.
And there's an active community that's out there supporting it.
But I think you might appreciate some of the more advanced features that Unraid
gives you access to without a whole bunch of hassle and time to set it up.

(48:33):
and things have really been taken to the next level in the latest OS releases from Unraid.
The big stuff, of course, is Unraid's always been famous for making it pretty
easy to pass through your graphics cards through to a virtual machine.
But now with QXL virtual GPU support, Linux VMs can now get a big graphics boost,
which is actually usable for gaming now, video editing, and of course,

(48:57):
just smooth, buttery desktop performance.
And Unraid 7.1 makes things even easier than ever to get started with virtual
machines and templates.
And now 7.1 also includes built-in wireless networking, which is great for folks
like me who just can't wire up their place.
Whether you're a tinker or a power user, or maybe you just want a simpler way

(49:18):
to run apps and VMs, check out Unraid.
Unraid 7.1 really gives you the next level too with ZFS support.
So if you want to import an existing system, like maybe you built an Ubuntu
box or a FreeNAS system or a Proxmox and you just want to migrate that over to Unraid, easy now.
Learn more, get started, and support the show by going to unraid.net slash unplugged.

(49:41):
Go play with the stuff we talk about nearly almost, I mean, unless we're really,
really early to something, almost everything we talk about gets published in
the Unraid App Store because that community is just killing it. Go check it out.
Unraid.net slash unplugged.
We had a big week this week at the JB community, and we wanted to do a few shout

(50:04):
outs, specifically new members.
Yeah, we ran that bootleg promo recently, and we had Ryan Davis sign up,
Marcus L and Batty Morris become new core contributors to the program.
So we wanted to give them a shout out.
Something we're going to try to do more on the show.
And it does look like there are still 17 slots left as of this episode for that

(50:27):
bootleg promo code, which takes 15% off the core contributor or the Jupyter.PartyNetwork membership.
And that just keeps going, right? As long as you keep it correct.
That is a nice thing about it. And you can get either the ad-free version of
the show or the special bootleg version of the show.
Do you want less show or more show?
You pick. And it's just our way of saying thank you. And yeah,

(50:49):
so as we record right now, 17 slots left. If you go to linuxunplugged.com slash
membership, use the promo code bootleg, it'll take 15% off for the life of your membership.
We also wanted to give a shout out to some folks that are positive contributors
in our various community spots.
This is tricky because we could name a lot of people.

(51:11):
I mean, you know, I mean, there's the folks that show up in the mumble room
like Minimac and Byte and producer
Jeff and Otterbrain and Hybrid and Hawkins and others that show up,
Swami and others that show up on the regular and without even just showing up matters a lot to us.
And then there's folks that have been in our chat rooms for years or people
have been helping moderate.
But I just want to give shout outs this week specifically to Bite Bitten,

(51:35):
Hybrid Sarcasm and Magnolia Mayhem because throughout the week,
I saw them being helpful in different rooms across the communities in different
places, just answering quick questions, providing interesting content,
helping people with questions.
Caretaker in the room.
Yeah, it was really nice. And so I just wanted to give you guys a shout out.

(51:56):
Thank you very much. It does not go unnoticed.
And listener Soltros reached out to me this week and our talk about,
you know, customizing our distros inspired him, I think, to create Soltros OS,
which is his personal RPM OS3 based OS, a gaming optimized immutable Linux distribution

(52:16):
based on Fedora's Bootsy base image featuring MacBook hardware support, gaming enhancements,
Cache OS kernel performance, and the KDE Plasma desktop environment and developer friendly tools.
This is impressive.
Right? And it looks good, too. He sent me a screenshot, and I love it,
man. It's looking really good.

(52:36):
So he's got a picture of it up on the GitHub, too, if you want to check out
the link in the show notes.
Inspired by VenOS, bringing together the best of gaming and productivity.
It's a weird mix, but it's my mix.
It's like primarily productivity machine. And then on the weekends, a little bit of gaming.
Well, and, you know, much like in the NixOS world, you could rebase over to
Sultris OS and try it out if you wanted to. and the rebase back.

(53:00):
You know what? I might do that on the Dell laptop because the kid's been playing
Geometry Dash like a madman on there.
And it could use a little help. A little performance in the kernel could be a nice thing.
So check out Sultros OS. Looks like a fun project. And we have it linked.
We also got a tip on a feed issue that was impacting some of our members from

(53:22):
Power 46, it was, in the Matrix.
Yeah, they reached out Matrix then via email. And I guess they were using Miniflux,
which is a cool RSS feed reader. It's got like a UI you can use because I think
they like to consume on the desktop as well.
Okay, so with the ad, ad free and the bootleg have different back-end providers

(53:43):
at the moment, and so it works out that there's what's known as a link element
in the feed, and that just, like, provides you a link you can go to for a specific episode.
One provider has it, and the other doesn't. So for the ad free version,
in the feed reader, it would let you open up that link, which would have a little
webpage and a player that you could play.

(54:04):
I see.
But the bootleg feed does not have that.
A separate provider doesn't generate that item in the feed.
Exactly. And so Miniflux was falling back to just including the whole feed URL
as the external link for every episode, which wasn't really working.
So I kind of explained some of that. And then, unfortunately,

(54:26):
there wasn't a lot we could do.
Yeah.
But that didn't stop Power46 because they submitted an issue upstream to Miniflux.
And the project has actually already merged a fix.
Yes.
So now we'll use the first enclosure link as a fallback if there isn't a link,
if that enclosure link exists, before finally doing what it was already doing. So that's great.

(54:47):
Thank you for doing that, Power46, and for reaching out.
Yeah. It's a great combination of a great community and open source,
and now it's fixed for everybody.
Yeah, maybe go try Miniflux.
Yeah. Could be worth it. Maybe if you want something on the desktop.
and it is also time to shout out our boosters and our baller booster this week is mr turd ferguson,

(55:13):
And he boosts 65,600 sats.
Do you gentlemen know of any open source health tracking software,
ideally something that would work with non-stock Android?
Open source.
Wow. I'm surprised we haven't thought about this yet.
I've kind of been kicking this around. I've come across a project that I've

(55:36):
bookmarked to check out.
But turd, I will include a link if you want to look into it. It's called Endurion.
I think it's a self-hosted fitness tracking service designed to give users full
control over their data.
And one of the neat things about it is, first of all, you can just import a
GPX file if you want to track a hike.
And we've covered an app recently that just runs in the background on Android

(55:59):
and just logs to a GPX file.
But it also looks like it works with Garmin Connect and a couple of other services
and it can import from like a Garmin fitness watch.
That's pretty handy.
Yeah, I haven't tried it.
You got my ears up.
It's got a nice UI that gives you like, so if you go on a hike,
it gives you a map overview.
A lot of what these fitness tracking things give you, but just locally designed

(56:21):
to give you full control over your data.
So it's available as a Docker image. It looks pretty comprehensive.
And if you want to give it a shot and report back, or if anybody wants to try
it in Darien, I think that's how you say it.
Let us know. Because it is something I've kicked around. Good question.
Yeah. And if it supports the Garmin stuff, well, we've already got that.

(56:42):
it'd be really nice too if it supported the apple watch and the wife could use
it thank you turd appreciate the baller boost good to hear from you again.
The do to buy it boosts in with 42 000 sats,
hello gentlemen i'm a few episodes behind but
i saw the matrix notification and i just had to boost oh thank you we appreciate

(57:03):
it we do i'm currently on vacation so greetings from somewhere at 37.04 blah
blah blah comma 25.08 yeah we got some gps coordinates okay.
West does your map have this feature.
Uh there's actually a plug-in module you can add as an overlay to the map.

(57:25):
Look at this thing. I'm impressed. Okay, I'm zooming out. I'm zooming out.
That's a lot of digits of precision, too. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
How do you suppose we say this place?
I'm going to say Antiparos?
Paradise, perhaps? It looks like paradise to me. It's a tiny island just off of a set of tiny islands.

(57:47):
Oh, my gosh. Look at all those little islands. Incredible.
so it's really kind of south east of uh greece yeah.
This looks beautiful.
That is really amazing holy crap that must be paradise i.
Think the dude is really abiding right now.
Oh my gosh the dude way to live it up thanks for thinking.

(58:07):
Of us even on your.
Vacation yeah man we really appreciate have a great time well.
We have the immunologist here with 5555 cents,
I use Aeon, which is relatively easy to modify by creating a changed Butterfest
image and then booting into it.

(58:28):
However, it is specifically a laptop OS. I do enjoy the whole DistroBox flat
pack transitional upgrade system quite a lot.
I also feel the pain of those .docx editing with reference software.
I use Zotero, specifically in scientific manuscripts. I strongly believe in

(58:49):
publicly funded science, people should actually use publicly funded software.
Yeah.
Wish LibreOffice would be fully compatible with the whole Word review system.
Man, wouldn't that be a change? That would be amazing. That's a solid boost. Thank you, Immune.
I've heard a couple people use Zotero and really love it.
I want to just touch on something really quick here. He says he's modifying

(59:12):
his AEM install by changing a Butterfest image. And then I presume,
yeah, he says he's booting into that.
That's a whole other way to approach that.
Maybe we should go try AM.
It doesn't sound very cloud native to me.
No, but maybe that's what makes it fun.
Maybe it's copy on write native.
It's...
Cow native, you know?
Oh my God, that's good.
Wes. That's the title. Someone remember that.

(59:34):
I'm going to go with period logical. I'm sure I'm getting that wrong,
but they came in with 2000 sats.
For the listener having an issue with Fountain or others, I had a lot of problems
trying to set up Fountain using a Gmail address. but then no issues using a different domain.
I never saw anything identifying this as a fix but thought it was worth sharing.
I have also heard that. Thank you. Plus one to that.

(59:55):
For folks that were trying to sign up with Fountain, something is going on with
Gmail and I don't know what it is because I use Gmail with my Fountain login
and it works fine but that is something I've heard reports of. So good looking out.
Thank you very much, period and appreciate that boost.
Thor comes in with 3,000 sats. I definitely need to give one of those Atomic Desktops a try now.

(01:00:20):
This is a boost for 623.50 Days of Blitz.
For the next episode, will there be a segment on how to build your own Nix-based installation image?
So it seems like part joke, but then also Thor goes on, sounds like it's trivial
for minor changes to atomic desktops like Bluefin, but how easy is it to build of Nix OS?

(01:00:40):
Not just configure, but say, make an image to deploy to your family or org.
Hmm, okay, so that's an interesting line right there.
If you're looking for something you want to deploy to other people,
it's an interesting question. I would actually argue that minor changes are
easier with Nix OS, right?
Because now I've essentially have a fork of Aurora that I need to go and make

(01:01:02):
sure I update from time to time from upstream or whatever.
And so now there's like an extra step in my upgrade process.
I don't just do like you just update. I have to go through a whole process now.
And if that was just so I could add Nebula and create slash Nix,
right? I mean, we're talking pretty significant shift in how I maintain my system

(01:01:25):
just for those two things.
But when you're talking about creating something that you would build and then
deploy as an image to multiple people, it would work pretty well for that, I think.
Yeah, I mean, you definitely have options, right? You can just do like a stock
install and then immediately apply a flake to that system if you want to.
Or you can totally bake in, you know, you can make your own install.

(01:01:46):
I think a flake would be the way to go. I think that's really the way to do
it, right, is take the flake approach.
Then also, you know, you can break things out a little bit, manage system and
application separately or
update individual applications and not have to update the entire system.
There's some other benefits to it, too, which, you know, give you flexibility
that maybe the other systems don't.
It doesn't change what gets applied but if you just want to build the iso there is a module,

(01:02:12):
uh in nix packages that lets you build like the installation iso so you can
also like totally customize that and presumably set it up to make it really
easy to just apply your flake at first installation if you wanted to yeah.
The output could be a vhd file the output could be an image file you know oci
container file it's a good question let us know if you go down the path.
Odyssey Westra boosted in a row of ducks.

(01:02:35):
Hey, wouldn't it be possible for you guys to shout out the sat streamers who
streamed over 2000 sats?
I don't know how feasible that is, but that would be pretty cool.
My opinion is that sat streaming will probably be more important for live streaming
and podcasts, especially music podcasts.
I don't like picking one specific artist to boost. I like them all sometimes.

(01:02:57):
That's a great point. And it's also sad to forget it, which is nice.
You just know if you're listening, you're sending back the value.
So remembering to boost or coming up with a topic, it just happened.
You know, Odyssey, you send this question at a good time because we have just
started kicking around like what kind of metrics do we want to pull to make
sure things are working correctly?
And to do that, you know, we have to move things into a database and then we

(01:03:17):
have to write scripts against that and pull that data and massage that data.
And one of the things we might be able to do is that type of thing.
Yeah.
We'd have to talk about like how to build something like that.
But we have kind of like the early scripts that we pull for the boosties at
the end of the year. So we could probably modify something like that.
Yeah, we have a lot of the plumbing. actually, but we don't have it rigged to
answer this question just yet, but we'll try to take a look.

(01:03:40):
I think it's a great idea.
Absolutely.
We really appreciate all you SAD streamers out there, too. Gene Bean's back with 8,455 SADs.
Across five boosts.
Excellent boosting. He sends us a reference manager that he likes at techment.com

(01:04:00):
slash reference dash management dash software.
as also for the Word stuff. He says you could try only Office and maybe consider
the web version of MS Word.
I was wondering, I assumed that for some reason they weren't using the web version of MS Word.
I wondered if like the online Office 365 stuff would work. Web Word, Web Word, I like that.
Gene says, I keep my ESP home devices up to date so that my configs are uniform

(01:04:23):
and so that everything plays nice with the latest Home Assistant stuff.
I've learned the hard way, like other tools, if you lag behind too long,
it can be extra hard to get a current again.
Additionally, I have a voice PE and a couple of those cheap Atom voice things
integrated with Home Assistant, and those need updating quite frequently.
That's true, I do update my voice PE.
For the ESPs, you're right in the syntax sense, but one of the nice things is

(01:04:48):
much like an Atomic Linux build, it's a transactional update.
So if the build fails, it won't update the ESP device. And then you can go back
and correct what needs fixed and then build it again.
In theory, Gene, you could pretty safely leap fairly far ahead,
but you're right. I probably don't want to fall too far behind.
It's one of the reasons I want to update my Home Assistant to better hardware.

(01:05:09):
It is a good principle, that's for sure.
Are people version controlling their ESP?
I have all sorts of questions about Home Assistant, I realize,
because that would be a handy thing.
I suppose you could. He says, I want someone to integrate BitChat,
Bridget, we talked about BitChat last week, into the MeshTastic firmware.
So you could optionally have people on both chatting away, say at a camp out or at a conference.

(01:05:34):
Each participating in a MeshTastic radio would then be able to support nearby
people in this theoretical world.
Oh, great idea.
I do feel like there's a crossover between BitChat and MeshTastic where you
have something that can use LoRa and something that can use Bluetooth and you're
taking advantage of both. Maybe one day.
MaxiMesh.
He says, for my laptop, I've loved 95% of Nix, but I'm bouncing to Ubuntu for

(01:05:56):
now for compatibility of select applications.
Wow.
Still love Nix OS. I'm still using it in many places. I'm going to try a normal
distribution plus Nix for my laptop for a bit.
Also a great option. Let us know how it goes. See what you think.
Might try Bluefin, too, he says, and do a little dual boot.
Oh, yeah.
Solid, Gene. Keep us updated. We want to know how it goes.
Thanks for writing back. Marcel boosts in with 5,000 sats.

(01:06:22):
You asked to boost in on whether we're using immutable OSes.
Well, I finally upgraded my 10-year-old Arch laptop to a Framework 16 running NixOS.
Nice upgrade.
I have a NixOS question for you.
All right.
How do you version control your Etsy NixOS slash configuration.nix?
Chris.
I have my home manager config in Git, of course, but I've seen different schools

(01:06:44):
of thought on forums for the root config.
Some sim link it to their home folder while others run Git as root in slash Etsy.
Well, what you do is you do old.configuration.nix, really old.configuration.
Do you append the dates just to keep yourself organized?
No, I just trust the file system for that. All right, what's the right way to do it?

(01:07:07):
What's the right way? Does everything have to be in git these days, boys?
Just git.
If you want a history of it, and you want to be able to roll back.
Oh, all right.
Well, I can tell you what I'm doing. I'm a reasonable man.
You want a time-traveling database?
All right, what are you doing, Brent?
Well, you know, when I was learning Nix, I had the little, you know,
a good Wes on one of my shoulders and a bad Chris on the other shoulder.

(01:07:28):
And it seemed like Wes won out.
So I've been linking to the home directory and doing a sim link there and then
doing version control there.
So that main, the main reason when I was first starting was so I could just
use Kate without needing elevated privileges.
Oh, that, yeah.
That has worked great. Great. I have to tell you, I've rarely used the Git portion

(01:07:52):
of it, but that's the whole point of Git is you hardly ever need it.
But when you do, you really do.
So, Chris, I feel like maybe you can get on board here at some point.
I think the solution is just simply you do different versions,
old, dot, old, dot, dot, back,
and then you throw sync thing at the entire thing across all your machines and

(01:08:13):
then just put certain includes that you want and you're good to go. What's the problem?
I mean, especially if you use Flakes. Git and Flakes are just,
you know, they pair so nice. And I'm with Brent.
You know, if you, under Etsy, NixOS, you can just put Flake.nix.
sim link that wherever you want i i just
say i might put it like under where i have the rest of my source code uh and

(01:08:34):
then you can have regular get regular user permissions and then especially with
flakes anytime you update you can see it just as a diff you can immediately
roll back if you want to and then you have a nice little change log from your
commit history of all the stuff that you've done and.
It sounds very traceable and like you can figure out where things need to be
fixed and take action it's wonderful.

(01:08:55):
You know what i've actually done because i didn't want
to post any of my git configs
to anything public because i figured i
would totally screw that up and make myself vulnerable i actually
have sim linked into a next cloud
directory so i actually have a nix os directory on
next cloud that just has a bunch of machines listed i know

(01:09:18):
there are better ways of doing this but i basically have
a folder for each of my machines and then configs within there
and i've sim linked the folder that is on that particular machine so it's like
i do it once and then but that way i can access the configs of all my machines
from any machine and i can remotely deploy if needed for a server or two i do

(01:09:40):
that which is really handy that.
Sounds like a solution that would work for me.
Yeah it's not too too bad um you know add get in there but chris i figured if
you want to stick with your trusted solution you could just append like a hash to your phone.
Yeah.
That'd be a better way to do it.
Well, we have a boost here from our dear PJ. 12,140 sets.

(01:10:07):
oh it's for me brent almost had it one two one four zero that's 12 years one
month four days prior to the release of linux unplugged six two one.
12 years all right based on the youtube publish date of linux arch show the
arch way published on june 2nd 2013 well there you go wow,

(01:10:30):
That was a little bit before PewDiePie Thank you, PJ Nice to hear from you Appreciate the boost,
Doornail comes in with Doornail, I should say 7887, sorry Comes in with 2,800 and 34 sats,

(01:10:52):
Zip code multiplied by 16 This one shouldn't require too many paper cuts Also,
another OpenShift ping for you as well.
Oh, right. Thank you. Thank you for the reminder.
We get so caught up in everything we're doing, I think.
Yeah, how's that cluster set up going, Chris?
Right. We got to get back to that. Oh, right. Jeez.
What was the amount again?
2, 8, 3, 4, multiply by 16.

(01:11:14):
Okay, so that's 4, 5, 3, 4, 4.
Okay, so now we just need to translate that in our book here.
We got to go find it in the map, bro.
Yeah, so we have a book that tells us zip codes to map coordinates.
The decoder, we call it.
Put that right there.
It's very old. It's got like a, I don't know. I don't know what kind of leather binding this is.
I think it's pleather.
Did someone spill coffee on it?

(01:11:35):
Oh, yeah. That was a while ago.
Was it?
That was.
Let's go with lucky city new Carlisle, Ohio.
Hello, Ohio.
Thank you for the boost.
You know I've never been to Ohio.
Me either.
Gotta put that on the list.

(01:11:55):
I've been, I believe, at least once, because I went to OhioFest way back in the day.
I've seen a lot of ads for Ohio.
My kids say the word Ohio ironically a lot. I don't know what that's about.
Like Ohio?
Ohio, they say. Yeah. I don't know. I couldn't tell you. Amorph Sausage comes in with 5,000 sats.

(01:12:20):
Well, he says, unfortunately, my experience with Universal Blue, a.k.a.
Bazite, was not good.
Oh, no.
Yeah, he says on initial setup, it was fine. But over the first month,
boot time increased with every boot to eventually get to about 10 minutes.
That's not ideal.

(01:12:40):
When I checked what takes so long to start, I saw an OS Tree or Ublue service,
I can't remember the name, taking eight plus minutes.
So I switched to CacheOS, and I'm very happy. I got my parents on Cachy 2.
It kind of went to a disaster. Now they're on Mint.
The OSes seem to not suit every PC tower. That OS seems not to suit every PC

(01:13:01):
tower, and I don't know why.
But I'd love to give Bazzite another try, but I'm scared about ruining my setup.
But I do love the immutable idea.
That is a particularly weird problem that I've never heard anybody else report.
And I'm wondering if something just went sideways.
And how long ago was that? It might be worth another shot. You know,
the projects in the last four years, it's come a long way.

(01:13:23):
I think maybe you give it another try there, Amorph, and let us know.
Tell us how the sausage was made, okay? And thank you for the boost.
Not a zip code boost in with 8,888 sats.
Coming in from Podverse, boosting from the only country that has one zip code per building?

(01:13:46):
Oh, I've heard of this.
Can I guess? Can I guess?
Is it on the Mighty Map? Love the recent Red Hat episodes and the Tui Challenge. Well, thank you.
A couple of weeks back, I fell into the Shaz... How do you say this?
Shamoah.
There we go. Thank you. Rabbit Hole, a past show mention. It's a blast once
you get it tiled in. Does anyone on the JB crew still use it?

(01:14:07):
I'm also now feeling like Bluefin might be the next logical step towards the
cloud-native desktop. Thanks for the great show.
Okay, okay, okay.
Yeah, you guys got to help me out on this one.
Now, the UK actually is known for having zip codes with a high level of granularity,
but I don't think he's talking. I'm just saying, I'm just saying before they write in, I know that.
I know Singapore and Hong Kong both use six-digit codes that uniquely identify

(01:14:31):
sectors or buildings. So it could be Singapore or Hong Kong.
seems like a long shot what do you think brent.
Well i mean i think the japanese get this one right i think they're super sophisticated
and we're just like you know 100 years in the past in the past.
Really okay i didn't know the japanese do this that's my guess okay i know that

(01:14:52):
the netherlands has a pretty granular postal code system too so this could be a few but per building oh.
One of My old maps seems to maybe say hungry.
Hungry, but there's a few options here. That's a rare one, though.
That's pretty neat. Think about the handiness there.
I don't know how to.
You know what I mean?

(01:15:12):
In Zala County, maybe?
Just the zip code tells you write the building to go to. That's so handy.
But in theory, they should be showing me a specific building then.
Wow. Let us know not a zip code.
Please do. Thanks for boosting in.
Now I got to know. I'm stumped.
I got to get an upgrade on this map kit.
Adversary 17 came in below the 2000s at cutoff, but we got to give him a shout

(01:15:34):
out. He says, sorry, I haven't boosted recently. I have been streaming those sats.
I'm getting married next week. So life is hectic.
I bet.
Congratulations. Nice to just hear I have a check in during the middle of all of that.
Wow, that's so neat that we get to hear that kind of stuff. I really appreciate
that. It's really cool knowing that. Thanks, adversaries. And congratulations.

(01:15:56):
Thank you, everybody who supported episode 624 of the Unplugged program.
We really appreciate it. You know, the thing is, is we work hard,
and this segment right here is sort of the reinforcement factor of that.
It motivates us. We give good signal from you. The conversations are great.
It reminds us of things that we've committed to, like the OpenShift stuff.

(01:16:17):
Got to get back on that. So it means a lot to us. And if you like to send a
boost, of course, you can use the Fountain app, or you can go down the self-hosting
route with something like AlbiHub and Podverse.
A shout out to everybody who streamed those sats. 22 of you streamed them as
you listen and collectively you stacked 44,891 sats for the show this week.
When you combine that with our boosters, the show stacked a grand total of 210,139 sats.

(01:16:49):
Join the fun, grab Fountain FM. They've been making a lot of improvements over
there and getting closer and closer to making boosting easier than ever.
And also a big thank you to our members who put that support on autopilot and
make each episode possible. We really appreciate you.
And we do this for you.
Check out the links in the show notes for easy ways to boost.

(01:17:12):
We have them all right over there. Okay, boys.
This is an app that was sent in to us by listener Nick.
And in the members pre-stream, the bootleg, we were talking about some of the
problems that Bottles is facing.
And Bottles is an application that makes it really easy to set up individual

(01:17:34):
wine environments to run Windows applications, and they include some installer
scripts for common popular applications.
So Nick sent in WinApps.
WinApps. And what is neat about it, and it works best with their key-supported
applications. But like what you were talking about back in the day last week, it pops them out.
Oh, I'm going to have to try this.
And it includes integration with things like Nautilus.

(01:17:56):
WinApp's unified software experience for Linux.
Yes, it uses Docker or Podman or LibVert, and then it can pop these individual
Windows applications out and make them feel on Plasma or Gnome like they're as native as possible.
so if you need to be in windows a lot this could

(01:18:16):
be a you know a word or something this could be
a great way to do it now you want to make sure your applications on there
like gonna work for sure list it doesn't have to be on here for it to work or
not but you know you're gonna have a good time but look at this list after effects
adobe audition i mean illustrator right all the adobe stuff wow internet explorer
the microsoft office suite from one note to word and outlook and Publisher and

(01:18:39):
Vizio and Visual Studio.
You could also just do a full Windows RDP session as well, and it could just
be a hyper-efficient way to run Windows applications.
I like that MIRC is on here.
Yeah.
But also PowerShell and Command Pro.
So this system, it queries Windows for all the installed applications,
and then it creates shortcuts for those Windows applications on the GNU Linux

(01:19:02):
OS, and then it uses FreeRDP on the back end to render the Windows applications
alongside your GNU Linux applications.
How neat is this?
It's so great. And there's an official taskbar widget that enables seamless
administration of the Windows subsystem and to launch Windows applications.

(01:19:23):
So if you want to add that, you can, which is just so slick.
The whole thing is just so neat. I didn't even know about it until Nick sent it in.
And it's using the GNU Afero general public license, which is a free copyleft
software license for all kinds of work specifically designed to ensure cooperation
with the community in the case of network or server software.

(01:19:45):
I'm still regularly blown away that we don't hear about some of these applications.
Like we do a lot of just sleuthing around to find the craziest applications
to solve the craziest problems.
And this seems like such an obvious one that should have been on our radar sooner.
It's a really good one, Nick.
Yes, it's fun. It takes me back too, to the old days of trying to run these

(01:20:06):
apps and using the different technologies.
Suddenly I'm like excited to go try to run a Windows application. What's going on here?
Could I run the Creative Cloud suite? If I could, would I? I don't know.
I feel, Chris, like this might solve your Bluefin software availability challenge.
You could just use the Windows Store.
Oh, that's so funny.
Well, you could probably run WSL, right?

(01:20:28):
Oh, man. You know what? That would be like some serious distroception right
there, Wes Payne. That's a good one.
That just about brings us to the end. If you have any tips for my Home Assistant
hardware setup, Brent's backup ideas for both the server-to-server,
the desktops, and really, I think the Android.
Like, what's really ideal on the Android? Say we did want to do a full Android backup.

(01:20:49):
Please boost in or go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact for that.
Also, if you want to make the power user move, join us live.
The program is live on Sundays.
You can get it converted to your local time at jupyterbroadcasting.com slash
calendar, or if you have a podcasting 2.0 app, we'll publish it ahead of time

(01:21:10):
and it'll just be right in your playlist.
And what do we got to tell people every week, Wes? What do we got to let them know?
Chapters and transcripts.
Yeah, that's right. Podcasting 2.0 certified over here.
We've got transcripts so you can follow along or go search for something if you want.
And easy chapter markers to go to your favorite segment.

(01:21:32):
Right back. Play it, listen again, or skip it. Thanks so much for listening
to this week's episode of the unplugged program and we'll see you right back here next sunday.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

The Joe Rogan Experience

Dateline NBC

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}624: Tiny PC, Huge Problems

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Stuff You Should Know

The Joe Rogan Experience

Dateline NBC

All Episodes

624: Tiny PC, Huge Problems

Stuff You Should Know