You know a few episodes ago I told you that my UK server was dead and busted and had ceased to be. I'm delighted to say thankfully that it was the UPS that was the problem. No way. Oh that's best case. Yeah. So here are the symptoms. Tell me if you would have picked the UPS as being the problem. The system powers off randomly. So I would go to try and do as LFS backup or watch a Plex thing from the UK or whatever. And the server's off and I'm like hmm that's weird.
I wonder if my mother-in-law did something or if there was a power cut or something. And then it happens again a couple of weeks later and then it happens two days later and then 10 days later. Just totally random. You come and just find the server just isn't on. So then you go log into the IPMI and you try and turn thing on. And the IPMI still works.
But whenever I guess tries to switch the computer on it draws too much juice, what's the first thing that would come to your mind that something's not turning on? I would just assume you're popping a circuit or something. I don't know how it works over there with your weird electronics. But I would assume like popping a circuit, GFI needs to be reset. Yeah GFI could be a good one. But then the IPMI wouldn't work because it's built right into the motherboard. Okay. All right.
Yeah I'd say power supply. Yeah power supply that's a good one Brent. That's exactly where my mind went. So good friend of the show Al who came to the self-hosted meetup. But I was in the rich this summer very kindly. It only lived about 15 minutes away from my mother-in-laws house where the server lives. When it took it back to his house for the week to try and help me diagnose it. And he messaged me and said Alex I got it home and plugged it in and it came on instantly.
What are you talking about, mate? I you're like I'm sorry. What? Now try doing something as it turn off. Does it overheat? What's happening? Yeah. So we just left it for a week and it was fine. So I bought a new P.A. new UPS and gave out the old one because he can replace the battery worries to the ICANN from here. And everything's been fine for about the last three weeks.
With a battery failure you would hope it would fail I guess gracefully and just in a power outage not provide proper backup but still provide consistent power. I suppose by running it through the battery you're probably getting additional protection there. But I find it ironic Alex because UPS's are so often thought of like something that adds reliability and stability but it is easy to forget they can be a point of failure.
Well this particular one I think I think I bought it when we moved to London or just before we moved to London which would be gosh eight nine years ago now so it's getting up there in age but you would expect it to fail with some kind of a warning tone or something that mother and look and go hey Alex your computer is a really obnoxious beep coming from the home.
Nope nothing like that so the UPS I got to replace it has a USB port so I can plug it in and monitor it via a PC was it called a PC UPS demon and then over to tell scale I bring it into per mythus in this house and about a being about a boom smart well you probably
heard there are buddy from Canada is joining us today Mr. Brent Lee is here he's going to be talking about a new nas he builds in a little bit hello Brent thanks for joining us hello yeah always good to be back I of course know that you've been following along
with our no good tober conclusions because you are asking me earlier today about my config for setting up searching what kind of good big Chris what was the next config I wasn't going to say it see you make this then I get in trouble in the matrix 10 see this is
what happens what you get in trouble for oh I you know talking about next right somebody always criticizes me somewhere every time we do it well I don't I used to but I've seen the mic now so I guess these people are just you know a little bit behind the behind the
time I don't I don't I shouldn't say that I mean something the audience and I I don't want to go to rule of content not to do that you know else we've seen the light though we've seen the light that Google might be done at least for a certain category
of users don't you think I mean looking back at no good tober I think it went really smooth I haven't missed Google one bit I it's it's almost up there with the jellyfin January challenge we did a couple years ago as being like a real nice surprise of all
actually the free and open solution alternatives are actually pretty good mm-hmm mm-hmm and I do have to say I found myself also using clawed and perplexity basically for everything that's not just a straight up I'm searching for a website or a business
anything that's kind of informational or I'm looking for syntax from looking for config or for example this morning I was troubleshooting a mechanical failure in one of my cars and working through the possible scenarios and narrowing it down and a conversational situation
like with cloud right it's perfect for that you know because I can say okay there's no oil leaks there and there's been no metal shavings on the ground so can you eliminate all those possible you know issues and then it works it through with me that's just so
much more superior than search for that exact kind of thing have you used chat gpc for anything no no no I literally have not I would be willing if I could pull it into like some sort of self hosted chat app just through the API you know I'm really looking for something
where I could have llama and thropic and open a eyes API all in one front end then I think that then I would probably use open AI a little bit more but for me perplexity and clawed seem to have it covered because clawed is really good for like configs and development
stuff and perplexity seems really good at current information it does like actively citing more recent information so it's great for actual searches yeah that's it you know I think my conclusion really I put a two-tout a couple of weeks ago saying someone once told me a
few years ago that I was going to have to pay for Google search in the future and I I recall literally laugh again their face that's never going to happen why would anybody ever pay for Google search like it's like it was endless commodity that you know the the ad model
they have would would prop up forever but if you look at the incentives of the algorithm it's entire purpose is to serve you ads right not to serve you good content it's to serve you ads and also by that same token people are generating content that is either you know
content marketing stuff I saw something just yesterday talking about Docker compose isn't enough and it was literally a the arguments were terribly flawed but it was this great long sort of 10-minute long blog post talking about a whole bunch of stuff and the arguments
were really weak and whatever but it ranks really well when you talk about Docker compose and Kubernetes and stuff because it's all it was on the top of hacking news and it you know just well guess what I'm trying to say is that you type anything into Google these
days and think about the number of man hours that have gone into people optimizing and tweaking every little dial to have that piece of content rank more highly it's not going to be me or you with our independent media and our little personal blog sites like
it used to be in in the good old days of the internet it's going to be companies with SEO content marketing teams that have spent time fettling and I don't want to accuse anybody of anything but AI generating articles that have the correct keywords to yeah rank more
highly and Google is just victim of its own success in that regard everybody knows that's why all recipes have like two paragraphs of their life story because they're trying to optimize for for Google looking for that kind of stuff Google's looking for meeting
content and not just small short stuff and so you've seen the perversion of web content to kind of meet that requirement and now it feels like Alex were at a period of time where I could kind of see that monopoly Google has on search really getting challenged I don't
think for every day people yet but for the fact that you and I between search xng or whatever you want to call searching and clawed and perplexity and maybe others you've tried I don't know it literally did not need Google and to me that is astonishing because go back even just
four years maybe three and a half four years ago and it seemed like nobody was ever going to topple Google and it's amazing how these tech giants while they're they're not beat yet and they're still doing great like new kinds of paradigm shifts come along that just
stand out and I'm sure they'll be around for a very long time and very successful but these are real challenges during this challenge for me I was doing a bunch of development work with terraform at work and trying to deploy tailscar using terraform on top of a w s and I was
coming up against an issue where I was providing the API key or the auth key I forget which way round I had it wrong but my syntax was wrong and so I just asked perplexity hey you know what what am I doing wrong here's here's my code and I just copy and pasted the actual terraform
file attached it to the query so it had an extra context it took me to the exact line of source code in the in the open source operator or provider for terraform sorry that told me the exact syntax that I needed to use like it was it was like it says no Alex this not auth key it's API
key this line of source code says so and I'm like oh goodness like that would just would never happen in the Google universe yeah you would you would be reading foreign post after a foreign post and right red trying to put it together yeah and that for me was the moment where it clicked
and I was just like you know I think give it five years maybe more for normals but certainly for people like you and I we're already switching I think the critical mass will come either Google will catch up and they'll figure out how the algorithm works because this is the other this is
the other part of it I read another post talking about how a lot of the original talent that wrote these internal services that run the Google search algorithm a lot of that talent's left and so a lot of these boxes internally a Google are just black boxes they have no idea how certain things
are coming to certain conclusions and I don't know how much truth there is to that but I could certainly see that you know we've built this complex thing and we're just going to leave it in the corner and not touch it because it works you know but I was revisiting your Google tober kickoff
episode earlier today and you mentioned defaults being king and I wonder what it'll take to see those defaults change in web browsers because right now you know us early adopters you're you're going to find those sites and making them work for you like perplexity or you're going there to use
them and that's from your own argument Alex is not going to work for most of the population so what's it going to take for those defaults to change I'm just going to ask perplexity how much did Google pay to be the default search engine in 2020 the schedule for 2022 let's see what it comes
back with this is the thing I really like about these more context aware search engines like they give you the exact sources so like it links me to a Reddit thread and a nine to five Mac thread and business today an Apple insider it says in 2022 Google paid Apple alone a staggering 20 billion
dollars to maintain its position as the default search engine in Safari across iPhones iPads and Max now that's just one small pillar that they are paying to be the default on we've no I don't know I'm going to dig any further as to how much they pay to be the default everywhere else
how much is the development cost for Chrome for example like that's not factored in here so to answer your question I suppose what will it take for Google to not be the default follow the money well I could see Apple becoming its own default if they keep going with their AI
strategy and open AI certainly is getting enough money to to bump Google out of that place in certain areas so we'll see yeah well I mean Apple like money right there like that 20 billion or they'd like not to spend it well Google's paying them now so that's a nice juicy little
little bit of money they make there is an antitrust suit that is proceeding and one of the things on the table is forcing Google to stop doing those deals may or may not happen that's one of the things on the table at the moment so these have been brought up in other contexts as well because
Google pays other vendors as well and they may have to stop and I think that's when Apple would swap in something like Apple intelligence probably backed by Bing or Google then or something like that and open AI just released their open AI search tool kind of a soft launch but they have
launched an open AI search engine now so it seems to me you're going to have the platform vendors build in their own Google alternatives and they're going to be varying quality and then you're going to have self-hosters like us that are going to try to you know plug in our own
self-hosted solutions and they're beginning to be more of those exactly just like perplexica so I'm aware this mispodcast is called self-hosted and you and I have just spent a while extolling the virtues of perplexity and Claude but perplexica is a self-hosted alternative or kind
of clone of perplexity so it uses search xng under the hood searching under the hood is early enough to do its actual Google searches that it then feeds into the local Lama model that it's using it's just a really nice like daisy-chaining of all these open tools that are able to feed into one
in one another it's not super reliable I spanned it up for the some of the time during this month to test it out and I found that sometimes it was sending empty responses to searching which caused it to kind of hang and crash and like going to some kind of like a race condition waiting for input
to come through but it's just really exciting that we've got things like perplexica coming through that okay they're not ready for prime time yet but give it a little bit of time and if you've got even just one of the new m4 mat minis for example you could use that as a fairly cheap machine
learning server that with running o-lama on it and that's going to be more than powerful enough to run something like perplexica for sort of the average home user I think that's where it's going to go eventually right now it needs too much GPU horsepower for the average person to even consider
self-hosting it but it does make you wonder about the scale of the the challenge of the the data sense of forms behind these big AI companies I know and it makes me wonder if if maybe in the future smaller models just aren't more competent and you have people just running smaller models
distributed instead of these giant hosted models you know how the arc of tech sort of started centralized with time compute and in universities and whatnot and then we moved out to the micro PC where people got compute at their local desk and then we move back to the internet where we have
a lot of cloud compute which is essentially time-slice computing again and it wouldn't be interesting if AI takes a path these lm's in particular where they're really useful ones take all this horsepower and all this GPU and all this big data and then as they get better and more
sophisticated in a five 10 years their micro and you know you have them built into all of your phones and your laptops and your OS's and your individual apps and your hosted apps and all that and it's just one Docker container image that they can include now you've got to build right in
and it can even run on your CPU I could see it getting there and at that point then these big data centers kind of become obsolete or they even get more powerful and do more stuff I don't I don't know I predict you get perplexica on your pocket I would love it yeah I'm gonna check out perplexica
this looks I mean it sounds like it's maybe just maybe keep an eye on it right now but it's not a crazy Docker composed to get going it looks like it's pretty reasonable and set up it's pretty nice yeah so it uses like I say a O lama under the hood and then it's searching as
well there's got a bunch of different search modes like you can do the standard kind of like writing assist academic search that kind of stuff it also has funnily enough a reddit default search mode so it automatically search reddit for discussions and that kind of thing
that's what you always ask for whatever Google search for the last few years has had reddit appended to it's to avoid the SEO spam really so yep unrade dot net slash self hosted hey self posters mark your calendars because you will not want to miss unrades annual cyber weekend sale
so here's the details for four days only from November 29th to December 2nd you can say $15 an unrades unleashed and starter licenses and then you can also say 50% when you bundle with a second unleashed or starter license net might not have known this but a lot of unrade users end up
with multiple licenses maybe a test server maybe an offsite backup server or maybe you have attack enthusiasts friend or family member that you want to gift unrade and if you already own unrade they've got you covered there too upgrades to the unleashed license will also be discounted
but that's only for four days from November 29th to December 2nd and don't forget about unrade 7 the bait is out now it's coming along really nicely it's got game changing features like full ZFS file system support a revamped dashboard much improved via management and a sweet new integration
with tailscale yeah that's right so go find out more and get ready for the sale by heading to unrade dot net slash self hosted unrade unleash your hardware unrade dot net slash self hosted a few weeks ago I mentioned a tool called bento box which is a window manager for macOS written
by a good friend of mine and I had several people write in and say actually I really enjoyed that recommendation and the mac has been my sort of development platform now for a few years because I have to use a lot of Adobe staff I do final cut there's and there's just nothing else
that really kind of sits in that gooey middle where where I get a proper terminal as well and I swear I've been through this rationale on the show before but I'm talking to you today through a brand new MacBook you got a new m4 over there huh I did yeah I've got the old m1 max I say old
it's what three or four years old now 2020 right yeah I mean it is old in terms of releases now it's three back right I wasn't gonna buy it and then factory okay mal and I'm running my mega base across multiple planets now and the fans are going were as I'm running and then I
I realized that the m4 was gonna be better because I read a read it post about it and so I'm saying that I did the m1 max upgrade from the m1 to the m4 and it can run my factories and the fans don't even spit out so it's super nice I love how Alex's determining factor now is did the fan spin oh it's
time to upgrade yeah hey man you know I'm the fans when you're playing when you're trying to play factory okay this is true because you I must have added I don't even know how many hours is well over a hundred since it came out like two weeks ago it's kind of a problem but anyway just just
a quick side no factorial 2.0 space age has faster past any dreams of expectations I could have possibly had for that game it is so good oh I can hardly articulate to anybody if your brain works that way in that kind of slightly ADHD like problem solving software development kind of way
beware it's a dangerous game to let yourself play so I'm just getting started can I jump right to the space because I love space you know oh no you have to you have to you have to build your own rockets I got it oh god okay well honestly a lot of the mechanics you learn on the first planet
they still apply to the next ones but they've done a really great like I won't give any spoilers but there are three or four extra new planets now and they each one has its own complete twist on the mechanics that you've learned on your home planet I mean for veteran players like myself
it's been really weird to like I can't say anymore I'll spoil it but it's been really weird to just have to land on a new planet be like huh none of the stuff I've done before with like recipe chains and stuff like none of that works anymore that you have to throw it all out and
start again and it's it's been a just a wonderful experience so anyway welcome into factorial corner apparently it's like learning a new programming language or learning next or something you have to throw out everything you already know I could see the I could see the the the appeal yeah you know
it's not it's not too far off like the yeah yeah okay so it's like switching from Python to go or something you know and it's like okay I know that the constructs are kind of the same when I can operate in a similar envelope here but huh what's threading like huh yeah okay see anyway
coming back to the MacBook I got the M4 Max with the Nano Texture display and it's it's like the best matte display on a laptop I think that I've ever seen it's it is superb and did you say it's the 14 inch version right yeah the 14 inch because like oh that's great no that's a perfect size
there's I have the 16 inch that Teoscale provided me to do all my editing on for work and it's it's a chunky heavy big lunch tray of a laptop that's what the good Lord invented external monitors for Alex yeah absolutely yeah I've I think my next laptop has to be 14 inch screen just for
the portability oh I'm very jealous it's small it's light it's wonderful and it fits I won't say in your pocket but it fits in a backpack without having to like do any kind of gymnastics or anything right it doesn't weigh a ton either which is very nice when you travel as much as I do
but whenever I set up a new Mac it's it's always a good chance to test out the next Darwin configurations and it's so nice to clone your get repo onto a fresh laptop run the next Darwin rebuild command a couple of times and you've got your dock icons exactly where you left them
all of the blue apps are installed all of the Mac app store apps are installed all you have to do is log in that is really sweet that is wow that makes it just like a super low effort low-cost transition I think I should probably do a video on it before I send my old Mac in for trading
by the way if if you want an M1 max 14 inch MacBook Pro for a decent price apple are any giving me like $1,100 or something for this thing send me a message and we'll work something out but before I send that one in I should probably make a video talking about my like Mac nix setup
because it's really quite dialed in at this point I've got I've got it so that I can override on certain machines if a certain file is present to have a different dock layout but if it if that file doesn't exist then it will just do the default Darwin dock that I like so like my recording
machine has a custom layout and then all of my other Macs are all the same yeah serenity it's really yeah it's really nice now when you're setting up a new machine obviously doing a lot of logging in and that kind of stuff and my bit warden password is kind along so I started looking for a
text expander application we finally get into the dev tooling corner part of the discussion oh I thought we were talking about factorial all right yeah I kind of digressed a little little haven't I been it oh well and I came across this tool called snippety snippety dot app okay this
is a tool that lets you basically it's not quite like text expander which was kind of this magic always listening to every keystroke like you used to have it in the the genius room at the Apple store where we would type a certain like RFR for example and it would expand it to ready for repair
or something like that or RFP ready for pickup or something like that like and then there were a bunch of like notes that we all had standardized across the team and stuff like text expander was really great in that scenario but here I wanted to use it to do things like type in my master bit
warden password you know I'm going to put it behind a secret incantation or something like that so that only I know really what the text expander thing is and it has this lovely kind of like little shortcut menu where I can do command shift x and it brings up a few options system-wide
for me to search through or I can do command shift space and it lets me search the entire vault it's really nice and it syncs with iCloud 2 or you can sync it using sync thing because it lets you just do a specific file if you want to if you don't want to use iCloud that kind of thing
really nice app it was about 30 dollars I think on the app store so not cheap by any means but it's it's really quite well put together application all right so snippety dot app it looks like it does it looks like it does a lot more than I would even need but the expander stuff would be so handy
oh it's got a okay collaboration well sync your settings to mine so I can just deal with you've done yeah well maybe not because it has never mind but if you're doing the same so I install tail scale and docker in a lot of different places these days and a bunch of other stuff too
where I'm like always downloading or curling the same feels like curling the same thing all the time and so I've put it behind a text expand a shortcut now as literally I do the command shift x tail and then what is it i tail actually for install tail scale i tail and it literally curls it
puts it into the text box in front of you curl tail scale dot com whatever and pipes it to to bash and a minute later tail scales installed so that that kind of feels like magic a little bit it is a little bit I could see using this for a lot of handy commands it does make me have a little
mac phomo sometimes because these apps are a great example of like there's things at macOS just just driving crazy but then there's so many great community apps that you come along and some of them are paying some of them are free but they they really fix a lot of this stuff this is an example
that now Brent I wanted to talk to you about your lovely shiny new server we've been threatening or you've been threatening this is this bloody thing I think as long as I've known you is that yeah that's likely accurate it's probably one of the reasons we became friends because they've been
trying to just like pry out the knowledge from that little head of yours and how I should go by doing this which has evolved in the last five six years something like that I think yeah as a little update I was just remembering exactly a year ago I bought a whole bunch of hard drives with
the you know grand vision of creating sort of two sister servers one that would exist in my parents place one that would exist at my place that I could sort of mirror data back and forth somehow a year went by and those drives were just never really put to good use but I finally did something about
it with the help of Wes and Chris we got together one I think one day last week to try to solve an unrelated problem and that wasn't working or like okay well let's build Brent's nest and I had just so happens to build the hardware that morning so we took advantage of some time together and
built me a thing and it's a thing that I've been wanting for a great long time and there's been as you've heard on this show a great number of you know franken builds trying to get towards this idea of just really just having a stable nest that wasn't like a laptop with a squid of hard drives
and I feel like for the very first time I might just be there all right so what were the goals for this project removing the squid of hard drives check sounds like yes so far well I have to plug them in back in to grab the data off them at some point wouldn't it really be more like an
octopus of hard drives right in and let us know yeah the idea of just having a box that's super stable and that isn't delicate to the point of you know someone coming by and unplugging a thing was really the idea when I say someone I also mean cats but the idea of just having a box a
super stable appliance that's really reliable is was the main goal and having hard drives that I could trust as well because I've had many many hard drives over the years being a photographer with tons and tons of data on them but they've never really been in one cohesive machine
for more than I don't know six plus months of being stable you know you should never trust a hard drive right well you've yeah you taught me that a while ago that's why I have more than yes more than I need maybe I'm just paying it forward from our good friend Zalyn and Jim you know
they're always talking about how hard drives are about to eat your face yeah maybe I should duplicate my data somewhere first but I don't know there's I think with a lot of self hosting at least from my experience a lot of it also has to do with just feeling good about what you built and a lot of
what I built previously felt exciting but didn't feel like it had that stable aspect of it you know and I know that's a completely emotional thing and it worked for the most part to get me to where I am today but it never felt like it was a long lasting solution both from hardware and software perspective but I think I think I might be there now we talked about this right at the very beginning of this show with Wendell talking about craftsmanship and this is an angle that I'm really beginning to
appreciate the longer I do self hosting is that you make deliberate decisions to replace certain services in your case I'm assuming there's next cloud running on this thing for example and over time you start to assemble piece by piece this solution that removes your reliance on
the cloud for for one of a better example because you not only are replacing these services but also learning how and and why you want to do those things there's certainly been several examples where I've replaced I can't think of one of my head but where I've replaced the service in the
cloud and then a few months later I'm like oh I've gone back to the cloud I've stopped using the self hosted version I guess that's not that important to me for this particular thing so like does does education play a big factor for you as well as the ethical side?
yeah I think I am a long like basically a lifestyle learner I just one of my best most favorite pastimes is learning things especially related to tech and that was part of the problem with the previous incantations of this solution was that I was
also using it as a learning platform so you know you go in there and you install a bunch of stuff and all of a sudden the thing you were hoping was really reliable and like an appliance is all crafty and you've gone ahead and broken all the things that were stable you know last
week sounds like a pretty average juice day to me well I think the key now is I'm in a place to be able to have a couple devices you know and I've got some smaller devices or some older devices that I don't mind for them to be the test device and for one machine to be the untouchable let's say you know have it be super stable and not do any tinkering it's like a no tinker zone but we'll see if I stick to that so what is the hardware and this thing that like them?
well you might recognize this hardware Alex because you worked real hard to get it over the border here to Canada I purchased your old server components so I think you might know these parts better than I do maybe it's the Azeroth rack e3 c246d for you Roser off the tongue doesn't it
yeah these from what I understand we're in your old server and they've got sort of a what second life versus third life here in my my cabin in the woods it'll be a second life yeah so it's based around the Intel 8th gen i5 8500 venerable CPU was there a reason that attracted you to such a
platform I gotta be totally honest here so I've like I mentioned the squid previously I've just taken whatever hardware I've had around that wasn't in use and put it to this purpose but I figured I have a surprisingly bad luck with hardware both with compatibility and frying like some
other boards by doing things I probably shouldn't have done so I just decided to trust uncle Alex embrace the Alex endorsement right and so when you said I got these parts for sale I was like if I could just take the tried and tested and true components that you've been running that I
you know I trust your your building capabilities then I I jumped right on that oh well because to be honest I was as you know because I have mentioned this to you very many times I have gone digging myself to find the right components and the right cases and all this stuff
and it just can become a rabbit hole so I feel super fortunate that I can reach out to someone like you and just say hey what should I build and you give me you know the grocery list and part of the groceries were in your house this time around well listeners might remember from
previous self-hosted that I ended up purchasing four 20 terabyte western digital reds with the idea of rating them like a raid one in pairs so two of these discs I'm hoping I can build another sister machine that will end up 3500 kilometers away at my parents place to
serve as their sort of stable server as well so the ideas to have two super stable servers that are built as close to identical as possible that I can replicate data back and forth and so how are you planning on doing that are you using ZFS hmm I knew you would ask this question and I would
have to let you know that I did not choose your darling ZFS oh you mad man you Chris and Wes got to know Chris and Wes did suggest that I go that as ZFS route and we had probably a 30 20 to 30 minute discussion about like the pros and cons of each and it's a it can
be a hard decision so I ended up wanting to go with better FS and part of the reason is I don't think I will be doing extremely fancy like enterprise type things and I also don't need those skills for my employability so that was one factor but also and this was the biggest one for me
I wanted to have Linux native technologies on these machines as much as possible what do you mean open open ZFS Linux native these days do you mean more license compatible I mean that you don't have to install like a DKMS module or like make sure you have the right kernel for things to work
properly and that it's you know comes out of the box in every single so which OS you running ah you know next OS of course so there's no DKMS with nicks it's just a couple of lines to config yeah right someone else has already built the kernel for you it's sitting in the binary cache like
just waiting for you Chris help me out here no it's true yep I think I think nicks is probably one of the safest distributions out there to use ZFS I think one of the things that came up on our conversation that we did have around the the native tooling aspect was and it's good and bad
and I think it just depends on your preference so ZFS is an entire suite of tooling right you have mm-hmm Z pool and you have all of the ZFS commands but our FS with a few exceptions is really using all of the standard Linux tools that you use to manage any other file system on a Linux box
and so it's kind of handy if you already know that tooling from other distributions like you know like you have runs but our FS on his laptop to then you just continue to use those same tools you don't have to learn a separate set I don't know I don't think it's so bad because I think
the ZFS tools are actually really great so I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to learn that but there's just something to consider it'd be the same thing like if when BKASFS is stable and finally shipping it's probably going to make a really great home lab file system for people that
are looking for something a little leaner and meaner than ZFS but it all again in the same situation it's going to be using you know make FS and it's going to be using the tooling built into Linux that you used to manage all the file systems that just come built into the kernel and there's pros
and cons to that I think I think there's also some positive pass experiences that played into this decision like I've had butter FS on root running my tumbleweed machine here that I usually use for podcasting we well we ended up the next day wiping that too but that's a different story
that you can catch in the link in the left and so I felt like I had already positive experiences with butter FS and also if I was going to run butter FS on root on my everyday machines it sure would be helpful to be able to do a file system native backups as well using like butter FS send
those kind of things I know I can run ZFS on root as well but that feels a little bit more experimental to me maybe I'm wrong but I think emotions playing to that decision too do you feel like you're pushing water up hill with this decision I can sense some kind of a not shame like you even
said it like I'm going to have to admit it to you that I'm not using ZFS like why do you feel that way only because I know you you love ZFS so much and you would certainly suggest that as the way to go because it's it's in your toolbox mostly because I've been brainwashed by one of your fellow
Canadians for many many years I think are you saying it's my fault no no Alan Jude of course you know it's just like technically a very very complete solution so honestly you know it's not my data that you're going to lose it's you know you're going to be a guinea pig for
us all Brent and I'm actually really kind of interested to hear how you find the butter FS tooling particularly for cross continental replications I assume over tail scale or some other means of course is available other VPNs are available it's for me it's you're just like the canary in the
coal mine and you're doing a sort of public service so you know as somebody who I ran butter FS when it first came out and I lost data and also had a system that couldn't boot because of butter FS at one point it was kind of a Buntuz fault but it was also because I was using butter FS
it was like you know 50 50 as somebody who says lost data and lost a bootable system to butter FS back in the battle days I'll attest to the fact that you know a lot of work from Sioux and from Facebook Facebook hired several core developers many years ago now and they've just been cranking
out fantastic code so it is a pretty solid file system now I think there's a real fine line though between like when you use butter FS or ZFS for long term data storage and that's what that's why I mean we seriously debated that the longest of all of the decisions we made like jellyfin that
was about a three second decision but butter FS versus ZFS was maybe even longer than a half hour but ultimately did come down to like the laptop runs it and his hands runs it I've had pretty good luck with mine you know now that I realize my O droid because it's just a
teeny little O droid I'm using butter FS in a really irresponsible way too just absolutely bonkers way that nobody should do so I'm not even going to mention how I do it but it's it's been running for about three and a half years now it's ridiculous well I would love to know from those
listening have I made the biggest mistake ever here I think maybe at least one of you currently on microphone thanks maybe I have but we'll see in time tailscale.com slash self host to go try it out for free on 100 devices and three users
not a limited time deal it's the plan I'm on since the beginning it's a great way to support the show and try it out then you can play around with their enterprise features if that suits you as well it's tailscale.com slash self hosted it is the easiest way to connect devices and services
to each other wherever they are and you probably thinking of tailscale like a VPN but it's so much beyond that it is a secure remote access system that is also a mesh VPN it is also my land it is also programmable networking and it is also very easy to deploy zero config you get it set up
in just minutes what I love as a self-hostar about tailscale is that I can deploy applications and services just to play around experiment with them I don't have to worry about the security but yet I can still get access and get the same services wherever I go and I use DNS resolution on
my tailnet so I just access everything by name from every system I own and guys I own way too many systems it's ridiculous and it's so nice that the well I'm an old man but the bookmarks that I have for like whatever it might be just work wherever I am everything's the same if I'm at work
if I'm on my phone if I'm at home if I'm at a friend's house it all just works because I have a mesh network that is powered by wire guard everything's on that tailnet and it creates essentially what to me is perceived as a flat network very simple but you can do it over complex infrastructure
some of my nodes are on vps's some of them are vm's running behind a net on a machine some of them are mobile devices some of them are raspberry pies some of them are containers and just the application container is on the tailnet directly and all of that is represented in a flat network that is easy to understand easy to set up and then I have all kinds of options like sharing I can do ACLs to securely control access to devices and services I can tie it in with my existing authentication
infrastructure so everybody that has a Jupyter Broadcasting account with our authentication provider also gets access to the tailnet and I can set their permissions and what they can and can't get access to it's really powerful you've got to try it out because it absolutely fundamentally changes
the self hosting and home lab game so try it out support the show and get it for free up to 100 devices not a limited time trial it's tailscale.com slash self hosted that's tailscale.com slash self hosted so one of the things that shiny new server of yours does Brent that it does really
well actually is video transcoding using the quick sync video encoder are you doing much video encoding at all I hope to I will admit I've had issues getting the quick sync and all of that set up properly so maybe we need a little session together but yes that's that's the hope because
you're running as you're running jelly for you know as a next module right yes sir so yeah probably just I don't know user permissions for the quick sync device but anyway I've got this dream that one day we're going to be able to just have quick sync video encoder somewhere on the network and run
jelly fin on this super low power divot I don't know like something super basic like a Raspberry Pi and that's going to be enough to do the front end and maybe even some of the server side processing too but the actual video encoding gets distributed across the network are you with me on this
well oh oh oh Alex it's Christmas in November because I got a gift for you I thought you might now it's not actually affiliated with the handbrake project but it's called handbrake web and it is a self hostable platform that gives you a headless handbrake web front end that does
distributed transcoding you can leverage multiple devices and send out transcoding jobs as workers to them or you can all have it running on one box it gives you a web interface to manage all of this and to create transcode queue so you could actually like maybe you're going on a trip
and you want to transcode something to a smaller format you could stack up many many many multiple videos and then have a dispatch those videos throughout your network to transcode them or do it all in one big box and they're working on adding a preset creation they have some built in but
what I think is pretty neat is you can just launch the handbrake desktop app which is a great app you can set all the settings you want export that as a JSON preset and then upload it right in the handbrake web bobs your uncle it brings all of those presets in and does that exact encoding
because it's using handbrake CLI under the hood and it's slick it does right now directory monitoring so I've created a directory that's on a song but share and also of course over sftp you just drop the job in there and it's off to the races so like a network share works really well in this
case oh nice they have other kinds of features are going to add like you know user accounts and other things but it's it's for what you need right now for that kind of stuff it's great so you could literally just have a network you know I use the word drop box but you literally
just drop a video file into a directory and then a few minutes later it spits out something with a pre-determined codec oh man yeah and I would have used this so much back in the day we were manually encoding like an HD version and a mobile version and a tiny version we would
create three different versions of the video file because that's just kind of how the distribution worked back in the day and how great would it be to just assign a different PC to each job so they're all three simultaneously running and then it just spits them back out in wherever you
define the output to go oh yeah machine has a proper Nvidia GP here in it so that does the 4k one and yeah yeah that would be nice tasty I mean I think the fact you have to create the presets externally it comes with the default handbrake ones but then if you want to create them externally
like the author of the project seems to think that that's a big missing feature and that they want to add like a preset creator in there but you could I couldn't theory like I could say oh Alex I just think this is the best video encoding preset and I could send you the JSON file and you could
import it and now you're doing your encodes to that spec I don't know much about video encoding if I'm honest like YouTube does a terrible job because you see all the compression artifacts in YouTube all the time like I know that looks bad compared to what I see in my editor but like
why it looks like I couldn't tell you so yeah they really they really munch it don't they could we just have like a directory of community sourced like a repo of like presets yeah that'd be interesting kind of like a docker hub of presets for handbrake yeah yeah or like a or like a
get hub list of something of great handbrake presets you know one for like mobile travel you're watching on a tablet I tend to like to to not really re encode my videos as possible but there are times where I've needed to do like before a trip a batch encoding or you know content like I
was thinking for JB maybe this is something that can be useful as part of our back end but then this front end aspect of it is available for the crew for one off encodes remember why not yeah that would be that would be really nice if you seen those videos on YouTube where people take
like an old VHS tape and they record a VHS into a VHS and then do it about and 20 times later they show you the end result and it's just complete compressed garbage it's just just terrible oh yeah have you seen the Marques Marques video where he like uploads his YouTube video like a hundred
times or 200 times oh yeah the same thing right the YouTube encoding is real bad it's real bad but yeah if anybody has anything else out there like this distributed networking coding or like a hosted video encoding app with some nice presets for travel and whatnot boosted in please because
right now I'm thinking this is it but the space could be better maybe there's more things out there and I'd love to know speaking of boost we have some great boost to get into and our first one came in from wine eagle who sent in a big old baller boost a row of sticks 111
101 sats and he sent us an email which I believe we read because I went through the inbox and read all the emails so thank you very much for that wine eagle coming over from this week and Bitcoin to the self-hosted podcast it's nice to have you thank you very much anonymous boosted in 55
thousand 555 sets that's not something special around these parts no I mean I feel like it's it means it does have meaning don't you think I just don't know if I know what it is high five oh there it is high five to you all for from a long time listener started with the Linux action
show way back and this listener finally got alby all set up so thank you for all you do the jb crew that rhymes that's awesome thank you anonymous you know I've been seeing a nice uptick of people getting their self-hosted alby hub setups and trying this out I mean why not right
it's pretty cool support one of your favorite podcasts with the whole self-hosted set up I started with last two back in the good old days wow you're making me feel old alie yes me to me to those one of the first Linux things I ever took in does learn Linux so thank you
wow wow wow ginkgo sound comes in with 10 thousand sets my ends next cloud instance turned 12 years old this year I never had many issues with it one time I moved more of its features to specialize apps like log set an image but I don't think I would have found those apps have
those features not been available in next cloud in the first place also the next cloud andred app has never complained about being out of sync with the server thanks next cloud looking at you image well that's a nice report yeah image does love to do that they release updates all the time yes
and then unless well the phone updates because it's through the apple app store or the google play store or whatever and then it you load it up and it goes hey by the way did you know your server is 0.1 versions I don't care please can we just remember we're not allowed to complain about
that remember I'm much trouble I got in when we complain about that last time yeah I yeah but you're right it is a thing and you know people would write in with and you should use such and such to auto update your image container but it every now then there's a breaking change so I
want to do it manually it is a thing I still love the project but it's a thing it's a thing it's a good job we got Brent on this episode you're talking about next cloud being 12 years old yeah wow that's a long install our next boost not exactly a next cloud win so I'll read it it's 18,345
sats by veimax I've had Chris's issue with next cloud locking down after being recreated due to one of my phone clients trying to log in yeah I didn't even think about it the my Android would be sitting there trying to knock on the door on I you have to uninstall the next cloud app and clear all
of its data which persists between installs for reasons I do not understand also regarding video on Linux I think this is the strongest case for Ubuntu here especially for gaming like Alex was talking about I have a 3080 running plane on Ubuntu and while I did have the issues Alex is
describing on Ubuntu 20 I had now I haven't since I had installed the proprietary drivers through the software center I know it's boring on the most recent version of Ubuntu every year just having had a problem since fresh installs have gone flawlessly in any game in proton DB that's
of gold or higher just works perfectly Fedora arch nix they all can work but when it's 630 on a Tuesday you just want to play a game with your friends you reach for that Ubuntu I mean yeah it's if it's a good experience it's a good experience I think the distros in general are getting better
about the Nvidia driver like Fedora it's like a one click install now right and with nix you just put it in the config once and it always makes sure it builds with the proper Nvidia driver and then like you say Ubuntu they got the one click there in the up store like the the Ubuntu
probably has the peak experience when it comes to gaming I will admit but the Nvidia experience overall is getting really good what about pop OS that's is out on the Ubuntu base yeah yeah I think that's pretty solved too probably a pretty good experience over there I'd imagine
they've all got their problems though I mean I just did a fresh install of Windows big again because factorial was playing up so you know need to give the factory room to grow on a proper install and the shenanigans that Windows 11 makes you go through these days to install
just a local only account like I had to disconnect the network cable and then do shift F10 and then there's some like out of box reset command you have to type in it reboots and then it tries to restart the wizard clap your hands twice jump up and down yeah and then when it can't
find the internet connection that's when it lets you finally create a local local account crazy well Jordan Bravo boosted in another 5,555 sets I used to run next cloud in containers on Ubuntu it was completely unreliable and very frustrating recently I started over with nextOS
and the next cloud nextOS module it's been running with 100% uptime for many months now and I'll never go back you can pry next set of my cold dead hands oh yeah this guy gets it yeah and I will say I'm very happy so far I haven't fully set up my next cloud install with my new kind of
nix based install that I talked about last episode but since last episode everything I have set up is been working really great I'm happy with the performance so far I think problem solved for me and I agree you can pry it out of my cold dead hands we'll see how it does with my file upload
from this episode because our centralized self hosted like how all hosts get the files to drew our editor is we upload them to a self hosted next cloud server and the last four or five episodes and problems yeah ever since I got my fiber upload like it can't handle my light speed apparently
ah it's your fault we thought so that's what that was our that was until this weekend when I uploaded files from the studio and I had the same problem and the city has got like a crap upload oh okay so I think it's I don't know we use s3 storage as a backend for next cloud we thought we'd
solved it with file locking and we'd had a couple of successful uploads and then here we are again I don't actually know what the nature of it is yet one what it sure stinks because it looks like the files upload and they even show the correct file size in like the web browser but when you go
to download them that's when you find out it's like an invalid URL or something or when drew message you do and says hey dude I have your file yeah it happened again yeah yeah you know the strangest thing is for once everything's been just working for me so I've never had one of the files recently
have any problems so maybe we should compare notes I don't know what's going on here he gave us his bug field bronze wing comes in with a row of ducks that's 2,222 sats I don't use nicks but I have been thinking this whole time the perfect media server could just be a next config just
plexer jelly fin and you know the r stack and just have it all preset up maybe one day I'll even try next I've been very happy with unrade and I have the pro lifetime license managing the array is what I don't understand how to do so I'm kind of scared to switch so there's a separation in
concerns in my mind at least between the base OS and the application layer I think there's a handful of apps that the nicks way and like the nicks modules might make sense for like we're hearing just in this comment section just in this feedback section alone that many people have
had good success with the next cloud module for example but I think there's still a huge argument to be made for kind of the industry standardization around Docker compose as a deployment artifact whenever you go to spin up any project almost any project at least they almost all have some kind
of a Docker runtime these days and the same cannot I mean image was only added a couple of weeks ago to the next packages repo so long as you are still in the the world that we're in right now and I appreciate nothing's going to change unless people move things forward so if I'm sat here saying
like we use Docker because everybody else uses Docker because everyone else uses Docker like that just maintains the status quo I'm aware of the irony but you know from from my perspective it just if I'm doing the same thing as everybody else it makes troubleshooting easier it makes the
developers lives easier because they've got stable deployment target yada yada yada I think yeah well I think with this one I get reminded that Alex on the perfect media server website that you have crafted you already have a nixos configuration for the perfect media server I admitted to the
world last week you even have a section here it says take take the blue pill I admit you to the world last week that my media server has been running nix for the last six months perfectly happily and yeah never been more stable so I just want to point out I'm not the one that's brought it up once
this episode I'm telling me I will say the base OS is nixos with zfs working flawlessly and merge your fs for the media drives and then the app stack continues to be Docker compose fed through my Ansible playbook that just deploys it onto the host and then I run Docker compose up and
that way if ever I switch off nix I'm I'm it's all about for me maintaining that portability if for whatever reason nix implodes which with the community drama that constantly seems to be going on with that project who knows what the future looks like but I hope it's bright I hope it's rosy
whether it's goo ex or nix or whoever licks is that another one isn't it yeah so yeah I don't know portability in a nutshell I'll summarize this one because tabby sent us a long one he's a long time listener and he wanted to send us his thanks he says he's reaching out to mention a heat I don't
know if that's a typo he says I'm not sure if it's been covered before I recently discovered it's extremely useful it's a quick command or remind myself of command usage and formatting it's really made a huge difference for me okay and he also also mentioned that he's been getting into retro
games and he's been creating Docker containers to package up different flash games and he's had great success he says check out tab rights code on GitHub there you go so it's tb rights code on GitHub to figure it out that says GitHub thank you we lost the whole error of gaming didn't we
of retro gaming when flash games went kaput yeah it's amazing to see people working on this you know recently listener Jeff brought this to my attention because he's a big flash fan and I gotta say before this episode I was reading this boost in particular who mentions ruffle which kind of
gets these things up and going and Chris I'm bringing this up because I think you're gonna you're gonna like this one it is an open source piece of software written in rust to run these old flash games and these old flash programs and they have if you if you go to the ruffle website they
have a little demo section and I I earlier today wasted a little too much time playing alien hominid which is one of the examples there so I gotta say if you do anything with this episode at least go play that game really really good fun check this out this is too good that is really neat
that's nice to see I love the juxtaposition of having like an extremely modern programming language like rust running these super old ancient like flash based games really nice that's pretty great swat rounds us out with a row of ducks and thank you to be appreciate that and says what's your
recommendation for a low power home NAS hardware wise I've been thinking about an o droid h4 with an extended extingle with an external hard download maybe it's kind of a dongle with an external hard driving closure with five or eight three and a half bays connected via a single USB 3 cable software
wise it'd be great to run zfs don't know which distro you'd recommend and maybe some VMs on top of that thinking about maybe prox mox on the bare metal and then a zfs or VM I think you get the gist what would you suggest uh wow yeah lots of unpacking this question I think for for a low power
a low power system I hate to say it but some kind of an intel box their idle efficiency is particularly good because of their p and e core architecture so if you wanted to go super duper low power with not much headroom something like an n100 ish based platform would be pretty pretty decent
but that box that Brent just built for example is also pretty low power as I recall it's something like 15 20 watts without the hard drives the idle and then it's got the headroom to go all the way up 60 60 70 watts and it's got quick sync built in so it almost never uses any of that amount of power
yeah so yeah video transcoding is is a bit of a beast so if you're doing that get something with hardware transcoding the OS I don't think it matters too much nixos is fine uh unraded is fine true now's just had a nice big release that just added Docker compose that's probably also
fine like just try them I mean there's there's a lot of different options these days and you know it's like telling me what kind of the it's like us telling you what kind of to paint your bedroom like different folks are different strokes those one leader PCs are definitely worth
looking at I have I have a lot of extensive experience with the old Roy D3 because I own a couple of them and you're right you could do that I'm running two desks over usb I don't generally recommend that but been working for three years but the h4 I would imagine is even better
and proxmox I think is something you should seriously consider because you could you could easily expand that later on to a different box so say you did go something like the o-droid and then you hit the performance limitations of that be pretty easy to migrate to something more powerful or if you start with a one-liter PC and want to go something bigger etc proxmox would mean though you're going with the x86 platform just something to consider a lot of the low power options are going to be
in the arm side of things as well but I would kind of love to know if we could answer this any further if you've got any specific questions or which direction you go so let us know swat thank you very much and appreciate the boost at a couple of callouts I wanted to do too we don't get to all the
boost but scuffed came in with 5,000 sats and he's looking for recommendations for a read it later slash omnivore replacement omnivore has just been purchased and he's hoping for a recommendation from the audience for replacement for that PC null ref a code radio listener wanted to send some
sats to self hosted for a little bit of love and we got 15,000 sats from the muso who said I was going to get I was going to go learn Docker compose but I decided to go full nix pag.com with 3,000 sats and I really appreciate this one there are an ersatz TV is pronounced like air because it's German so it's airsatz TV and ersatz is the German word for replacement so it's your
TV replacement. That's clear right. I was so grateful there was other people that boosted in but for time we do have to we do have to cut it short your boost will be in the boost barn which is linked and will ever for ever be in our show notes thank you everybody who does boost in we had 31 of you
stream sats as you listen so collectively you sat streamers helped us stack 47,000 and 12 sats thank you very much and when you combine that with our boosters we had a very generous 346,354 sats sent into the show this week it is a value for value production so if you get some value from it
we really appreciate if you send in either a boost or you can set your support on autopilot and become a member to boost in you just need a podcast app like fountain or cast thematic or podverse or podcast guru there's so many good ones they're listed at podcast apps.com
fountains the easiest but it goes up from there to fully self hosted solutions enjoy and thank you for supporting the show absolutely we all support makes all the difference so it's it's not lost on us trust me when whenever we get we see the the subscribe accounts going up and down all the time so big thank you to everybody who signs up we're doing a post show every time for our site reliability engineers just to give you a little extra content as i way of saying thank you
and an ad free feed as well. Little bit of a psa before we wrap up if you use vault warden there has been a pretty serious release and you need to upgrade to version 1.3 2.4 it has fixed um I guess they quite say quote some cv reported so I don't know the details about the cve but it sounds like
they recommend the vault warden team recommends that you get to the latest version as soon as possible um and then the contents of the cve are going to be disclosed shortly publicly soon so you probably want to be patched before they make the public disclosure because then people are going to start
banging on it interesting I wonder the bit warden service had a little bit of downtime a weekend on a weekend a couple of weeks ago I wonder if that bit me by the way that got me that down to me yeah thank you yeah yeah you might be right maybe they were patching the backend real quick
to the only time in many many years that yes ever bit me now one last thing we mentioned it briefly in the episode last week that t tech the guy behind the proxmox helper scripts was in a hospice unfortunately since the last episode it's come to light that he has passed away sadly so
sending thoughts and prayers and all that kind of stuff to his to his family it's nice to see that the proxmox helper scripts have moved now into a community owned repose that they will live on beyond the man himself so post humously thank you for everything you did t tech yeah it is really
nice these people make an impact on our communities it's nice to recognize them Bradley is there anywhere you want to send people to get a little bit more of you yeah you got any places you can catch me every single week at linux unplugged hey that's a great idea
here you go Linux unplugged.com for that thank you for joining us brand always a pleasure yeah thanks for putting the fire on for me i know it's a baby NAS it's brand brand new so you're going to have to come back at some point after you've had it in use used it in anger for a while sets and
things up maybe got your backups going and give us an update at some point out it's all working out yeah i'm sure i'll ask you how to migrate from butter if s to zf s at some point hey you can find me at alex.ktz.me i've got a little self-hosted link tree over there and thanks for listening everybody that was self-hosted.show slash 136