Welcome to ChangeLog and Friends, your weekly talk show about the Linux rabbit hole. Big thingy to our friends and our partners at fly.io. Check them out, fly.io. Okay, let's enter the home lab.
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I do have hot water, a tablespoon-ish of honey and a little lemon. So that's what you need. A spoonful of sugar helps them go down. So they tell me.
So good. So good. Alex, how are you man? How's life?
You good? Mostly good. Mostly good. I mean, you see me here in my Attic studio in Raleigh and we've had the house on the market for three, four months now.
We're trying to be back to England. That's right. But nobody's buying houses right now. So we're kind of living in this perfect show home of a house.
And you got it all ready to sell. It's always clean, right? It's always clean. Show it.
It's nice. In the middle of a recording, you got to show you an hour, got to end the recording and go, right? That's it. That's it.
Well, London's calling. You got, is this on your material a little bit of it or no? Yeah. You got to go with that.
Just in case. Yeah. Well, if we don't end up selling, we'll stay. What's going on?
What's going on? That's right with the sell. That's what it is, right? I hate that phrase, Alex.
It is what it is. It is what it is. I feel like it's just such a give up moment, you know what I mean? You know, many years ago, when I was working at the Apple Store, we used to have these little bets on the Genius bar about how a conversation would go from the opening line.
And if someone used the phrase, what it is is, you'd be like, Oh, this is going to be a good one. Tell me your story about how your photos don't seem to grandma's device or there's uploading happening or where are my apps? I tell you, there are only so many times you can reset someone's iCloud password within the same 10 minute appointment without losing your sanity. Oh, yeah, that's how long ago was that for you about a decade or more?
Yeah, long time. I phone for I phone for era. So when was that a long time ago, 2008? Yeah, maybe 10, 11, 12, maybe something like that.
Well, I guess 2007 was the first one. So I was there when the iPhone four launched, I remember we had a because it wasn't a thing. I think so. It was a good version of the iPhone four, right?
It's the same blocky. Really? Hills, but I remember it wasn't available in many countries at that point. So what we ended up happening was we get a bunch of what we called resellers queuing up outside the store first thing in the morning.
Thousands of pounds in cash in their pockets buying as many iPhones as we could sell them to ship them off to Dubai or Abu Dhabi or just, you know, it was all Arabic customers that we had purchasing these things for resale. It was kind of crazy, actually. Yeah. And that was back in London?
Yeah, well, Manchester, but yeah. I forgive my lack of geography understanding of the United Kingdom. I just I don't know. Well, things are I've never been there.
I say London to Manchester like it's a big deal, but it's probably no further than Houston to Dallas in reality. So like four or five hours? Yeah, it's pretty it's pretty it's pretty close, really. Well, if you said Dallas and I lived in Austin, I would say Austin because it's awesome or Houston.
So I get the correction. I get the correction. Interesting. Interesting.
Well, friends, you know, if any of that made it into the show, which I imagine some of it might maybe all of it knows this is my good friend Alex. We become friends over the years. Hello, big fan, as you know, Alex of your podcast that is no longer in place. And self hosted is such a wild world these days, bro.
Obviously, as you know, I was the last, only the last time that like one of the last times we talked, I was surprised by your creation of, was it Linux server IO? Is that right? Yeah, is that the? Is that what it was?
Yeah. And we found that out and you were the very first entry in there because obviously you started it. Yeah, it was it was my personal blog and then morphed into something else. And now it's like where the trusted images of all your favorite things as a homelabber.
That's usually your source. Maybe if you're running Plex in a container, you're running that Plex container. I'm personally not. I'm using the official Plex media server.
Fun story with that one. Then Plex actually approached us back in the day to help them write that Docker container. So technically, you're just running a fork of the Linux server container technically. Technically, okay.
Yes, a derivative is more accurate. Yeah, it was a fun project because you know, for 10, 15 years ago, wherever it was now getting old, there was just no standardization in the containerization space. People weren't writing, if they existed, they weren't writing coherent documentation at all. And there was no kind of standardized base image pattern or anything.
And there is some weirdness in how the Linux server images ended up architecting around S6 to have like this init system inside the container, because obviously if Pid1 dies, then the container dies with it. And some of the services need multiple things running inside the same container. So it's a bit of a weird thing, trying to containerize some of these apps that were written before containers were really the native deployment format for server software in general now. Yeah.
How do you feel about the Podman Docker War? Do you feel like it's a one or you a Podman person? What's your feels? I'm not.
You know, I'm a threat hat. So I really should be pro Podman, shouldn't I? But the thing the thing the Podman misses for me is it's a very purest implementation. So it's extremely technically sound.
What it misses for me, though, is some of the user spice on top, like that last 10% that Docker closed in terms of usability is all the primitives for Docker pretty much were there before Docker came along. It was just the packaging of Docker with the standardized image format that really made it take off. The trouble with Podman, though, is when you want to do basic stuff, like even just mounting a volume, you've got to do this user ID shuffle, because I'm talking specifically about rootless Podman here. You've got to do this user ID shuffle because the user ID is inside the container don't map to the IDs on the host properly, unless you do this shift.
And so it ends up being this world of complicated UID script shuffling nonsense that I just haven't got time for. Hmm. I guess I don't, I'm not that much of a Docker user to know exactly. I would definitely map to UIDs to UIDs, but I never really hit the issue.
I do know if you if you mismatch on ownership, there's an issue, but that's I sort of leave it to the AI or the stack overflow or something else that's like slightly above my pay grade. Well, I'll break it down as best I can just really simply. So in a in a rootless Podman container, you end up shifting the user IDs by roughly 100,000 or so. It depends on how you've got it configured.
So on your host, you would probably have a user ID of something like 1000 right one thousand inside the container. It would be the user ID 100,000 and 1000. So like 100,000. So you've got to find a way to map those IDs from what the container sees to what the host can speak so that file permissions for those bind mount volumes actually work.
And that whole mess, the fact that we start to explain that to you is exactly my point. Yes, I'm feeling your point with rooted with root with a with the demon that Docker has running as root. Yes, there are some security implications with that, but also comes simplicity for the user experience. So right, you know, this is the world of like potentially se Linux, I think like you maybe you mentioned, I think does that play into it all like this whole purest security Linux thing that I'm just sort of just sort of being exposed to just now move to Fedora 43 first move of a ran for door as a desktop, even I'm loving it honestly, it's really cool.
You know, tradition have been an Ubuntu server kind of guy I only really ever ran Linux as a server and never is a desktop. And so only the last few months have I actually taken the plunge and began to run a system that's based on Linux and honestly Silicon Valley back there is running on Fedora 43 just seeing all right. Good. Yeah.
There's another interesting stuff that Podman does as well, like they have this thing called the quadlets, don't if you've heard of Podman quadlets, not any name, but essentially there's system D units that let you run your Podman containers as system D units instead of using something like Docker compose to define the state of the world that I can take and see. So yes, you have a service for instead effectively. Yeah, I mean, so I know I know I give Podman a hard time, but they just do some stuff really well. So, why didn't I should talk about part men like that do I'm really curious about this.
So I think one thing you mentioned in this gloss over which may be super important, which is rootless versus root. All right, like that seems to be the divider there, which is the big reason why people think they want to use Podman. It's more secure because it's rootless versus root. Well, that seems to cause problems we just said.
Well, I come at this from the home lab angle, the pragmatist angle of I just need my Plex, I'm secure, right? Exactly. Whereas I think a lot of the motivation for rootless Podman and that whole movement in terms of boot C and a lot of the containerization changes that happening is because of the enterprise where that stuff does matter where SELinix does matter, Appama does matter, but in my home lab, I don't care. I mean, that stuff.
Yeah. I mean, like even if you're an API locally that you're doing something with, no off, right? Why do you have off? No off?
Here are systems like if I'm just going to go, yeah, like there's no off for an API. I'm writing locally. That's just that's just causing problems. I don't need to authenticate to my own API.
My own lab, I can trust me. Okay. I'm the admin here. I need to stress is on the admin here.
Yeah, look at me on the admin here. If anything, though, my adoption of tail scale over the last few years has made that stance of mine even stronger because I have no ports like Nada opening my firewall anymore. Nothing. I don't have Plex.
Oh, yeah, maybe for the only port open. The advertisement of the server. Right. And we do external watching for my kids.
I mean, I mean, I do have to watch the Com Valley in the pinch here and there. Okay. So I might be, you know, on the subway or something like that, which we have no subway. I'm just making a story.
I got to guess this is America. We don't do subways. You know, we don't have subways around here. No, the ground is too hard here, not to do a sub.
It's rock under there. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
It's true. And I think you'll maybe trying to find a way to make a hole. Oh, we'll see. My land is a trusted zone completely.
And how recently do you VLAN a lot then? I imagine you probably have an IOTV land at least, right? I do. Yeah.
So like when some random piece of IoT, John Corrass, or Famason, it's not getting on the same VLAN as my server. It's just not happening. Yeah. It might be shipping software onto it that's got a rootkit or something like that that could be trying to infiltrate, you know, or like ports and stuff.
No, you just don't know. It could do that. It could just have an algorithm that that crawls open Sambershares and listens to the file directory. And fearful.
I don't know. I mean, who knows what these things are doing, okay, ESP devices over the years have gotten so capable that I watched a video just last night of a guy that built using one of these ESP32s and a little display like a need for speed kind of like mini map for his car. And he had like 2.5 million map tiles that he generated for the UK and like had petrol stations on it and restaurants. It was really cool, actually.
So they're very capable devices, my point. So just to know what they're up to. Gosh, do you want to go to Boot C? Do you have any good to say about Boot C?
What's your thoughts on Boot C? I think it's a really interesting development. I don't know a huge amount about Boot C technically, but in terms of where it fits in the space, I think it's a logical conclusion of where things should go next. You know, the immutable botanics.
Are you able to describe Boot C? So that folks can follow? I'll try. Yeah.
Well, you go first and I'll look it up. Okay. Geez. What I know about Boot C is Adirat had.
It's part of like their world, essentially, and they're they're setting this up. It's essentially a system that can change itself underneath. And it's, what's the right word that you can't change the system? It's immutable.
So what you have that you have, and you can update underneath your data, but that's the part I don't get. And I know that Steam Deck and some other things like these gaming things are doing on top is really cool. I just don't know what's cool about it yet, aside from being able to build your own Linux distro for yourself, potentially. That's kind of where I've been dabbling at.
I'm actually dabbling just a moment and I got scared and I ran away. Did you get a red hat summit this year, Pochons? I did not, but I did go to Texas Linux Fest. It's the first one I haven't been to in maybe seven or eight years.
I think I reached out last year and I was like, Hey, I might be there. I didn't going. And me and a buddy went and thank you to Carl George from Red Hat for the culture in that conference. It's an amazing conference.
If you're even close to Texas during Texas Linux Fest, you're missing out if you don't go. Seriously, it was a blast. I was at two workshops, both amazing. It just is like one of those really feel good regional Linux conferences.
You get that regional feel where it's sort of small and intimate, but all the right people there to sort of still go deep into this world of Linux. Did Carl share with you any of his pocket meat? No. Is he a pocket meat?
Yeah. Carl George. I met Carl for the first time. It must have been 2017 or 18 at Texas.
And he was like, Hey, Alex, what do you like? So I'm my pocket. You're a complete stranger. Why are you offering me your meat?
But it turns out he lives in San Antonio and there's a meat market near his house. And so he came out for all things open in October to Raleigh. And I literally placed an order with him to bring me vacuum packed packages of San Antonio meat market meat to Raleigh so that I could get my fix of Texas barbecue. Oh, yes, Texas barbecue.
Yes. Good old Texas barbecue is the first thing I've been asked in. I'll be the size of a house. I mean, it would be a problem, I think.
It would be a problem. It's a problem around here. Okay, Texas is big and so the people people and Texas would be people, but not everybody, but some of them pretty big. I still need to make it out of something like salt, like or something like that.
I mean, I've done the Franklin's. I've done the, what's it called? Dan, Dan by the river. Terry Black.
So, yeah, I've done a sports barbecue. Yeah, I need to do some of the, some of the, you know, some of the others. If you came here, I would have you take you and we can take Carl too. He can come to an imposition, but you'd find time.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would probably, so I've been wanting to take him.
We've been meeting to meet Carl and I at Salt Lake, which we, I live about 10 minutes from the original Salt Lake. So the one that began it all for Salt Lake and it's like going to somebody's backyard ranch in their house. It's so cool that it's not even like restaurant fields. It's like somebody stood up a little barbecue in their house and it just started it more over time.
That's probably exactly what it was. Well, that's exactly what it was. I was like, let's make some barbecue. Oh, people come and eat it.
Oh, cool. Let's keep doing this and there you go. I like there's nothing wrong with Salt Lake. They're good.
It's not my favorite though, but it's still amazing. So you can't go wrong. I would take you to the switch, which is near here. I think it's under known and it's just so awesome and they've got a really good platter.
They've got an amazing chopped brisket, baked potato. I mean, just like a little bit potato with chopped brisket in it. I mean, come on. Is your mouth watering?
Yeah, I'm hungry now. We're not far from lunchtime for me. The switch. I would take you there.
Yeah, that's quite, I'm just looking at it on a map. That's quite a ways outside of the city limits too. It is, but it's really close for me. So I live about 10 minutes west of the switch.
Nice. So I live in that area there. Okay, Texas barbecue, Texas Linux Fest. We would say we would see.
Brutalist. We'd have to go in the boot. See, I'm more interested in number. This number.
Tell me if this number matters to you. 50, comma, zero, zero, zero. What does that mean to you? 50,000, right?
50,000, right? I think we're going. Thank you. Yeah, I'm going to be going to be this.
But that's a feat. I mean, you've grown the tail scale channel on YouTube from, I don't know what number, but 50,000 is nothing to stick at. 1,600 subscribers when I took over. Yeah.
It's been a lot of work. Does that make you happy? Does that make you sad? You feel content?
This content? What do you feel right now? When I say the number five zero comma zero zero? You don't have to some degree.
The subscriber count itself doesn't matter that much because you can put out a video that gets 2,000 views and you can put out a video that gets 50,000 views or 100,000 or whatever. And there's just no connection between the number of subscribers to the number of views you're going to get. But it is a nice vanity metric and it is a nice thing to turn around to management and say, look, we've got big number. It now says 50,000.
And it's a nice signal. And I really appreciate everyone that has subscribed to the channel, of course. It wouldn't, I mean, I wouldn't be able to pull a roof over my head without people watching. So it's quite humbling in a way, but also in some ways doesn't matter that much.
Like maybe it's not what I'm trying to say about it. I don't mean about it. Any great team of things, right? Yeah.
I also kind of just feel like we're just getting started. Like I've just been, I've just taken over as the head of developer relations for tail scale about two weeks ago now. So we're putting together a plan to build our team to support me on the backend because up until today it's been just me. So I've been editing scripting, filming, doing everything.
It's a lot of work. It's too much. It's too much. It's too much.
So we're putting together a plan and there'll be some job postings going up in the new year. So keep an eye on the tail scale careers site, little pluggy plug. If you want to work on my team, come do some video editing, come do some dev rel stuff. It'll be a good time.
Yeah. I've been following and actually I saw that number. I was like, let me go check it out. And I think we're like 52,000 now.
So I think since that post, a few more thousand have subscribed. And then I saw a button there that said subscribe. And I'm like, gosh, I haven't you haven't subscribed yet. Which is so weird because that's how the algorithm works, which is probably why you say it doesn't matter if you have 50,000 subscribers or not because I watch your stuff, but I'm not a subscriber.
Yeah. And that's what we're saying. Yeah. I like that.
I like it's a consumer and I have to subscribe everything. Well, because I generally think that good content, the people, there's a bunch of tropes on YouTube and the people that rely on the like, comment, subscribe, smash that like button, all those kinds of tropes that exist on YouTube. The content's good enough. You don't need to say any of that stuff.
People watch people. They don't watch, you know, they're not watching the tail scale channel. Just watching me and what I'm doing. And it's really like you look at Linus and how he's had to grow his channel sort of beyond the cult of just Linus.
And obviously he's way down the road from where I am. But it's really interesting. He'll just make random cameos in videos hosted ostensibly by someone else on his team. And then he'll just helicopter in for five minutes and say a couple of pieces to camera and then go away again.
And you know that he hasn't done anything like post production or scripting or even involved in the video at all, but they're really struggling to enter that post PC era, that post Linus era. Hopefully tell us to go away and suffer from that problem. I don't really I don't really chase the fame aspect of it. I don't want to be famous or anything like that.
But like, I do want people to be as excited about stuff that I am as I am. And that's really my driving goal is to just, you know, like this week, for example, I am self hosted image instance. You know, the photo Google photos replacement. Yes, tell me about this done by Alex and his team at Futo and Lewis Rosman in Austin, no less.
So they're on your doorstep, dude. So I set this up and I was like, I can delete Google photos now. And I finally did it. I've actually finally deleted my quarter of a million pictures in Google photos.
It took me all weekend. You have to go through the web UI and select a maximum of like 10,000 images at a time. It's really one one million for real. Yeah, it was like quarter of a million pictures.
Yeah, it was quite a lot. But they Google make it really difficult to leave. Anyway, I'm off the Google source. Finally, it's about time I started to go.
I actually did that. But I was like, well, I bought my family for Christmas when my daughter was born five years ago. Some of those little Google picture frames. And so we just had this shared album where I just dropped photos in every few months and then it would update their picture frames remotely.
And I'm like, Oh, oops, I guess I've just broken. I've just broken that workflow for them. So I just came in just a favorite, basically. Effectively.
Yeah. And so I came across this project called image frame. And this lets you turn any device, because it's just a web view. So you can run it on Android iOS and Apple TV and Android TV, just a web browser even.
And it lets you turn any of those devices into essentially a Google photos frame. So I can just drop pictures into an image album on my self-hosted server, connect this Android tablet I'm going to give to my family for Christmas back over tail scale to my house. And the same functionality exists, but it's all completely self-hosted and completely I own the whole the whole shebang. It's that's what I love about this stuff.
Getting people excited about that real world use case, you know, it's like, yeah, yeah, tail scale is cool. Image is cool. And all this stuff in is people don't wake up in the morning go, you know what I'm going to sign up for a new VPN and it's like the now what problem. How do I actually use this stuff, make it useful?
That's right. You know, I think my usage of tail scales is pretty simple. I think I just connect my services and I don't do much really. I'm not a deep tail scale user and I kind of feel bad.
So I'm actually thinking about having Claude help me go deeper because I'm just like, I don't know how else I can use it personally. Aside from the obvious connected tissue of my home lab, that's really just it. And it's really just mainly, kind of showing my colors a little bit, but I think for me, like I will SSH into Cineplex, which is what I call my plex machine. And so I just type SSH Cineplex because that's what it's named in tail scale.
It's the name of the machine, right? So that's really, sadly, potentially, maybe you'll be sad about this. That's my use of tail scale is just easier, host name SSH around my home lab. It's great.
It's fun. And the occasional external view of something of a service running. And I have a lot of I could do better with that. I got other problems I'm dealing with in my home lab, which is just running a few more pieces of fun software for me.
You know, I love it. Well friends, I'm here with a good friend of mine again, Kyle Galbraith, co-founder and CEO of depot.dev. Kyle, we are in an era of disruption, right? I would also describe it as rethinking.
Well, we thought was true. And I guess that's kind of the definition of disruption. But from your perspective, how are teams, reliability teams, CICD, pipeline teams, how are they all rethinking things? And where does depot fit into that?
In the conversations that I have with customers, a lot of DevOps teams, platform teams, site reliability teams, they're really looking at this new era of software engineering that we're all living in. And they're starting to question like, the bottleneck is no longer the active writing code. The bottleneck is shifting. The most time consuming part is integrating the code.
It's everything that comes after. It's the build. It's the pull request review. It's the deployment.
It's the getting it into production. Once it's in production, it's scaling up support teams to support it. It's adding documentation, all of these downstream problems. And so through the lens of depot, what we're really starting to think about is there's a very realistic possibility that within the next two to three years, maybe even sooner, that we're going to enter a world where an engineering team of three people could theoretically have the velocity of an engineering team of 300 people.
And what's the consequences of that? What's the consequences of the code velocity spiking up to that level with such a small team? There's no way three engineers are going to be able to code review all of the code that's being created if there's three engineers and 297 agents, also creating features and fixing bugs. So that's just like from a pull request perspective.
But then you think about it through a build lens two of if your builds take 20 minutes with three humans, and now you're going to have three humans and 297 agents also running. Well, you definitely don't want to build 1620 minutes because now the entire pinch point is the build pipeline. And so we're starting to think a lot about how do we eliminate the bottlenecks that come downstream? And what can we do with depot that streamline?
So obviously friends, we are in an era of disruption. Things are changing. You know what I know it. That's how it is.
And the thing with production and what Kyle's talking about here is how in the world do you get your bills to be faster? I get them to be more reliable, faster, more observability around those deployments. You need it. It's required and depot is there to help you.
So a good first step is to go to depot.dev get faster, drive the trial is too easy. Again, depot.dev is where to go. It all begins at depot.dev. So how'd you do you back up, Adam?
Gosh, I don't have backups. Alex, I'm just kidding. I really don't have offsite backups. Okay.
I'm not practicing 321. I'm in a situation like it could go down right in this moment. It could just like get on fire over there. And I will have to say, you know, get the thing, get the extinguisher and put it out and my stuff is gone.
So I don't have backups. Well, in case one of my pitches for you would be an offsite backup. Well, no, you can't pitch those. I need an outside backup.
So what would you do? How would you do it? Well, I have a friend in Canada. So I'll tell you how I do it.
And so I have a ZFS array in the basement, which just got, I think, five, 23 by hard drives in it. And then I use, it's a program called Z REPL, Z-R-E-P-L for Z replicate, I guess. And it essentially mirrors all of the ZFS blocks to Canada, which is where my friend lives. And he's got a similar size server.
He actually runs an MSP. So he just carved out a few user racks space for me to use there. And so I have, he's a very nice friend. I'm sure he would offer you some racks of if you paid him a few Canadian reables every month.
And I just use the REPL over tail scale, because it's an SSH based protocol for replication. Could you do the same thing with HESner, by any chance? I don't know enough about HESner. You can do a lot of cool things with production machines.
I know you can do some pretty decent size builds, because you can choose your CPU and stuff like that. But they have that level of ZFS to me, because we're different. My brain is so confused about that letter. Because it's in my name, Alex Ktz, Alex Ktz.
People always give me a hard time about that one. I'm like, I'm like, I'm just going to say ZFS. I just pick whatever. Could you do that with a, I don't have the friend, I wouldn't mind the friend, but like for those who don't have the friend, could you, how could you do the same thing?
There's a couple of ways. I mean, the trouble with any cloud provider is that once you get over a few hundred gigs of storage, the cost becomes prohibitive pretty fast. So there's a service called, and I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but there's a service called zfs.rent. Go take a look.
What you do is you send them a hard drive, and they put it into a slot in one of their servers, I think in California, but don't go at me on that. And you pay them 10 bucks a month per slot that you occupy. So if you want 20 terabytes of offsite backup, you send them a 20 terabyte hard drive. It can be direct shipped from Amazon or Best Buy or ever.
They'll rack the drive for you, and then they'll give you an IPV4 address and a VM, and then you use that as your ZFS replication target offsite for 10 bucks a month. Job done. That is good. That's a good find.
I should get them on the show. This is a really, like, I wish I thought about this. ZFS.rent is the coolest domain ever. And then, you know, any notable person with Raid in their house has got to be running ZFS.
And if it's, I mean, if it's a ButterFS, sure. Okay. BTRFS. They just aren't many alternatives.
I mean, I know Butter gets a bit of a hard time perhaps unfairly, but it's an Fs at this point. Really, for me, there's nothing that comes close in terms of the reliability, the development trajectory that it has with the IX system support and Clara systems up with Alan Duding in Canada as well. TrueNAS, of course, has been industry standard for sort of normal people for a long time. I say, non enterprise deployments of like ISCSI storage and anything you want to do for a small, medium business, whatever, like true NAS is the answer.
I just can't think of anything better. Like BKHS is kind of promising, but then there was a whole drama recently with Kent Overstreet and Linus Torvalds and the Linux kernel, meaning lists and development, trying to sneak it's also some weirdness there. So I'm unfamiliar. Oh, go look it up.
It's a whole tranche of stuff. Drama. Yeah. So we need more drama.
Well, BKHS got accepted into the Linux kernel, which you think would be an amazing thing, right? We've now got another custom native in the Linux kernel, because this is one of the downsides of Ss, it's the licensing drama. You forget all that. Loosely.
I mean, I know about the origination in Sun and the accidental open sourcing of Talk to Matt Aaron's before. We have a good friend at Oxide and Brian Cantrell. So I kind of have some of the banks for the Sundays and I guess not Sundays like the other week, but SUN, Space Days, Capital S, UN. It's like a microsystems.
Yeah, some microsystems. It's got an interesting history. And I think even the accidental open sourcing of it was really wild. And then now you have OpenZFS.
I don't know. And Alan Duke came on the podcast and talked about and really got me wanting to become a BSD nerd. And I tried for a little bit and it just did enough to be familiar, but just was like, okay, Linux is really for me. I just don't need what BSD has.
And it was like an uphill battle for me personally, but I get it. I get it. But the licensing thing is like really where it's at. The issue at least.
The channel with BSD is I learned Linux first. So all my muscle memory is Linux. Same. That was me.
And just stuff like the way that grep works or said works or just basic command line utilities like that. It's just different enough in BSD land that I'm like, I'll just go back to what I know. Yeah. There's a lot to like about the BSD universe.
There really is, but it's just never stuck for me. Yeah. So I'll say backups ZFS dot ran unaffiliated. I don't have any experience with it.
So if you check it out, y'all, your mileage may very report back, of course. The other option you've got is just a Raspberry Pi with a USB hard drive and shove it under the stairs at your mums house or something. So how does that work? That means ZFS is so RAM intensive.
But I guess for a backup, you don't need a lot of RAM, right? Is that the idea? is like, it's just a backup. So the arc can be small.
You are not going to be limited by the performance of the Raspberry Pi. You're going to be limited by the performance presumably of your internet pipe. Right. That's going to be the bottleneck.
And even if you do end up being limited by some local thing on the Raspberry Pi, it's a backup. It doesn't matter. It's going to run over night every night for the next five, 10, 20 years, whatever. So if it takes an hour, it takes six hours.
Who cares? Right? I have to do this. Like, you're, okay, this is my, you've given me a Christmas present.
Thank God. This is what motivates me, dude. It's just like, yeah, solving real problems for people. So I'm glad to hear that.
I like that. Okay. So image is what you stood up. You're off of Google images.
If I'm just going to correctly, there's no favorites list. Like I try to presume in Google, and we've gotten a whole new hosted system that is image all the way. And your family is still happy with their Google frames. The family, one of the family texts me this morning and said, my photo frames stopped working.
I don't know. Oops. I might pull the trigger a bit too soon on the deletion, but I just wanted to stop paying Google eight bucks a month for the two terabytes. You know, so yeah, how many hard drives do you buy?
Well, for eight bucks a month, amortized over five years, I can buy probably two terabyte drives. Yeah, that's not the end of the world. I mean, there is some value there that you're not the manager, but now you get your friend, you get your friend in Canada. Well, I'm also not training Gemini's future models with my images and the images of my daughter.
And there's a huge digital sovereignty aspect to my motivations for getting off the big tech train. When it comes to really deeply personal data like photos and documents. I'm sure many of us use Gmail even. And I've been a Gmail user since I guess 2004, five era, like when it was cool and a beta product.
And I look back at the original emails, I'm like, Oh my God, every email I've had in the last 22 years, they know what it is. It's a lot of data. It's a big data set. So you get paid to run a home lab there.
Would you say that? It's fair to see you get paid to run a home lab for the most part or play with a home lab? We get paid to make videos. The phrase if you do what you love, you never work another day in your life is very true for me.
I'm extremely privileged and lucky to get to do what I do. Like Thanksgiving weekend was just a couple of weeks ago as we record. And I decided that I was going to learn Kubernetes over the weekend. Oh, there we go.
And I spent the whole weekend glued to my laptop and I had a great time and I've now got three no Kubernetes cluster in a closet. And it was great. And then I was able to turn out into a piece of content for work. So, you know, for me, I'm just very privileged.
Like, this is what I'd be doing anyway. So the fact I get paid to do it is like just a huge bonus for me. Yeah. Can we maybe touch quickly on, I guess, as long as you like to actually say quickly, but however, at least the fields that I think get exposed through vibe based podcasting, let's just say, right?
I get this vibe that going to tail scale from being a podcaster, I don't know what else you did then some kind of diminish what you were doing. I don't know. I know you were running the podcast and you got the job of tail scale. What were you doing before we consulting or like, how was it to go from like, podcaster that I knew you have at least, and then now you work for tail scale to produce content there.
I was a Red Hat consultant in Europe for a year or two. And then I moved to the States. And I got a job as a TAM, sort of managing open shift accounts and things. It was fine.
It was pretty boring. As long as the customers were happy. It's a TAM. I take the cool account manager.
I'm sorry. So yeah, I basically have, I don't know, half a dozen accounts assigned to me. And I would have weekly calls with those customers, big, big spend customers and make sure that they were getting value for money and that their support tickets were being sent through the queue correctly. And if there was anything like new coming, like I was there during OpenShift 3 to OpenShift 4 transition, it was a big shift from a rel base to an atomic immutable base OS image and rearchitecture of like around CoreOS and Project Atomic and all that stuff for Red Hat.
And it's helping customers navigate the complexities of all that stuff and just telling them what they need to know ahead of time. And so there's a lot of skills in that actually translate pretty well to video. There's also a lot of skills that translate from being on the genie-spar back in the day to being personable and being on video and figuring out what someone's problem is and then presenting it to them in a way that they can understand. So it's just, you know, wearing on now is like the summation of an entire 20 year journey really, just failing upwards.
Talking about the personal field though, getting to go from, I guess, seems like interesting work, but maybe not so fulfilling based on what you're saying. You were running self-hosted at the time I believe, right? And that podcast has since ended. And then you go to TLSK, like being able to go and create content.
Like, yeah, I used to do stuff for free, you know, marginally for free. Sure, you probably have sponsors that maybe cover some rants or some things like that and some pieces, but not the full paycheck necessarily to get to do it as a job. Well, you've got two routes to go as a content creator, don't you? You've got one which is to do it the really hard way and do it yourself and bootstrap your own small business and interface with all these different companies and manage sponsorships and negotiate every cent that they give you.
And then you've also got to be a creator and an editor and like just you've got to be five to 10 different roles in one. I chose to go an equally difficult but totally different path of trying to do that, but within a corporate organization, a startup organization. I'd be really lucky in so much that the sales channel doesn't have to pay for itself in the traditional way that say any other content creator has to pay for itself because it's a brand awareness play, ostensibly. That's the purpose of the YouTube channel is just to say, hey, look at TLSK, look at the core stuff, you can do a TLSKEL.
And that's it. We're not reviewing products, we're not taking place on sponsorships, we're not doing any of that other stuff, which I kind of find a little bit dirty to be honest. I don't ever really enjoy doing that stuff. It's a necessary evil.
I understand. Everybody's got a week. But the attention that you're selling as a content creator, you're monetizing that attention for well, money, I suppose. So yeah, I mean, it's nice to have insurance, it's nice to have a paycheck and all that kind of stuff doing it the TLSKEL way.
I don't know where it will end up though. I mean, I really, I love what I do. I get a paycheck reliably every month is fantastic. But there's that phrase in, do you remember?
Of course, you've got my judge playing behind you on Silicon Valley. You remember Office Space, right? Where he has the interview with the Bobs? Yes.
If in a tech ships, a few extra units, I don't see an extra dime. Where's the motivation? Right. And of course, my motivation is a kind of paycheck every month.
But if the channel goes from 1600 subscribers to 53,000 subscribers, I still get paid the same. Yeah, you know, I suppose the validation is not a good shade though, right? You can see some some some hallmarks and some mouse notes, but you get to hire to make some friends. Yeah.
Yeah. I suppose the validation is the promotion is the fact that I'm still employed is lots of different positive signals, but like it's just these are sorts of things you think about in the shower and just like two am your mind starts going and like, well, how can I maximize just everything? I'm going to maximize it for tail scale. I'm going to maximize it for Alex.
How can I make sure that the audience is getting the most out of it too? Because ultimately, if the audience is happy, that will drive everything else down the road. So really, my focus isn't on me. It's not on tail scale.
It's on what people want to see and need to hear and want to hear. So my best performing content has been our long deep dive tutorials and how to set up a self hosted server from scratch. It's got to do with tail scale, does it? But it's on the tail scale channel.
And so it's a really weird, unique thing. And I've decided to see other competitors about copying that strategy, which is kind of interesting. But yeah, it's a very unique way of doing DevRel. Because if you think about what developer relations typically do, they'll be hacking away on SDKs and API code on the backend and people don't really see it unless you're a developer and you want to integrate with back in the day, Twitter or something.
And they might go to a conference and talk to a room full of a couple of hundred people, and that talk is never seen again. Whereas what we're doing is effectively that same cycle, that same loop, but we're not focused on the developer aspect as much. We're focused on the end user, the top of funnel user ommithical person. And getting them excited about using tail scale for free and hopefully they have such a good time that they then go, why are we doing this at work?
Why are we doing open VPN? Why are we? And hopefully then that motion turns into a sale two, three, four years down the road, whatever it turns out to be. It's just it's a fascinating space.
And I kind of feel a bit weird talking about it publicly. But there you go. I'm enjoying it. I'm sorry for the weird about it.
Do you feel like it's just a bit naval gazey, isn't it? Anyway, why I suppose you're the guest here though, where you're the friend here. So you have to navel your gaze a little tiny bit just to be your role. Come on, Alice.
If you want to, but that's not what you want. The question I have for you, I suppose is you work at tail scale. This is going to be on YouTube. And this may be seen by other people.
How on us can you be about your curiosity? Like, do you have an itch? And if you have an itch, could you? Do you feel like you have the freedom to speak publicly about the curiosities as a developer, as an engineer, as a Linux nerd, as a home lab or as a self-host or whatever?
I mentioned a few minutes ago that the channel today has basically been just me. That comes with a huge bonus of it's just me that decides what gets put out. So to date, the last two and a half years I've been at tail scale. Yeah, I've had basically complete creative freedom, which is both a huge blessing and a massive responsibility at the same time, because you're representing the brand.
And, you know, for example, Kevin Purdy, who is ex-arstenica, who we hired earlier this year to write for our blog. He's an amazing writer, by the way. You should totally go and look at the tail scale blog. He wrote a piece about how to jailbreak your Kindle and put tail scale on it.
And it was on Hacken News yesterday. And we saw a huge spike on the back end. But putting something about jailbreaking a device and breaking a EULA on a corporate blog, there are just certain topics you can't really touch. And that one, it falls under fair use and it's fine, you know, we think legally speaking.
But there are huge trunches of self-hosting that I just cannot talk about. You know, Wink, Wink, Nudge, Nudge, the stuff behind you is what I'm talking about for sure. And, you know, we can't talk about circumventing geopolitical, geopolitical content, right restrictions and circumventing copyright, obviously, and everything that goes with it. And for me, the reality was some of that stuff was the reason I even got into self-hosting in the first place.
So I have to find a whole other scene of stuff to talk about, which can be challenging, admittedly, sometimes. But then we have product release weeks and you sort of think to yourself, right, well, now I'm going to actually put together advert effectively for the products. But how many ideas in the way it doesn't feel like an advert? And so it can be tricky.
But also very, you know, it's very creatively challenging and rewarding at the same time. What are you doing in your home lab currently that isn't so much tail scale, but more just like, I know you just mentioned image. But could you describe, you know, the level of home lab you have, do you have a massive, you know, by system? Are you rocking something else?
Like, take me through from from Gateway to client. Yeah, you know, if I fanboy over here, so it's hard. Yeah. Yeah.
It's hard not to like them, right? It really is. They're apart from the price. There's definitely a unified tax.
It does get you. Yeah. We have got the U C G fiber, then you fiber gateway that's really nice. And I replaced a, I think I had a dream machine pro or something.
Like when we get in a solar house, I just downsized everything from sort of rap gear as much as I could to those sort of small utility switches. Yeah. Nice. Okay.
So I've got like a ton of those Lenovo mini PCs, the Kubernetes cluster I mentioned a few minutes ago. I've got a couple of MS 01, mini forum devices doing like all the heavy lifting. I've got 100 terabytes of spinning rust in the basement. Give or take running set of F s that I talked about.
That's in a 19 inch slide a case. But yes, it's pretty minimal. There I say for what I do, like I need a set of infrastructure to run tail scale stuff on for the videos. And then I need a separate set of stuff to run my home sort of pseudo prod.