LINUX Unplugged - 316: Self-Hosted Secrets

Episode Date: August 28, 2019

Safely host your own password database using totally open source software. We cover BitWarden, our top choice to solve this problem. Plus we announce a new show we're super proud of, and chat with Dan Lynch from OggCamp. Special Guests: Alan Pope, Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, Dan Lynch, and Ell Marquez.

I'm already lightheaded because I'm so nervous. Nervous? Yeah, we should all just take a little moment before the show, you know? I am. Calm ourselves, get ready. I am legit nervous. Chris, you don't get nervous. Come on.

I don't normally get nervous, but I... You got this. I don't know what it is, but every now and then, for me, it's... Well, yeah, no, I'm... We'll see if I make it through the episode. I'm pretty nervous. I probably might be stumbling all over myself. You got this for me, Wes?

I'll do my best. You just jump in. Come on, you're a pro. No, no, I know, but it's like getting in a new relationship. But we all get to watch. It really is. There's a commitment. There's a huge commitment that goes on for a very long time.

You will have to stay with this thing through good and bad. All right, let's just start the show. I'm just going to sit here and be a nervous wreck. I'll just sit here and dwell on it. No, I'm nervous. I'm sorry. Hello, and welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's being co-hosted by someone who's totally composed and really has their stuff together today.

My name is Chris. I always do. My name is Wes. What about me, though? I'm saying me. You always do. Wes, I'm just going to let you take over if I go off the rails. But before we go any further into the show, which is I'm super excited about today. We have some huge news, but we also have a great topic. I want to give a shout out to both Mr. Cheese and Alex. Hello, gentlemen.

Hey. Hello. How's it going, internet? Hello. Hi, nice to see you. And then I want to say time-appropriate greetings to that virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello.

Ho, ho, ho. Hello. Hello to Brent and Al. And I'm going to say Stinky Karate, TechMav and Turth. Is that Stinky? I don't even want to know because that's too good. Okay. Yeah. Let's not fix it. For my defense, that screen is across the room. Oh, and TechMav just joining in there right there at the end. Hi there. Oh, and Carl too. Well, hello. You guys are the best. Hello, everybody. Good to see you trickling in. We have a huge show today. I'm very happy to have you here. Let's start with some community news. There's some items that we want to cover.

Recently, Linux has been getting a hard time for its low memory handling. Recently? I mean, haven't we complained about that for years? Okay, well, forever. But I mean, just like recently, I saw two different people writing about how Linux falls apart in low-memory situations. Particularly, these are server workloads where it's something that is just a massive load that is unexpected, and then even once you recover the memory,

the system still never really comes back to its full... Yeah. To its full performance, I suppose. Well, that may soon be a thing of the past, Mr. Payne. This is some good news. There is a project that has been started by an individual. I'm going to let you try to guess that pronunciation. Bosteen, what do you think?

I think you're spot on. You do not. You do not. You're just going to let me take it. I see how it is. I see. I'm on to you. Anyways, he's working on a project that's very similar to Android's low memory killer, Damon.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, just last year, Facebook released something similar. We talked about it on TechSnap 377. They're out of memory, Damon. And the idea is just try to be helpful. Don't totally rely on the kernel. Here's a little Damon that can look for, monitor, expect situations where there

is this sort of system and memory pressure and then fire off signals to let applications know, hey, if you have memory that you can give back to the system, now would be a great time to do so. It sort of seems odd that we don't have that. I guess we've always just relied on the kernel to go kill things. Yeah, I mean, we needed someone in the middle to sort of seems odd that we don't have that. I guess we've always just relied on the kernel to go kill things.

Yeah, I mean, we needed someone in the middle to sort of pass the note. Hmm, yeah. So, you know what? The only thing I think this is lacking is deep integration with systemd. Oh, just wait. Okay, well, while we're talking about performance and stuff, I just had to squeeze this one in, too. It appears that Fedora is switching to the BFQ IO scheduler for better responsiveness.

This is something that I've toyed with on and off. If you've ever experienced some odd leg in your desktop UI when you're, say, hitting your disk pretty hard, this is something that BFQ, I have been led to believe, can make a big difference with. However, I've never really noticed believe, can make a big difference with. However, I've never really noticed a massive difference myself when I tested it. Well, you know, there's some interesting quotes here of some numbers. Under load, BFQ can load applications up to 20 times as fast as any other IO scheduler. Soft real-time applications like video playback, that can benefit too,

if you're ever, you know, stuttering while you're trying to write a USB drive. There's some interesting benefits, although if you already have a super fast NVMe drive, well, this isn't enabled for you, there's no point, you're already too fast. Yeah, that's probably what it is, because my main OS drive is NVMe,

but then like my large storage disk, some of them are still spinning rust, so maybe it'd be useful there. It is nice. I mean, this is one of the things that many interested sort of super users have been tuning, tweaking, playing with. Kind of neat to see Fedora actually adopting it, making it more mainstream. Okay, well, let's talk about something that everyone on the crew is very excited about, and that is the Pinebook Pro. Pre-orders have been, well, there's been like one window already, Cheesy?

Yeah. So there was the initial window where if you were a forum member and you had been for the last three months, then you could get in the pre-order queue for the first round. Now they've opened it up so that anyone can get in the queue. You don't have to have been a forum member for X amount of months or anything like that. A hundred and ninety nine bucks. They're coming a long way on the machine. Um, it's a little different than the original Pinebook, obviously. Uh, it's a magnesium alloy casing.

Keyboard's supposed to be a lot better. Not supposed to have that flex like it did before, uh, an NVMe adapter for it. So you can toss an additional NVMe drive in there if you want to. Um, but you know, it's gotten a lot of attention and I think that it's going to be a really great little machine whenever it comes out. I'm waiting on mine to ship. I think they said toward the end of October is when I'll receive mine. So I'm really looking forward to that and hoping that none of our American politics will affect me getting my Pine book. Because I'm going to be very frustrated if that happens.

I want an unboxing video from you. I want a full cheese rundown. Yeah, I'll do it like unbox therapy for you. I'll be honest here. I've never really followed the Pine book that closely. I just love a quick, too long, haven't followed. Like, what is it? Why should I care about it?

So it's essentially a single board computer that's thrown inside of a laptop um it's you it uses the rock chip 3399 soc which is a pretty powerful um soc a little bit better some may argue a little bit better than what's in the raspberry pi the pi 4 yep uh four gigs of ddr4 um ips display 1080 it does have a The Pi 4? Some say that the way that they're using their kill switch for their radios is actually better than, say, other distributors like the way Purism does it, where it's not necessarily a mechanical switch that could break on you. I think they're still working out a few kinks as far as, you know, if you turn the radios off and you put your machine into spin mode, getting back out of suspend mode and turning the radios on is kind of an issue right now but um essentially what it is is a single board computer put into the housing of a laptop um with four gigs of ddr4 a pretty powerful cpu uh something that in theory if they get it down to what they're talking about which is like 0.25 watt draw um on suspend um then you know they say 100 hours of battery life but you know i would just be stoked to get a good

solid or solid eight or ten hours out of it worth noting usbc charging and the screen size 14.1 inches it'd be a great little remote machine man it also has video out over USB-C as well. So there's some demo videos out there that Lucas has recorded that I can link to in the show notes for people to go check out. It does play Quake 3. And so what's the price on that? Is it like? $199. Wow, that's pretty great.

Yeah, it's very exciting. And this time it's an even better, that's why they're calling it Pro, with that magnesium casing, that IPS display. It's pretty compelling. I'm very excited to hear what you think of it, Cheese, because if you like it, I may end up ordering one. Well, I'm really looking forward to it, and I think, if anything, it'll be a great little companion machine to take along with me whenever I go to these conferences or our sprint or anything like that. A little bit lighter, and I'm not really concerned if, I mean, obviously I don't want anything to happen to it,

but I'm not overly concerned if something does. Hey, over on the Linux Unplugged website, linuxunplugged.com, we have a blog you can click at the top of the site. And Cheesy just posted a summary of some of the fun things we did during our team sprint a couple of weeks. The JB summer sprint,

we had our full-time staff and full-time contractors all came into the Seattle area. And we worked on a lot of things, some of which you've seen in the extras feed, some of which we're about to talk about here in just a minute. And I'm, to be honest with you, I'm, I am more nervous than I, I think I've been in 10 years about this. And I really encourage you to go check out this post because she's did a great job of capturing some of the moments that were so great about the sprint. The shot of us working on the ferry while we're

having a team meeting all in person for the first time. Yeah, that was great. On a ferry boat going across the Pacific Northwest. It's just so great. I mean, the only challenge was you had to not just get lost in the scenery floating on by. Which did happen from time to time.

Like you can, there's a few shots of cheesy in there. Oh yeah. And our trip out to the Diablo Outlook, where I learned how to do night photography for the first time. And talked my wife into driving up and down the side of the mountain so I could get a picture, a long exposure picture of her headlights. And it worked out. It did, didn't it? That was a lot of fun. You both had radios and, you know, you were still on this overlook radioing to Hadiyah saying,

no, wait, wait, wait. And then you missed the button. You say, oh, just turn around, honey. You know, it's no problem. Brent, you were a great mentor and handled my noobness with much ease and kind gloves. I thank you. Well, you're welcome. You were a great, great student.

Hardly, hardly. But I managed. I managed. Anyways, it was a really nice write-up. And the sprint was more than just about creating some new stuff. It was also about us getting a chance to hang out together. We did that, including going out to the ice caves and some epic drone shots of the ice caves in there.

Hey-o. Let's check that out. Yeah, that was pretty good. Okay. All right. Ice caves and some epic drone shots of the ice caves in there. Hey-o. So check that out. Yeah, that was pretty good. Okay. All right. Now, there's a moment that we've really been building towards. I know.

We make news this week. This is still part of the community news because this week, a well-known podcast network in the open source community is launching yet another podcast that is totally free, handcrafted, and built just for our audience. I'm very excited. Alex, do you want to say it? Do you want? Come on, Alex. Say it. Say it, Alex. We are launching a new show called Self Hosted. Self Hosted dot show. The teaser's up right now because we're filling out the RSS feeds. And we're really excited about this. In fact, so excited that we're holding a launch party coming up next weekend.

Our buddy Wendell from Level 1 Techs is joining us at the meetup. And Wendell's going to join us for episode two of Self Hosted. That's great. We've already recorded episode one. It's in the cam. It's going to be premiering on September 12th to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Jupyter Broadcasting joining Linux Academy. It's our birthday, and you're all getting a new podcast.

So selfhosted.show slash subscribe if you just want to get the RSS feed so as soon as Episode 1 goes live, you've got it. And then keep an eye out for Episode 2. We're going to travel to Wendell's lab and get in a conversation with him about why self-hosting matters. Yeah, so Chris is going to fly out to Raleigh, North Carolina, which is where I currently reside. And we're going to take a road trip through the North Carolina mountains up to Kentucky over the weekend, Labor Day weekend.

Yeah, it's an incredibly exciting opportunity. I'm very excited and really looking forward to the future with you, Chris. I am too. You and I have had a chance over the last couple of years to get to know each other pretty well. We met at Texas Linux Fest and then at Linux Fest Northwest. Alex had a packed talk.

The room was all, you know, standing room only talk about self-hosting, about getting control of smart devices on your LAN, about standing up services for your family and friends, or even business. And it was really, really well received. And afterwards, we started talking and saying, there's a show here.

There really is a show here. And then we really refined the idea at this year's Texas Linux Fest and started working on it hard. And we've been working on it for a little bit because we really wanted to think about all the different ways we could do a show like this. And we wanted to come away with something that's the essentials of what you need from a podcast like this. And we're not anti-cloud. I think that's going to be an important aspect about the shows. We're pragmatist. Really for us, self-hosting is about controlling

your data. So if there's a way to intelligently leverage the cloud, maybe with encrypting your data or some other means, we're absolutely going to talk about that in the show as well. Alex's day job is OpenShift at Red Hat. So it's a huge part of what he does on a day-to-day basis.

Huge part of my entire quote-unquote Linux career. One of my other quote-unquote Linux career. One of my other projects is LinuxServer.io. And one of the most popular articles on that website has been the Perfect Media Server series, which is something I started writing in 2016. And this show really is just for me a way to pay it forward to all those that have helped me along my journey, but also to bring in a whole new swathe of people into self-hosting services.

I think with the privacy implications of giving all your data to Google and Amazon and all these big companies, that the time to self-host has never been more prevalent than now. And the tools have never been better. That's what's blowing me away, is we've had some resources now to have decent hardware and decent systems and experiment with different things and have time to deploy things and learn things. And it's been eye-opening for me this last year with

Linux Academy. You have been converted to containers. It's been a fun journey to watch because I've been listening to the network for a long time now and you've been talking about docker on coda with michael for years but i knew you didn't use it because i could just tell from the way you were talking but now you do use it and some of the stuff that wes is doing you know on the back end with hosting all the sites and stuff like you just talk about it like a giddy school kid and it's just wonderful because like you get my enthusiasm for this stuff too now right oh yeah he really does well and you and i have been discussing a lot about taking the smart devices that you get that the vendor drops support for and reflashing them we're using things that just have plugins for them already uh and and building

up infrastructure we're going to very early in the series on self-hosted we'll just cover a few fundamentals too like um port forwarding reverse proxy and the tools we use to do reverse proxy, right? Just so we have some of those fundamentals as well. That's all going to be in there. Very, very, very excited. It's going to be a twice a month podcast, self-hosted.show launching September 12th. And if you're not familiar who this Alex guy is, check out Linux Server I.O. And also, just released three or four minutes ago, extras.show

slash seven is a chat with Brent and Alex, and you can meet Alex and his journey from Apple to Red Hat and from London to Raleigh and becoming a podcaster. It's some great background that I think you'll appreciate. So if you're curious about one of our new podcast stars, check out extras.show slash

seven, a new brunch with Brent. You cheeky monkey. You didn't tell me that was coming out today. Isn't that nice? Well, I figured you guys had such a great chat and what a great opportunity for people to get to know who you are a little bit because they hear you contribute to the show. But it's like we know you as a fully actualized person, right? And we know your wife, and we know your background,

but the audience doesn't. And Brent is such a great conversationalist, and it was just such a good opportunity for, I think, even people that are tangentially interested in what we might be cooking. Go meet Alex, extras.show.com. Brunch with Brent should be its own show, I'm just saying. I heard it here first start the campaign. Well, that's nice. Yeah. It was a lot of fun. Alex and I had a great

conversation. Um, I listened to it three times already cause I have the, um, you know, I might have it in my back pocket before it gets sent out. So I just keep enjoying the heck out of it. So Alex, thanks for sitting down with me and having a chat. And I think the audience is really going to love it. Well, thank you. It was a pleasure. Now, selfhosted.show. Again, the teaser is out. The feeds are getting populated now.

It's selfhosted.show slash RSS if you just want to pop it into your podcast player of choice. Episode one, September 12th, our meetup with Wendell this weekend in Lexington, Kentucky. Meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. Join Wendell this weekend in Lexington, Kentucky, meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting. Join Wendell, Alex, and myself at Goodfellas Pizzeria.

Big thanks to Elle for booking that one. She picked this one out, and it looks fantastic. One final plug, if I may. It's the new hashtag that we're using. I want to make this into a two-way conversation and not just Chris and I talking about stuff. We've got a hashtag we're going to use, so you can use it on Twitter and or Telegram.

AskSSH is the hashtag. There you go. AskSSH and then ask your question away. We'll try to work it into a future episode. We do have a couple in the can, and then we'll work them in. I am so excited. And today's episode of Linux Unplugged is on theme.

It's really about self-hosting. I decided to recently self-hosting. I decided to recently self-host my password database with Bitwarden, but some of the guys on the show are using the hosted option, so we'll talk about that as well. So, this is sort of on point. And then those kinds of things and a lot more from the self-hosted show

once it kicks off. It's real now, Chris. We can't back out now. It's real now. I know, I know. We've been working on this for so long. We really wanted to be intentional. And I hope everybody likes what we've come up with. I feel like it's fresh. It's good.

It's an important topic. And the area is getting so interesting. There's so many great free software projects out there right now that you think take all this time and effort, but really it's all manageable. And with just a couple of pointers or a couple of lessons we've learned, you're off to the races. So lots of potential. Now, I have something else for us before we go any further. We need to talk about Ogg Camp because that's also coming up really soon. October 19th and the 20th isn't that far away if you need to plan for travel.

And believe it or not, Ogg Camp is now 10 years old this year, which is amazing because I remember when Odd Camp started. That makes me feel like I've been around for too long. But if you've never been or you've always gone, this seems like a pretty good one to go to, October 19th and 20. I'm going to see if I could see if you think I, see what you think of my pronunciation, Alex, of these, okay? At the Manchester Conference Centre in the Pendulum Hotel near Piccadilly Station. Wow, very good. How'd I do? It was so close.

So close. Hello, Popey. Hello. Which one was it? It was the Piccadilly Station, right? Yeah, it kind of went off of Piccadilly, but that's fine. So anyways, OgCamp, OgCamp.org if you're interested. And Joe had a real quick chance to sit down with Dan from OggCamp

to give us a little taste of what's coming, and we'll be right back. So welcome to the show, Dan. Thank you very much for having me. So you're here to talk about OggCamp. What is it, where is it, when is it? Yeah, so OggCamp is a free culture and free software open source uh bar camp kind of hybrid we call it so we've had some uh it's a it's a uk event um it's been running for 10 years so this is our 10th anniversary this year so it's quite a big one for us and uh we've

got uh four different tracks we have one kind of scheduled track with some speakers on there we've got some interesting stuff coming up with Andy Stanford-Clark and Roger Light are going to talk about Mosquito, which is a project they created together at the first Ogg Camp 10 years ago, which is still going. And it's been quite popular in IoT, kind of embedded fields as well.

So that's cool. Yeah, so it's coming up in Manchester in October this year. It's our 10th anniversary. As I said, we're going to be at the Manchester Conference Centre, which is in the Pendulum Hotel. It's on the 19th and 20th of October.

And tickets, well, you can give a donation of tickets or they can be completely free. It's whatever you think you can spare. So that's, you know, we want to keep it open to everyone. But we just want to get as many people together and have a, you know,

a celebration of open source and all the kind of crazy goodness that's around that. Yeah, so the 19th and 20th of October, that's the Saturday and Sunday. But there is kind of an unofficial social event on the Friday night, isn't there? That's a very good point, actually. Yeah, so on the 18th, which is the Friday, there will be a party in the hotel. I think it's about 7 o'clock onwards uh in the uh in the main hotel there's a bar there and we've got some there's food available you can order food and you can

have drinks and stuff and i know it's october but there's a really nice courtyard outside and it's got like nice outside seating and stuff so fingers crossed i know in manchester it rains a lot but fingers crossed it's not going to rain and it won't be freezing and we'll be able to spread out into that as well and have a really good kind of, a good get-together. Well, I remember a few years ago up the road in Liverpool, and that was at Halloween, and I was walking around in a T-shirt. It was lovely weather, so fingers crossed. You never know.

You never know. That's very true. Tickets are available now, as I said, so I should give you the address, shouldn't I? If you go to ogcamp.org, O-G-G-C-A-M-P dot org, there's a link on there for tickets, and you can easily sort all that sort of stuff out and if anybody's interested in supporting the event you know sponsoring or anything like that that's still up there as well and you can find out about the schedule and that'll be getting more stuff on there as we go along it's gradually getting filled

up we're looking for crew now there's all kinds of stuff on there we're on twitter as well at camp and uh mastodon and various other things. If you search for Odd Camp, it's quite a unique name, so it'll come up in many places. Yeah. So what should people expect there then from, well, I suppose let's start with the schedule track. What should people expect there?

Well, lots of interesting stuff coming up. As I said, we've got our kind of opening keynote this year is Andy Samford-Clark from IBMm he's the cto of ibm um he uh he and he was largely responsible for creating mqtt which is this um message messaging protocol which i'm sure your listeners will know better than i do to be honest but uh yeah for people use a lot for reporting and messaging and stuff in um iot and embedded linux and just embedded software in general so he's going to come talk about that and how that's changed and how the project that he created with roger uh roger light he'll also be there um he how that's changed um then we've

got all kinds of stuff on the saturday uh there'll be a number of scheduled talks we've got some stuff for beginners um introduction to Ubuntu Anna is going to tell us her story about how she got into Ubuntu and we've got other stuff there and as you'll know Joe we've got the podcast panel discussion uh extravaganza at the end there which which you'll be uh which is totally organized and completely final at this point excellent so that'll be fun that's always fun um and then there's a party on the Saturday night as well, because one of the big things about Odd Camp, which you can probably attest to, is that we do like to take our parties as seriously as everything else. So we tend to have lots of social events around it. So there's another party in the evening. There's going to be a band playing, Dev Null and the Colonel Panics, who are a Linux band, if you want to call them that. They're going to be playing in the main room, and there's the bar next door, and there'll be more food and stuff. And on the Sunday, actually, I should mention, we've got our first...

Well, actually, on the Saturday, we've got our first ever kids track as well, which is nice. So there's going to be stuff to do for if you've got family, you can bring them along. We're going to have sessions for kids. We've got a special little kids room where there's going to be people putting on sessions, like building little robots and doing cool stuff, which will hopefully get the kids interested in technology and keep them entertained.

And there's an exhibition area. We're going to have lots of various stuff going on in the exhibition area. Hacker Public Radio are there and lots of other people. I'm still booking that at the moment. So if anybody listening has a project and they think they'd like to be involved and they'd like to exhibit, you can just email contact.ogcamp.org and I'll sort that out with you. And we can get you on the exhibition. And then there's the Open Hardware Jam, which is going to be in the middle of the exhibition space as well.

There's going to be people doing, again, cool stuff with making stuff with Arduinos and micro bits and Raspberry Pis and all that sort of stuff, which should be cool. like arduinos and micro bits and raspberry pies and all that sort of stuff which should be cool and then on the sunday we've got our first so we're linking up with an event called floor con which was a security and open source event due to happen in huddersfield which sadly was cancelled and then we kind of said you want to come and do a run one of the rooms for us during the day so there's going to be i don't know what their content is yet but it's going to be lots of security based talks and they've got some speakers lined up as well which i'll i'll publish on the website as soon as i find out more um and then this all ends with the fabulous raffle cast which goes on for which goes on for a while usually when we give away all the prizes that we've got and and then on the

sunday night um i suspect a few people will still be around on the sunday night so there'll be a few people in manchester hanging around for probably food and drinks and stuff before we all crawl off to wherever we're from on the Monday and it is also an on-conference isn't it so if anyone turns up wanting to speak then there's a chance that they will be able to they should be able to yeah so that's a really good point actually I should highlight that if um if you have a topic that you want to talk about and actually something that we're trying to do this year as well which we haven't done in the past is um so um lauren is in charge of the schedule and she's much more organized than i am and she came up with a great idea which was to have um suggested topics so if you're listening and you think oh i'd love to see a talk

about uh git for example but i don't know if there'll be one you can we're gonna have a call for like topics so someone can say i going to have a call for topics, so someone can say, I want to see a talk about Git. Somebody else can go, oh, I actually know a bit about Git. I could probably do that. And then we can kind of put those things together and hopefully build the content that people actually want to see and get involved in.

And I think Lorna's also going to do some, if you're nervous about talking and you haven't done it before, she's going to run a couple of webinar sessions during september and helping people to get used to talking she's an excellent speaker and she's going to give some tips on how you can do you do you know feel comfortable do your talk and get the most out of it all right cool and there's usually lightning talks as well for people who want to just kind of dip their toes in there will be yeah i should mention that that's on the saturday i think on the main stage there's five minute ish talks usually yeah well i'll be there you'll be there it sounds like it's going to be excellent fun so uh again plug the url for it yeah go to

ogcamp.org that's o-g-g-c-a-m-p.org and all the information's on there quick plug for you then yeah if anybody wants to find out what i'm up to, you can go to best place, probably Twitter actually, which is at MethodDan or DanLynch.org which is my main website and you can find all the various podcasts and things that I do on there. Nice one. Well, thanks a lot for coming on the show, Dan. No problem. Anytime. And that panel they mentioned

will be recorded and released in our extras.show feed. Oh boy! Yeah, so if you want to catch that and you can't make it, we'll try to make that panel available because we have that avenue now. Oh, yes, we do. So, my friends, we are gathered here today

to discuss Bitwarden. We all know that a password manager in 2019 is a must-do. I've tried them, gone back to LastPass, and I decided I was going to hang out and wait at LastPass until my subscription expired.

Which, it expired this month. And I have no intention of renewing it. So this is something that's been on my radar. You kind of have to move. You've been a KeePass user for a long time. For a long time. I mean, I've always had sort of syncing infrastructure set up anyway and I don't,

you know, I read a whole bunch and hardly ever write to this thing. So for a long time it was fine to just sort of sync it around and access it when I needed to but I just have more and more passwords now. I thought, you know, it's been a while since I've tried something else. For me too, sharing my passwords with

all of you on the team has become much more of a thing. It's okay like, you know, once or twice you give someone your account password, but that does not scale. Well, they're not really my passwords anymore. They're the team's passwords. I just have them in my database.

And so I need like a team password database as well, but I still want it to be secure. I want us to host it because of the sensitivity of this. And we want it to work with mobile. We want it to have autofill. And I really was just sort of, without really saying anything, observing everyone just switching to Bitwarden. And you were the last domino to fall now.

And you switched over the weekend. And I was like, okay, this is time for us to talk about it. So, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce you to Bitwarden. It is developed by Kyle Spearin. Kyle is the primary contributor to the project, but it is an open source project. It debuted in August of 2016. It does have mobile applications for iOS and Android, including an F-Droid store version of it.

And it has browser plugins for your common browser platforms. You can use their hosted version or you can self-host it. And there is their version you can self-host, which they make available as Docker images. And then there's also a community-compatible version server-side written in Rust.

Yeah. So if you look at, and we'll have links, of course, in the doc to all of this stuff, you can run it just like they do, you know, up in the cloud. But that's going to be like a whole bunch of database containers and a few other things. It's also based on.NET technology, which isn't always the most familiar to Linux users.

So there is a community-maintained Rust server implementation that is kind of geared at, you're not building a whole big infrastructure for many people, you're just hosting it yourself. So we'll get to that, because I had a chance to play around with that. And you also then, like I mentioned, have the option to just use their services.

Their infrastructure, from my understanding, seems pretty solid. They encrypt before they send it up to their server, so they just have an encrypted blob. Their systems run on Azure, so you have the security of the Azure platform be at what it is. Probably pretty good. And on top of all of that, the best people could get, even if they compromised the servers, would just be that encrypted blob sitting in a SQL database somewhere. And Alex, so you elected to use their hosted infrastructure. I'm sure you've played with the self-hosted one too.

What do you like about using the hosted version? For me, a password manager is something that has to have 100% uptime. I know that's not a realistic goal for a self-hosted service because I'm not a data center right but the thing is for me um you know particularly over the last 12 months whilst I was emigrating I didn't have a great way to run unless of course I'd spent up on a droplet or something um I didn't have a great way to run this locally and for me you know I think it's $12 a year or something. That cost a buck a month is fine for the service it provides. I've been extremely happy with the experience as a Bitwarden user. And a lot of the integrations you can get on Android,

like autocomplete and stuff like that are pretty nice. You can do control shift L in a browser, and that will autofill the form entries on a page for you if you've unlocked your vault and stuff so I mean I'm a very happy user I've been using it for well over a year at this point I think it's sort of set up by default to use the hosted service when you go to log in

and if you were going to throw it up on a VPS you're probably better off using their hosted solution. For me, what was critical is I wanted it behind my LAN because of the nature of this. I just, and if it's not available, that just means somebody on the team can't log into a service they have to. It's probably not the end of the world. And so I'm willing to run it on a box that could have 99.5% uptime for the year. Right, we can make arrangements too, you know, with backups and spinning up new servers if we have to.

So it's really kind of your choice. You know, you have the option. I like having the self-hosted option, and it's always a balance. Sometimes it makes more sense to use their infrastructure. I think that line for something like this is if you already have several things you're running on a box, and so you just have a machine that you are routinely keeping up to date and secure and following best practices you're probably a good candidate to self-host this particular software if you would just be spinning up

something that would be set off in the corner that you would have to remember to log into and make sure it stays up to date and it could be easily neglected probably not a good candidate to host something like your password database. And you might also consider, in this case, that it is all available open source. So you might think of it as just a way to fund that development if you also get a nice service out of it. One other thing to consider as part of this,

should I self-host it, should I use the hosted version, is what happens if your internet goes out in your house? use the hosted version is what happens if your internet goes out in your house you know you have all of the passwords for everything in this database and suddenly okay i can't log into amazon right now i can't buy this pot of dog food that i need to buy okay well i'll just go to walmart instead but there are other things that are more important i need passwords for and if my internet's out for half a day for for some reason, thanks AT&T, then, you know, I need to have access to these things. So for me, it's worth the price of admission.

I think it's worth mentioning, too, that the software provides some pretty handy functionality outside of passwords. It'll offer secure credit card information storage and address book and secure note storage. It's just nice to have some organization kind of all in one place for that. And so to answer your question about offline,

so last night, just to see how far I could push things, I decided to do a bunch of crazy stuff. And the way I was able to do this safely was I used a tool called Podman, but it's also available as a Docker image. And I Podman installed or pulled down the Bitwarden Rust implementation, set up something that only works on local host,

so I just go to local host on my laptop, and I was able to play with all kinds of crazy features, like importing large swaths of my password database into a team database without risking actually exposing passwords and stuff. And the entire thing worked offline. I connected the mobile version of my phone to my laptop, and I was able to connect the Chrome extension to the local version of my phone to my laptop, and I was able to connect the Chrome extension

to the local version on my laptop, and it all worked beautifully. Really, you could run, if you just wanted something on your laptop all the time that only listened to local host, it works great. Or if you want something that only works on your LAN, and so you sync to your mobile device when you're on your LAN, you can absolutely do that.

I want mobile access too, but for experimenting, it was so nice to know that I could have this sort of safety of it only is accessed by local host. Whatever I do on this is only on local host. It won't go anywhere else. And if it's a failed experiment, just blow it away. Did you mess around with the Rust version as well, server-side, when you did look at self-hosting?

Yes, I did. And what was your reasons for going with the community implementation versus the main project release? I just kind of wanted to experiment and see how well it compared, because I'd been using the upstream, you know, I'm using their hosted service as well at the moment, and that is using

the other version. So I wanted to see how much they matched, if it felt like the same experience. And so far, yeah, I mean, it really does. Now, if you do want to play with the other one, they've got some instructions for manually getting all the right containers set up, because it's kind of a bunch. They hook into Docker Compose to get it set up. I would suggest if you want to play with that,

maybe just allocate a new virtual machine or VPS somewhere, because it kind of wants to do a whole bunch of things. Yeah, that's why I liked the community implementation. It's one single... It's just simpler, right? It's aimed at like a smaller deployment just for kind of running something small for yourself and it's smoother to do so.

And once it's up and running, you just go to the web URL and you've got the administration front end right there and all the software clients can connect to that. And it's very straightforward if you use the community Rust version. One thing I'd like to point out is with the community version, they have a big disclaimer that says,

whichever client you're using, do not use the official support channels. Come here first. Yeah, yeah. There's always that aspect of it. That's true. And as far as Bitwarden itself, it recently, well, I think it was about a year ago almost, they went through an audit and they found a few things, fixed those things. We'll have a link to the information about that.

So it has been audited by a third party as well, even though it is a fairly new project. It seems really good. And it really does seem like it's, what I like about it is it's just absolutely everything I need and not much more. The team management stuff's just the right amount. Being able to auto-fill the credit cards or address information and store different profiles and identities, that's just right. The mobile apps are functional.

They support some offline caching if you don't have a connection. Right, yeah, it looks like it's read-only. I'm not sure you can add new entries, but that's alright with me. Yeah, you still get read-only access. So be aware of that. But you're right, it's almost stupidly easy to get to. I was looking at the docs for the show, and I'd just

run the app image that they provide, but it's also of course packaged, and it's flatbacks and snaps, and basically it'd be hard not to find it on your platform at this point. And the web interface works great too. So what I'm getting from this is that I can actually use this to store my Apple

card credentials since I can't carry it in my wallet or my pants, right? Oh, too soon, Cheesy. That would be a great workaround. Yeah. I kind of want to take the temperature of the mumble room. Popey, I saw you in there. Are you using any password managers? Have you tried out Bitwarden or LastPass? Yep. I exported everything out of LastPass and chucked it in Bitwarden a while ago. It's great. I love it. There's not much more to say. No, it just works, right? It's just simple and straightforward and clean.

I did an export as well, and I'll link to a guide. There's just a couple of notes. It doesn't directly import the file like it does for other password managers. There's an extra step, but I'll have a link to that in the show notes. It just totally works really kind of in a unremarkable,

remarkable way. And their organizational functionality is perfect, exactly what I needed to securely share passwords with the team. And we have it hosted in a way that the team can get access to it, but it's not publicly accessible. I'm pretty happy with the end result. And I think

the last time I tried to switch away from LastPass, it was a total mess. And so I tried this process a couple of times. And I will warn you, if you have sketchy connectivity when you do the import of your LastPass database, for some reason, it will import all of the passwords, but it will drop all the folders. If that happens you can essentially eject the entire password database and re-import again.

So if the first time you import and you don't get your folders that you all have set up in LastPass just drop it all and import again

and it will bring them in. In like three or four times that I did this that happened to me once. Yeah, interesting. But I did a little Google search

and other people say it happens and they say it's when you have intermittent connectivity, and I did at that time. Because it's like it's going out to resolve the favicons and stuff, and when that process dies, I guess it just doesn't create the folders or whatever. I didn't go any further than that, but it seemed to be the case, so keep an eye out for that.

But otherwise, love it. Yeah, I was pleased. I had several different versions and generations and types of KeePass files from the different clients I'd used over the years, and all of them just sort of imported fine. The client version for Linux, the desktop application, is available as a Snap and as a Flatpak. And AppImage.

Yep, and an AppImage. And it's sandboxed, I believe, as both Snap and Flatpak. I believe so. They are sandboxed, so that's nice and safe for a password manager. They've also got a little CLI. It is node-based, so it's not the most lightweight, but they've got a little handy CLI client to interact with the vaults too.

I wanted to mention that part, because that is actually pretty cool. It's nerd-friendly, but it also is good enough to work for your family members if you're going to go that route. We will have a link, again, in the show notes, linuxunplugged.com slash 316, to an article I used where it's a one-line command that you copy and

paste, and you can fire up an experimental container and play with this thing. We're not talking like it's a one-line command that you copy and paste and you can fire up an experimental container and play with this thing. We're not talking like it's a big investment. Really a big, high recommendation of Bitwarden from the team. I've been using it now for just a couple of days, but it was smoother than any other transition I've ever done. So I'm pretty optimistic. And you're using it, Alex is using it. I'm picking up a theme here. Chris is a little resistant to change, but once he does, he's like, oh my God, Alex is using it. I'm picking up a theme here. Chris is a little resistant to change, but once he does, he's like, oh my God, this is so much better.

As long as it's good, you know, it's got to meet all the various needs. KeyPass just didn't do it for me because for KeyPass, I then needed to rely on either Dropbox or Sync. It's just, there was all this extra stuff to it that didn't work for me. But this, this solves those problems.

I was really sad to see LastPass be acquired and, you know, the general posture of that acquisition didn't sit right with me. And finding Bitwarden was like an oasis in the desert at that point. And I'm really happy to see how this project has matured over the last couple of years. It's great. Now, if you're curious about their types of encryption that they use and whatnot, they have that explained too. I'll have a link to that in the show notes and also a link types of encryption that they use and whatnot, they have that explained, too. I'll have a link to that in the show notes and also a link to the audit that they went through.

So you can give that a read. It's always good to be paranoid about these kinds of things. So we definitely encourage being paranoid when it comes to your password manager. So check out. We've tried to really pack the show notes full of links to help everybody who's doing some research. But really good recommendation. If there's something wrong with it, we're all screwed at this point because I'm putting our team passwords in there.

Watch out! I do have one question about Bitwarden. Does it also support secure notes and stuff that are similar to the feature set that LastPass has? Secure notes, secure autofill. You also can do two-factor, too, if you enable those features. And I did.

I turned on two-factor using Authy. It was really straightforward and simple and took me two minutes maybe at most using even just my local installation. I didn't have to. It seems when you install it locally, it has identified you as like a paid pro user because my stuff in my menu says pro users.

Oh, interesting. Maybe because I'm using the free implementation. Right. But either way, yeah, really nice, smooth two-factor process. I'm like, okay, well, that's just great. Like LastPass is kind of clunky. You got to go through some process. I've never seen you complain about that.

Yeah. Is anyone familiar with any hardware sticks that you can use with this? Is it compatible? I imagine it is. It would be a fairly standard feature, but anyone have any experience with that? I believe it works with the YubiKey, and there's a few others that I'm not as familiar with.

So that's definitely a route you can go. It can, although I don't really like to recommend it, also do two-factor via email. I think that's a bit of a stinker. And it can also do some recovery code stuff. So there's some nice stuff to dig into there. It seems like the project has some really good plans down the road for that area as well.

But I think, I know it's a bit of a compromise, but the thing that I really appreciate about Authy is cross-platform, and I can move between devices and not lose my two-factor tokens. And so it's just that bit of compromise between something that isn't absolutely as secure as an RSA token, or you know what I mean,

or something that isn't something that is just as dumb as SMS text or email. If something's not too unworkable, you're not going to use it and that's not getting you any security wins. Right.

So the nice thing about Authy is it lets you have all of your two-factor services in one spot, and it synchronizes them across your devices. It's like if you lose a phone or you switch devices and you forget to back up your two-factor stuff, you're not SOL. And so the fact that it works with that

works with my workflow. I'm not necessarily recommending it for everybody, but it is really nice. Now we have some feedback to get to. We don't do that too often in the show, but we just had some great notes on the subreddit from our Wayland episode. We spent the weekend with Wayland and got some good feedback. He says, you guys talked about Tilex.

This is the poot. It's not with threes and zeros. He says, you talked about Tilex, but I still recommend Gwake. It's very stable. It supports split windows these days. It does. Poot spelled with threes and zeros he says you talked about Tilex but I still recommend Gwake it's very stable

it supports split windows these days it does and he thought he'd also mention backup tools he doesn't like to trust companies like

Google, Microsoft or Amazon with any data but SpiderOak1 I have to recommend he says also was recommended by Edward Snowden

also Mr. Poot, I've recommended it too. I was going to say, yeah, weren't you? You used to be a big Spider-O fan.

I used to back up all my different cloud services to Spider-O. I might do it again. It's pretty great. It's pretty great. Spider-O's pretty solid.

Anyways, oh, he signs it as Guybrush, which is much easier to read than the other one. And our last bit of feedback, One Tune More writes, the Wayland future

is like electric cars are the future. That's kind of, I like this. For auneMore writes, the Wayland future is like electric cars are the future. That's kind of, I like this. For a very long time, they were good in theory. But recently, they've been good for some uses. Now they're starting to be good for the masses. I think we said something similar in the show. He writes,

Wayland being smooth really means that mutter has become really smooth. Since that's Gnome Shell's compositor, Mutter has to implement everything which Xorg used to do. So when you guys are talking about Wayland being smooth, you're really talking about Gnome Shell being smooth, which is a fair point. And it's something they're working on. He writes, I'm predicting Mir is going to be a huge deal in a few years. He writes, I'm predicting Mirror is going to be a huge deal in a few years.

They are working with projects on standardizing protocols, for example, adopting a layer shell protocol from WL roots and permitting shells, depending on whether they want to write a plugin for a pre-built display server like Mir or control their own window management rules and behavior like WL Roots. Mir is going to be a big part of a lot of projects' futures, he says. I think that's spot on. For a lot of projects that have to implement... Right, you need some helper framework

because there's a lot to implement now. Today I saw news about the next release of XFCE, which is expected in a year, and they're already saying no GTK, no Wayland. No GTK4, I should say, and no Wayland. Sorry. Yeah, I mean, it's not too surprising. Also, interesting technical detail about Flameshot.

That was our screenshot tool that we recommended that we all really like. It doesn't actually use the Wayland protocol. It works with KD and Gnome Shell using Dbus for communication. Yeah, and they are clear about that. If you go look at the Flameshot docs, it's basically like,

well, these two big guys gave us hooks. We're going to use them because it makes our stuff work. That's what that means. That's your limitation. Yeah, yeah. So he says it'll be quite a while before we see the dust settle on all this Wayland stuff. Hey, it's an active project, right?

Yeah, if you didn't catch our episode, we spent the weekend with Wayland last weekend. I actually am still using it. On my laptop, I, over the weekend, very proudly played some No Man's Sky using Proton on Wayland using an eGPU with Bluetooth headphones and a Bluetooth mouse. I think you have to be clear at this point. You did that on Linux. Yeah, I did. And the only downside is my Bose headphones, they convert to phone mode when you use voice.

And so I sounded like I was on a telephone call from 1920. But that wasn't Linux's fault. Yeah, no, no. And you probably sounded pretty good. Chris did a whole bit where he was 1938 World's Fair Chris. It was very funny. Yeah, it was great. It really was great.

Yeah, but that was the only downside. I mean, we played No Man's Sky for a long time, and I didn't have a single issue. I mean, this is one eGPU cable into my laptop, which only has Intel graphics, on Wayland playing a Windows game, okay? Using a Bluetooth mouse without leg, with Bluetooth headphones, where the sound is matched

up with the gunfire. That's crazy. I can't even with that. We played for almost three hours or so. Flawlessly. I played flawlessly. You were playing on top of Wayland and never crashed, but I think Drew had a different setup and had crashed a couple of times. So I wonder what the difference there was.

He has a slightly nicer AMD card than I have, and he seems to have all of the issues. He has a lot of problems. I wonder if it's just a support thing there on the AMD card then. Maybe. I kind of cheaped out. I got like a mid-range card since i figured it's in it's in an e-gpu right so why go like the top of the line um and it's just been super solid the only downside is there's there's this amd reset bug so when the machine goes to sleep or anything

like that to get the e-gpu working again i have to completely power down physically power off the e-gpu and then power everything back up before my eGPU works again it's just like the old days have passed through that you used to have to do that with every single video card never mind just a few specific ones and there's some ways you can fix it depending on the type of ROM that's on your card and all that sell it and buy the right card that's the answer oh yeah there is a specific card where you won't even have to mess with it just find one that doesn't have the resect bug and you know as we talked about in our VFIO episode a little while ago, the right hardware is almost more important than the right software.

Really, it's truly remarkable that that whole stack's working, though. And, you know, it's using X-Wayland in there to play the game and all that. It's just mind-blowing. I want to share a pick before we go. USB Top. It's like the Top utility we all know and love, but it shows an estimated instantaneous bandwidth on your USB buses and devices.

So you can see who's hogging up all them USB bandwidths. How neat is this? That is neat. I gave it a little compile before the show. It seemed like maybe it's packaged in some repositories, but it wasn't available to me that way. It was easy to compile, and it does exactly what it says. You just sort of check, and you run it up,

and then it shows you all your different buses and devices on them, and then if there's any activity. You do have to do a bit of legwork. You do. And you have to mod probe USB mon, like all that kind of stuff. You have to do all that. Indeed. Yeah, but once you get it going, you don't even need to run it as root necessarily.

As long as you're on a more modern Linux, you can just run USB top, boom. There's all your bandwidth hogs. It's pretty fun. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes. Good luck because, yeah, it's, you know, six months ago it was active. But I think the core code is about six years old. So good luck. Travel safely.

But we believe in you. We'll have a link in the show notes for that as well. USB top. How about that? And I think it's really cool too, for those little single board computers where everything's on one bus. So if you are building a NAS with a single board computer, you can actually kind of measure that throughput and know, you know, if you're getting enough throughput or if that's your bottleneck. This is amazing. I've never seen this before. And it's in Ubuntu app to install USB top. Jeez, come on, Westpan.

What are you running over there? Aren't you running Ubuntu? Yeah. You didn't have to build it. You just did it. You're so funny. I didn't check because I'm on it. I mean, the search doesn't find it.

But maybe I typed the wrong thing. Maybe Popey knows how to Ubuntu better, though. I'm sure he does. It's possible. I hope so. It wrong thing. Maybe Popey knows how to Ubuntu better, though. I'm sure he does. It's possible. I hope so. It's awesome. Well, it's good to have you back, Popey. And you didn't get a sunburn, did you?

Nope, not at all. Didn't go outside. You didn't go outside. I know that's false. It's too damn hot outside. I'm not going outside. You can't help it. I got a sunburn walking from the hotel across a parking lot to a Mexican restaurant in Texas last time.

Just the 10 minutes back and forth, I got a sunburn. I'm blessed with slightly darker skin than you, though, Chris, so I don't tend to get burned. You're blessed in many ways, Popey, but that's for another show. Anyways, go check out Ubuntu Podcast and User Air, two great shows. And while you're at it, if you're on Telegram, go get Telecast with Popey. Recently co-starring the one, the only Martin Wimpress

from America's Friendliest Airport. Go check that out. It's great. Popey, thank you for joining us. Thank you. Everybody out there, thank you for joining us. I am so elated to announce

the self-hosted podcast. Again, don't forget our meetup, meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. If you're in the Lexington area, come join us. And then check out selfhostup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting. If you're in the Lexington area, come join us. And then check out selfhosted.show slash subscribe for the RSS feed. I should be live from Raleigh next Tuesday, so come see if I can pull that one off. We'll see you back here next Tuesday. අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි All right, all right.

So here's the, it's just not an 1804. Newer versions have it. All right, you're off the hook, Wes. So Chris, what's this relationship thing we were going to post show? Oh yeah, right. You're off the hook, Wes. So, Chris, what's this relationship thing we were going to post-show? Oh, yeah. Right. Well, I mean, it really does. I don't know.

Like, okay, for example, I'm about to get on an airplane and fly down to Raleigh. And then we're going to get in a car and drive for seven hours to go do something. Like, a new show is very much like kind of like a polyamorous relationship where you've already got a couple of wives and now you've got to work a new wife into the or husband or husband

into the mix. Well, you've got to be fair but you still have to sort of prioritize. Right. There's a lot of things to juggle. Well, that's true because then I sit here

and I think to myself am I spending enough time with Linux Unplugged and now I've got this Don't leave us over here. this new show I'm doing you know, it's a lot of pressure.

We're a very jealous show. And the truth be told I know that a new show I'm doing, you know, like it's a lot of pressure. We're a very jealous show. And the truth be told, like I know that a new show needs a little bit extra attention and it's just a lot to take on and I've got to be there when I'm sick. I've got to be there when I'm healthy. I've got to be there in tough and bad and hard and good times. Like it is a different form of a relationship. Some weeks you won't have content, you won't know what to do, but you'll have to struggle through. And you stick with it.

You stick with it. And it sounds silly, but in so many ways, there's a lot of analogies. And so when I'm like really getting committed to something, I freak out a little bit. I freak out just not that I have commitment issues, obviously, I'm married. But I just kind of like I actualize the amount of commitment i am making because this thing could go on for a decade can i uh can i pull out at this point is that an option i know my freaking you out a little bit we're all in now buddy we're all in i've already bought my tickets and i'm headed your way i'm getting on a plane to london tonight