LINUX Unplugged - 447: An Umbrel for Everything

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

We look at two new options that enable ANYONE to run a personal server at home or a small business.

Ready when Brent is. How you doing over there, Brent? Tracking down a power cord? What are you doing? Yeah, it's actually a desk vibration issue. I think I figured it out. What do you think? I think it does sound better. I don't know how you have desk vibration issues. Amazing. You know, I don't mean these things, but sometimes they just happen. Sometimes they just happen.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. My name is Brent. And my name is Alex. Hello, gentlemen. Thank you all for joining me here in our giant Linux assembly. As we have quite the show this week, we're looking at two new options that enable anyone to run a personal server at home.

I'm talking easily, safely, self-host this sucker yourself, and run some of your favorite open source apps like NextCloud, maybe a Matrix server. Anything you want, take control of your data after today's episode. And then we're going to round it out with some great emails, boosts, picks, and more. We have quite the show. Very excited about it today. So before we go any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello, Chris. Hello. Best friends and everyone.

And also, Alex, thanks for joining us. It's been a bit since we had you on the show, but today's episode kind of seemed like it was in your sweet spot. I like what you've done with the drapes. Yeah, that was Wes's idea. You know, I didn't think unicorns would match the decor, but if you get the right unicorns, it works. I think the googly eyes go a long way. It's just they all look like they're looking at me.

Well, one of the other reasons Alex is here besides the topic, which is right down his alley because he is our host of Self Hosted, is we are also announcing, very excited about this, a Jupyter Broadcasting East Coast meetup. It has been a long time coming. We have not made it out to the East Coast since Ohio Linux Fest about 100 years ago. out to the East Coast since Ohio Linux Fest about 100 years ago. So on April 9th, a Saturday, we're going to be in Raleigh, North Carolina. And Alex, I think you have maybe found the ultimate meetup location. I think this could be one of our best spots ever. I hope so. Yeah. So I've been racking my brains for a COVID safe location, which primarily means somewhere outside and you want somewhere with good food and good drink.

So we're going to go to a place called Prime Barbecue, which is a Texas style barbecue joint. And then just across the park from this place, it's a place called Oak City Brewing, a local brewery. That's so great. You got a park with barbecue on one side and a brewery on the other side. I'm salivating already. North Carolina, Raleigh, North Carolina is going to be beautiful in early April, right? Like, Wes, you got to go. I mean, you just got to go, Wes.

We're going to talk Brent into it, too. I think I have to go. I'm in. I love it. All right. Cool. So I have a link to the meetup in the show notes, or you can find it by going to meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. We don't make it out to the East Coast very often. I'm hoping to bring the wife and maybe the boy with me because it's going to be right around his birthday and spring break. So I'm not sure exactly, but I think we're flying as much as it would feed my soul to take Jupes out there on a road trip because I've always wanted a road trip to see Alex. I just don't think we could get the cost figured out because it's like going to be four or five grand in gas alone, plus wear and tear on the vehicle, plus camping. So then it's looking like a seven grand trip to take jupes versus like a two or three grand trip if we fly, you know? And even that's kind of expensive.

So it is what it is. I'd love to do the whole thing where we do the trip and shows on the whole road. But I think for this one, we're just going to do like the surgical strike because it's the most economical. Look at you being practical. I mean, it would make me a little worried considering how you got stuck in Tucson last time. There's a lot of places to get stuck across the whole country.

It's true. However, much better time of the year to travel, especially once you make it down south. April is not nearly as hot as August. It was brutal. But I'm very excited either way. It's really long overdue. A couple of small details. We're thinking of meeting around about 3 p.m., so mid-afternoon.

The barbecue place closes about 5, and then we'll head on over to the brewery afterwards. Those are good details. Thanks for adding that. There was something else, and I've forgotten what it is. Well, the meetup page is super early. It's just really rough, but I could add you as an organizer, Alex, and then you could add the details as you think of them and stuff. Yeah, that sounds good.

We'll probably want to do some updates and stuff. Let's do that. Yeah. Do you think Jose might show up? That's always going to be the question now, isn't it? All right, Jose. Gauntlet's been thrown. We shall see.

Okay. Well, Alex, while you're here, I wanted to pick up on something that you and I touched on in Self-Hosted 65 last week. And that is the release of TrueNAS Scale. This is a big release because iXsystems has been working on this since the summer of 2020. And this, unlike previous FreeNAS and TrueNAS products, this one's based on Debian 11, which enabled them to do a whole bunch of extra stuff like properly support Docker, use KVM for the backend virtualization. And to manage all of it, underneath the GUI, to manage those containers and those VMs, they're using HelmScript, which is – what's an easy way to say that? It's a composable Kubernetes. How would you describe HelmScript?

Yeah, Helm is like compose for Kubernetes. That's what I would say. And so you could see how if you have a whole system that's being orchestrated by Kubernetes, it does kind of lend itself to scaling out, hence the name. But you went hands-on with it, Alex, and you go into detail and self-hosted, but I just kind of wanted to get your impressions

as a potential platform for people to use this to like run applications at home, like NextCloud, maybe to back up their systems, like their desktops and laptops and other servers they might have. Like, what are your opinions for that kind of use case? Well, we talked about it in episode 65, as you say, of self-hosted. And my impressions, unfortunately, were kind of colored by the fact that i was unable to even do a basic thing like import my existing zfs pool and without storage you can't really do very much in true now as it turns out so i'm gonna have to revisit it in a few months and actually wait until they've worked out some of the release kinks but since airing that episode on friday we've had a few folks right into the self-hosted

mailbox telling me because i was struggling to think of a use case for true nas really in a world of unraids and kind of just normal linux with zfs on linux kind of layered on top turns out lots of people use it for things like dentists and doctor's offices that kind of thing small to medium business deployments, that sort of thing. So there is definitely a market out there for something like TrueNAS. Lawrence Systems, Tom from Lawrence Systems has done some good content on it this week. I think the craft computing dude has done some stuff as well. And serve the home as well.

But I'm pretty excited about what this means really for the future of ZFS on Linux as a project. Like having TrueNAS scale and in particular a Linux-based version of, air quotes, the product formerly known as FreeNAS, is really exciting. It's almost as exciting as like the Steam Deck on the desktop. Like it's a proper legitimization of that technology stack. I know Chris and I have chatted about this for a bit, but what does the switch of base system actually mean for you? As an admin, especially if maybe folks are used to just using the UI, what does the base platform matter? It matters less than it did thanks to containers.

But every time I log into my OpenSense box and I think, it would be cool if I could just apt get this package or whatever it is. Like I'm, I'm totally fluent and familiar with all of the Linux tooling, but even just something as simple on BSD as doing a net stat, for example, to list all the listening ports for a particular service, right? The, the, the flags I use for net stat have to be different in BSD than they do to Linux. And it's just, I guess a muscle memory thing at this point. Like I use for netstat have to be different in BSD than they do to Linux. And it's just, I guess, a muscle memory thing at this point. I use Linux all day, every day.

And I don't want to have to remember that for this particular box, I have to context switch to the BSD version of stuff. Right, you're suddenly back to ifconfig. It's death by a thousand little paper cuts, you know, for me, BSD. And maybe those hurt a little bit extra when you're kind of in crisis mode. Right. And that can happen when it's your NAS. Which is normally when you're looking at that kind of thing.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I'll tell you what I find interesting about it. And you just touched on it, Alex. So for TrueNAS scale, and of course, they still have the regular TrueNAS products that are BSD based. But with TrueNAS scale, it's exactly that use case. What I did for the very last kind of two years of

my IT contracting where I became an independent contractor, my ninja move was a Linux box that was pretty powerful that ran KVM and then Microsoft, they probably still make it, but back then they made this tool that you could install

on a Windows server and it would convert a live Windows server into a VHD file. And I could then move that to my Linux box. And so what I would do for these folks is I would help virtualize their legacy infrastructure from their failing hardware. I would use Samba on the host to actually provide a lot of the essential network services. Because often they were like older Windows boxes, NT4 or something like that, you know, or just another thing that was kind of common is people would just use Windows XP and just set up file sharing on it, you know, for like a doctor's office or a dentist's office. This is this, I actually, this exact scenario happened at a dentist's office. They use a Windows XP workstation because they needed access to a scanner as well.

And I ultimately moved that all over to a Linux box. And then we just kept the XP workstation just to do the scanning and save it to the Samba share. And what TrueNAS Scale has done here is they've really built this thing to be super user friendly for Windows right out of the box. It supports all of the fancy kind of Windows Samba share features that you need to just kind of look totally like a Windows file server to the clients. And that to me is like, that's great because that's anytime I'm setting something up, that's

definitely part of the setup. And to have iX systems just kind of build those kinds of things in in a prescribed way where it's already on and it's on in the right way because this is what they do. And they give me a UI that I could actually hand off to like the tech person, quote unquote, at that office. Or in the case of this dentist's office, he wanted to have the login. He would want it. He wanted all the passwords. And, you know, this is something he could actually go check to see how much free space he has.

And so this is exactly the kind of thing I would deploy for that dentist's office, no doubt about it. What they ended up getting from me were just Linux boxes that just would have, like, some form of some whatever web admin UI was in style back then. Well, I'd be curious to know what has changed from then till now. Like, it sounds to me like abstraction is the whole kind of beauty

of where we've come now. It's like you just kind of hit a few buttons and it's all there for you. I would imagine, Chris, back then it was quite a bit of work to set all this up. But do you think now it'd be like maybe, I don't know, a few minutes for you? The big advantage here now

with their support of Docker containers is a lot of the applications you'd be deploying on a local network for a small office or any small business, a lot of that's going to be via a Docker container or a VM. And they make that really easy now because they support KVM and Docker. It's still early. Like Alex said, he ran into issues. If he was creating a new storage pool, it probably wouldn't have had any problems, right? But, Alex, because you're trying to import your old storage pool, you know, you ran into some kind of bug. I bet you if you checked back

in six, seven months, downloaded the latest ISO, I bet you you wouldn't even have that problem anymore. You know, they're just kind of early still, even though they've been working on this for a while. I may well do that. You know, there were a couple of other teething issues which we covered in the episode as well, but I look at the other thing that they're doing they're including gluster

out of the box like as their primary scaling storage method scaling out zfs yeah yeah it's a really interesting play that because then you end up treating individual servers like uh they become cattle instead of pets and you can lose any of those servers and still maintain your data. So there's some really interesting stuff that they're bringing to the masses almost with this release. I have to say that Gluster aspect of it kind of for just a second made me go,

maybe this is what we should be doing because we've kind of had a pause with our local server rollout. And what we've been thinking is maybe instead of YOLOing the storage like we were originally going to do and just like. Definitely, definitely. Just YOLO it for sure. Not enough VDEVs, crazy configurations with not enough redundancy. And then like, let's grab some Fiber Channel, connect these things together and just run disks across all of these.

Now I'm looking at it going, well, what if we did the opposite thing and we actually built for liability so like what if we wanted to host more things here and how would i build the infrastructure in that case and there was a few minutes where i'm looking at that free nas scale and i'm going you know this would solve some of our problems like i could immediately see how it would work for us. You know, you did that in self-hosted as well. You called it FreeNAS scale and I let it go then. Ah, TrueNAS scale. I just thought that was funny. Yeah. You know, it's hard for me because it's been FreeNAS my whole life.

You know, this TrueNAS stuff, that feels new, Alex. But if you're going to build a system like that at JB, let's say you've got two or three different systems. Are they all in the same building or is there an internet connection involved between them offsite? Well, in my new head paradigm, they're in the same building or is there an internet connection involved between them off-site? Well, in my new head paradigm, they're in the same building. In my old head paradigm, there was like one at Wes's house or something.

So what would be wrong with something like just a simple ZFS receive and send? When I started looking at it through the lens of Freenet scale, I started thinking, what if this would let me manage KVM and Docker containers across all three of these systems? You know, what if it let me kind of just trade it all as one giant storage pool? Then I started thinking, okay, maybe we could actually start hosting quite a bit of applications if we started doing that. I don't know. I'm just kind of thinking, before I was thinking I was just going to use a couple of the systems as storage pass-through with mild compute. Now I'm thinking maybe I could use them all together. And we still have a little bit of YOLO because we want to make content. That's true. There's a lot of options in that

space. You know, you could start looking at K3S, a very lightweight Kubernetes with something like Rook and Ceph on the back end. There's a lot of ways to skin that particular turkey. on the back end. There's a lot of ways to skin that particular turkey. Oh, okay. Turkey skin. All right. Yeah. Well, we'll consult. It's just been on my mind recently and, you know, saw this true to scale thing come along and it had me thinking. I like it. You know, I am a little disappointed. I was kind of hoping they'd figure out a way to make Docker. Like it seems clear with this that they kind of had to seed, right? Like everyone's using Docker and Kubernetes these days. I was still a little hopeful

they'd figure out some kind of jank on top of jails, and that would have been neat. Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get $100 in 60-day credit on a new account, and you go there to support the show. Linode provides virtual servers

that make it easy and affordable to host anything you want. And I'm talking like a big old enterprise deployment that'll have millions of users, or maybe you just need a portfolio, or maybe you want to experiment with an open source project, or try going from something that's proprietary on the cloud, like Zoom, to something you can host yourself, like Jitsi. So if you're into gaming, maybe you want to host a gaming server. What I'm trying to tell you is that Linode has built a system that is 30 to 50% cheaper than those big hypervisor duopolies out there, but yet can provide enough horsepower to run your entire enterprise, which means that's just a great option for everybody. Developers

also love Linode and they have one of the best cleanest and well-documented APIs in the business. People should take notes from Linode on how they do this. I mean, they've been doing it for nearly 19 years, so they get it right. And for those of you who are into security, like real nuts and bolts security, this is something I probably should have mentioned earlier, but Linode security team publishes weekly Linode security digests, and they go through ranges of dates, and they'll cover a series of things, like they posted one on February 25th and one on February 1st, et cetera. And they are just packed full of good information.

You know, Linode's on the front lines of this kind of stuff. Imagine what their security team is seeing. And a while ago, they realized they could help the industry do better by sharing this information. So if you're in the biz, go check that out. We'll have a link in the show notes. And while you're over there, go create a new account, go experiment, go try things and support the show. There's never been a better time to take advantage of Linode and learn something new and maybe even build yourself a bit of a multi-cloud strategy. You know what I mean? I think you do. So sign up today at

linode.com slash unplugged and get $100 in 60-day credit on your new account and support the show. That's linode.com slash unplugged. So if TrueNAS scale was the perfect server for a small business, this next server might be the personal perfect server for you if you'd like to set up your own sovereign bank and install a bunch of open source applications we talk about all the time. And we decided to talk about Umbro this week because of the situation in Ukraine. It's absolutely horrible what's happening. We don't normally even touch on this kind of stuff in the show but a lot of us had the sense that we wanted to do something and there's not really anything practical that we could do from this distance other than likely financially support uh the resistance the people the people specifically we have listeners in uk. I've heard from some of them.

Some of them are in our matrix room right now. And so, you know, we feel for what's going on over there. And we wanted to talk about Umbral in this context. And as we start, I think it's noteworthy that 107 Bitcoin have been sent over to Ukraine, to the Ukrainian government on Twitter, a post, I can't believe I'm saying this, posted their official crypto address wallets for Ethereum and Bitcoin and whatnot, and have received an unbelievable amount of money. I mean, I think we did the math, and that's something like $4 million, more than $4 million that's been sent now. Every time we check the page, it's gone up. They have spent 54 of the 107 Bitcoin that's been sent to them. I've heard from a listener that used some Bitcoin to buy a car to get out of there. The used car dealership started accepting Bitcoin.

It's incredible to watch all of this happen. And that's kind of what got us thinking about this. And the way Umbral fits in is Umbral is a software package that you can run either on a Raspberry Pi or you could run it on an x86 box. We find it works best if you use Ubuntu 20.04 and their script. And what it does is it sets up a local Bitcoin node. This doesn't mine. It's not using your GPU. It's not doing anything like that. It's simply adding one more node to the consensus generation network.

It's helping validate transactions. It helps decentralize the network and keep the transactions secure. Following along and checking the math. And the nice thing is, is you just install Umbral and you get the Bitcoin node as just part of its function. It does take some space, so you want to have about a terabyte of free space and it'll run in the background and you don't have to do anything. And what you get with Umbral is essentially an app store of some of the best open source apps that are out there. Absolutely. Next cloud is on that list. Uh, matrix is on that list. Hosting your own Bitwarden server is on that list. A lot of the

things, Home Assistant, like a lot of the things we talk about, Piehole, Prism for photo library management, that's all on there. In addition to that, there is a suite of software that lets you manage your Bitcoin stuff locally. It is a node, so you can use that as your own source of truth for the Bitcoin network and you can point wallet applications at it. And it can also act as a local bank for you. So as an example, and I talk more about this on a new podcast that a friend of the network has launched called the Bitcoin Dad Podcast, I have set up family wallets. So my kids all have wallets and they get allowance in Lightning Payments. That lives on this node.

And you can do things like multi-sigs where you can have a key and your kids can have a key so the money can't be spent unless you both authorize that money gets spent. And they have software that lets you do that. And you can also run a Lightning Node, which is how we're receiving and sending payments and participating in that transaction network, which I think has a lot of potential to help fund open source software long term. And I don't say that lightly. So it offers a lot of features. And I think one of the more noteworthy things about Umbral is for both Brent and I, it made the Bitcoin thing real.

Like it took it from this nebulous concept into something that we were hosting ourselves and we had full self-sovereignty over. Yeah, I could tell because, you know, I wasn't at the studio, but you guys were doing all kinds of projects. And I just get like spanned with links from both of you getting really excited about everything you were setting up. When I remember opening, I was like, oh, this thing's got, it's got get teeth, got synapse. I mean, look at all this stuff. It's like one button away. And I'm like, okay, but it must be a mess under the hood. And underneath, it's all very clean.

It's using Nginx as a proxy. And then behind it is Docker. And what it does is when you install an app, it does like a Git checkout that includes some information and a Docker Compose file. And then it's doing a Docker Compose run under the hood. And then when it's doing updates for the quote unquote apps, it's just pulling down a new image and deploying it, right? And it's very clean. And because of that, I've been able to actually dig around in there

and troubleshoot several things. I talked recently about how Wes went in there and helped us troubleshoot something with the helipad messaging system. You can get in under the hood and you can actually see what it is and understand it because it's all using good practices, common sense stacks. It's not some weird black magic script thing that's happening where it's doing all this weird stuff on your box. And so I like it from sort of an aesthetic from as a former sysadmin. I like it from that kind of standpoint as well. But when Brendan and I started working on this brand, I had a sense from you, too, that it brought it to something that was really tangible, that was participating in like a decentralized network.

Yeah, it certainly was something that we've talked about over the years. You know, Bitcoin is super interesting and I knew you were getting into it. to it, but when we were together at the studio recently, I don't know what brought us to just kind of totally dive in full steam ahead, but it just brought all these concepts together for me to like this tangible piece of software that you and I could discuss right in front of us. Oh, let's try this. Oh, what about this? How does this work? And not to mention, you know, some of the apps are really quite a wonderful visualization of how some of the Bitcoin technology works as well. I found that really helpful as someone who visually, that's a better way for me to kind of learn and grasp concepts. So I just thought as a way to play with technology, you know, I'm relatively new to some of the Docker stuff.

That was super fun. with technology. You know, I'm relatively new to some of the Docker stuff. That was super fun. And as a way to understand, you know, some pretty neat technology like Bitcoin, that was really fun. And just for you and I to be in the same room doing this together was just an amazing experience. And now we've sort of turned you into our reporter in the field because you've been setting up your own node, right? Yeah, it's true. You guys sicked me to go set up my own instance of Umbral. And so the first time around, Chris, you did all the heavy lifting. I just kind of watched you and cheered you on. But this time around, I got to really sink my teeth in.

Maybe as we standardly do. I don't think I did it in a way that we would recommend. So we just kind of booted up a VPS and installed it on there, which I don't know if that's the recommended way and installed it on there, which I don't know if that's the recommended way to do it. I mean, I don't know. Why not? It could be a decent way to get a few apps. And the thing about like with Linode is they just got, you could do a one-click deployment of NextCloud. So you don't really need to install software that helps you get NextCloud going. You know what I mean? That kind of thing. But if you wanted one box and you wanted to run

several apps at once, I might do it for the horsepower. Well, I guess my question was, you know, one of the obvious benefits to us was kind of the throughput on the network. So we could download the blockchain as quick as possible. But the real question that I had around that was, you know, I know running your own node and having your own wallets in a piece of software is, you know, they even say it. The Umbral folks suggest, you know, don't be reckless about this. This is, can be real money. So don't put anything on here that you're not willing to lose, they specifically say. So I wondered, you know, maybe this is a question for all three of you is, you know, running a node like this super interesting and really helpful to the Bitcoin network. And it runs, you know, all these other pieces of software

that we really care about, and it makes it super easy. But the question I have is, is it a good idea to bundle these things? You know, running a node and having your own Bitcoin on a, you know, a software wallet on there potentially is one risk, but then you open up all of these other pieces of software as potential attack surfaces?

What do you guys think? I think it depends on how you use the node. You could use the node as a source of truth for a wallet software that you run on your machine. Ideally, though, you don't want to store large amounts of Bitcoin on any computer that's connected to the internet. It's just not a good practice in general, because as the value of Bitcoin goes up, which eventually it will do again one day, it'll become even more of an enticing target. So when they say don't keep anything you're not willing to lose, that's essentially what they're

saying. I keep about $600 on my node. You can actually see the information if you look up the node address. And I do that in part so I can add liquidity to different channels where we open up to people for different Bitcoin or, yeah, Lightning Bitcoin transactions. But think of it more, Brent, not as a bank where you store your money, but as your personal source of truth for what is a transaction on the network and when you submit a transaction. It also, like, lets you interface with the network in sort of a first-class way, right? Like, you're not using an exchange or another third party. Right. It's definitely one of the more secure ways to do that kind of thing.

And, you know, the node function doesn't take a lot of overhead because they've designed this thing to run on a Raspberry Pi. So it's a nice kind of low key way to support the network. And then you go into the app store and they have done a really good job of adding apps too because I've been running this since December, and there's been probably about three updates since then, and each update has added stuff. Like the recent one added Tail Scale, and that's been really nice. A little while ago had Uptime Kuma added, which I started using. That's been really cool.

Yeah, it was interesting. I kind of noticed like back in, I guess, August, a little before we discovered it, but they had a blog post writing that Umbral isn't just a Bitcoin and Lightning node. It's a personal server OS that helps anyone have control of their data. And I guess that's like, maybe that's some of the motivation

for having these things, right? Is that once you're thinking about maybe how you're interfacing with your various cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin and Lightning, then you're also starting to wonder like, oh yeah, I am putting a lot of other stuff out on the internet, aren't I? Alex, I know you're not a big fan of the front end, let us set things up for you, but there's a couple of exceptions. You've got a little love for a couple of projects out there like Unraid. What do you think of something like Umbral where it's, I think we have to be

honest it's first a bitcoin node but then one of the things they've done on the back end is they've just added all this other stuff that's become so popular so i'd say like you know the top 20 self-hosted apps are on there it looks fantastic the design language that they're using for the interface is just beautiful. I look at it and I think, I wish I could use this for everything. I wish there was a plugin, say, for MergerFS. I wish there was a plugin for SnapRaid, all that kind of stuff, like out of the box. Because I would genuinely be quite tempted to see if this could replace my Proxmox deployment.

Because I don't really use very many virtual machines. I run Home Assistant as a vm i run a fedora box for irc purposes for for work that has to be on a vpn apart from that i don't really utilize anything else of proxmox's virtualization features so i wonder like if we push this project further down the road, is that a possibility for the future? Can we work on a beautiful storage UI for this thing and turn it into the base platform for a future TrueNAS competitor? From what I have gathered from the outside, the dev team seems pretty easy to work with

and pretty willing to work with projects to integrate them. And so far, because of the way they've designed the base system, they seem to be pretty flexible in what they can integrate. And they do it in a clean way. And I have installed stuff, removed stuff. I've gone the whole, like, talked to a developer to get a beta version of something to get that installed. Like, I've tried the whole gambit of messing around with this thing, and it's been really reliable. It's really held up. So the team seems to be very clever in how they've built this. I also like that because it is so approachable, it really is conceivable that a free software project like the Gnome project,

although they probably would never want to associate with something as earth incinerating as Bitcoin, but a project that looked into the actual environmental impacts would probably be willing to run something like this. And then they would have their own lightning node. And the reason why that is significant is I could open up a channel to them and then they would be connected to a popular lightning node that would be really quick and cheap to route through. And it'd be their own self-custodial way to receive contributions right like that's a big deal because right now these projects have to go

through some third party there's some master there's some middleman and like for the example like we were just talking about contributing to the ukraine defense force you're contributing to ukraine listeners patreon just blocked a transaction because it because it was going over to somebody in Ukraine. And that kind of thing, the middlemen, even when they intend to do the right thing, they often mess it up. And when it comes to software and speech, I just feel like we got to get rid of the middleman as much as possible. And that's why I'm so compelled to talk about this right now, because I feel like having self-control over this kind of stuff is more of a topic than ever because it's not just what's going on in Ukraine. There's all kinds of stuff going on right now.

And this gives people access. And Umbral also sells a hardware product that somebody who maybe wants to – maybe has more money than they do time could grab that and participate and have access to a really solidly set up self-hosted platform with a lot of really cool apps on there. And so I think it's worth a try, even if you don't involve with, even if you don't use the Bitcoin stuff, I suppose you could always SSH in and just stop the node container. Yeah. You know, XMN in the IRC was kind of asking, is that, can you just use it for some of the more self-hosted stuff and not, not have the Bitcoin parts? I absolutely have shut off the node at times when we were trying stuff.

So that is possible, but I, I actually am striving for as much uptime as possible. Brent was here doing construction work and I was like, don't shut down the Bitcoin node. It was days of negotiation to get you to accept that the power might go off. Yeah. Cause in the lightning network, at least, your uptime matters.

They consider that part of your reliability. Okay, two things. One, I think maybe we should mention that they're using a particular license, the Polyform non-commercial license, for folks that care about that kind of thing. And then I also was just noticing their hiring, and that made me reflect that there is a company behind this. It's an open-source project, but also there's more going on yeah they've raised some money uh they got three million dollars in seed funding uh so they were i think you know able to

do some hiring with that it's not a lot uh but i you know you combine that with a hardware product that maybe gets some sales it's a cool looking device It's a little expensive though. I don't know if you guys, if you go on their website, they have like two options. And one of them is install on a Raspberry Pi and one of them is install Umbral on Linux. We had the best results with Ubuntu, but if you dig around their website, they do offer hardware like they used to. Maybe they will again. So talk me through the requirements of this thing, like in terms of disk space and all the rest of it, because are you sinking the entire blockchain down? Like, I don't really understand how it works.

We did have to do a little pre-planning for the show to make sure Brent's experiment synced in time. Yeah, I had to add some block storage to the Linode that we were running it on. Which for me was a great learning experience, actually. So just putting that out there. Yeah, just getting that disk attached to the system and all that. We'll on. Which for me was a great learning experience, actually. So just putting that out there. Yeah, just getting that disk attached to the system and all that. We'll get to Alex's question in a sec here.

But from the point of view of someone like me who is pretty Docker uninitiated and just playing with all this technology and just curious about how it all works, it was a fabulous experience to go and like have to attach, you know, some block storage to this and do a little change in the Docker compose file and stuff. And it was a nice way to just kind of dip my toe

in some of these technologies. And I had more fun than I expected, actually. I'm feeling pretty giddy about it, actually. It is a lot of fun. So what your question was, Alex, about the blockchain download. You download the blockchain. I have some stats here. Ours is using about 467 gigs for the blockchain storage.

So you're going to, they recommend 600 gigs. I think, you know, if you want some future proofing around a terabyte is probably a good idea. That's why I said earlier, it's like just plan for a terabyte for that. And if that doesn't appeal to you, you might not consider Umbral. You might want to consider something else. I will be honest. Part of the draw for me is participating in the decentralized consensus part of the network. And the nice thing about Bitcoin is that you can just install a node.

You can get it as a Docker container. You don't have to participate in the mining, in any of that, and you can still add value. You can add decentralization. That has always been something that I've loved. I've always been into that kind of stuff for as long as I've been into computers. So a terabyte would cut it then. And presumably that's going to grow over time. Do you have any sense as to how much it's going to grow? How quick? I decided to put an eight terabyte disk in my machine, I think is what I did ultimately,

just to not worry about it for five, six, seven years. But they say plan for a terabyte to two terabytes long-term. Or you mean you put an eight terabyte drive in there because that's what we shucked at the sprint and what Brent found in a box. Yeah. Let's be honest. That's our planning really. But I didn't partition it. Yeah. Now I'd say I'm going to run this until the machine dies. Really? This is, I really,

this is one of my, I'm not, I know it sounds ridiculous. I'm not shitting you. This is one of my most favorite projects in probably the last four or five years I've done. I just love it. It has been so great. And the community is so great. And to participate in something as big as this is I think an awesome opportunity. And I love that it's free software. I'm not just talking about Umbral. I'm talking about Bitcoin. I'm talking about Linux. I'm talking about the Docker stuff that it's using. It's incredible where this stack has gotten. And it's pretty easy. They give you information on how to submit your own app to their app store, too. I think one of those examples is, you know, one of the apps that I think has been giving you a lot of the fun is Helipad, which Dave Jones was just packaged up and got included in Umbral, right?

Like, it doesn't seem like it's a big hurdle to get stuff added, which is important at this stage. Yep, that's very true. Yeah, that's been a great app, and that comes right in there. And so when those boosts come into the show, they come in via the Lightning Network, and they sit on a node on my LAN. I think about this from a small business standpoint. Imagine a future where free software projects and content like JB is getting a significant bit of its funding

from micropayments directly from the audience at scale. And the things like advertisers and those kinds of things are maybe playing less and less of a role. And this starts playing more and more of a role. Now, how empowering is that, that that's a box sitting on my land, right? It's not a Stripe account. It's not PayPal. It's not my local bank. It feels like a true value for value exchange where the audience is giving me something and like they came into my storefront and then I'm taking it and I'm putting it in a register, a cash register that's there at my store. It fundamentally changes the

status of ownership. And it feels like security to me. It feels safe to me. You know, as a business, it feels like that is actually mine now and not something that somebody else is holding for me that they give me access to until they don't. And that is a big shift. Imagine a future where you can pay for a road trip using those funds, you know, where the audience think, you know, Chris has just bought a plea for, you know, a few dollars to come to the East Coast in Lady Dupes. Imagine a future where all of that is just local and the US dollar isn't really involved until you cash out, you know? Right.

That's a cool thing to think about, no? I think so. I think it gives people a lot of freedom. I think that's, I think it's pretty neat to see it happening. And it's still a little early, but that's usually when we start talking about this stuff.

It makes me think about when we, you know, went down the effort of hosting our own email. Not because you necessarily should, but like, I think we also got some kind of giddy vibes

of like, oh, we just ran this thing and now we're participating in a wider ecosystem. And there's a lot about this stuff that has those old internet era vibes. Thank you to our members at unpluggedcore.com. You're playing a big role these days, keeping the show going. As a thank you, we give you access to

the full live feed that's like, I don't know, way too much show. Irresponsibly long. That's what happens. That's true. Or option two is ad-free, nice and tight. Still got that nice Joe polish, just a little bit shorter. And that goes out in the feed when the show's ready. Your choice. Usually the longer live feeds out within about an hour of our recording or so. So it goes out pretty quick on a Sunday evening local time.

We love your feedback. We want to make more and more of that a part of the show. Your ideas, your suggestions, your responses to what we've talked about. Agree or disagree. Linuxunplugged.com slash contact. Send it in over there. And our Matrix community is always growing. There's people talking right now.

Linuxunplugged.com slash Matrix. You never know. One day it may replace that chat embedded on the website. So why not get involved one night? You're sitting around, you got your beverage of choice. Linuxunplugged.com slash matrix. Go get it set up. The love plug is happening before the show on Sundays. I usually pop in there for a bit and say, holla. Or today, I was chasing a power supply demon. Either way. And that's always going, really.

I'd say set it up and pop in there on a Tuesday. See who's in there. Pop in there on a Monday. I don't know. Yeah, what could it hurt, you know? I mean, worst case, you make some new best friends and you'll have a lot of fun. That's the worst case. You got to do it.

Linuxunplugged.com slash mumble. That's where you get that action. And now, as the French say, it is time for Le Boost. Bien, on aimerait dire merci à tout le monde pour Le Boost. On vous apprécie beaucoup. From Anonymous sends 3,000 sats. And he says, what are your thoughts on the Simula VR? Brent, I know you saw the Simula VR and were getting pretty excited about it right away.

So what are your thoughts? Yeah, I saw it early morning and I think I spammed you guys pretty early in your time zone about a bunch of stuff. No need to apologize. Yeah, I guess we should say it's a Linux PC that's going to crowdfund, that's strapped to your face, and they are building their own window environment. With Godot. Yeah. In fact, I invited them on the show.

I haven't, they're looking into their schedules, but I haven't got a confirmation yet. So it's an Intel based x86 box, fast Linux box on your face, super high res screen, optimized for text rendering. It seemed like it blew your socks off, Brent. Well, I think from a technical point of view and like a trying to accomplish some really great things point of view it seemed like it was right up our alley. They're putting together a bunch of technologies in a way that we typically love and Chris part of the reason I got really excited was that you've basically been asking for this for a few months. I know you've been playing with VR kind kind of a workstation, a virtual workstation for you that might solve a few of your problems.

But don't you feel like this, you know, running Linux and having a pretty powerful PC, I guess, on your face is an exciting development if it could happen? Yeah, I would have if you would ask me this question two weeks ago, I would have said, no, this is silly. This isn't going anywhere. Why are we doing this? But then for my birthday, I got the Oculus Quest and it was perfect really, because it's not something I would have expected. So it's one of those, like my whole opinion has changed within like a couple of weeks. I put it on and I was like, okay, the gaming graphics are about exactly what I expected. It looks like a high-end Android phone graphics, really well done application experience, more polish than I expected.

But the thing that blew me away was the virtual office stuff. And I'm not talking like the Facebook thing, but like just an app that was designed to just bring your screens. It supports multiple virtual desktops in Mac and Windows, and it supports one desktop in Linux. But I created this awesome, badass log cabin studio on top of a hill looking down on a lake with panoramic windows and a ginormous blue couch, and then I brought in five virtual screens.

It was awesome. And I'm telling you, man, I sat there at my desk. I had my keyboard and mouse. So I put down the VR controllers and I had all these screens, but they're like each one's like 105 inches or something. I don't know. They're huge and they're cool curved and they're like hovering there. And it was an awesome, isolated, focused experience. And it tamed my ADD monster. and because it was like in a meditative place while also being a home office like the perfect ultimate infinite home office and i took off the headphones and you know i'm just sitting in lady jupes's passenger seat seems like it might

have um like a pretty decent spousal approval factor for one like you're not cluttering things up with a whole as many monitors as you want but then two she can kind of laugh at you like you're not cluttering things up with a whole, as many monitors as you want, but then two, she can kind of laugh at you while you're getting your work done, looking funny with the Pfizer on. Totally, totally. Yeah. I, you know, if you want to get in the zone and drop away all the distractions, it really works for that. It, I was surprised. And so what they're working on with Simula is doing that for Linux. And we covered a little bit in Linux action is including the window manager stuff and all of that. The only obvious issue is that, A, I think people are going to be pretty skeptical.

You got to try it before you're going to buy it. Like me, two weeks ago, I just would have said this is ridiculous. So you got to try it before you're going to understand it, I feel like for most people. And then the other thing is the price. Because they're going for something that's good performance with a modern Intel chipset and the high resolution screen that makes text look

actually good, the price of that is high. And, you know, like a good one's four grand, the starter one's like two grand. And it's tough. I mean, I guess when you consider it's also a PC that's detachable. I think one way to look at it for you, Chris, might be, you know, how much would you spend to take Jupes out into a spot where you had the view that you had and sit there for, you know, being as productive as you were for even, you know, that hour that you were playing with it? Yeah, I will say the one thing that I thought about when I was trying the Oculus was like, well, this is great, but in order to use this, I always have to have a computer with me. So I have to have both devices. That's kind of lame. I might as well just use my laptop then, right? And then I can, you know, I don't have to.

But if this is the computer too, well, that's something, actually. And you've just got like your little launch keyboard that you drag out and away you go. I got a lot of questions. I'm skeptical. The price is tough. I got a lot of questions. I'm skeptical. The price is tough. I'm worried about the heat. I think we've got to, if we can get them on, I'd like to just talk to somebody about some of those things. But I would say if you are skeptical, it's just worth considering that there may actually be a use case.

I think especially for developers who like to have multiple monitors, Would you like to have eight monitors, three monitors? How many monitors do you want? You can have as many monitors as you want, many screens as you want. You can have them all over the place. You can have them spatially in different locations. It's very powerful. You know, I, Chris, when we were talking about this off scene, I got inspired to watch Ready Player One, which I had never seen before. And it just made me realize that that's exactly what you're talking about. Basically a whole simulated VR world where you can do just about anything you want. I thought it was really fascinating.

Yeah, let's just hope it's not dystopia, you know? We'll see. We'll see. Our next boost is from Mollisk. I think Chris and Dylan should play the free trial of Final Fantasy XIV online. I've been having a blast playing nonstop for the last year with my spouse. The lootress option for the third-party launcher works great, as long as you tell the launcher to use ARIA 2 for downloading, which ARIA 2 is great, so that's just a great pro tip.

I am on the Crystal Data Center if you guys need help. Go podcasting. Thank you, Mollusk. That was a great 500 cents. Yeah. Okay. I'm totally looking for a co-op kind of play-together game I can do with one or two of the kids, so I'll totally check that out.

And I also think, Mollusk, that when I do get the deck, I think the first thing I'm going to try doing is putting Lutris on that. Right? Like, that just seems like the first thing you do is get Lutris going on a deck. So that's going to be awesome too. Hudson writes in to say, boosting for boost. It's amazing to have a current use for Bitcoin other than just saving it away for myself. I feel so much more involved with JB and Bitcoin through value for value.

Aww. I agree. These messages when they come in, these little boosts, are the highlight of my day. I usually have it up on one of my monitors, get a little pew noise, and I get a little note from somebody. And sometimes it's just the sats, and I get to know what episode they're listening to or something like that. But there are a lot of tools that are being built. XOXOXO sent in 333 sats. 3,333 sats? Yeah. Four days ago

he said, I'm working on a Boost CLI It'll send Boostagrams to podcasts, also on a Boost bot for IRC, Matrix and Mastodon. Oh! I thought that was notable, right? Because now you can start seeing maybe you can support a developer or a podcast

from their Matrix room with a matrix bot. Yeah. And we need these kind of like handy things just to sort of lower the barrier to entry, make it real easy to show your love. And then another app I'm looking at from the user side is like, so if somebody wants to get in on this, but you know, they want to get into the boost system and send us boost messages, but they don't want to go get Cast-O-Matic or Fountain.

get Castomatic or Fountain. Breeze, B-R-E-E-Z, is an app that is in development for both Google and for Apple phones. So you got to get it from the Play Store or the App Store. And right now it's in beta. So you either have to have test flight or you have to agree to a Play Store beta agreement. Either way, it's an app that'll also let you listen to podcasts and get in and send messages and stuff like that. It's pretty cool. And I'm keeping an eye on it because it's in early days, but the developer seems really sharp. And the app seems like it has a lot of options. It's pretty exciting. I guess we could consider that our pick for this week. Should we consider that our pick, Breeze?

B-R-E-E-Z? I think you just did. There you go. That's a lot. It all kind of ties together. It's not like we're going to focus on this stuff all the time. But it felt today like this was our way to contribute to the conversation that's going on without talking directly about the politics and all that kind of stuff that this show doesn't need to get into. Hopefully you forgot a little bit for this one little hour about the rest of the world.

Yeah. You know how you can really tune out? You really get in is when you get the live experience, right? You either become a member or you show up. You can do that on Sundays if you want to do that at noon Pacific. We're hanging out over at jblive.tv. I suppose one of the ways

you can get the show is by subscribing to our Twitch page. Hey, there he is. You go over there somehow, I don't know, it's like a, I don't even know what Twitch calls it. Do you twatch over there? You go over there and you twatch to our channel. We need you to your audience to go find out and then report back whatever, whatever the terminology is. And if you ever looked at the title and been like, I like that title or the, you know, of an episode, or you look at title, you go, that title sucks. It's your fault. Literally your fault. Yes, you, because you

didn't show up live and submit a better one. Because when people are live, they can bang suggest a title. That's exclamation mark and suggest it. Get it together, Steve. We need your help. That's right. I know. We were saying that.

And they showed up on Sunday and they title suggest. And then we vote on it. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. In the meantime, you can just subscribe and get the show when we release it. Not have to worry about any of that BS. You just go to linuxunplugged.com slash subscribe. Hey, if you would, leave us a review in your podcast app of choice. If it's the Apple podcast, you know, we got like 20% of you now on the Apple podcast. Have you given us a review recently? Wouldn't it be nice? I think so. I think it'd be real nice.

That'd be real great. Or tell a friend. Tell a friend. That's also great. Or become a member for the whole network and support us financially at jupiter.party. There's a lot going on. Things are shifting. So we appreciate you being there and coming along for the ride. It's a new frontier. And I'll see you right back here next Sunday. Thank you. All right, let's title this thing, jbtitles.com. You know, one of the apps that I had a lot of fun with on Umbrell was,

well, you know, I had to install a bunch of them just for fun. But there's one called Mempool. Chris, have you played with this one? Super cool way to visualize what's going on on the blockchain. Yeah. Yeah. I ended up just kind of watching because it lists transactions as they're coming through. And I ended up just kind of like watching it as you might a bonfire or a, I don't know.

It was really neat. And I saw a transaction come through that was wild. Chris, it was 28,500 Bitcoin. Whoa. Whoa. Okay. Let's do the math on that. 28,500 BTC, you're saying? BTC.

In USD? Yes, please. Let's see what that is in USD. Can I type that into Google? I feel like I should be able to type that into Google. Yeah, I tried doing that with DuckDuckGo before

and it didn't work. I was really upset. DuckDuckGo doesn't do it? That seems like obvious. Oh, I know. I know. No way. No way.

All right. Well, anyways, I got a converter. I got a little calculator here. I can do that. But that just seems obvious so they should have that built in, right? Right.

Now, while Chris re-remembers how to do math, jbtitles.com, everyone. Oh, yeah. There you go. So is that – boy, that's a lot of numbers. I don't even know because it just gives me a – here, numbers are hard. So here's the number in USD. That's the – oh, here we go. What is that?

Is that 106 million? Is that what that is? You got to put some commas in here. I know. That's the problem. So I put commas in. So we got one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. Oh, dang.

I'm seeing 1.1 billion. That was one transaction that I saw come across. Okay. That makes sense. That makes sense. No, 1.1. Yep. 1.1 billion?

Yeah. That's not rounding up. Yeah, that makes sense. Isn't it 10 billion. Yep. 1.1 billion? Yeah. Not round enough. Yeah, that makes sense. Isn't it 10 billion? We're all good at math, right? I thought Google did this. If you're using DuckDuckGo, use BangWA. What's BangWA?

Wolfram Alpha. No, Brent was right. Oh. BangWA, huh? All right. I love, ironically, searching Google for DuckDuckGo I hope somewhere at Google they have a metric of how many people are searching for Bing and DuckDuckGo so now I will try it with WolframAlpha

there's definitely a graphonic dashboard for searching for DuckDuckGo that would please me a little insecurity of it all would please me they did it, would please me. Okay, they did it. Yep, it's 1.1 billion, according to the wolf. That was one transaction I saw kind of speed past the screen in a, you know, a small flash along with a bunch of other transactions.

And it was just like really landed at home. Like, what is happening on the network? Some serious money. Oh, yeah. If you think that's one transaction between, I don't know, two wallets or so, what else is happening that I'm not seeing? It's wild. It's all there. It's all open. Anyone can see it.