LINUX Unplugged - 528: Where's Your Data?

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

Today's theme is data sovereignty, and we'll check in with two crucial projects that are giving you more options. Special Guest: Noah Chelliah.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. And joining us again, it's our buddy Noah from the Ask Noah program. Hey, Noah. Hello, hello. Hello, sir.

We're going to chat about a couple of different projects that are really working to give us data sovereignty every single day. They both have some news, at least for those of us that are paying attention. There's some things that are really exciting in there. So we'll zoom in on those renewed efforts from the NextCloud team and the Matrix communities to build something that projects and businesses and families and even enterprises can use. And we'll talk about what's worked and what hasn't worked so well, too. We'll be really honest about it. They'll round out the show with some great boosts and picks and a lot more. Noah, we're so glad to have you back on the show. It's been like, you know, way too long.

It's been what, three weeks? Yeah, a couple months. But yeah, I appreciate you making the time. Oh, I appreciate you. We time no i appreciate you we were supposed to have noah back via ham radio but you know maybe next time right or matrix right well i was catching the ask no show episode 354 and you guys were talking about some of your matrix server work in there so i thought oh let's let's do a little like collab and and talk about we're both working on and i think it's going to be really great. So before we get there, I want to say good morning to our friends at Tailscale.

Tailscale is a mesh VPN that's protected by Wirecard. You can get it up and running in just minutes. It'll connect all your machines directly to each other. It's so robust. It'll change your networking game. Go say good morning and try it out for up to 100 devices for free while you're supporting the show at tailcale.com slash linux unplugged. And a big-time appropriate greetings to our virtual lug.

Hello, MumbleRoo. Hello. Hello, Noah. All of our favorites right in one place. That's great. Hello, everybody. So let's start with kind of some somber news. We're going to try to make lemonade out of this.

But LinuxFest Northwest 2023 has been postponed. Late last week, we received the news that the construction work the Bellingham Technical College was working on had expanded, and that they were expanding the scope of the project due to some serious issues that were found. I'm not really pervy to all the details, but I'm told it's pretty significant and they're really kind of tearing the place apart. So as a result, we are going to punt the October event to next spring. Now, because a lot of people already have traveled because we really want to get together, we're still going to have a get together and make the best of the situation. Both the Linux Fest crew and the JB crew. There's going to be the Friday night game night, which is at a great venue. There's going to be some single track educational sessions on

Saturday and a Saturday social that we'll also be participating in. And we're hoping to pull off a live self-hosted and a live Linux Unplugged recording. So what we are doing is we're transitioning to more of a meetup style. And the LinuxFest Northwest meetup page has several meetups with the individual events going on. Plus there'll be other things and no doubt lots of social track stuff. So if you're interested and you're still going to make it, please go RSVP on their meetup page. We'll have it linked in the show notes.

It of course is quite simply meetup.com slash LinuxFest Northwest. We'll be there with bells on. In some ways, I'm sad because it's been a lot of work to have this happen in other ways i feel a little bit relieved because it means we're going to have more time to talk and interact with people probably have more time to work on projects at jb and we can just work towards the spring and maybe working some even better stuff. We have a little more time now to work with. It was rough, right? I mean, LinuxFast Northwest has been at the Bellingham Technical College for 20 years,

20-plus years, and I've been going the whole time. And so we did consider very strongly switching venues, but that's a pretty big change. And with about 30 days out, it just doesn't seem like we'd be able to pull it off the way we want. So instead, we will punt to the spring where we have traditionally somewhere in that timeframe done it. It usually floats a little bit. And I think it'll be a good event when it does land. be a good event when it does land. So if you aren't going to attend or you can't make it, we totally understand. But if you're still planning to make it out, we're going to be hanging out Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. So it'll be a great time. Well, we've only got Brent for a limited time because he has been working his moose off for the last few days. Hours and hours of NextCloud video content up on their channel for you to go check out and along with a big next cloud event where brent was essentially playing dj and doing q a up on stage between sessions like a boss uh there was also the hub six announcement with a focus on healthy meeting

culture and brent was also participating in that so what's's that been like? Brent, you've been now on the inside of a big NextCloud. This has got to be like their biggest release ever yet. Yeah, it sure is, especially from a media point of view. I mean, they pulled out all the punches and did some amazing stuff. To be, you know, such an interesting experience. So as some disclosure, I have been employed by NextCloud for the last three months, which has been an amazing ride. But to see the video production that went into recording all this, you know, in March when I was here, I was just watching it from the crowds, you know, as, you know, European JB journalists, I suppose. But to be on the other side of that, I mean, I was honored to be asked to

participate, really. But to have like all these lights and cameras shine at you, that's very different than the podcasting that we do. You know, I'm used to sharing my voice and that's about it. So it's been a super, super fun experience and really cool to see the team come together and pull all that off. It's super impressive. Now, here's what I've been noticing from the outside. Hub 6, they're definitely focusing on ways to make meetings more tolerable for humans, which I really appreciate. But underneath all of that, there's a couple of reoccurring themes I noticed in the announcement videos, and I also announced it in day one and day two of the presentations and the Q&A. And that is, there seems to be a growing focus by NextCloud on the benefits of decentralization. And I'm just curious what insights you have to share there, because that to me, you know, that's one of my big things.

Yeah, well, I think it's true that probably for most listeners here, it really is a nice thing for us. I think it's always been true that NextCloud has been decentralization friendly, of course. Now we've seen a bit of a trend with other technologies these days, especially, you know, with Twitter catching on fire and such that this theme has come up more so in the last year than we've seen in a long time. And that has only been positive. But for NextCloud, I think it has been important for us to continue to say that, like, yeah, by default, it's decentralized. And there are some features that allow you to federate and such. And not everybody needs those features, but they're there by default if you want them.

They've been there for years, and they're pretty well battle-tested and can work in various ways. You know, there's a lot of creativity happening on the back end, too, to allow that stuff. But just by the very nature your next cloud is decentralized and you can you know craft it to the type of decentralization you want it can be completely off of the public internet if you want or it can be federated you know anywhere in between that i think what i'm noticing though is and this isn't a bad thing i'm'm noticing increased ambition from NextCloud on the scope of the problem they want to take on because they're really positioning themselves as a big tech alternative. We're an alternative to the Microsoft suite. We have on-premise AI instead of using open AI and remote AI.

We're focused on open source and being decentralized. I feel like they they feel i feel like they've figured out several of these themes decentralization open source on-prem ai and they're kind of bringing it all together in this alternative package to microsoft and to the other suites and they're just kind of being a lot more aggressive about it with a much more public demonstration now and And they have this NextCloud event that's been going on for two days that has people up there doing presentations on the apps they're creating for the NextCloud platform. And it's just like they're really

now positioning it at a much larger, more ambitious target, it seems like. One thing that would be interesting is if they would consider an answer to email, right? Like when you look at what those organizations are looking for, NextCloud ticks like nine out of 10 boxes, but that 10th box is email. Those organizations need it. And like five years ago or 10 years ago, I would have said you're a fool if you try to host your own mail.

But these days there's some really, really interesting competitive self-hosted mail products out there. It would be interesting to see if there could be some sort of partnership or if that's something they could incorporate down the road. Yeah, what's fascinating about that, Noah, is that Nextcloud has Nextcloud Mail, which is integrated. But there's been, hmm, how do I put put this there's some cool things happening in the open source mail ecosystem that we're working on behind the scenes uh that is fresh brand new and i don't have all the details but i can at least tease that uh there's some cool partnerships happening and i think we can announce something in the next little bit but there's some work to do there before we

really reveal what's going on. But we, as you do, totally have our eye on those same things. And it's, you know, it's fascinating to be part of a group of people who are, you know, worldly. I'm meeting people from a whole bunch of different countries and work with people from, I think it's like 16 different countries now, which is awesome. But we all see the world and the problems that are here and are like, oh, yeah, we need a solution to that problem. And what's really great is that we have the resources to kind of tackle some of these things

and can point our eye at those really difficult problems and say, well, what can we do in this area? Maybe we can't solve it all right now, but at least we can start. I noticed, Brent, in the Q&A from the audience, so like the customers, the users of NextCloud, I noticed for some of the Q&A sessions, almost every question was around concerns about the NSA spying on non-US citizens and data protection. I mean, it came up so often that it became a joke between Hadiyah and I. Oh, it's another question about the NSA. Did you drink every time?

We would have been wasted. Did you notice that? That seems to be a big area of driving NextCloud adoption is people that are concerned about, I guess, government overreach. Yeah, there are a few things I think that contributed to that, especially at the conference this time. The first thing I noticed being a North American in Europe is that, yeah, generally people are worried about these things. As North Americans, I think, I don't know, I'm fascinated by this, but I think there's just a general acceptance of some of that surveillance

happening. As a Canadian, less so, like we're on the sidelines watching what's happening in your country. But it is worrying, both for your citizens and the citizens of the world, right? It's like we have these undersea cables, and apparently they're tapping into them and just gobbling up everything. Now, we only have hints of what's actually happening, but we have imaginations, right? And what I'm noticing is in Europe, there's just generally more awareness. I mean, I'm hanging out in circles of people who are well-educated in that regard, but that has been a fascinating insight. But I think what contributed even more to that, especially with the Q&As that you're referring to, is that we had on stage Max Schrems, who did a keynote.

And this is his game. He's an expert in privacy law and has fought giants like Facebook and challenged the EU Commission on some of their decisions around enforcing some of the privacy laws here in Europe. And so a lot of that has to do with data collection and with sending data to the NSA. And so I think it's just been a hot topic and kind of a topic generally at the conference because, yeah, it's sort of worrying for all citizens everywhere in a way. If we have transparency about what's happening, at least then we can make some decisions about it and maybe do better for society, you know? and maybe do better for society, you know? I got to get to upgrading because I think I'm on like hub four. I've got to get caught up. Hub six looks like a good one.

I like the simple improvements to the files stuff, which Brent covers in the keynote, or I guess in the presentation, which we'll put a link to in the show notes. You can see all the features for yourself, but it's time to upgrade. It looks like a really solid one. Can we get a quick summary

of what healthy meeting culture means? Yeah. What does that mean? It looks like a really solid one. Can we get a quick summary of what healthy meeting culture means? Yeah. What does that mean? It actually means a lot of things. There's a massive list of features, which I think we have a blog post that tries to not list the exhaustive list because it's just crazy. We have so many people contributing and community members contributing this kind of stuff. But generally, it's that the next cloud hub is trying to make your life just a little bit easier. You're doing a bunch of actions like attaching files to, I don you know, 10, 20 times sometimes,

just making those smoother. And so a lot of attention both from our designers and the design community and also just the back-end developers has been just focused on making life easier for the people who are actually using the software. One example I noticed was, like, if the sharing menu, there's a sequence you can click where it sometimes will close the menu and then you have to click it again to bring it back up. And then you can actually get the URL and those types of little kind of niggly UI things they've been smoothing over with this release. So now that, for example, in that scenario, the UI doesn't close and you can click the link without having to bring it back up again.

And it just saves you a couple extra clicks. You know, what's fascinating for us long-term NextCloud users is that that's just always how it's been. So we've gotten used to it. But now that, yeah, there's a bit of a different UI change to a few things like, oh, wait a second, actually, yeah, that did need improvement. Yeah. It kind of, it feels like we're watching, kind of coinciding with, you know, probably their hiring of you too. It feels like they're going into the next kind of phase of getting really serious about this user base that's using it as a full collaboration suite. And it seems like they've really found a stride there and a customer base that's

interested in that product. You know, especially at the conference, like I mentioned, I'm relatively new to the team, but I thought, you know, since we've been looking at Nextcloud for years and years and years, i kind of prided myself on knowing what was possible and all the different integrations and stuff but man just with all the lightning talks and stuff this weekend i realized i actually have no idea of all the different possibilities like cad drawing integrations and all this crazy stuff it's it's really impressive and it's making me realize by having a bit more of a european perspective when i'm here in berlin i think it's the third time I'm here. That is just used in a variety of ways that us home labbers don't ever interact with.

There's some total European governments using it and big institutions using it, Amnesty International and stuff. So there are these use cases that I don't think I had considered until I was part of the Nextcloud team. It's really fascinating to see all the different ways that it's being used by a bunch of different types of people. Well, Bradley, your next job is to rest up so you can make it to the NextOS meetup and get that framework finished up. Yeah, I think you won this bet. I'm not daily driving. The framework, yeah, has been what, weeks? What? So I think I lost this one.

Yeah. There is, I think, there's one last feature I want to tease you guys with. Oh, yeah. Just because I think for our audience specifically, I think it's actually an interesting one. So previously, NextCloud apps have always needed to be written in PHP. That's what the server's written in, and that's what needed to happen. needed to be written in PHP. That's what the server's written in, and that's what needed to happen. But with this

release, we're starting an app ecosystem which is language agnostic, almost. So you can write in any application language you want. Python, maybe Rust. It is early days, but it is super exciting. So community members can dive in now

and play with it. Now, that's about the limitation of my technical knowledge on how it works on the back end. I was going to say, are there any sample apps or anything out there you can try if you upgrade? Yeah, there are two kind of sample apps that you can play with. They're written in Python, and one of them does a file conversion, so it converts video into a GIF.

Oh, sorry, I mean GIF. Jeff, it's Jeff, right? Oh, it's a Jeff. I apologize, Jeff. The.jeff file. So just to show a simple action working. But what's neat about that is that the application uses Docker in the backend to enable the app to do its stuff. And so there's some coordination there that I think might have a really cool future. And I'm seeing a whole bunch of possibilities. So to see

Nextcloud as a bit of like a Docker coordination platform too is a totally different way of framing it. And I think there might be some cool things down the road. Well, yeah. I mean, you've got all your data and so much information there. And then you can have some of your execution now sort of co-local with that data and running right there.

It seems like it's some powerful possibilities. Yeah, and some neat implications of that is you can have your AI segregated on a rig that is specifically with GPUs that can deal with that, for instance. Or you can control an app tightly, almost like we do with Flatpaks, and say, well, this application specifically only has access to this type of data. So it is early days, but I would encourage people who are interested to just dive in and see what you can make, I guess. Linode.com slash unplugged. Head on over there to get $100 in 60-day credit. It's a great way to support the show, and you can check out the exciting news. Linode's now part of Akamai. All the stuff that we love here at JB, the stuff we've used to deploy, the things that you've loved, like the tooling and the stuff that makes Linode famous, it's there, and they're just investing in making it better than ever.

But now, all the tooling that Linode is famous for, it's all still there, but now it's combined with Akamai's power and global reach, and they're expanding their services to offer more cloud computing resources and tools, while still giving us that reliable and affordable and scalable solution that we love, we've used for years, and I think you're going to love too. Small business, project, or even a big old enterprise. And what's really nice to see is that as part of Akamai's global network of offerings, they're actually expanding their data centers worldwide. They just spun up a brand new one in Sweden, and they're giving us access to more resources to help you build your project or your business, to help serve your customers or your family, your friends, whatever it might be. Even better.

So why wait? Go see why we love Linode and go experience the full power with that $100 when you go to linode.com slash unplugged. That supports the show, and it lets you check out Linode. Now Akamai and see how you can scale your applications. Really kick the tires. That's linode.com slash unplugged. Now let's shift gears and talk about Matrix. about matrix another tool that helps you stay sovereign and is potentially potentially a solution for a small team an enterprise a school there's all kinds of organizations and groups that

are deploying and looking at matrix and it just recently well it will very soon i suppose got a lot nicer to use on the end users side no Noah, you've been telling me about Element X, and this last week it just came out on Android, and it's a faster matrix client, isn't it? Yeah. So it was funny. When they started developing matrix, they kind of wrote out the protocol and they were thinking to themselves, okay, will this work? So they put together a Python client and they put together what is Synapse and they tried it out and they went, oh, it's great. It works. And a bunch of governments from all over the world are like, yes, it does. And it's fantastic. And we want that. And they went,

yeah, but this was really more of like a proof of concept, more than like the thing we're rolling out. They're like, yeah, we need it today. So they put the necessary lacquer around to make it work. And that's kind of how the experience for Matrix has been. It's workable. It works. It's usable. I, on a routine base, take more questions of people on Teams than I do for Element, which says a lot. But at the same time, they knew it could be much better.

So if you've ever used a Telegram or a native app, you notice, man, this thing is super responsive. Why doesn't Element do that? So Element X, which is what you're talking about, is the latest version in which they use the native toolkit on Android or on iOS. And then that toolkit then references essentially like a shared underpinning that is the same across all those platforms. And so it's a much, much more, it's a much faster, more responsive app. But the other thing that they've done is they've implemented sliding sync,

that idea that you only get the latest amount of messages, then it'll go back and kind of fill in the backlog as it sinks down. So signing into your Element account used to take minutes or hours, depending on how many rooms you were in and how long of the backlog you needed. Now it's seconds. You log in and it's just instantaneous as long as your

server supports sliding sync. Yeah. Yeah. But that is going to be fantastic because that syncing process is no joke for the server side either. You know, if you've got several clients all logging in at once and they're doing a big sync and if they're in a lot of rooms, it takes a while. And so what they're letting, what they're kind of doing with the sliding sync system is clever on large accounts with thousands of rooms they'll just sync like the most top two or three rooms that you're in like they'll do more like lazy syncing they'll sync just selective things then that to get the ui up just the bare minimum just to get the UI up and responsive. And then in the background, they can sync the other stuff kind of quietly,

then they can pull down read receipts later on, they can pull it down kind of more individually, which not only uses less resources on the server, but it makes it just way more responsive on the client side. And it also gives the clients a way to just sort of filter out certain rooms they've joined

and say, I don't ever need to sync that room either. Right. It's great. So that's going to make the experience a lot better. But then, like you're saying, they're combining that with that new clean code base. So the app itself is actually quite nice. Yep. And that's all just on the client side.

So then on the server side, they're rewriting the entire server. And so eventually that will be done as well. It's functional today. It can go use Dendrite. Much more responsive. There's a couple things left yet I think that they're going to iron out. But once they shift over to that, the experience is going to be much more similar to that of a competing messaging alternative, except for, of course, the data sovereignty that you get from self-hosting everything. Yeah, yeah.

So let's talk about hosting it a little bit um we've learned some lessons you know we kind of did the yolo thing we just threw it on a server thought let's see if anybody uses this and then it grew and we we just kind of had to scale and scale and scale and kind of learn sort of i guess after the fact what we should or should not have done and we've made some mistakes along the way. And I overheard you saying that you're going to be kind of re, or you have been reorging your matrix server and kind of re-datacentering it, I think.

And I'm imagining you've probably incorporated a lot of lessons learned. So I just kind of wanted to chat with you about that. And like, what hasn't worked? What did you really have to kind of like reassess? What lessons have you kind of incorporated? You know, just kind of that general stuff. Yeah.

So I would take you back to, like you say, logged into a VPS provider, spun it up, went, hey, that's cool. That works. Now, the idea, again, going back to that kind of proof of concept idea, if you had a server with like 12, 25 people on it and it federates to other servers, you're going to have a fantastic experience. When you just open the server up to internet and thousands of people log in and register for accounts, it's not that matrix isn't technically capable of it. It's just that it starts to quickly exceed your system administration capabilities, at least in my case, and starts to exceed the budget that you had planned for the VPS host. And so at some point we had to shut it down and say, we, and starts to exceed the budget that you had planned for the VPS host. And so at some point we had to shut it down and say, we're not going to turn the server off,

but we're going to close it to public registration because we can't accommodate any more people. Yeah, we had the same problem. So what we started looking to do is I was like, okay, I go every night or every Tuesday night and talk to people about self-hosting and here we are using somebody else's infrastructure. It's time to make the next step. And so we had tried, we had rented space in a data center, and we had moved some of AltaSpeed services over to there, and those are working fine. So I thought, well, we'll just move it over and see what happens. So we started syncing the server over, and that took days to get everything sunk over. But eventually, you keep running rsync until it

gets the time down. And then we flipped the switch and thought, well, let's see what happens. And six hours later, the server still wasn't running well at all. So we looked at it and said, okay, that's not working. Now, we were running on an R710.

It was a virtualized matrix instance and it was running on top of spinning rust. So it- It was just not enough performance. Yeah, it worked like a pig because we put it onto a pig. So that wasn't really any surprise. But then we started reevaluating and saying, okay, we got some early advice from people,

people recommending specific hard drives and specific servers. And we started to get into the budgets of like tens of thousands of dollars. And it's like, okay, here's the deal. Just some back of the envelope geek logic tells us that four out of the five people that work daily at AltaSpeed have home labs that would rival most small businesses. And we run all this stuff at our home and it's just fine.

So what are we not thinking or what are we, we don't, shouldn't need to spend tens of thousands of dollars to get this working. So we started putting some stuff together. And what we wound up with was a Dell R430. And we just said, we looked at the proper Intel Optane SSD, super fancy enterprise things, and then went, or we could buy the consumer ones and just plan on swapping them often. And so started setting up mirror pairs and put it inside of this Dell R430 and spun the whole thing up and ran it for a little bit and thought, okay, this could work. Brought it down to the data center, put it in there. We copied all the data over and flipped the light switch, and it was like night and day. This time, instead of waiting for six hours and being like, is SQL caught up yet?

Are we federating? Oh, we're getting further behind. Oh, this isn't good. This time it was, well, that's faster than it was on the vps provider like by a huge margin and and so and it's been great and and so i would say the the lessons would be first understand what you need grafana has become my new best friend and i i learned about it through this matrix journey but now i've gotten to the point where like i start to feel like i'm flying blind if I don't have Grafana on a server and I can't see in one place, like here's the memory, here's the, so I would say that's one lesson is learn what you need ahead of time. Don't make the mistake of just throwing something against the wall and hoping it works. So I would say that Ansible, I would describe it as like the best hat trick anybody ever taught me, because you only have to do the work one time. And then when, not if, when you end up moving something or resetting something up, you've already done all of that work. And you can also borrow from what other people have done. So it was remarkably instrumental to have people that I could lean on

to say, okay, you're a database person. What am I not thinking about when I'm going to be writing, you know, huge amounts of data to this database? Oh, you should put them on separate disks and make sure that they're on your, but okay, thanks. Having people that, you know, that, that understand system administration and networking and stuff like that, and being able to kind of pull all of those resources together, it kind of helps paint a bigger picture. But where we're at, where we're at today, it's running on its own, that dedicated R430 with a backup plan. Nice. We have brand new, we have new to us anyway, Dell R730s that are the new virtual hosts, again, decked out with SSDs.

And we think, although we've not tried, this time we should be able to virtualize the matrix server and have it right out to a dedicated set of disks inside of that machine. And we think it would work okay. But for the time being, it's sitting on its own dedicated machine and it works great. It's like when you get a big matrix server, you do kind of have to go hard. Like that's a serious investment you've made there to make that work i'm curious if you think it'd be possible for something much simpler if it was just five or ten people a hundred people using it something like that i would tell you that it's not so much based off of the users as the size of rooms that you're in if you have a hundred users but you're in like oh you're all in like four rooms and there's not a lot of people in those rooms you'll be fine if you have three users but you're in matrix like four rooms and there's not a lot of people in those rooms,

you'll be fine. If you have three users, but you're in matrix.org, that server is going to struggle. That's kind of the way that I would frame that. Right. Because it's pulling in right for those rooms. That is a tricky thing to remember. Because a part of it, I don't want to scare people away from deploying matrix on their own home server and enjoying it. But at the same time, I want them to appreciate that if you're going to open it up to a community, there is a lot to consider there. We're looking at our box, and I think one of the things that it took us a little while to figure out

was how to really properly multiprocess that thing, you know, and get it taking advantage of multiple cores and whatnot. Yeah, workers. Yeah. That was something we had to wrap our head around. Wes, I know you've been fantasizing about rebuilding that matrix box anew, a little NixOS style. Yeah, I mean, I think we've been toying with putting NixOS, well, really wherever.

Everywhere. Yeah, wherever we can put it. And whether you use Ansible or something like Nix, I think you can have a really simple setup. It could just be like a home server config and a synapse container in your database, maybe a Redis. But once you've got workers or other things, you really do need some more orchestration between all of these sort of service components

that Matrix has. That's where something like NextOS or Ansible, there's that great community Ansible project, but something where you can have a little more abstraction to declaratively, repeatedly tie those components together so you can understand it. Yeah. Now, let me ask you this, Wes. If we were going to migrate, would you do an in-place nixification of the existing box,

or would you stand up a new box and do the rsync move thing? We'd have to probably think through a couple of the scenarios. I think we'd stand up a new box to start anyway just to start playing with it and tweaking all the configurations. If that works, we might just repoint the storage. you've got to re-import that database when you get to the newest version of Postgres. So there is a project, it's on GitHub, and it is called pgautoupgrade. And it is a Docker container that will do an in-place MySQL upgrade. So you can spin up the new one, update the schema, do all the things, and then just reconnect over without having to take the entire thing down, be down for like six hours.

It is worth calling out probably too, right? Like one of the things about running Synapse is that it really uses that database. I mean, you know, whatever database you've got backing it is a really integral part of the whole design and the whole system working. And probably for something this small, it's not a big concern. But if you are going to scale it, you are going to have to understand a bit about how to operate a database. yeah man um and i think when i was reflecting on this topic i was i was also kind of revisiting the decision to go with matrix as our community focus over discord and you know we covered it on the show a couple years ago and there was some strong advocates for going with discord and a lot of what we just talked about today would have never been an issue we wouldn't have had to burn any brain cycles on any of this with discord. Are we in the business of running the community or hosting the community software?

Right, right. But at the same time, I think at least for us, I just don't regret it at all because it has been a fantastic learning experience. And I have seen a lot of open source communities embracing matrix. So I've been participating in more open source community rooms than I ever have been before.

And we have a really great community that is on those matrix servers. Like I, maybe because it does take a couple of extra steps to get going. It's sort of self-selecting, but whatever, whatever the reason is, it's also just been a great community experience on there. And I don't regret going with matrix at all.

I still think discord is a fine platform, but I think for our show and the fact that we focus on free software and that we do advocate for self-hosting and data sovereignty, I think it's really great that we can run this. And I, I want to encourage other people to try it at home, even just for like their family chat, because if you keep it really simple and it's just a couple of group chats between, you know, you and your spouse or a couple other family members, I don't think it's going to be a big burden. And it's still a lot of fun to play around with.

Yeah, I feel like we should call out because, especially here on the show, because we kind of talked about some of our scaling issues with the server that with workers, with just improvements to Synapse over time, we could downscale our server now for sure because it's just gotten a lot more performant. And once we learned the ropes and figured out the stuff

we hadn't thought about before actually diving in, it's actually been not a pain to administer at all. Here's the other thing. So you talk about getting your family involved. For me anyway, I don't know what platform I would put my kids on. I honestly straight right hand to God don't

because all of these places, there's this increased emphasis on they want to know who you are because that's what keeps us safe, right? Is if everybody knows who everybody is. And so that is the antithesis of what I want for my children on the internet. And so Matrix gives them a way where they can interact in a limited fashion with other adults, other family members, other people, and we can slowly, under my wife and I's control

can slowly let them reach out. They don't need a phone number. They all know how to sign into their account from a web UI so they can sit at any place that they have a web browser. They're able to get there and send my wife and I messages back and forth, which is super helpful. So I would, I would double emphasize the idea that, you know, that's a great direction for kids. And then as far as longevity, you know, if you think about it, so IRC has gotten us what 1988, so that's 35 years. So we've got 35 years out of IRC, you and I, I don't know what platform will be the hip kids, new platform in 10 years or 15 years or in the next 35 years. But I do know that I'll be able to talk to you because you'll still be running the Jupiter broadcasting server and I'll still be running mine. So we will be able to facilitate communication between each other.

And that's a really powerful thing. And I don't think you can say that about Discord or Telegram or any of the rest of them. Yeah, absolutely. You're right. And that is how I prefer to think of things too, is that long-term. I want to mention while we're wrapping up here for the Matrix stuff, there is an event next week as this is released. The matrix community summit is in Berlin. Lucky Brent. Thursday, the 21st of September to the 24th, September 2023, of course, as we record, we'll have a link in the show notes and they have surprise, surprise, a matrix chat room where you can coordinate and they have some ticket information and they have the conference schedule on there and it's packed packed with good stuff uh home lab stuff encryption stuff ui design even barbecue i mean packed with good stuff wes so another reason to be jelly that we're not in berlin because the matrix community summit is happening next week. Can we talk about Beeper? Oh, yes, please do. Tell me about Beeper.

So, you know, you said it during the intro, you said, hey, let's kind of touch on some of the rough edges as well. And I have had a number of people that I've gone to and said, here, use Element. And I've done that with a number of pieces of open source technology. And most of the time, like technology. And most of the time, like 80, 85% of the time, they're really happy with it. And sometimes they're more happy with it than they were the thing that they were using. In the case of Element, this process is repeated so many times that it almost gives me a compulsive eye twitch just to repeat it. So a user signs up

for Element, creates their account, they sign in, they're going back and forth, they're messaging, things are great, all the rooms are encrypted by default because that's great and secure. And so life is happy. Then they go and get a new phone and they don't know anything about cross-signing certificates and locally end-to-end encrypt. All they know is I downloaded this thing from the store. And so they re-download Element and, oh yeah, I remember my password. Well, what they didn't know is that they were supposed to set up an encrypted key sync. And it told them that numerous times. Hey, encrypted messages aren't backing up because you don't have the setup.

But you know what? They were able to talk with their friends, so they just ignored that message. And so they get six months down the road, eight months down the road. And from their perspective, they got back in and lost all of their messages. Now, we as geeks look at that and go, no, the key is still there. You just have to export it off the other device. You have it with you. That's what you want.

But to them, they lost their messages. So Beeper is a service. Now, it's a proprietary client, and it is not an open source implementation of Synapse. They have their own server, but it federates with the rest of the Matrix ecosystem and is a service very much like a signal or a discord or whatever else with support built around it and so when you sign up on beeper it it tells you hey this uses encrypted messages you need to have this key do you understand that yes i do and you click on the next screen then it says give me the key back so i know that you back that up and it forces you to step through that process and holds her hand a little bit. But what the selling point is, and it's really one of the most under-talked features about Matrix, it can talk to anything.

So I have LinkedIn, Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, all tied to Twitter, all to X, all tied to one thing now, and all of those messages come to one place. And so there are a lot of people that are looking at it and going, I don't have an iOS device, but my entire family is on iCloud. So the idea that I can go to Apple and register for an ID, I don't need a phone number, I don't have to buy an Apple device, but I can tie that to my Beeper account. Now I can message people on iMessage. pictures or excuse me, videos over telegram versus doing it through beeper and that iMessage bridge cut their video time down in a fraction because it would compress the videos and stuff. So beeper is a really great on-ramping tool for people that are not geeks, but also want to take advantage and participate in the matrix ecosystem. Gosh, how are they doing the iMessage stuff? Is there like a software client you have? Well, yes. They're running a bunch of Macs, and they have accounts that are signed in for each user, and then there's a local bridge that runs. Originally, they were shipping people iPhones and having them run the bridge on old iPhones.

No way. Wow. Yeah. But they've now figured out a way where they have Macs running in a data center, and they're able to run it that way. Wow. That would be kind of nice. Cause yeah, so much of the family is on iMessage and it'd be nice just to have that piped right into one spot.

So does it work inside element or is it, is it separate app? Beeper is its own app. It is a separate app, but they have not nerfed anything. So if you, if you know your way around element and you know where to click on the button to say reset password,

you can absolutely set yourself a password. Then you sign into beeper.com as your matrix server from any matrix client you like, and it works just fine. So you can absolutely use it from element. Now I would tell you one of the advantages of beeper is they have a custom UI. So it breaks out all of your chats, you know, the LinkedIn ones from the Twitter ones from the telegram. So it looks really nice. And there's like this global inbox thing that shows you, you know, your latest IMs. Funny story. I tied it to LinkedIn. First time I've ever gotten spammed with IM, but that happened.

So there's some downsides. But so there's some advantages to using their app because it looks a little prettier. But yeah, because they're all open source geeks to the max, they don't stop you from leveraging the stuff or leveraging Federation and all the rest of that stuff. You can use it. You just have to know what buttons to click on. And if you've used Element, you will, because it's just a forked version of Element. Oh, okay.

All right. I have some homework after the show. We'll have a link in the show notes, and it is just beeper.com. The audience has been telling me about it for a bit, but Noah, you sold me. I'm going to check it out. Collide.com slash unplugged. If you're in IT and security and work with Okta, you have got to check this out. Have you noticed that all the

recent issues that really come around data breaches or ransomware or vulnerabilities, they often enter through the user's machine? Maybe it's phished credentials. Maybe it's out-of-date software that hasn't been patched for a while. It's not really the user's fault, but yet they are still the vector often now for the most common ways that networks get infiltrated. And the issue really there is that the tooling hasn't been very good. Collide has stepped up to solve this problem. For those of you that work in security and IT with Okta, Collide ensures that only secure devices can access your apps. So say goodbye to compromised credentials, phish credentials, whatever it might be, because that's no longer an issue. Collide catches it

before they authenticate to your apps. It'll manage multiple operating systems, Windows, Mac, Linux from one dashboard, and every employee gets information that helps them resolve issues without having to burden it. It's really simple and straightforward. You got to experience this firsthand. So what they've done is they set up a demo so you can see how this works. So you can support the show and check out the demo by going to collide.com slash unplugged. That's K O L I D E.com slash unplugged. Get some insights into how this works, support the show. It might really solve some problems for you. Check it out at collide dot com

slash unplugged. Well, Brent brought the mailbag to Berlin with him and now he's off partying with our mailbag of all things. Why does he even bring the mailbag to the parties? I thought that was like a federal offense. Yeah. Well, especially the way he opens them and then tries to reseal them like we wouldn't notice.

It's covered in maple syrup. Yeah. Come on. Come on. And now it is time for the boost. And we got some super boosts this week. And we start with our baller boost from Hybrid Sarcasm. He is our big lobster this week and we start with our baller boost from hybrid sarcasm he is our big lobster this week get ready for this 1 million 22 222 sats across two boosts he is our baller this week uh and he

says bummer about linux fest northwest boosting what i would have spent on the trip love the show especially the member pre-pre show and then he sent in a row of old mcducks this old duck still got it because he just wants to hear the duck hunt thank you sarcasm you can ask for anything you like really really appreciate that support um you know we're we're really trying to build something here where if the ad market continues to crater through the remainder of the year, we might have a system here that's sustainable. And the trickiest

part about it is the sustainability part, right? Is that recognition of the value each week and stepping up. We really, really appreciate it. Kusuria boosts in with 123,456 sets. Oh. I hoard that which your kind covet.

We see what you're doing there. I would totally be up for a no-Nicks episode. I'd also be up to up the stakes of, uh... Anywhere you would want to mention Nicks, you have to mention an alternative solution like Ansible or Fedora Silverblue. I'd also be up for a literally all-Nyx episode on the flip side, too,

where you talk about how Nyx could fix all the problems and world hunger and more, basically like the Rust episode, but for Nyx. Sounds like there's a code here, too. This boost is a planet Druidia shield code reference for those oldies that remember Spaceballs. We need to open the gates to these challenges.

Fun will now commence. That's great. I'm down for it. I wonder if we could try it next week. I'm going to have to do extra nicks in the off time just to get it out of my system. We'll have to think about that. Okay, I'm going to start thinking on it. Thank you very much for the boost.

Goose comes in with 76,823 sats. I'm working on troubleshooting my boost, so hopefully you guys get this, but graphing OS is great, but the Target and Starbucks apps have both been crashing on startup recently. Has anyone experienced this? I wonder if that's the memory management stuff. You know how you can turn on the compatibility mode for some of the apps in Graphene OS? Yeah, and disable some of the extra mitigations or whatnot.

No, you're still rocking the old Giraffe-ing, right? In full disclosure, I have two phones. I have my personal phone and I've got my work phone. Personal phone is 100% graphene and work phone, I actually bought with the idea of I was going to run it until I didn't get updates anymore and then flash it to something like Lineage. I found out there were two versions of my phone. One was made around the rest of the world and that one you can flash. Mine, the US special version, you can't flash. So it's going to be hot trash here in about two years.

And then I'm probably just going to get a pixel and do graphene. Oh, yeah, I hate that. I hate that little region lock stuff. Jolly Hobbler boosted in 50,000 cents. Up front notes that you should probably direct all hate mail to alan at jupiterbroadcasting.com. No comment there. Looks like we've gotten a bit of a ham radio story. From time to time, the astronauts on the ISS would fire up the SSTV transmitter to do events.

I did not have a good way to hook up my portable radio up to my laptop and did not want to put a lot of money into it at the time. I also needed to figure out when the ISS was going to be making its passes. So here's how I solved my problems. I used WebSDR to find two or three ground stations I could tune to the ISS frequency. I then fed those into GPredict and found when the ISS would pass over one of those stations. This would also give me backup and alternate passes. I then downloaded QSS TV and here's where I started having the most issues. Getting audio into QSS TV from Firefox. Played with Jack and couldn't get it to fully work and even now I don't remember all the audio

issues. But I did get the audio from Firefox into Audacity. After it was in Audacity, I was able to load it into QSS TV and get my image. The big caveat is that a ground station is stationary, and when doing SSTV from ISS to ground, you'd like the ground station to be able to track the signal as it traverses the sky. Thanks for all the fish. Yeah, no kidding. That's a great story. I barely follow it, but I love it. Yeah, keep up the nerdery. And wow, getting something from the ISS, that's wild. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Makes me want to be a ham right there.

Karenbug comes in with 27,567,000 sats using Fountain. Y'all need to find a better map. Yeah. Yeah, we budget shop on the maps. Yeah, we do. That's true. Yeah. Yeah, we budget shop on the maps. Yeah, we do. That's true. You know, I took notes last time because I had some other ideas, but did I bring my notes? Let's find out, huh?

Notes for maps? Yeah, well, because this is from the booster we can't find. Oh, right. Yes. Okay. The hunt has begun. I didn't bring a map with me, too. I just have it on the phone. I'm sitting here scrolling around. I can't find nothing. You're doing a good job. Let's see. Okay. Postal code 27557. Okay. I think it's somewhere in Germany. Bremerhaven, maybe? That's my best guess, I think, from last week. Did I get it right? City in Germany? If the digital map didn't save us this time, there's no saving us.

I'm going to have to go to a map store. Is there just a big physical thing of all the postal codes in the world? That's going to be my next best guess. MonkeyPod Dev boosts in with $24,444. Hey, guys, first boost. I wanted a zip code boost to the podcast index, but the albium amount shown in sats didn't match up. Is this normal? Anyway, love the JB shows, keep up the great work, especially the value for value stuff. That was 22,222, and then we got a follow-up row of ducks to say, I now see that the Lightning transactions are broken up into several confirmed pieces, which add up to the total amount requested.

B. Peters boosts in with 25,414 sats. The GPL needs to be enforced. If they don't use a technical solution, they would have to do it with the legal system, which would be expensive, slow, and would probably just make more enemies. By the way, zip code boost in this area is known as data center alley. All right, well, this one, hopefully I get right because it's a little more local. It looks like that's a postal code in Jefferson County, West Virginia. Hello, West Virginia. Todd from Virginia, Northern Virginia, that is, boosts in 22,222 sats just because. Thanks, Todd. Bear 454 boosts in with 22,222 sats.

Hey, Chris, check out the Atari VCS base for your garage machine. Wait, what? Forget the built-in OS, put in an M2CS base for your garage machine. Wait, what? Forget the built-in OS, put in an M2, upgrade the RAM if you need to, disable the built-in MMC, and boot straight to whatever Linux. The factory OS is based on Debian, so everything works flawlessly from Bluetooth to gigabit Ethernet. Plus, it's an Atari. At $200, it's hard to beat this little Ryzen-based box.

It would be nice. It would actually have made a great machine for this. You know, Bear, I... That wasn't even on my radar. I mean, come on. Wow. Clever. I put in for the Kickstarter on the crowdfunder on the Atari way back in the day, and I never got my unit. Maybe they tried to get a hold of me. I've looked for the email. I have yet to receive my Atari VCS, and now you're telling me I can go buy it for $200 just directly? I'm not buying it twice, but I do like the email. I have yet to receive my Atari VCS, and now you're telling me I can go buy it for $200 just directly?

I'm not buying it twice, but I do like the idea. If only I had my Atari. Noodles also comes in with a row of McDucks. That's right, 22,222 sats. I have a framework as

well, and I love it. Plus, it works great with NixOS. There's even a hardware profile for it over on GitHub called just Nix Hardware. I've had mine for about five months now, and I love it 100%. Even just as a laptop, I haven't had to repair anything on it yet, which is good. No repairs needed in the first place because, you know what, it's better than having to have a repair. Also, a massive plus one to Obtanium. It has an export-import feature that allows easy migration to a new phone or OS. I use F-Droid to find applications, and then I install them through Obtanium.

You know, that was a boost just right to Brent's heart. Unfortunately, he's not here, so I think we're going to have to direct him to this part in the finished episode. So just hi, future Brent. Yeah, there you go, Brent. Noodles has you on the DL right there. Our buddy Bearded Tech boosts in with a row of ducks, saying thanks for the mention. Also, I do host some services on a dynamic IP address. Answering your question there, Chris, I created a container to auto-update my DNS on Linode

and points us to a GitHub link we'll have in the show notes. Neat. Okay. I was surprised we didn't get more feedback on how many folks are using static IPs or dynamic. And if they're hosting content at home, I'd like to, I'd still like to get some more boost and collect some samples on that. And don't include your IP. Jolly hobbler comes in with 2000 sats.

He says, I'm still surprised you've never had an XMPP server. Huh? Yeah, me too. Well, there's still, there's time yet, right He says, I'm still surprised you've never had an XMPP server. Huh. Yeah, me too. Well, there's time yet, right? I feel like it is in our future. I don't know for what, especially now that we have Simplex. But

I don't know. You happen to have a random XMPP server anywhere you use? I don't have a random XMPP server. I use the public instance for jmp.chat, but honestly, it's just like it's a stopgap until the bridge gets good enough that I can just move to matrix and then chat in all the places.

There you go. Hal was right, BooSin, with 2,100 cents. I use pfSense with Namecheap.com to change what my URL points to when my dynamic IP changes. It's worked flawlessly for me. That is a nice combo. I mean, who would have figured, right? Our audience is trying to mitigate the whole dynamic IP thing

with a lot of different clever solutions. Jeff comes in. Torched ESC comes in with 8,910 spicy sats. And of course he's got to take on the garage computer. He says, I use my Rock Pro 64 as a garage pewter to record drums. I fold down the monitor arm I made from my EMT so it stays out of the way. So when I'm not using it, it's clear. I really like this setup. I think you focus way too much on the implementation. Just roll something out and iterate as you need. We're talking about my garage PC build I want to do. You're already using your phone.

So no big deal until you're happy with it, right? Oh, and it sounds like you already have the perfect machine. Put that clockwork pie to work. He says, when I checked it out, it seemed pretty fast, at least for notes. It turns on quickly, has a full-size USB port for a keyboard, and it also has micro HDMI. You can dock this thing for notes. It turns on quickly, has a full-size USB port for a keyboard, and it also has micro HDMI. You can dock this thing for notes. You can put it in the car for diagnostics even. And if you need to take it to a notes with the auto parts store, you could actually print it. Sync it. Also, you could sync to your home folder, maybe on a NAS, and you just don't really care

what OS it's using. If it dies, you flash a new SD card, call it all good. Or, when I'm there, I'll try to get one of those laptops from the graveyard running again. Oh, Jeff. I love it. He's just signed himself up. I guess we don't have to worry about it because it's Jeff's project. Yeah, I think problem solved. Yeah, it's Jeff's fault. It's Jeff's fault.

It's Jeff's problem. It's all fine. Bring it on. Thanks, Jeff. Oppie 1984 boosts in with 4,000 sats. As a fellow mic, plus one on the B-Link and Scepter display setup. My weekend workstation in my

home office is a B-Link NUC and dual Scepter displays. Nothing fancy. It just boots into Linux Mint in under 30 seconds, and I can get right to work. I've only had the B-Link for about three months or so, but it's been rock solid. Good to know. I've been hearing good things about those B about three months or so, but it's been rock solid. Good to know. I've been hearing good things about those B-Links and they seem to be a good price.

That is a great, that's a great use for that. Brandon comes in with 6,666 sets. Coming in hot with the boost. It's for the garage setup. I say keep it simple, stupid. Use the old ThinkPad. I can attest it'll be more than capable. I temporarily have been driving daily an old fourth-gen quad-core i5. And the general performance with GNOME and Silverblue has been solid. If it weren't for the clunky form factor and sub-1080p screen, I don't even know if I'd be bodily looking for a replacement. Minimum of 8 gigs of RAM, those critical guys.

If you're going to have a web browser, you've got to have at least 8 gigs of ram those critical guys if you're gonna have a web browser you gotta have at least eight gigs of ram uh he also likes the suggestion of using kino night or silver blue as the os as opposed to maybe something else he says you could run the installer then you throw a flat pack on there with obsidian set it to auto start pretty much good to go if something breaks you just boot to a previous image with grub you don't have to over engineer it it's taken me years to learn to just embrace the keep it simple philosophy. It always works out better in the end. That is some sage, sage advice, Brandon. Thank you.

Gene Bean boosts in with a row of ducks. I let my unified dream machine keep DDS updated at zoneedit.com. I delegated a subdomain to the DDNS service there, and it's worked great for the last few years. Hmm, neat, Gene Bean. Also, a little shout-out here. I think I saw Gene Bean playing around with Nyx

over in our Nyx Nerds channel and getting a whole bunch of seemingly helpful input from the wonderful community over there. So keep up the nerdery, everyone. That's amazing. Complete Noobs came in with 11 111 sats just to say karma uh thank you everybody who did boost in sourced c came in with a set of enterprise sats i am programmed in multiple techniques saying he would be down for a long-term steam deck review

so that is two votes we've seen for long-term steam deck review we had 20 boosts this week absolutely thank you everybody and the grand total for the show this week was 1,434,449 sats absolutely incredible thank you when it really whips the llama's ass as we look forward to the future i hope that we can keep some of this momentum sustainable um you know we have who knows what kind of uncertain future ahead of us. And to be able to build kind of like this now, build out this pipeline, figure this process out, iterate and learn as we do. It gives me peace of mind. It gives me peace of mind as a small business owner. And it gives me peace of mind knowing that we can keep the show coming.

So if you get value from the show and you'd like to send a little bit back, well, you can do that via a boost or by becoming a member. If you'd like to boost in, get a new podcast app at podcastapps.com. Fountain, Castomatic, and Absolutely Podverse seem to be the most popular amongst our crew. You can top those off and then boost in directly using the app. And you also get all the new features like the advanced RSS stuff for live items, chapters, transcripts, and more. And then if you want to keep your podcast app, but you'd still like to get on the Boost Fund, just get Albie. Get Albie.com, top it off with something else on the Lightning Network, like the Cash app or Strike or anything that's on Lightning, RoboSats.

It's cool. And then you just go to thepodcastindex.org, you find our entry over there and boost up. We'll have it all linked in the show notes, so it's real easy for you. And we really appreciate everybody who does that or becomes a member at unpluggedcore.com and supports the show directly. You also get some extra special benefits just for our members. And a big thank you, everybody. We really appreciate the support this week, and we'll continue on now with a fantastic pick. I love it when you find these, Wes. These are my favorite, like, I watch, I look over the links for the show and I'm like, oh, Wes has found a goodie.

Tell us about this terminal-based file manager. Yeah, Yazzie. I'm sure I'm saying that wrong. Apparently it's Duck in Chinese. It's a terminal file manager written in our friend Rust, it's a terminal file manager written in our friend Rust, but also based on non-blocking async IO. It aims to provide an efficient, user-friendly, and customizable file management experience. And since it's async, all IO operations are done asynchronously. CPU tasks are spread across as many threads as it can,

trying to make the most of available resources. It's got all kinds of stuff in the back end, like real-time progress updates, good support for like canceling a task. So even if you try to commit to something that might be on an expensive or slow disk, you can cancel that. Internal task priority assignment. It's also got built-in code highlighting and image encoding and like some sort of fancy caching mechanism to speed up trying to display images or load files like that. And it integrates with things you might already be using, encoding and like some sort of fancy caching mechanism to speed up trying to display images or load files like that. And it integrates with things you might already be using like the Fuzzy Finder FZF or the awesome RipGrip.

It just looks so clean. It just sometimes I think it's, you know, maybe I'm a visual learner, but the fact that you could be in a terminal and you can hover over like an image and it'll preview the image or you can hover over a shell script and it'll give you a preview of the shell script inside the terminal. It's going to be so quick from I'm like busting around on our NAS server and just kind of cleaning stuff up and going through there. So it's Y-A-Z-I, the blazing fast terminal file manager. And yes, it is already packaged in Nix. Of course. Of course it is. Very good, Wes. Thank you. I'll be

adding that to my staple of Wes picks. I should just have a list of Wes picks, because you always find the good ones. If you'd like to suggest a great app, you can always go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact. We've got our contact form over there. You can always boost in as well, and we'll have links to all the stuff we talked about, like Yazzie, at linuxunplugged.com slash contact. We got our contact form over there. You can always boost in as well. And we'll have links to all the stuff we talked about, like Yazzie, at Linuxunplugged.com slash 528.

So, no, I think you dropped it in there, but it sounds like the Linux Delta server is going to be opening up signups again in the near future, you madman. Yeah, hopefully. We'll see how that works. We've opened it up every year around Southeast Linux Fest, and we've done – It's a good idea. It's neat because it allows you to pass a token. So what we've done is told people, if you go over to Southeast Linux Fest, you're looking to participate in the conference, then those people get an account there. Now we're thinking we're probably to the point where we could open it back up because if we just outgrow the storage, we'll just throw more drives in the thing, and we don't have to rent it per gigabyte anymore.

You just got to buy the disk, but at least you only have to buy them once, really. It's not a monthly thing. Yeah. Well, thank you for joining us, Noah. It's been great hanging out with you. We'll put a link to the Ask Noah show in the notes, and we'll put a particular link to the most recent one where you talk about some of your Matrix stuff. I'm sure it's going to come up on the future episodes as the wells,

right? Yeah. Yeah. No, it'll be an on running journey. Thanks for having me. Yeah. It always is,

sir. It always is. Also don't, don't forget, like if you're going to be able to make it to the Linux session, and again, we got meetup pages now with a Linux fest crew does. We'll have a link to their meetup page,

Linux fest, Northwest meetup page, lots of stuff going on still. If you can make it out to our area, we absolutely would love to see you out here. Everybody listening, just pack it up and start heading this way. It's coming up soon.

If you can't make it, or you got to make some adjustments with the changes, we totally understand. We hope maybe you can make it in the spring and we'll try to bring you some great content from the events, whatever, whichever way it happens to go. If you'd like to get more show,

well, you can become a member. You get a whole lot more show about double the show, or you can tune in live, jblive.tv. We tend to do it Sundays at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern, and that is converted to your local time at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. That's right. That's right. jblive.tv. Of course, you just get the RSS feed and you get the dang show whenever we release it. You don't have to worry about time math or when we're streaming or any of that. LinuxUnplugged.com slash RSS.

You pop that in your podcatcher of choice. Of course, the new podcast app, of course. And you'll just get it when we release it, which is probably the best way. And then, if you enjoyed an episode, you can share it with somebody. All right. Thank you so much for tuning in to this enjoyed an episode, you can share it with somebody. All right, thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of The Unplugged Program. From eastern Washington, we'll see you right back here next Sunday. So Well, the connection, it seemed to have mostly held.

I wasn't really sure. So for years, I have had this custom self-hosted VPN box on Linode. I had to tear it down to the metal and then load this custom Linux distro on there so I could use this VPN service that aggregates multiple connections into one. And so I have Starlink, AT&T, and Verizon, all three are active right now. And they all send the same thing. I'm using all three connections simultaneously to send and receive the same data. It goes through the VPN to this hosted server where it aggregates everything back together again and then transmits it out and in for me. And so if the Starlink drops,

because I have a lot of tree coverage right here, the Verizon can pick up, for example, because it's sending the same thing across all three connections. And it has this check some it does called forward error correction, and it can see if something hasn't arrived in the right order, and then it can quickly reassemble it for me too. So it's really crazy what it can do. But, you know, I upgraded the firmware on my router because I have this, I kind of have like this process. I go through a couple of days before we depart.

I kind of get everything updated because once I'm on the road, I'm not, I don't want to change state. So I just, if there's going to be anything that goes wrong, I want to find it a couple of days before we go. Oh, this is how you, uh, update the studio machines before we go live. Same idea. So I update the firmware on the router and it's all good. Nice little new UI.

It's all good. Right. and it's all good. Nice little new UI. It's all good, right? What I didn't realize, because I don't use it at my home base, is that they drop support for the old-style self-hosted VPN system that I had been using. And now they have a cheaper option, but it's still like a pay service.

And so they used to offer both, and the pay service was like a thousand dollars a month or you can self-host and so i obviously did the self-hosting but now they have a pay option and it's like tiered based on how much data you want to use and so two terabytes is like 80 bucks but two terabytes i've measured it when you count the video streaming and the uploading of the files and streaming for three or four hours two terabytes isn't really enough so i had to get the five terabyte option so to get five terabytes you go from 80 bucks to 180 bucks and it's just once the five terabytes is up you're done you just got to buy it again that's how it works now so i mean it seems like it did the job though so maybe

it was money well spent what does that work out to per gig? It's bad, man. But that's how I managed to do it for the show, remote from eastern Washington on the other side of the mountains. Using three connections simultaneously, it actually managed to hold up. What do you think of Starlink? I'm very happy with it. Because I'm coming at it from the perspective of an LTE user and not like somebody who had fiber, right? So I'm coming at it from, it's a significant quality of life upgrade and it's really nice that they let me move it and set it up so I can bring it with me to different

places. I put it up on a flagpole now. And so I've got a flagpole that I suction cup mount to the side of jupes and I just i just send up the starlink and uh get it clear and it generally works really great and i just bring it in via ethernet to the peplink and so it's just one of the connections and i like it i've worked out their router they have a fine router but i don't need it so i've been able to work that out and i like it a lot i i think it's probably a fair product wait do you have the first generation or the second generation one is square or circle i had the circle it broke and, do you have the first generation or the second generation one? Is Square or Circle? I had the Circle.

It broke. And they gave me like the second gen kit after that one broke. You can use the Square one without the router? You can get a bypass kit, basically. You can go into the router. And once you have the kit, you go into the router and you tell it turn off and just be a PoE device. And it turns off all the router functions and it just does PoE pass-through. No kidding.

Yeah, it's sweet. I bought the wired Ethernet thing for the second gen one, but I didn't realize you could shut the routing stuff off. You do lose local stats. You know how you can open up the Starlink app and it'll get you all these stats directly off the device? You lose that because the router forwards that stuff to the dish, but you can still get that information through the cloud. So like they'll cloud connect in and you can still get that data, but it's just not over your land, which kind of stinks,

but you still get the data. So yeah, I'm really happy to made this show possible. So that's great too.