LINUX Unplugged - 592: Chris' Netboot Nonsense

Episode Date: December 9, 2024

USB thumb drives are old and busted. No hard drive? No problem. Need a quick system rescue or work in another distro for the day? Easy.Sponsored By:Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices! 1Password Extended Access Management: 1Password Extended Access Management is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMODROID H4 PLUSODROID H4 Mini-ITX KitPlan your meetup: Colony EventsLUP 600 Pacific Northwest Party · Colony EventsRequest for Proposals: Flathub Program Management — The GNOME Foundation, in partnership with KDE e.V., is bootstrapping Flathub LLC to become a self-sustaining entity.Flathub to become a self-sustaining entity and they're looking to hire someone to helpFlathub StatisticsFlathub Verified AppsVerification | Flathub Documentationopen issues on FlatHub-Infra GitHubnetboot.xyz — Your favorite operating systems in one place. A network-based bootable operating system installer based on iPXE.Booting Methodsboot netboot.xyz from grubboot netboot.xyz from a USB DiskWindows | netboot.xyzWindows PE image as an ISO, instructions on how to build it can be found hereLUP 333Annual Membership — Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!Proxmox and Veeam backupshome-assistant-technitiumdns — This custom integration allows you to integrate TechnetiumDNS with Home Assistant, providing sensors for various DNS statistics.sam h's nix config with BlockyRescuezilla — Rescuezilla is an open-source easy-to-use disk imaging app that's fully compatible with Clonezilla — the industry-standard trusted by tens of millions.rescuezilla/rescuezilla: The Swiss Army Knife of System Recovery

You boys know that I love my Odroid H3+. It's amazing how much I have that thing doing. It feels like it should be in the it's getting punished category, and yet it keeps delivering. So when I heard that Brent ordered the new Odroid H4, I'm super excited. So you must have it by now, Brent, because it's been a couple of weeks. Well, I thought it was going to take about two weeks to get here, and it turns out it showed up yesterday when I wasn't expecting it, but not at my house. So it's in town. I got to grab it.

But it showed up in like a week from South Korea, which makes exactly zero sense to me. What was hilarious is you were showing all of the destinations it had to go through. And you literally had to send a video because you had to scroll the page. All the different spots. So your O-Troid is well-traveled. It's even been to Memphis. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Well, hello, gentlemen. Today, I'm going to tell everybody about my perfect net boot setup. I am so excited. I'm throwing out all my USB disks, never booting a VM the same again. So I'll tell you about that then. At the end, I got a tool you got to know about.

A great pick that will probably come in really in a pinch, just when you need it. And then in the boost segment, stick around for that, because if you've ever missed a few of the inside jokes on the show, we're going to do a rapid rundown and answer some of them. So there's a lot to get into today. So before we start, let's say time-appropriate greetings to that mumble room. Hello, virtual lug. Hello. Hey, Chris.

Hey, Russell. Hello, Brian. Hello. Hello. Hello. Look at that huge, huge quiet listening. I love it. That's great.

Hello, everybody in there. And a good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. Tailscale.com slash unplugged. Tailscale is the easiest way to connect devices and services directly to each other, wherever they are, on a mesh network protected by... Waggle.

That's right. Secure remote access to your production systems, databases, servers, maybe you got your Kubernetes, whatever it is, and it's super fast. Like, fast enough

that we can have public traffic funneled over our Tailscale, hit a database, and get back to you. You never even know you went over our Tailnet. It's super private. It's really intuitive to use. It's programmable, and it's free to try right now for up to 100 devices and three users. You go to tailscale.com slash unplugged, and that's not a limited time deal. You get that for 100 devices.

You're going to love it. Thousands of listeners do and thousands of companies like Instacart, Hugging Face, Duolingo, and others have switched to Tailscale. So get started at Tailscale.com slash unplugged. So we want your help partying for episode 600. And to get there, we have put up a new meetup website. And we would like you to either form or join a meetup in your area on Sunday, February 2nd, during Linux Unplugged 600. Then you join the Mumble Room, i.e. someone brings a laptop and maybe a microphone, and y'all call in from your meetup in the Mumble Room. And we get to chat with you from meetup to meetup.

So we have launched colonyevents.com. Colonyevents.com. It's a self-hosted Gatheo instance. No account required, though there is an edit key if you want to be able to edit from a different web browser. You'll see our events are already up there. They're pretty simple. Anyone can start an event. Please start one in your area. And then we'll start promoting them on the show.

So get over to colonyevents.com. Right now we're tentatively planning to have a little party for episode 600 here at the studio too. Now there's only about 25 spots available and we may move to a different spot if we can find something that accommodates more people. So just remember like that's around linux fest northwest it's going to be like another month so if you can't make it to the party at the studio linux fest is like just a little bit more than a month away from that date but we really would love it if you helped us party for 600 by creating your own meetup in your own area and then join us in the mumble room on february 2nd

colony events.com. And Wes, it's a brand new little baby that we set up. Can you tell me a bit about it? Yeah, it's, well, Gath.io, which comes with a Docker Compose setup that's really easy to get going. You just need a MongoDB database and then, you know, the actual application itself. And you're pretty much up and running. It's got a simple little toml config file

you can set up uh email if you want you can kind of configure um how long do you want it to keep events around one of the nice things that kind of self cleans up so you can configure i think right now ours is set to keeps it hangs around for a month but you can tune it so it'll just be like well the event is done x number of days has come by. Delete. Yeah. I like that a lot because then there's sort of, there's no cost for y'all out there in the community to use this to self-organize. And it'll just clean itself up. It's not really something we have to go in and prune up over time.

So it's colonyevents.com. I have a basic one up there for the one in our area, the Pacific Northwest Party, but the idea is to have them hopefully all over the world. And so we got this set up now, thanks to Wes getting that going, in a couple of weeks, so you have time to get this organized and figured out. So it's February 2nd, if I'm doing my time math right.

I believe so. Yeah, and you know, PJ had previously reported, and with help from Hybrid Sarcasm setting up an instance, that we'd had some good reports about Get. Yeah. And, you know, PJ had previously reported, and with help from hybrid sarcasm setting up an instance, that we'd had some good reports about Get.io. So this is also just another round of experiments where we're getting a little more hands-on in terms of, will this work as like a permanent fixture? Is it a tool we want to keep around? What do people think about it?

Can we replace meetup.com with this? Does it handle time zones in a sensible way? Will we miss the network effect of meetup.com? But maybe the fact that the community can use this tool to self-organize supplements that network effect? I don't know. But we'd love for you to, well, help us celebrate. ColonyEvents.com. And it's up and running now.

So go check it out. Thank you, Wes. It's up and running now. So go check it out. Thank you, Wes. Before we get into my Netboot setup, I want to talk about a major milestone that is approaching the Linux desktop. Perhaps one of the quintessential problems yet to be cracked on the Linux desktop, and it's coming from the Flathub team. It's a request for proposals for Flathub program management.

The Gnome Foundation, in partnership with KDEEV, is bootstrapping Flathub LLC to become a self-sustaining entity. So they're looking for a contractor to essentially run this thing. So they call it program management. It'll be financial and legal setup, and it'll also involve public outreach to bootstrap the whole thing. Right. So I both get the actual structure in terms of the legal structure and all that tax structure of the company going and get like the initial running of that business. I wish I had the bandwidth to do things like this because you don't have to be a lawyer. They say that in here. You just need to know how to work with a lawyer. Sure. Right. Yeah. And, you know, I'd love to help them get something like this going because I have wanted to see this for so long. The program manager is going to focus on these key objectives, they say.

Launch a payment and donation system for applications and Flathub itself. Establish operational governance for Flathub LLC. Coordinate financial and legal operations and ensure community engagement and transparency. So far, they have a budget of $12,000 for a three-month part-time role. So that's like 4K a month? Yeah, it's capped at $55 an hour. And the deadline to get this rolling for proposals is December 18th. The end goal is essentially have a universal Linux app store powered by Flathub, obviously using Flatpaks as the back end.

That is, like I said, one of the quintessential Linux goals since nearly the beginning. I don't know if I've yet to actually use an app store to pay for Linux. I've bought Linux programs like Reaper as an example, but that was their own bespoke. Do you remember when Canonical first took a crack at their store? Yeah. I bought one or two apps from the Ubuntu store back then. You had to have a Canonical account and all that.

And I bought one application from the lindos do you boys remember this wow this was this is from forever ago are you still getting that money's worth i don't remember what it was it might have been something like crossover office but um yeah linspire or lindos they had the click and run store known as the CNR, which launched in 2001. Wow. Yeah, it was part of the initial release. And it was based on Apt because Linspire was based on Debian. And the whole thing that was groundbreaking at the time, because this was five years before the Apple App Store, at least five years before the Apple App Store.

The whole groundbreaking thing is you could click a button, pay for software, and then it would install. And then it would turn into a run button and you could run it. I like that. Huge innovation. But, you know, I guess at one point they had over 38,000 packages in there, which was probably also free software and proprietary software. It was kind of a mix. Yeah, before it was click or run, and that didn't really work. But, you know, it was tied to one company.

It was tied to an idea. It was distro-specific, technology-specific, right, apt only, which meant all of the dependencies for that apt package would have to be installed as well. This time it feels a little different here. It's distro agnostic because of the packaging technology. It's being put together by the big desktop projects, not by a big distro maker. And also, I don't know if you agree, but it feels like FlatHub's been coming into its own. I mean, it's not perfect. There's still issues around, you know, community packaged apps and all kinds of things.

But... UI's been improved. Yes, right? It seems like it's operational. It's been super solid. It also seems like, you know, there's a lot of interesting apps up there. Enough so that sometimes when we want to go look for picks,

we'll go search like, hey, what's been uploaded to Flathub? Yeah. And there's often good stuff. Good stuff, yeah. Yeah, they got some good stats. And some of these are a little old, as of like August of this year, but 4 million active users,

2,800 applications from over 1,500 different contributors. Nice. 70% of the most popular apps are verified. And the verified status, I have a link to that if you're curious about how that works. Wait, wait, wait.

How do they calculate that stat? Well, they have like a stat of like the most popular applications, and they're saying 70% of those, of that subset. It's not a lot. It's not a lot of apps. It's a charitable way to frame it. You're right. Still, there are some that are verified, which is good.

And they're popular. That's good. And I would imagine if you're going to charge for your app, you probably some that are verified, which is good. And they're popular. That's good. And I would imagine if you're going to charge for your app, you probably have to be verified. I hope so. What do you think, boys? I mean, Canonical's tried this with the Snap Store. Obviously, you have Apple's approach, which is extremely heavy-handed on the review side. Does Flathub have a shot here at doing this right?

It seems promising. I mean, I don't know. We probably will end up depending a lot on who gets selected, who applies, how you implement that vision, and how it ends up working. Is the payment process a pain and people just end up not really doing it? Or is it easy enough in a way that you can, do they eventually enable stuff like subscriptions that we're talking about, you know?

You have an account you can sign into and keep track of your apps and then automatically pay them. I don't know. Oh, that would be interesting. I don't think any of that's in this first. Yeah. But like a Flathub account, sort of like the Humble Bundle store or my GOG.com account. I don't even know if we want that. I'm just.

That's interesting. No, I would like that. It's sort of like Patreon, but through Flathub. Right. Where I pay one thing. It's one transaction in my account, and then I can kind of divvy that up amongst the things I'm installing.

That'd be an interesting way to do it. Maybe make it sustainable. It does feel like they're the right organization to pull this off. I mean, there is this side conversation about what does this mean for app image and snaps. I don't think broadly it means much for them other than we're probably going to have, if this is successful, more developers directly targeting Flatpak. But, again, you can run that on every distro.

So it sort of seems like even Ubuntu users win. It's not really a downside. It's very easy to get installed and set up. Yeah. And I don't imagine they'd have's very easy to get installed and set up. Yeah. And I don't imagine they'd have to make a huge profit to keep it running because it's essentially running for free now. I think what I worry about

is we lose sight of the fact that this is still primarily a free software project around it. Their statistics page is a great example. They would love more transparent public data, but they just don't have the people working on the stats page. They have 79 open issues on their

GitHub project right now. So it's like there's plenty of work. You know, that's funny. Infrastructure's just like always invisible. I wouldn't even have thought, you know, like if you just had some time would help improve and maintain FlatHub be one of the things I might consider volunteering for? Maybe now, but I don't think I would have thought of know like if you just had some time would yeah help you help improve and maintain

flat hub be one of the things i might consider volunteering for maybe now but i don't think i would have thought of that at all yeah i wouldn't have either and i think as as they become known for making a bit of money we would lose more and more sight of that and i and i don't want us to because it's such a great community resource especially when you think about it from a central repository that can supply these all different app discover and all these different app stores that are on people's desktops already. And watching my kids on Linux, that's the route they've gone when I'm not around and they want to install software is they launch discover.

And they've installed a dozen applications that are just flat packs. They don't know they're flat packs. They don't need to for the most part. Exactly. And they didn't need to add there to do it either. I mean it fits with the model they're familiar with from their phones or maybe even their desktop. Yeah, exactly. It's an app store as far as they're concerned.

And so Flathub can kind of become a centralized version of that that was put together by the two different distribution projects and has run as its own thing. So it's not a red hat employee initiative. It's not something that Canonical is doing, you know, where every time something goes wrong, Mark Shutterworth personally gets name dropped. It does seem like maybe one of the better ways to approach this kind of thing. Like, obviously, like you need a company and various structures just if you're going to be dealing with money and the operations for this thing. So that, you know, that's just tricky to marry

with open source and community run things anyway. But if you can do it in a vendor neutral cross platform from the start, it seems like openness and, you know, being able to publish what they are doing is being built in from the start. Again, implementation TBD, but I think they got the right ingredients, at least. We'll see what they make. I think the biggest deal that I've noticed here is that the

two biggest desktop makers are involved in working together to make this happen. I think that's a good chance for success. But we'd love for you to boost in. Can Flathub succeed where 20 years of Linux app stores have failed so far? Why or why not? Let us know. 1password.com slash unplug. That is the number one password.com slash unplug. Okay, I've got a question.

Do your end users always use approved applications and devices and services without exception. I really don't even know how it would be possible today. Not to mention the workload it puts on IT and the burden it puts on employees who just want to get their job done. In today's world, it's like herding cats and trying to get everyone to stick to only company-approved devices, only company-approved services, and only company-approved apps. It's just sort of a never winnable battle like there's just always something new popping up or a new device or a new service and the reality is is they probably get more done they're getting more done they want to get more done they're using their own phones they're using their own tablets they're using their own laptops

maybe they even have a smart fridge that's tied into their work calendar feed for all we know Maybe they even have a smart fridge that's tied into their work calendar feed, for all we know. So how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on unmanaged apps or devices? That's what 1Password has figured out. The answer to this question is extended access management by 1Password. 1Password extended access management helps you secure every sign-in for every app on every device because it solves the problems traditional IAMs and MDMs just can't even touch. It's actually security for the way we work today. And it's generally available for companies with Okta and Microsoft Entra,

and it's in beta for Google Workspace customers too. Lots of information. This is going to be a huge time saver for yourself and for your end users. So check it out and support the show by going to be a huge time saver for yourself and for your end users. So check it out and support the show by going to 1password.com slash unplugged. That's the number one, password.com slash unplugged. And a big thank you to 1Password for supporting the Unplugged program. 1password.com slash unplugged. Well, today on the show, we've got a bit of a role reversal.

Normally, I'm the one bringing some wacky, weird way to boot a Linux box. But this week, Chris, you've been net booting. I have been. I bet you we could work some kegs at the end of this, Wes. So don't feel too bad. But this is something I should have talked about a long time on the show. We did cover the launch many, many years ago of this project. Yeah, what, 2018, 2019?

Yeah, episode 333. Okay, yeah, that says it. It's been, you know, it's been a long time. It's netboot.xyz, and their slogan is, your favorite operating system in one place, a network-based bootable operating system installer with Pixie support. And if you're not familiar, Pixie booting, it's been used for years. It allows your machine to boot from a server over the network.

You've probably seen it when you've had a system that can't detect any other boot device and then kind of falls back to trying to find a network device to boot from. Also super common in like schools, businesses, right, where it just sort of sets up the auto install provision from somewhere. Also in boxes, if you just launch a – or like most VMs, if you just launch them with no boot device attached, they just try to boot from the network. And this, my friends, is an opportunity in waiting. to slide in netboot.xyz, which sends out a super flexible, simple menu that these systems boot. So they boot from the network.

Netboot sends them out a simple menu, which lives, all the source information for it lives on a little web server that you can modify. And these menus contain all the different various options for live CDs or full installers or system rescue CDs and you can select in this menu which can be sometimes for example I did an installer and then I have all the list of basically every Linux distro you've ever heard of in your life and I chose Pop OS and then I chose the current version of Pop OS and then I hit enter and Netboot XYZ

will then go retrieve that image from the internet or you can cache them locally and it will download it from your local server and then it will boot that instance and the next thing you know you're in Pop! OS. It's really quite that simple and it'll spin up a little web server

for you to go through and figure out what images that you want to pull down ahead of time. And you can modify the boot config so it boots from the right location. And it's all sort of instantaneous. So the system boots off of the network. You have your DHCP server. Tell the client where to find the TFTP server, which is essentially what this is doing. Just a little tiny TFTP server running on this thing. It goes and pulls the image from that TFTP server, your client pulls the image from that TFTP server,

and it boots into this little environment that then is sort of like a bootstrap and then goes down and gets you the menu and pulls down the ISOs and things like that. Yeah, right, and then they've implemented all the rest of the stuff to be able to display the menu and download the kernel and the init ramfs and then get those loaded up and then boot into them. It's very slick. And they make it really easy to make your own custom entries so you can have your own custom versions of an ISO in there.

And so the example here is you want to test something on a machine and you want to just reboot and mem test, or maybe you want to back it up. So you just want to reboot into CloneZilla. You no longer have to go even download the ISO first, let alone write it to a USB disk, because this thing can dynamically pull down those ISOs when you need it on demand, which is really handy. But additionally, if you don't want to go tweak your DHCP server to support TFTP and, you know, all this kind of stuff, they also have a live Netboot ISO image you can attach. They have raw images you can flash to USB. They have a lot of different ways, including ready-to-go VM images that already know how to talk to Netboot. so you don't actually even have to use pixie if

you don't want you could still have a netboot server running on your network and then have this tiny iso or tiny raw image that you boot from and then it goes and gets the menu and all of that that's really nice yeah i mean i've i've abused that before just to leave the netboot xyz uh iso in my downloads folder and then just boot up vms that way with that attached and there you go it's like okay so my son has a problem with his machine i can just boot off the network and let's do some tests you know let's do a mem test uh let's boot into system rescue cd or let's try out a live pop instance and see if i can replicate the problem under pop and if it's like in this incredible resource we're just waiting on my network is all of

these Linux distributions on demand. I don't do it anymore, but I used to think having, you know, a Windows PE environment on hand was nice. Just like if friends were having laptop problems. Sure. Yeah, you can do that. You can put that into recovery and repair things. Yeah, you have to have the Windows PE stuff and you have to have the files extracted on a Samba share.

But if you've got the PE Windows stuff and you've got a Samba share, you can point a Netboot menu entry at it, and it will do it. It'll boot Windows. That's great. It is. It's pretty slick because it's another thing to test, too. I love it from that kind of standpoint. But then additionally, I'm trying

to have a good chunk of stuff offline and available even when I don't have internet. So the fact that I can, they go through this, they have this really simple web UI and you just select the different images you want. It'll download and cache all of them on your local system. Then you just go update the boot menu to point to your local URL instead of the remote URL. And from that point forward, it's blasting these ISO images at line speed, at whatever your local line speed is. So it's, in other words, it's very, very fast. But I think where I'm going to use it absolutely the most, and I know this sounds like kind of not a big deal, but man, is it so great. VMs. the most and i know this sounds like kind of not a big deal but man is it so great vms it is so great to just create a real basic vm i don't have to specify an iso file or anything like that it powers up because i've because i've got like maybe a blank hard drive attached and

i've got no other boot media it immediately falls back to network booting, and then it instantaneously finds my Netboot XYZ server, and I have the menu, and I'm installing a distro inside a VM in seconds. I never went and downloaded the ISO first. I didn't have to attach it to the VM. I love it for starting up VMs. That's where it's chef's kiss. You know, it would pair nicely, too,

if you had, customized uh for sure install environments or repair environments that you wanted to uh yeah i'm curious because i've seen some of similar implementations like let's say gnome boxes allows you to download an iso immediately when you're creating a vm i'm curious how up to date you've found the entries to be because like let's say i I don't know, NixOS just came out with a new version recently. Are they pretty good at including all that stuff in the recent menus? The Nix ones in particular are a little out of date.

Fair enough. But it doesn't matter so much with Nix, right, because it's pretty quick to just get right up-to-date. But you can add an ISO for any distro. You just throw it on the server, and then you just add a line, and it gives you a text editor in the web UI to modify these boot menus. So in that way, you could go grab the ISO once, store it on the server, and then it's available to all your machines that can network boot from that point forward. And I could even see having just those ISOs, right? So maybe not all the different – because this thing, it's every distro you could think of, right?

And so maybe you just want to whittle that down to five. And you just have your own custom menu with your own custom ISOs. You could totally do that. I think that leads into my next question, which is, did you see any evidence of any like automation for this cache? Are you able to say, hey, when a new version of Ubuntu comes out, please pre-download it so it's always available on the network? No. And you would still have to go update the menu. Got it.

The menus do get updated. There is a system for that. So it does kind of have like an index and it does keep up to date. But you have to go refresh that. I think you would particularly like it for rescue scenarios, Brent. I agree completely. You essentially always have like a – like it doesn't matter if your hard drive dies. It doesn't matter if you can't find any USB medium.

You've just got a system that's on your network ready to boot immediately for you that you could start diagnosing problems with. I bought a whole bunch of like USB drives, I don't know, years ago for doing exactly loading ISOs, and they're slowly all dying. I guess, I don't know, I'm overloading them or something. And I was like, I don't want to buy new USB drives. So this is a perfect solution to just not even need that anymore, at least locally. I almost got the Windows stuff set up. I don't know if I'm actually going to use it. Because you've got to get

this PE version of Windows, and then you've got to go put it up on a Samba share, and it's like, I just don't want to create a Samba share. But for getting access to Linux distros, just so easy, because it's all built in. Linux is so easy to boot. It's Apache licensed. The project is Apache

licensed, so it's free software, and there's a lot of ways to configure it, but there's a really simple Docker Compose. Again, it's one of these things where you pick your own adventure, but the Docker Compose is pretty simple. I think the Linux Server IO folks have a version. If you're a fan of Linux Server IO images, they've got one for Netboot XYZ. And I'll have links in the show notes for documentation and stuff. images. They've got one for Netboot XYZ. And I'll have links in the show notes for documentation and stuff. This is one of those things that I'm never going to not have now. Because it is

if you're familiar with Docker Compose, it's a five minute setup. It's five minutes of work to get this going. And then you have this available forever. And it's so handy. I can't even explain, especially if you have family computers. The one thing I don't know, and I know this will be kind of painful, I'd love to know if there's any way to tunnel the iPixie boot requests over a tail net somehow, because the system wouldn't be on tail scale yet when it's first booting. So you'd have to have a subnet router. But I would love to have one net boot server

that would work across my entire tail net. And I could boot over my tail net. That would be awesome. So if anybody has any suggestions or advice, or if you're running a net boot server and you have any particular configuration that's worked or hasn't worked, let me know.

I think as long as you did the DHCP stuff, right, to point it at the TFTP server for each LAN you were doing. Okay, okay, okay. But then maybe the TFTP server could be proxied over the, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and maybe doing like subnet routing.

I don't know. If you've tried it, let me know. Or if you have another solution, because I'd love to have one central server that would work everywhere. Yeah, because we need this in the studio. Yeah, it's so handy. Like in here, it would be really great if one of these machines has a problem.

So if you've got anything like that or if you've got any tips for using Netboot, let me know. Boost it in. I'd love to hear about it. Tis the season to boost, and it's never been easier without having to switch your podcast app. Fountain has Boost from the web now. We have that linked in our show to switch your podcast app. Fountain has boost from the web now. We have that linked in our show notes. You will need a Fountain account, but you create that and then you can start boosting using your internet browser rather than a mobile app, which I think some people really like. Breeze, B-R-E-E-Z, is also making

it easy to boost without switching podcast apps. You can find our feed inside that app, and it is an entirely self-hosted lightning node in the mobile app. It's actually quite the technical achievement. It's been years in the making, and it is really impressive. So go get BREEZ for iOS or Android, then you can boost without switching apps. If you are ready to change it up and adopt the new standards, then go to newpodcastapps.com. We love Fountain, Podverse, and Castomatic. There's a lot to choose from, but each of them support the podcasting 2.0 spec, which means things like transcripts, which may be relevant soon, cloud chapters, which gives you even more context and information in your chapters, and a neat feature that I love is within 90 seconds of the episode being posted

or going live, you get notified. They have a really great update mechanism as part of that standard, as well as about 15 other specs, including boosts that are just incredible and bringing features to podcasting. We need to compete with things like YouTube, Spotify, Rumble, and all the other platforms that want to be podcast platforms. So it might be time to try out a new app. New year coming up, maybe time for a new podcast app. Either way, it's never been easier to boost, and you can support the show on your own schedule, at your own amount, with your own message.

And we always appreciate the support, and we always appreciate you listening. Well, we got a boatload of boosts this week, and I think we even have some ballers. And now it is time for the boost. We got a couple of baller boosters actually this week. Our first baller is Brazzer, who came in with 32,030 sats. Hey, Rich Lobster! Coming in hot with the boost! Alright, you finally convinced me.

I now have Albie Hub installed on my Rock Pro 64 NAS. Yes, sir! Yes! Okay. So, he says I have it accessible via tail scale only. This is actually a pretty fun project to do.

I learned how to do reverse proxy with Nginx, and now I have Jellyfin, Notify, and even NextCloud accessible like this. I was a bit worried about security, but nothing's open to the internet. This was the year of Linux self-hosting for me. Nice. That's rad.

Thank you for sharing your setup. That is very great to hear. Well done. He says, by the way, some tech details. The Rock Pro 64 is running Armbian. Services are installed via Docker containers and I have two RAID 1 arrays, one with

an 8 terabyte hard drive and the other with two 500 gigabyte SSDs. Right now, the first one is my media storage. The second one is my NextCloud document storage. That is pretty great. He says, also, Concate 46 with the sum of my total boost, and you get my zip code. Oh, he's got a hidden zip code in there, Wes.

Yes, zip code is a better deal. Yes, zip code is a better deal. It's a better deal, Wes. It's such a better deal. Okay. Hey, Wes, I's such a better deal. Okay. Hey, Wes, I don't know if you knew this. Yes, zip code is a better deal. Beginning to regret getting that clip.

Oh, whoa, watch that thing, Wes. Watch that thing. Come on now. Yeah, I added metal bits to the... That is not Christmas decorations. That's just dangerous, Wes. Oof. I'm going to guess that this is a postal code in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Whoa, hello, Brazil. Nice to hear from you, and great work on getting Albie Hub set up. That is awesome to hear. That's a great way to do it, and now you're participating in a self-hosted way, and you're supporting the show directly. It's so cool. It's so cool.

It's so cool. Our next Baller Booster is Todd from Northern Virginia. He comes in with 22,222 sats. Things are looking up for old MacDuck. This old duck still got it. He says, I wanted to share a quick tip about the ad blocker discussion. When I run into a website that's getting blocked by my Pi hole, I simply switch on my VPN.

I keep an anonymous account with Mulvad that I paid for with Bitcoin. This routes my traffic outside my home network, bypassing Pi hole entirely and resolving overly aggressive blocking issues. Seems like a handy way to do it where you don't have to necessarily, you know, disable it for the whole network. Yeah.

I love how he's like like, VPNing himself here. This is the best use of a VPN I've heard of in a while. He's bypassing himself. DHCP, we have DHCP over TLS over HTTPS. Why not, you know, DHCP over WireGuard? Free KVH boosts in with 20,000 sats. Love the last sounds. Brings me back.

I cut that. Wasn't sure people caught that last episode. Oh, come on. Hit me in the feels. Oh, okay. And then second boost here. As far as I know, Albie Hub doesn't have to be on the public internet to function, right?

Mine isn't, and everything works for me. I guess you could use Tor, right? Yeah, totally. And if you could just have private channels? Yeah. And as long as things are, I guess, those are working and not getting firewalled, then you should be okay. Yeah. Yeah, I think so.

But ours are public just because of the nature of what we're doing, so that's why we can't speak confidently on it. But I do believe that is the case. Yeah, my only thought would be maybe it would make receiving a lot tricky depending on. Yeah, if you're trying to get from rando folks that you weren't. But if you're always getting from private channels and you're doing very specific things, it should be okay. And it sounds like it's working.

It's great. Yeah. Thank you for the boost and congratulations on AlbieHub free. Nice to hear from you. We have a gene boost here for 2048 Satoshis. Because I'm the win. For the consultant building a home virtualization server, a plus for Proxmox is the option to use Veeam for backups.

Do you guys know Veeam? V-E-E-A-M? Veeam backup for Proxmox. V-E performs a number of things, Brentley. It'll backup things for you. It'll backup infrastructure for you, and it'll deploy backups for you. Nice. So there you go.

Yeah, Veeam, V-E-A-M. I think Gene makes a good broader point here, too, just that, you know, Proxmox is just about, I don't know if you'd call it standard, but it's super common. It's well supported, so you're probably more likely to run into other folks who are willing to support it or have plugins or services for it or whatever. I would say it's even more so than the last couple of years with some of the changes at VMware and Rockcom. I think people are looking at Proxmox with a lot more serious consideration now. And it's a good product. Thank you, Gene.

Nice to hear from you. Listener Jeff, a.k.a. PJ, comes in with 8,888 sats. Oh my god, this drawer is filled with Froot Loops! He points out that the Tuxy should have KD Connect. It's like, a lot of times we only put stuff that's come out this year, but then we've started mixing that.

So I'll take that. Also, for best CLI tool, the other category, one we should have considered was perhaps Nix Shell. We love that one a lot. We use it daily. Yeah. But that's dangerous. How is that not the goat? Yeah, that is.

Yeah. And for the non-Nixers out there, it gives you the ability to just quickly, essentially instantiate any application you want. Just nix shell dash p, name of application. There's a way to do it with your Flake system too. And you just say the application, boop, boop, boop, pulls down, boom, runs it. It creates a small little environment immediately for you.

And then when you're done, you can just destroy it. Also great, you can go like, hey, give me a Python with these packages available. Yeah, you can get fancy like that and give me a Python with these packages available. Yeah. You can get fancy like that and get dependencies that are pinned to particular versions. It's like the net boot for packages. I love it. I don't know about that.

Oh, come on. All right. We'll go for it. We're like the net boot of podcasts, I guess. It's not the distro. It's the way you boot it. Yeah, that's right. Jeff says that, because I've been asking, hey, what is this the year of?

And nobody's been taking me up on it except for PJ. He says, obviously, it's the year of immutable desktops. I resisted them until NixOS and SteamOS, then the deck came out. I just didn't like the idea that I couldn't muck around in my root. It's my root after all. I get that. Yeah, I do get that too. Yeah, but knowing Jeff, that's probably a good thing.

But NixOS finds good balance for me. after all. I get that. Yeah, I do get that too. Yeah, but knowing Jeff, that's probably a good thing. But NixOS finds a good balance for me, and despite being a tinker, I haven't needed to break into my Dex root for anything. Because of this, I kind of now look forward to playing with this fancy new standard that's being adopted across the board. I would challenge anyone to find me any other

Metastory bigger than Immutable Linux this year. And I know it's not just new to this year, but just look at what's going on out there. You've got GNOME and KDE Plasma announcing their own OSs, which are immutable. You've got the Steam Deck selling like gangbusters based on an immutable Arch distribution. You've got Fedora with multiple spins that are immutable. You've got Ubuntu working on Ubuntu Core and an immutable desktop. You've got everything happening with NixOS that's also immutable.

It's Endless, which is reaching real users, is immutable. It's huge now. And it seems to be the direction of the future. Thank you, PJ. Appreciate the boost. Jordan Bravo boosts in with 5,000 sats. You's a boost. Me's a boost.

Aw, thanks, Mr. Bravo. 5,000 is a Jar Jar boost. Well, the immunologist came in with two rows of ducks. Boy, they are doing a lot with mayo these days. As a response to last week's episode about the new Linux distributions from the biggest desktop makers, he says, I personally don't think those

distros will add more value to Linux than investing those resources into Plasma and Gnome desktops. But who am I to judge? I only ever use OpenSUSE distros. Yeah. I think that's often the initial reaction. And I totally understand it

because I think that might have been my initial reaction for the first 10 minutes was like, oh, just sort of like this feeling of defeat. Like, we're never going to put all of our wood behind one arrow. And how, you know, then I fantasize for a microsecond

that feels like forever about how wouldn't it be amazing if we just all focused on one thing and built out this incredible desktop. And then I realized that was never on the table. Never going to happen. It's not how humans work. Especially not how open source works. It's out there. It's very much an organic development process like a lot of open source can be.

It's very much an organic development process like a lot of open source can be. And thankfully, there's a lot of primitives they can build on that are commonly shared. A lot of the core components are shared across all Linux distributions. And improvements that they make to those and the more users they get on those improve those subsystems. That improves all Linux distributions. So while there will be a lot of work, particularly for their experiences, the issues and the problems and the discoveries that they make at those layers

will benefit all Linux users. So it's not a 100% loss. It's still a pretty good win overall, I think. I would also say the talk that we linked last week that introduced this concept really went into details about what they do and don't want to replace. Like they don't want to be packaging things. They want to create this to make things easier for everyone. So I think visiting that talk, actually, if you're interested

in the reasons why behind this, greater detail, it was a good visit. Go watch that. Now, the second message here says also also, automatic updates plus immutable plus stock GNOME is not enough for a new distro. Aon has it and probably other distros do as well. And plus one for Kernel News. I think that's a solid argument. You know, it takes more to the experience perhaps than just stock. We shall see. We'll see where they take that. Also, thank you for the plus one on the kernel news. That's now two votes we've had for more kernel news coverage, and I

love hearing that because the kernel is well, it's surprisingly very exciting, even though it's as old as it is. I mean, we're not changing the name to Redox Unplugged. Only on April Fool's. Only on April Fool's. And there's so many cool things happening in in the linux kernel in the next several releases so we'll keep an eye and just

stuff we think that is worth talking about we'll bring to the show thank you for the signal on that also thank you for the boost nice to hear from you mr immune spectaurus comes in with a row of ducks and he sent it from the podcast index probably using AlbiHub the way I solve ad blocking it's multifold first I have a home main network that is fully DNS ad blocked to prevent breakages for others

with work and school context I have a private separate VLAN for my work laptop and my spouse this way I can leave DNS unfiltered here and let the application on that VLAN decide what to do. When my kids are old enough, I can have a VLAN for them in their school that has tighter filters or customized to their particular age. If your networking gear supports VLANs, put them to work.

Yeah, that's a great point. Great setup, Spectoris. That's a really solid way to do it. And kind of makes me want to upgrade my dumb switch. You know? Yeah, I'm feeling pretty jealous at this point. Bamam182 comes in with 5,109 sets. I have eight different bosses right now.

I've been running a NixOS firewall for a while now with overall great success. Current iteration uses Unbound for DNS, and I have some systemd services that pull in the OISD small and not safe for work block lists, then restart, then it restarts Unbound. This has been rock solid. I also threw in some nftables rules to force any attempts to reach out to port 53 via UDP to redirect to unbound. Helps when things try to use their own DNS servers

all sneakily. Yeah, smart. Between that and searching, thanks for that, see self-hosted, ads have been almost non-existent. Damn, that's a solid setup. Bam ham. I like that a lot. Wes, that kind of sounds like a setup you'd like yeah i do i have

a nixos firewall setup going i will also say nf tables uh i'm really enjoying nf tables i mean it's not perfect but such a nice usability upgrade from ip tables you know you don't hate working with it anymore but yeah unbound there's so many great options for for dns these days too i was tempted by unbound but i hadn't tried Technidium, so I was like, well, in the vein of experimentation. You got me really seriously considering Technidium DNS. You got me seriously considering it for my home setup, especially after I had to go spelunking in PyHole

to support Netboot. And thankfully, I had mapped my Etsy config and my DNS config to my home folder so I had all the files. I didn't have to do any exec into the container or anything like that. And there's lots of documentation how to do with Pyhole. But I asked you about, does Technidium DNS

just support TFTP server and PixieBoot? And you sent me a screenshot. I'm like, right here, here's the config for it right here in the UI. I did not double check, but I imagine there's an API option for that too. Thank you, Bam. Nice to hear from you. Yeah, I'm curious too. I don't think I've pushed mine yet,

but I will. Curious if other folks out there with NixOS firewalls or networking setups, they want to boost in or share configs? Definitely would love to hear some of that. Glavata boosted in 5,000 sets. You supposed! First time booster.

Thanks for the fun shows and keep up the great work. Thank you for taking the time and the effort to set that up, Glavata. I know depending on the route you take, it could be a bit treacherous. We really appreciate it. Yeah, we do.

I know, it's a big ask and we don't take it lightly. I hope to hear from you in the future and I hope Fountain works really really appreciate it. Yeah, we do. I know. It's a big ask, and we don't take it lightly. I hope to hear from you in the future, and I hope fountain works really well for you. Welcome aboard. Oh, CavemanF16 is here with 4,445 stats. I don't know. I like that number for some reason. I run PyHole as an LXC on Proxmox with both Proxmox and Pi-Hole on my tail net.

Then I point my tail net to my Pi-Hole as a DNS resolver for the whole tail net. Heck yeah. Every device is on my tail net. If the wife or kids run into things like edge cases, then I just temporarily disable Pi-Hole blocking with a time-based turn-it-off system. Yeah, that is one of the options in Pi-Hole. Oh, that is nice. Okay. Yeah, that is one of the options in piehole blockings. Ah, that is nice. Okay. Yeah, so you don't forget to turn it back on. Once the edge case has

been resolved, I look at the offending cookie web address and I add it to a custom whitelist so the wife or kids it's usually the wife, don't encounter the problems again. He says, to add to my previous boost, send another message, I explicitly do not point my home router at my piehole DNS so that if anything happens on my Proxmox box, Pihole and the LXE container or any of the equipment that supports it can still get the internet.

Yeah, that makes sense. Everything keeps working. I call it my balance between risk and safety for optimal productivity. That's a great setup. And it's a smart use of the tail net, to tell you the truth, because then you've got name resolution on anything that's on your tail net.

I have a pie hole in my tail net as well, but it's just a dedicated tail net pie hole. I might change that up. Yeah, I was just looking at this exact setup yesterday. I mean, Alex was definitely pushing me in this direction. But I got to thinking exactly about these edge cases. Like, well, I affect other people in my network and I don't want them to, you know, have some issues when they're trying to do work stuff. So I'm curious, a bunch of these

workaround solutions sound awesome, but I'm curious, how often do people run into these edge cases that you need to solve? Because if it's like, I don't know, a couple times a year, that'd be all right. If it's once a month, that's maybe okay. But if it's more than that, I'd be worried. I'm curious to hear, for those of you who have been doing this kind of DNS cleaning up of your networks for ads and stuff for a long time, how often are these edge cases showing up for you? You know, I think it's interesting too.

It's kind of showing here, I think, the solutions that fit can be different depending on what you're doing. You know, like if you're trying to go for like a network wide, you don't need to touch the end device. You just kind of want it to work solution. That could be very different than if you are just using, you know,

personal devices of you and a spouse and you can like make sure that those are always on things and are configured the way that you want. And, you it's neat it's that that's what i love about hearing everyone's diverse setup chukka busin with four thousand cents what is a mamble room also thank you for talking about graphene os it's really good to have these resources. That's me not enunciating clearly. It is a mumble, M-U-M-B-L-E, and that is an open source voice chat app with really great Opus Codex support, super low latency, and structured room permission. So we can have an on-air room,

we can have a quiet listening room, we can have a join queue so we can test your mic. We can even have like a restricted area if we don't want anybody to break in for a little bit. And every Linux unplug that we record, you know, usually about an hour to a half hour before the show starts, we open up our mumble room, which gets a direct feed off of the board. And then folks can, you know, shout out. Mumble room, everybody in the mumble room, say hi real quick. Just say hello. Just say hi.

There you go. There's one. Hello. There you go. There's one. Hello. There you go. There's two. The rest have their mics off at the moment. And they're listening. And then there's also for people that just don't have open mics, but they just want to listen.

There's a quiet listening area. And that runs alongside every single Linux Unplugged. And if we have a topic that you want to chime in on, you can tag us in the chat room, myself or Wes or Brent, and let us know. And if we've got the time, we'll work you in. And then, of course, we have the non-recording times where we're on the stream and it's sort of just open and anybody can chat at those times. So that's the mumble room. And we do have details on our website if you want to learn more. Oh, Chukuka comes in with one more boost for 2,121 sats to say, could someone pass along to the Fountain folks that

the show notes are really hard to find? So I saw this boost before my weekly meeting, which is back up to weekly now with Fountain FM, and we had a conversation around this, and thank you. This feedback's really valuable to the point that we demoed, we

basically tried various different UI options to try to look how to solve the problem to make it more discoverable and easy to find. We actually brought up the template for the next release and tweaked around with the different UI options, and they're based just on your boost. So these boosts about Fountain, I'm getting them directly to the folks in charge, and we're talking about them. So that's something that is now on their radar. Thank you, Chaka. Appreciate it. Spurious Tom sent in 5,510 sats. All systems are functional.

Well, Tidal has excellent quality, pays the artist more than other services, and has a pretty large selection. Also, if you have a subscription, there's an open source project, Tidal DL, that works similar to YouTube DL for making offline backups in high quality FLAC format. If you're going to use a streaming service, Tidal is the way to go. Wow. That is so great to know and probably just sealed the deal on me maintaining my Tidal subscription, which I signed up for after the show last week. I just decided let's solve this problem because audio quality matters to me. And the fact that they let me select like super crazy, ludicrous quality audio. That's neat.

And then show you in the UI that you're getting that or if you're not getting it. I love that kind of stuff. Do they have a family plan? I don't know. They do. That's a great question. They do have a family plan. I'm part of Drew's family.

Thank you, Drew. Aw. And Drew let us know and a few listeners let us know after the show last week when we were talking about Tidal that Tidal also pays artists in a different way than other streaming services. And they seem to be a bit more kind to the whole music industry in general. I didn't read more than that, but I trust what our listeners and Drew are saying. So if you care about that, then that's another tick in the right box in my game. The big thing for me is the fact that this title DL thing exists. I don't mind continuing to pay if I can also save my favorite tracks offline. And I'll just, like I do that with Audible. I've had an Audible subscription since the beginning of time. I don't listen to any of my books through

the Audible app. I use Audio Bookshelf, but I buy them and I continue to subscribe to Audible because that's a fair exchange in my opinion. I can say, Chris, I have used Tidal DL. It works amazingly. Dang, okay. That's great news. That is great news. I have to look into that family plan, Wes, since you could be part of the family.

CMCUSN. I'm going to go with that. There's probably something there, right? Comes in with 13,337 sats. Heck yeah. The traders love the Vol. Maybe Colonel McSun? Okay.

Let's go with that. Using Podverse. Very nice. The best hardware vendor not included in the tuxes has got to be Nova Custom. I got an insane 16-inch laptop and dock from them to replace my 2015 MacBook Pro last month. It's running Fedora 41. It's got the Intel Arc GPU.

Ooh. I paid for it with XMR, which is Monero. They also accept Bitcoin. There's no VAT outside of the EU. They have custom firmware with Intel ME, probably disabled, powerful high refresh rate screen, free shipping, and a three-year warranty. I don't think I've even heard of Nova Custom before.

That sounds like a great laptop, though. I so want the right laptop. I so want the right laptop so badly. I'm going to take a look. It looks like they also do Corbo laptops. Yeah, I think that's pretty cool. That sounds really cool. Yeah.

Well, thank you for putting that on our radar. CM really appreciate that. Take a look after the show. Jay comes in with 10,000 sats. It's over 9,000 via cast a medic. Check out. And then here's a link to get hub amateur. God home assistant,

technetium DNS. Oh boy. This is kind of like what I was talking about with pie hole. Of course they have available for technetium to an easy way to switch on and off dns ad blocking and so much more a lot more wow this is really comprehensive and also buttons for temporarily disabling ad blocking for 5 10 30 60 in one day i was gonna say i did just check on my uh home router yeah has got that also has a blocking bypass list if you want to put in IP addresses that don't get blocked. I think I'm switching.

I think that just sealed the deal. I think I'm switching. That looks really sweet. Thanks, Nungi. It does say that they haven't tried it. Oh, that looks really good. Because they're also looking to switch from Pi hole but have not yet. It looks good.

Thank you. Yeah, my problem is my pie hole is working just fine. But this is so sweet. Looks like they just put a release out on November 7th of this year. So it's only December 8th. So it's been about, you know, just over a month since they put out a release. Actively maintained. Actively maintained, I say.

That's really good to see. Thank you for that tip. Appreciate that boost. We have three boosts for a total of 6 000 sats from adversaries well that's very good buddy well number one i think linux millionaire but with sats would be way more fun yes yeah so the context there is on the live stream last week carl stepped up and he won a million fake dollars he he went all the way on Linux Millionaire. He did a great job. I suppose that means we have to, you know,

buy him a snack or a beverage next time we see him. I think so. Boost number two, Technidium. I've used that before. I loved it. It was a very solid experience. This was before I had Tailscale, though, so every service I had was a separate VM

and I needed a way to make dns records at home worked great for as long as i used it i did get rid of it after getting a new router with a dns resolver built in though also a note here that it looks like albie hub has a new app called zap planner he says which could make autopilot memberships possible using SATs. Oh. That's interesting. All right. ZapPlanner.

The Malmy folks make good stuff. They do. And it's all open source. Thank you, Mr. Adversaries. Always like hearing from you. Mike HXC comes in with a spooky 6,666 SATs. Analysis mode. Password 80085.

This is the way. Hey, guys. Long-time mode. Password 80085. This is the way. Hey guys, long time listener, first time booster. Nice. Mike, thank you for taking that journey.

You know we really appreciate that. At the moment I can only send earned fountain sets, but I'll find a way to get more in my wallet. The UK seems to not

really support Moonpay or things like that. Any advice for the UK users would be appreciated. Hoping to start a 666-based Iron Maiden-themed boost. We should get that. That's right. Yeah, come on.

All right, PJ. Come on. I'll get you something. All right. I think, okay, so this is where I think we need, like, boost buddies. You know, someone else who's already gone through the process in that country. Yeah. Because, yeah, I've, someone else who's already gone through the process in that country. Because, yeah, I've never tried. And it seems like maybe the U.K. is one of the trickier places to find a place that, you know, banks and cards are happy with.

I thought Strike was available now, but perhaps, perhaps maybe, you know, might maybe it's like different banks too. Strike would be the way, if it is available, Strike would be the way I would go. Because they're in like 110 countries now. But I know we've gotten some good suggestions for UK-based places to get SATs before, but we could definitely use a refresher, because it's hard for us to really know which ones are great, since it's not really something we use. And Starmus boosts in with 12,345 SATs.

So the culmination is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Thanks for bringing my attention to KDE Banana. I currently daily drive Neon and I like it, but I'm definitely excited for a new KDE distro. I'll start using it probably in a VM and maybe on a spare laptop sometime soon, but I won't be able to run it as a daily driver until June at the earliest because I'm using my desktop for something that I really can't interrupt until then. Thanks for the great shows. Now, see, this sounds like some sensible planning where you don't get yourself in a, you know, sticky situation and then end up being frustrated with the distro.

Yeah. Yeah. Maybe they should run the studio. Okay. I like what you're thinking. Otter Brain boosts in with 11,000 sats Thanks gents haven't boosted in a bit but here's one for ya you know DE's really have

come a long way it's great to have the choices we have in Linux yeah, amen incredibly, like Plasma is such an awesome toolkit now and Gnome is such a lean mean machine and then of course the other desktops are just fantastic as well.

Thank you for the boost. Well, Nojo's sent in 6,300 sets through Podverse. Oh, this is Cajun Spice. Just want to share something I'm working on at home. Since JB talked about Thingio on the show, I have installed that on a couple of my cameras. Using MQTT functionality, I can send messages to Home Assistant. a couple of my cameras. Using MQTT functionality,

I can send messages to Home Assistant. And from there, I use XMPP to ping my phone with any Home Assistant-related notifications, including those from the camera. Looking to expand this out with some other automations. And thank you for all the great coverage and discussions. That's a fantastic setup. Freaking rad. So Thingio is great because you can take things like the Wyze cams and get them working with a USB Ethernet adapter and a standard RTMP stream and something like that.

And then he's using MQTT, I imagine, to grab some of the messaging that it can do, pipe that into Home Assistant. And then once it's in Home Assistant, it's essentially a sensor, and you can build automations around that. And then using XMPP to act as kind of like the push notifications comm layer from Home Assistant to his phone is such a great implementation. I mean, I don't really have any uses for XMPP, but maybe that's one of them. Like, it's just a great use for XMPP right there. That's really bringing it all together, Nojoes. That's a fantastic setup. Thank you for sharing that. I love that that that's really

great torped came in with 11 630 sets oh my god this drawer is filled with fruit loaves just supporting some great content he says well thank you we appreciate it torped chatty mike boos in a row of ducks not so chatty mike this time because Mike just says boost there you have it thank you well Faraday Fedora came in with 2025 Satoshis make it so sorry for the lack of Satoshis

lately been stacking but Black Friday membership deal you finally convinced me to go NixOS now it's time for you to get your ham ticket. I challenge the three of you to do so in 2025. Okay, that gives us some time at least.

GMRS can be useful, but ham radio is so much more. Amateur radio is Linux. GMRS is Android, if you will. Fun will now commence. All right, Faraday Fedora. I mean, those are strong words for a 2K sap boost,

but I'm going to take them to heart. No, it's 2025. I appreciate it. Right. We got 2025 to do it, so that is, we really should. We really should make good on that. You know, we really, really should. Thank you, Faraday.

It's just got to have a good Linux angle. Can you tell me the Linux angle so that way I can justify it as show content? Because otherwise I'm never going to spend time on it. You know, guys. Yeah. You know how I work. But keep stacking stats. Also, good thing to do.

Thank you, Faraday. Appreciate hearing from you. Somewhat Justin came in with a Jar Jar Boost. That's 5,000 stats. You're so boost. On a whim. I bought 28 old laptops. Wow.

What's happening? $60 off of Facebook Marketplace. Pay with cluster. Let's go. Some are quite old. One even has a Windows 2000 sticker on it. My plan is to fix up as many as I can and then turn them into serviceable, ultra-low-cost laptops for anyone who might need one. laptops for anyone who might need one. Okay, so besides swabbing out the SSDs or hard drives for SSDs and installing Linux,

any other tips for breathing new life into old hardware? For distros, I was thinking Mint with XFCE for good performance and usability, but I'm open to suggestions. I'd have to listen to your 32-bit episode again, I think. Thanks. Yeah, you know, I think Mint, it probably is not a bad way to go because I think you still have that. You can still get 32-bit versions, right? I will say this, and anybody that has a laptop that's a few years old, and if you can open it, you might want to consider disassembling it just to kind of go through it and clean it up.

I had to replace a fan in my son's Asus ROG, like G14 gaming laptop. One of his little fans died. And so you got to take off all the heat sinks anyways. And since I knew I was removing all the heat sinks, we decided to re-goop and, you know, put that silver stuff on there that helps with the heat dissipation. Thermal paste, yeah. Thermal paste, thank you.

Goop. And so we cleaned it all up, you know, just a tiny bit of isoprobe and just cleaned up all of the old thermal paste, which was getting a little old. And his laptop's, you know, three or four years old at the most, three years maybe. And put new thermal paste on. And just that, of course, with the new fan too, the system's running great. And I wouldn't be surprised if some of these older laptops, especially ones with Windows 2000, if opening them up, cleaning out the fans, if you can take off heat sinks, if they do have thermal paste or adding thermal paste, because it does dry out on these old laptops.

And it's not something people talk about very much. I don't know if any of them have replaceable batteries, but that could be, you know, a nice new treat. Obviously, RAM, if it got any old RAM to go around. So much, Justin. Stick around, too, for my pick. I think it could be useful in this context as well. So don't miss that. Thank you for the boost.

Great to hear from you. Brandon boosts in with $4,096. Boy, they are doing a lot with Mayo these days. Metastory, it's definitely the year of immutable distros. Yep, all right. Or call it the year of the immutable Linux desktop if you must. As for AlbieHub, what are the pros of taking the time to set it up and dealing with liquidity over just using Breeze?

So you get kind of a more full-featured, like, your own lightning node. So that means you can do other lightning things with it. You can connect to other apps. There's a lot of other apps in the ecosystem which you start playing around that are actually pretty great. And it's sort of your own central backend that you can share between multiple apps, where Breeze is all just one self-contained app.

But that might be all you want. Especially if all you're doing is boosting? Yeah. Then Breeze is totally fine. Yeah. I think that's where you draw the line right there. I think it is the year of immutable distros, right? Even though it's not brand new to this year, it really feels like it. It really, it's like everybody that's making distros is now on board with that idea. For better or for worse, maybe you think it's worse.

Tell us. Thank you, Brandon. Good to hear from you. Well, Sam H boosted in a row of ducks. Here's another DNS server to consider, Blocky. It's not as fancy as Technidium or AdGuard, but it can be configured 100% declaratively in NixOS. That also means I can easily run it on multiple servers for redundancy.

I've only been using it for encrypted DNS and local records, not blocking because of the risk of breaking things, especially for family. They also link to their Nix config. Thank you. We love when you do that. Oh, yeah. Let's take a look. Okay, great.

Thank you. And it includes their DNS-blocky.nix. All right. There's a lot of good options. I think I wasn't sure if this one did THCP, which I wasn't strictly needed, but a lot of these do both, which is convenient. Looks super nice. This supports UDP and TCP, DNS over HTTPS, TLS. Yeah.

Ooh, Prometheus metrics. Love that. I'm going to be looking through that config later. Thank you for sharing this. It's been a minute since somebody shared their config, and I love it. CLI tool, REST API. That's pretty good. Pretty good.

Lucky, eh? Thanks, Sam. Nice to hear from you. Statsacker7 came in with 7,100 sats. Just pump the brakes right there. Hey, guys. I'm now listening regularly since the last couple of months. As a newcomer to the show, I noticed a lot of inside terms being used as jokes.

Things like mumble, which was covered last week, or lady jupes, or why Chris has a passion for nano, just to name a few. I still don't get when you're all opening the onepassword.com website, why are you surprised by how fast it loads? Could you enlighten me? What's this about? Alright, so let's answer some of these inside jokes.

So the mumble room, we talked about that. Lady jupes is my class ARV. And Nano, because I believe that people should have a text editor, and I believe it should be default. I don't think we should gatekeep text editing. I'm remaining silent for a bit. Safety.

Now you tell me, if you go to the number one, password.com slash unplug, if that doesn't load insanely fast, I mean it's just remarkable how fast that loads. You should try it. 1password.com slash unplugged. If that doesn't load insanely fast. I mean, it's just remarkable how fast that loads. You should try it. One password dot com slash unplugged. Give it a go. Just to comment on last week's boost regarding security when exposing a lightning node from your home IP. If you do not plan to do any routing, it should be enough to just use private channels, in which case you do not need to advertise yourself to the public network. Okay. Kind of closes that loop up. Thank you very much. Yeah, I wasn't sure if there's any nuances. Like, you can have the

route hint for an invoice. I wasn't sure if you were trying to receive key send. Would that be trickier? Yeah. Thank you, SatStacker. Appreciate that boost. Planet Ace boosts in $8,555. Did you buy that from a certified vendor?

Hey, everyone. The boss of my department at work has resigned, and I've taken the opportunity to take his place. I thought I would see if the term boss boost sounds catchy enough to add to the boost stack. Try to use the amount of sats to spell boss. Okay, well, we have this sound effect. I have eight different bosses right now.

That's kind of a great boss move. Yep. I still think the coverage of the finer details or more technical details is important, e.g. new kernel features and the likes. Some of this content is hard to make exciting or sexy, but it needs to be addressed.

This doesn't really happen anywhere else, so keep up the good work and have a good week. Thank you. That's some good signal there. Appreciate that feedback. And we've got the boss boost now. We got eight of them. While Tomato sent in a row of ducks. Here is my Tuxy's vote for CLI program. MC

Midnight Commander has been a faithful companion since I switched to Linux in the 90s and has followed me to other Unixies as well. Classic. Is that not on there? Darn it. That is such a great one.

That is such a – and it's based on Norton Commander, which was something that was around before Windows 3 and Windows really was a popular UI. So, Heliot Packard and others would sometimes sell DOS-based workstations with Norton Commander as the whole UI. And Midnight Commander is very much inspired on that, and I love it. Maybe someone, if anyone can remember out there,

to go fill out the feedback form for next year's Tuxy. Yeah, I'm going to remember it because, dang it, that's an injustice. That is just an injustice. All right, thank you, everybody who boosted. That's everybody above the 2,000-sat cutoff. I did want to call out True Grits, who did send in just below the cutoff, 1,999. He's a longtime listener.

He said he loved the last news callback. I am so impressed so many of you caught that. I don't know because maybe it's been a decade. I just thought it would kind of go by unnoticed. But it was a little bit of a wink and a nod to the longtime listeners. So let's sum it all up, boys. We had 44 of you stream sats as you listened. And collectively, you sat streamers stacked us 62,651 sats. Not too

bad. And we appreciate everybody who's listening along and streams those sats as they do. Now, when you combine that with our boosters, we had 71 unique participants in the Value for Value Boost system this week, which is incredible. 71 of you made this show possible. Tens and tens of thousands, multiple tens of thousands, many tens of thousands of people will be listening to this show. 71 of you and our members made it possible. And together, you stacked 304,646 sets. Not bad at all. Thank you, everybody who participates either in the member program or by boosting.

The fastest, easiest way to get started is probably Fountain and Strike, if you can make that combination work for you. But as you hear from the boost, so many of our audience, they're willing to take the challenge of getting Albie Hub going and self-hosting and doing the entire thing. And actually, Breeze is a self-hosted approach as well. Just a freaking lightning note in your pocket. Thank you, everybody who goes to new podcast apps and gets one of those.

We'll have new features for you down the road, too. So there'll be more reasons to have one of those new apps. Thank you, everybody. Appreciate you. And, of course, shout out to the members. All right, I've been teasing this all episode. It's RescueZilla, and it is an easy-to-use front end for not just CloneZilla, but a lot of other tools. And it is a go-to rescue backup restore environment that I think you could leave with new users.

When you give them one of these, like, say, our booster who was sending folks laptops, when you give someone like Wes's mom a new computer, they could boot into this environment and you could absolutely walk them through it over the phone. It's big UI buttons, really easy to understand, comes right up on the screen, and it even gives them, like, multiple steps. So they could probably figure it out on their own, too, if they were willing to just read the screen. So it's a really nice graphical interface that lets you back up Windows, Mac, or Linux systems to any external storage or a network storage. It's fully interoperable with CloneZilla. So it's kind of like this nice front end to CloneZilla to get you started in a user-friendly way. It's called RescueZilla. This looks really nice. I'm not sure how I haven't tried this before. I know. I know. Because I love CloneZilla. This looks really nice. I'm not sure how I haven't tried this before.

I know. I know. Because I love CloneZilla. Yeah. And, you know, for you and I and the listeners, we'll probably just, you know, whatever live environment you like, and then you get CloneZilla going. But if you think about something that's either A, a go-to, and by the way, this is in the NetBoot XYZ menu. That's how I found this. So if you're using Netboot boom you're just pulling

this right up now but also i think it'd be handy to have around if you don't have netboot but you want something that you could give to people to help recover data they don't even have to be a linux user and that you can also get on the internet and pull up a browser they've got specific software to help recover deleted pictures and documents and other files that users sometimes accidentally delete and uh yeah rescueilla is an open source project that's just been around for a while. I just, I guess, I don't know. Sometimes these things, you know, they miss.

They miss us. Ironically, recently, I've been going the opposite direction. I've been using PartClone by itself as a CLI backup solution, which is one of the technologies that powers CloneZilla and, I guess, guess Rescuezilla as well. So how are you using it outside of Clonezilla? Are you calling it directly?

Yeah, so kind of like, you know how there's like the Fsic tooling for each file system, you know, like fsck.ext4. There's partclone.ext4 or.butterfs. Okay. And so I had a few old servers that I've been trying to you know modernize clean up shuffle around nixify etc and so as part of that i was just doing some backup

so i knew everything was done and i could you know delete these things and deal with the files later so i would k exec them into a nixos environment or use a rescue rescue c CD if that is supported and then install part clone because I didn't realize before, but you can stream the output. So you can take part clone, point it at the file system slash dev slash VDA1 and then stream that over SSH to wherever you're backing it up.

I love that you did SSH. That's great. And then you know, you're done. You just shut the machine off, delete it, or you know, use it for something else. God, that's handy, Wes. That's like a VPS hand. That's like super handy on a VPS. Where something like CloneZilla or RescueZilla is nice, if you really do want to do like a full

disk thing, it'll handle like recording what your partition layout was like and doing all that. If you just care about like one file system at a time, then PartClone is super handy. And then, of course, if you just want files or whatever, then there's a million other options. And if you want something even a family member could use, RescueZilla.

So you got it all the way. You got the whole stack there. We don't give CloneZilla enough love either. It's such a great, useful tool. Worth saying, too, the thing that makes PartClone good is you get a whole backup of the file system with all the file system structure intact, but it only backs up the used space. So you don't have to, right? There's no compression to do that.

It just knows how to backup because that's why it has a utility for each file system because it uses the file system knowledge to do these really nice little backups. That seems like the kind of backup I would like to do is, you know, part clone each individual one and then go to a new system, create new partitions, maybe of a different size, maybe not, and then individually restore them with that. Over SSH, of course. And using Kexec, no doubt. Where's the Netcat?

Well, yeah. Did you Netcat it to SSH? Or where was Netcat involved? Please tell me your Netcat had come with it. I didn't this time, but I will, you know, locally. You can just swap out SSH for Netcat. Well, you. Did you Netcat it to SSH? Where was Netcat involved? Please tell me you Netcat it somewhere. I didn't this time, but I will locally. You can just swap out SSH for Netcat. Well, you could Netcat to 127.0.1. They're already on SSH. I mean, you can figure out a way, Wes. Or you could Netcat to one machine, and then that machine takes it, and then SSH is it.

I'll have it for next episode. Okay, thank you. Remember, we want to hear your thoughts. Can Flathub succeed where 20 years of Linux app stores have failed? Why or why not? Boost that in. Also, if you've got any ninja moves for Netboot or customizing Netboot, please do let us know. And we only have a few live shows left.

We have the Tuxes on the 22nd where we'll do two of our last live shows of the year, give away some sats. That's in two weeks. Yep. Coming up in two weeks, December 22nd. We'd love to have you there. We do the show on Sundays at 12 p.m. Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. See you next week. Same bat time, same bat station. I haven't actually checked, but I'm sure we need more votes in the tuxes. Oh, I bet we do. Right. Tuxes.party. Oh my gosh, we didn't even mention it. There's so much going on. You were not even to 1k responses yet. Only

two weeks to go. We got to get over 1K. This is a disaster. This is a disaster. Tuxes.party, please go vote. I think we had at least 2K last year, right? Maybe the Tuxes are done. Maybe it's done. Maybe this is the last year of the Tuxes.

You know? If it barely gets across the finish line, we're done. That's what I say. Links to what we talked about today, LinuxUnplugged.com slash 592. Hey, we appreciate you. Thank you for listening. Thank you if you've ever shared it with anybody. And we hope you'll join us right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday. Thank you. It turns out if you try hard enough, you can.