Chris: Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
Wes: My name is Wes.
Brent: And my name is Brent.
Chris: Hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show, today we're digging into the Linux
Chris: news that's being shaped by delays and some interesting technical shifts that
Chris: might actually matter more than they look at first. I'll tell you about that.
Chris: Then there's a moment where the future actually showed up in Linux and everything
Chris: worked. We'll share that story.
Chris: And then we'll round it out with some great boosts, some picks,
Chris: and a lot more. So before we go any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings
Chris: to producer Jeff. Hey, PJ.
Mumble: Hello.
Chris: It's the big game day, as they say. So we have a few up there in the quiet listening
Chris: up the hello, hello, hello, mumble room.
Chris: And PJ is the sole member brave enough to set the nachos aside long enough to say hello on the show.
Chris: So why don't you make it a Tuesday on a Sunday next week and join us in our
Chris: mumble room. And let's have a nice, vital, big mumble room. You know what I mean?
Wes: I mean, if you do, you get a whole extra show.
Chris: Yeah. Round of applause to people. Dijil just showed up. Round of applause to you guys.
Chris: And of course, a big good morning to our friends over at Defined Networking.
Chris: Go to defined.net slash unplugged. This is where you want to go to get 100 machines
Chris: absolutely free, no credit card required on the decentralized managed VPN.
Chris: They manage it for you. It runs Nebula VPN.
Chris: Unlike traditional VPNs, Nebula's decentralized design keeps your network resilient.
Chris: You can manage a home lab with it. I have a Nebula network that's just two nodes.
Chris: And you can have a Nebula network that has thousands of nodes.
Chris: entire global infrastructures across data centers, carrier grade NAT, whatever it might be.
Chris: It's extremely resilient. Saved my butt the other day. I was able to get it
Chris: on the wife's machine and save a problem before she even knew it was going on.
Chris: It's so nice. You could go from
Chris: this teeny tiny lean infrastructure where there's no big tech company.
Chris: You don't need any sign on from Google or whoever to use your mesh net.
Chris: You can do these tiny setups or you can go to these massive slack size scale, right?
Chris: And it's incredible. And if you want to try it out, you can start with Managed
Chris: Nebula. You can use 100 devices for free.
Chris: You can really get a sense of it. It's a great product. It's also a lot leaner on the system.
Chris: Shows up in multiple ways, on the CPU and on the network.
Chris: It's really great for that. And it's got best-in-class encryption,
Chris: and it is fantastic because,
Chris: you control the keys, you control the lighthouse, so the redundancy,
Chris: the discoverability, all of it is under your control, or you let them run it
Chris: over at define.net slash unplugged.
Chris: Then if you wanted to move on, you could. You could self-host it too.
Chris: They're really, really great product because it's the Snebula open sourcing,
Chris: something that we've been following for years.
Chris: Absolutely. I think maybe we started watching in late 2017, early 2018.
Chris: And so we knew there was something there. Now to see it really take off,
Chris: it's really impressive.
Wes: I just noticed on February 6th, we got an updated Android app.
Wes: So, you know, if you are using it, go check that out.
Chris: Check it out. Go over to defined.net slash unplug, support the show,
Chris: and check out Nebula. It is fantastic.
Chris: Just around the corner, 25 days away, Planet Nix and Scale 23X.
Chris: We're working with our buddies over at Phlox, who's focused on making reproducible
Chris: dev environments actually usable.
Chris: They're sending us once again to Planet Nix for the second year.
Chris: They're throwing a hell of an event.
Chris: It's looking good. Year two is looking really, really good.
Chris: And Brent, you have 19 days until you're going to be absolutely slammed to get down the road.
Chris: It's about a 46-hour drive for you, buddy, which is six days of hardcore driving.
Chris: How are you feeling about that?
Brent: I'm glad you've been doing the travel math on this one for me.
Brent: I appreciate it. Yeah. That sounds daunting.
Chris: Sure.
Brent: I think is the main emotion that comes across. And also, holy,
Brent: I probably should leave tomorrow, right? That's what I should do?
Chris: Yeah, well, if you want to have a nice drive. Here's another way to put it in
Chris: perspective. There will be three more unplugs until we are in Pasadena.
Brent: That's frightening. I mean, wonderful. It's coming soon.
Wes: Just keep that one in your head. I think it's easier to work with.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Yep. Three more lumps. So there you go.
Chris: Check out planetnix.com for the details and then go get registered at scale.
Chris: That gets you to both events.
Chris: We have a link in the show notes for scale at socialinuxexpo.org.
Chris: And you can use our promo code unpludge, U-N-P-L-G, to get 40% off your registration. It's no joke.
Chris: And I've updated the meetup page a little bit as well. We, I think,
Chris: are locking in the yard house because the other two locations are no longer in business.
Chris: I was informed by a local listener which I really appreciated it is but it's
Chris: great we already have a good showing and if you are planning to be there at
Chris: our meetup please go sign up so we can let the venue know oh.
Wes: Great already 25 potential attendees join the crowd.
Chris: Meetup.com slash jupiter broadcasting for that and we'd love it if you could
Chris: be there even if you're not going to one of the events show up and say hi we
Chris: like that so there you go that's all the housekeeping I have for you,
Chris: So we wanted to get everybody on the same page with a couple of stories that
Chris: have gone down, and the first one you may have already heard about,
Chris: It's not too surprising. We just wanted you to be aware. Valve has updated their
Chris: plans for their recently announced upcoming hardware lineup.
Chris: All three products announced last November are now expected to ship in the first
Chris: half of the year instead of in early 2026. So it's a bit of a delay here.
Brent: In a Steam community post, Valve explained the lack of firm release dates.
Brent: Basically, ongoing RAM and SSD shortages combined with the rising prices,
Brent: making it hard to lock in final pricing and also launch timelines.
Chris: That's not too surprising, is it?
Wes: No. Okay, but what are we talking about concretely? Well, it's the Steam machine,
Wes: the Steam Frame VR headset, and that new Steam controller.
Wes: In their statement, they did say this in a very Valve way, I thought.
Wes: They have more, quote, work to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates.
Chris: It's like they don't even know.
Wes: No, and are still kind of figuring that out internally. I mean,
Wes: but they did then secondly emphasize, especially given how quickly hardware
Wes: market conditions are changing right now.
Chris: I think some of us maybe were lingering on to this hope that they had maybe bought a pre-stock.
Wes: Which things were already rolling and done and you were just going to ship them. Yeah.
Chris: And then we recently saw these rumors floated that there was a possible bare
Chris: bones steam machine with no RAM or storage that they might ship.
Chris: And they didn't seem to really give much life to that rumor in this press release
Chris: and in the questions that they took. Do you think that would be a product?
Wes: I mean, it might be for our crowd. I don't know. It doesn't seem like it competes
Wes: as much in the console market.
Chris: For sure.
Brent: Yeah.
Chris: I think in normal market conditions, a bare-bones steam machine would be the one I would want.
Chris: But I can't buy RAM or storage any cheaper than Valve can.
Brent: Exactly.
Chris: So yeah, it's like if I have it, yeah, then I would like a bare-bones machine.
Chris: I'm curious that if you're listening to this and you could boost and let me
Chris: know if you would buy a bare-bones steam machine if they offered it.
Chris: And they might be able to ship that sooner would be the advantage.
Chris: So if you had the money to spend and you could buy your own storage and your own RAM,
Chris: And you could get your hands on this a couple of months before others.
Brent: One of the questions I have is like, how long can they wait for prices to stabilize
Brent: or to secure hardware before the product just gets older and older and less worth releasing?
Wes: Why is it two grand for a three-year-old product?
Chris: You're right. Yeah, that's tricky. Maybe they know something we don't know.
Chris: Maybe they know some other vendors about to come online and start manufacturing RAM.
Chris: I don't know. But that's a good point. If they wait too long,
Chris: they're not going to be super competitive machines.
Brent: Yeah.
Chris: Huh. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not sure. I guess what we do know is that it's going to
Chris: be later than they originally suggested.
Wes: But they're still, for now, promising first half. So what, by June, July?
Chris: That's what I would take it to mean.
Brent: Assuming they don't change that again.
Wes: Right. Do we think it even ships in this year?
Brent: Jeff, how are you feeling about this? Were you going to buy one of these?
Mumble: Yeah i'm a little sad i really really really want a frame.
Chris: Yes yes me too that's the thing for me is the frame i'm surprised the controller's
Chris: delayed that's interesting maybe maybe there's memory on the controller it's.
Brent: All that ram in the controller.
Chris: You feel for valve because when they announced this it was maybe the writing
Chris: was on the wall at that point but it wasn't obvious where this was all going
Chris: price-wise certainly wasn't.
Wes: Where we are now.
Chris: And now here we are and it's like you feel for don't you i.
Mumble: Think if they can get through the covid stuff with the steam deck i'm pretty
Mumble: sure they're going to get through this too they'll find some way it won't be
Mumble: as much as we hope you know i don't think they're going to do any better than
Mumble: they did with the steam deck.
Chris: That's true though that was challenging got it out yeah and they.
Wes: Are very smart you know they have a lot of smart people working there that's.
Chris: A good point all right pj you're making me feel better i like that all right
Chris: here's another story that may suggest an interesting shift virtual
Chris: box is finally learning to ride on
Chris: top of kvm some code changes are landing
Chris: in virtual box that could have big implications long
Chris: term for how people use it it's just being tested now they're beginning to support
Chris: native kvm virtualization backend for the virtual box application that's crazy
Chris: i know it's a long-standing ask from the linux users out there who just want
Chris: no i don't want a little kernel module. I totally get that.
Chris: Very early, very opt-in, hard to get. We'll get more into that.
Chris: But this does seem to be a trend that we just keep seeing is that hypervisors
Chris: over time are just adopting Linux's native virtualization stack and just saying,
Chris: ah, fuck, you can just screw it. You can just use that.
Chris: I mean, VMware did a similar thing. I just think that's fascinating.
Brent: I mean, this is one of the main reasons I moved away from VirtualBox.
Brent: It was the first virtualization software that I used way back when I was stuck
Brent: on, let's just say, other operating systems.
Brent: um but then once i discovered like why there's
Brent: all these kernel modules and stuff that was the reason
Brent: for me to move away from it so i would assume for other linux
Brent: users this is about reducing kernel friction so less
Brent: reliance on those proprietary kernel drivers
Brent: that you have to load and sometimes break better compatibility
Brent: with hardened kernels secure boot and distro
Brent: updates right right that is a good point would be a great point and i think
Brent: from a privacy and freedom angle basically kvm is part of the kernel so it's
Brent: audited it's upstream transparent and running virtual box on kvm shifts that
Brent: trust towards the kernel rather than vendor specific modules what.
Wes: Brent you don't trust oracle.
Brent: Well let's just say i have less reasons to trust oracle than i do the kernel fair.
Chris: Yeah good point.
Brent: So they're pretty much Oracle's positioning this as a fallback,
Brent: so not the preferred path for VirtualBox.
Brent: So the messaging still centers Oracle's hypervisor as the, quote,
Brent: better choice, especially for legacy workloads.
Chris: Yeah, isn't that interesting? Like, I mean, I guess I get it.
Chris: They're very proud of what they've done, and they've specialized it over the
Chris: years to address their users.
Wes: They're not just chucking the old one on the ground, throwing it behind the bag.
Chris: But it's not often where somebody submits an upstream patch so that way their
Chris: software can take advantage of something in the kernel and then includes like
Chris: a five bullet point. But this is why ours is better, right?
Chris: Did anything in there stand out to you that was reasonable? I mean, there must be some.
Wes: Yeah, a lot of it is like legacy and exotic guests, right?
Wes: So if you think about KVM, when it came of age, which was after VirtualBox,
Wes: and it's been very Linux native, and it's been used a lot by hyperscalers to
Wes: run cloud businesses, running a lot of Linux guests,
Wes: whereas VirtualBox can run a whole bunch of stuff.
Wes: It's got accurate A20 gate emulation, which is important for some DOS stuff.
Wes: It's got advanced instruction emulation, ring zero device emulation tricks,
Wes: aggressive VM exit optimizations.
Wes: For modern guests, you really don't notice a ton of difference for most situations.
Wes: But if you do have some particular legacy workloads, you might find some areas
Wes: where the old driver would be better.
Wes: I still think even partial KVM support is, you know, a win for us.
Wes: It is, as you said, hard to get.
Wes: It's in the latest VirtualBox Git and Test Builds, Linux only for now.
Wes: So you can't, you know, obviously.
Wes: So you have to go build it yourself.
Chris: Okay. All right.
Wes: Or I'd be comfortable with getting one of those test builds from somewhere else.
Wes: You can opt into it explicitly if you want, or as Brent was saying,
Wes: I think probably what is probably an upgrade for folks and end users who maybe
Wes: don't know what a kernel module is, is this could be a easy fallback,
Wes: right? So it could try to run with the virtual box stuff.
Wes: Sees KVM's already loaded, kernel conflict, just go use KVM.
Wes: Maybe you won't have all the features. Maybe it won't be quite the same, but it'll work.
Chris: That's going to be the main use case initially for this.
Wes: Probably would. I think it's going to convince them to do it, right?
Chris: Yeah, yeah. I wonder if long-term, if there isn't some potential for VirtualBox
Chris: to essentially become one of the recommended user space VM managers for KVM.
Chris: That was my first thought is, oh, it would be a nice way to manage a bunch of
Chris: KVM systems, especially if I could remote connect from my desktop,
Chris: if I could have the VirtualBox VM management UI on my desktop and then I connect
Chris: to my KVM server and I could manage all my virtual machines at KVM with the VirtualBox UI, I mean,
Chris: I think I would at least give that a try.
Wes: It has been, right? Like it is in some of the best ways of open source,
Wes: even with its own licensing complications in Oracle and all the rest,
Wes: like it's been around for a long time.
Wes: It was early at having a good, consistent cross-platform experience.
Wes: It's just this like very available if you need virtualization software.
Wes: And that has a lot of utility, especially now if it can kind of adapt.
Wes: I do also think you kind of hit on the Linux side trend of folks using more
Wes: of this existing in-kernel infrastructure.
Wes: And I think that's a trend that is beyond Linux, right?
Wes: Like you've seen Apple offer a lot more robust virtualization primitives in their system.
Chris: Right, they provide the plumbing and then you write to the API, essentially.
Wes: And same on the Microsoft stack, right? You got Hyper-V side,
Wes: you've got the WSL stuff.
Wes: There's just a lot more primitives that you can do. There are still products,
Wes: especially Microsoft, but like there are still products built on it,
Wes: but you get a lot more of that base infrastructure that you can plumb yourself.
Chris: And it makes sense, right? They're in control of the kernel and all of that.
Brent: We've made and heard some wild theories in the past of Microsoft,
Brent: maybe Windows is just going to take this approach and become Linux under the
Brent: hood with a nice, fancy interface.
Brent: So my big question becomes, do all roads lead to Linux?
Chris: Yeah, it seems like it.
Brent: That's what it seems like here.
Chris: Here we are, right? I've been talking about Linux for 20 years.
Chris: And can you believe it's still relevant after 20 years? And it's more relevant than ever?
Wes: It's more relevant.
Chris: Yeah. There's not a lot of technology like that.
Chris: And it is this trend of all things just kind of moving to the kernel.
Chris: And they stop their own way of doing things.
Chris: Now, VirtualBox is going to keep going for a while with their own modules, to be clear.
Wes: Did you see this week's unrelated, but that someone proposed like a machine
Wes: learning framework offload for the kernel? So it really is everything in the kernel.
Chris: Whatever you want. Right? Use eBPF. I don't care. Well, speaking of things in
Chris: the kernel and sometimes outside the kernel, let's talk about BcacheFS,
Chris: big update in just the last couple of days over there.
Chris: And I have one particular feature that I am very excited about.
Chris: I'll hold that because I'm going to let you take the stage for a moment on this Bcache update.
Wes: Yeah, so this is on the heels. We had 1.36 back in the end of January.
Wes: That had a lot of internal stuff.
Wes: This time we get a little bit of user-facing stuff with the new BcacheFSFS timestats
Wes: command. It's an interactive TUI for monitoring various file system internals,
Wes: slow paths, and device performance, duration, frequency tracking for various events.
Brent: Wow.
Wes: Helpful for diagnosing performance issues.
Chris: Brent, did you catch the part in there that I'm excited about? Did you catch that?
Brent: Uh-huh. I think the light bulb turned on for me, too. A little TUI to do this stuff.
Chris: This is great.
Brent: It's good for the people like you and I.
Chris: A file system repair tool with a TUI? Are you kidding me? To look at some of
Chris: the internals and device performance and what's going on?
Chris: That is so up my alley.
Wes: There's also some other improvements around in the output, like improved BKeshFS
Wes: reconcile status output.
Wes: I saw on Reddit just some users in Kent chatting about, in general,
Wes: some of the interface and the outputs, because there's kind of an array of,
Wes: there's some up-to-date stuff, there's some older stuff, so there may be one
Wes: area of porcelain that gets some more attention.
Wes: But something we know is getting more attention is that in the release announcement,
Wes: Kent said 136.1 is out, which we were just talking about.
Wes: The next release will be Erasure Coding.
Chris: Yeah, so tell me about this.
Wes: So that would be the Parity Raid kind of style stuff, right?
Wes: We made 5.6 in the Bcash of S world coming for Bcash of S, or in the Butterfest
Wes: world coming for Bcash of S.
Brent: That's massive.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: And a lot of the base stuff has been there, but all the user side stuff,
Wes: and especially like you can make these file systems if you do experimental things
Wes: or enable flags, but there hasn't been a lot of tooling support for actually
Wes: doing anything if a disk dies.
Wes: So you could test it and use it, but you don't want to run a prod system on it.
Wes: And the last little BcacheFS bit for today is, it's not all good things.
Wes: It is still an experimental developing file system.
Chris: A little bit of a PSA here.
Wes: Indeed. 19 hours ago on rbcachefs early
Wes: reconcile had a serious bug in the data update path
Wes: if an extent lives on devices that are all being evacuated while being evacuated
Wes: they're considered to have durability zero and the old code for reconciling
Wes: the existing extent with what the data update path wrote would drop those replicas
Wes: too soon okay so if you're on 1.33 through 1.35.
Chris: You need to upgrade you.
Wes: Need to upgrade,
Wes: Good news is the new code is much more rigorous with how it decides when to
Wes: drop replicas. And so far, only like a handful of people have been hit by it.
Wes: As usual, I have seen Kent doing a lot of on-the-ground support,
Wes: both in the IRC and on the subreddit.
Wes: So if you do have file system issues for your sake and for everyone else's sake
Wes: as this thing gets developed, don't be afraid to reach out.
Chris: Yeah, he's very engaged. I just realized, I told the story to the members recently,
Chris: but I'm just around the two-year mark of BcacheFS on one of my absolute most
Chris: important production systems, runs 24-7,
Chris: and it's been using BcacheFS for its critical data drive.
Chris: And I do that not necessarily saying that you should and not necessarily recommending
Chris: it, but so that way I can be kind of on the front line and report to you how it's going.
Chris: And so if we're five years down the road and I'm talking about Bcash FS,
Chris: you know, I've been using it for five, six years at that point.
Chris: Right. So I think there's some credibility in actually deploying it and testing
Chris: it with data that is literally putting my money where my mouth is.
Chris: But I don't know if everybody should do that yet, but I'm very impressed because
Chris: two years ago it was in a much different state than it is now.
Chris: And now it doesn't feel risky at all.
Wes: Yeah, definitely. And a lot of improvements, right? And we're still getting
Wes: some really nice, like, being able to do more upgrades in the background or
Wes: without, you know, not having to have the drive offline to do them.
Wes: It's now a very robust file system in a lot of ways, which is great.
Chris: I mean, I, again, don't do as I do, but I'm at the point where if I can,
Chris: I'm going to make it my default file system on every root install for workstations
Chris: and laptops going forward. You already have been doing that.
Chris: You've been running it for a long time on that laptop.
Wes: Yeah, I think it's summer 2024.
Chris: Wow. And you've just been going through the kernel upgrades kind of regularly and just...
Wes: And then I've also got it running on my home router box at the moment.
Wes: I don't have any RAID systems.
Wes: So I do want to set that. I mean, I've dabbled with some, but no permanent ones.
Chris: I don't know. The router one tickles me the most, right, Brent?
Chris: It's like, that's the one.
Brent: Because, like, why?
Chris: Yeah. You can do extended four on a router.
Brent: You can do anything on a router.
Wes: That was actually one of the first ones I built, I think. I think I was just...
Chris: Oh, yeah, why not?
Wes: I was, like, redoing the system.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: It was there. And there was... That did buy me one time, I will admit.
Wes: with what wasn't a byte. It was just, it had been an old enough file system
Wes: that I had to go through some of those on-disk upgrades.
Wes: So I did have to do one update where my network was offline for like 20 minutes while it did that.
Chris: I want to ask right now, if you're listening, what is your router file system of choice?
Chris: If you're building a router or a system like that, boost in or send us an email.
Chris: What is your router file system of choice? Let us know.
Chris: Yeah, I have ridden the file system way for a long time. So I think that's kind
Chris: of one of the reasons why I'm a little bit more comfortable using BcacheFS.
Chris: I switched to SUSE back in the day because they supported Riser FS.
Chris: And I needed extended attributes for Samba shares. And I needed support for
Chris: a lot of little files because I was doing images of checks, JPEGs.
Chris: And so I went with Riser FS way back in the day.
Chris: And then when ButterFS came around, I adopted it and got so burned early on.
Chris: Some of the early Linux unplugs are me ranting about losing my machine to ButterFS.
Wes: Yep.
Chris: And now I have it everywhere. And I'm starting to do that again with BcashFS.
Chris: And then I have a lot of my scary raids around, which you guys remember my scary raid, right?
Brent: Oh, yeah. How could you forget?
Chris: Which is my, it's a raid zero of just a bunch of spinning rust.
Wes: Well, you forget everything if it disfails.
Chris: That's true. And I have a scary raid here in the studio on the studio machine.
Chris: And I have a scary raid on my workstation upstairs.
Chris: And I name it slash scary raid. So I always remind myself this could blow up at any time.
Chris: Anything you put here is ephemeral. And so that's my little mental trick is scary raid.
Chris: And that right now on all my systems, all my scary raids are XFS.
Brent: Wow.
Chris: Yeah. All my Scary Raids are XFS. And I don't know, I just, it's legacy because
Chris: they've been around for years because I reload the boxes and then I just remount the Scary Raid.
Chris: You know, because I've always got the Scary Raid. It's just sitting right there.
Wes: So are you going to upgrade that to a BcacheFS Scary Raid?
Chris: Well, this is what I'm thinking, is the next generation.
Chris: The next generation of a Scary Raid would be like a bunch of used SSDs that
Chris: I just slam into one big volume and use BcacheFS for that.
Wes: I should say that was the other factor on the router box is it's pretty much
Wes: just a NixOS config in Git, so there wasn't a lot of data on there.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think if I were to, you know,
Chris: because all my scary raids are identical disks.
Chris: And if I were to do a mix of drive size and just sort of mush all that together,
Chris: I think I would call that messy raid. That would be a messy raid.
Chris: Well, I just want to take a moment and thank our members. We don't have an advertiser
Chris: for this spot yet, although we do have the world's best Linux audience,
Chris: the world's largest Linux audience.
Chris: We've been around for over 12 years doing this show. I've been doing podcasting for 20 years.
Chris: So if you would like to reach one of the best audiences with somebody that knows
Chris: how to do podcast ads, send me an email at chris at jupiterbroadcasting.com.
Chris: In the meantime, thank you, members, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash membership.
Chris: I don't know. I know you can get the Linux unplugged. Jupiter.party for the whole network.
Chris: I don't need to go through the whole thing. You guys know it,
Chris: so I'll just say thank you very much.
Chris: There's not a lot of big commercial demand for a Linux podcast that is talking
Chris: about file system nuances like this.
Chris: I don't know if that surprises you, but it turns out people that are selling
Chris: ads on podcasts and YouTube, they don't find file system discussion particularly
Chris: interesting and doesn't really reach their radar. are.
Chris: So we do have to lean more on listener support than a typical podcast that you might listen to.
Chris: Because what we do is we use that listener support to give us the runway to
Chris: actually nerd out on these topics and go for the stuff that is never going to
Chris: get us any play on YouTube.
Chris: We're never going to get a clip on TikTok. We're never going to show up in some
Chris: sort of advertiser's keyword search dashboard thing, right? It's never going to happen for us.
Chris: And that's okay. We're fine with that because we have listener support.
Chris: So there's a couple of ways you can do it.
Chris: We have the show membership. Those are our core contributors at linuxunplugged.com slash membership.
Chris: We have the jupyter.party membership that gives you access to all the shows
Chris: and their special features. Every show has special features.
Chris: And then you can boost us. And that is not only a signal, but it also supports
Chris: that particular production and gives us an idea of like that topic worked or didn't work.
Chris: And so there's several ways where you can participate. and we really do appreciate
Chris: it because we couldn't make this kind of content where we talk about these nerdy
Chris: esoteric things that actually do matter.
Chris: It's not our fault that the advertisers don't realize this stuff matters.
Chris: Right? It's not our fault.
Chris: This stuff does matter and it matters to you just like it matters to us.
Chris: So thank you very much for the support and you can find membership links in the show notes as well.
Brent: A little while ago, we took a moment on the show to plant our flag and say all
Brent: this assisted AI stuff was coming for Linux administration.
Brent: And the last few weeks, with all the OpenClaw excitement, might be proving that out.
Brent: But there's also been a lot of pushback to all these big tech commercial models.
Brent: And for some of us, it's made us more excited about local open source models.
Brent: Over on ItsFoss, Bhwan Mishra wrote about ditching Clawed code and using the
Brent: open-source Quen model for real sysadmin work.
Chris: I liked hearing about this, guys.
Wes: Yeah, me too.
Chris: Yeah, so the author dropped Cloud Code, went with local Quen code because it
Chris: behaves more like a proper Linux tool.
Chris: He says he could install it locally. It was open-source, and it shows every
Chris: command it's going to execute before it actually runs it.
Chris: And you can describe a task in plain English, and the Quen model,
Chris: which is a free model that you can run on your own machine, will just turn that
Chris: into reviewable shell commands that you can then authorize, and then it'll execute them.
Wes: Yeah, it's pretty neat. So Quen comes from Alibaba, so it is a Chinese model,
Wes: but it is also open-weight.
Wes: Some folks have found some kinds of censorship or other sort of things you might
Wes: expect from some of these Chinese models.
Wes: But it has also been optimized for agent stuff, so has Quen code.
Wes: They have various specific models, especially like the code-focused models itself
Wes: sort of aimed at exactly these tasks.
Wes: And in fact, even the app itself is a fork of Gemini CLI. So it's under the
Wes: Apache 2 license. They look pretty much exactly the same.
Chris: Oh, interesting. Okay.
Wes: But the Quen folks wanted to add in, like Gemini CLI does a lot of stuff because
Wes: it's attached to this very broad Gemini product and stuff, and you can only use it with that.
Wes: But they added support for using local stuff. They also optimized it more for
Wes: doing these coding and agent tasks.
Chris: Very nice. Okay.
Chris: That's, I didn't realize that you could, I guess I never looked at Gemini CLI.
Chris: I didn't realize they had made that open source.
Wes: Yeah, isn't that nice? I mean, the back end isn't, but at least the front end is.
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Wes: And, you know, it is like, maybe you don't do everything with one of these particular
Wes: local models, depending on what kind of system and GPU and what you can actually run.
Wes: But as these things get better and better, like writing shell scripts,
Wes: or especially like, you know, especially even silly stuff like,
Wes: Like, oh, dang, I downloaded a bunch of files with spaces in there,
Wes: and they got weird names, and I just want it cleaned up.
Brent: That happens to me all the time.
Wes: Even stuff you can run locally can definitely handle a spitting out of Bash script to do that.
Chris: Yeah, it is really exciting to see where these local models are going.
Chris: I feel like I'm in this tortured position where I recognize the utility now
Chris: in a way that I kind of missed the boat on when hardware was reasonably priced.
Wes: Where's that open source time machine?
Chris: Now I'm so GPU starved, and I've been looking at Venice AI, which is a pretty
Chris: good privacy-focused model system that you can use with agents and whatnot.
Chris: But the tokens are more expensive because of the privacy layer.
Chris: And this gets really expensive very fast when you want to do more extensive things.
Chris: So it is with a particular eye we're watching these local models and seeing where they go.
Chris: Just a little background on something we tried last week. This was a very interesting
Chris: experiment, and we wanted to share it with you. We have wanted to stand up a
Chris: production Mattermost server for years.
Chris: We've spun up a few. We've toyed with them kind of as just experiments.
Chris: We've even ran a few project-specific Mattermost when we're working on something with people outside.
Chris: JB will spin up a Mattermost real quick, but they really just throw away Mattermost,
Chris: and we don't really spend a lot of time with them.
Chris: We wanted something we could use long-term. So last week before the show,
Chris: I had been working with one of these open claw agents, just going over best
Chris: system practices, focus on this, consider this, security.
Wes: And the stuff we normally want or don't want to see in a system.
Chris: Yeah, exactly. And so also I've been working to delegate some subtasks to agents and stuff like that.
Chris: So naturally, I thought, let's do something really stupid and give this thing
Chris: API access to Cloudflare.
Chris: I figured, why not? I had an old domain that I'd sat around for years.
Chris: I don't use. I could set up a limited scope API credentials.
Wes: I was about to say that we've already gotten to the point of maturity in that
Wes: side of the industry is really useful if you're trying to use agents.
Wes: Like, don't give it everything.
Chris: No. So I gave it this old domain I had sitting around that I bought on a lark.
Chris: Probably had too many beers and decided, I'm going to buy this domain.
Chris: And so before the show last week, I told the agent, go SSH into this VPS because
Chris: the host that it's running on has an SSH key.
Chris: SSH into this VPS. Go look around.
Chris: Learn the system. The Docker Compose files are over here. And then commit to
Chris: your memory what you've learned. That was before the show, just Sunday morning last week.
Wes: A little scouting mission. Reconnaissance.
Chris: After the show, when we were all done with our post-show duties, I...
Wes: I didn't even know you did that, by the way. You're sneaky.
Chris: Yeah. After the show, I said to Wes, how fast do you think an agent could deploy
Chris: a secure Mattermost server?
Chris: And so I brought up Telegram and I sent my agent the API key for its Cloudflare stuff.
Chris: And I gave it a clear goal. I said, go deploy a Mattermost server on the VPS
Chris: I told you about earlier. That's all I said.
Chris: and follow best security practices and use Cloudflare to handle things like
Chris: DNS caching and other security best practices.
Chris: And that was the entire Telegram message. Five minutes later,
Chris: The agent had deployed Mattermost via Docker Compose, integrated a Cloudflare
Chris: tunnel sidecar, set up DNS with optimal caching based on upstream Cloudflare
Chris: docs for best security practices when deploying a Mattermost server,
Chris: which is really neat because it set up the sidecar.
Chris: Wes, talk about the sidecar tunnel. We talked about these sidecars before. You're a sidecar guy.
Wes: Oh, yeah. I mean, it's a handy pattern, right? It's just because you're using
Wes: network namespaces with the containers, You can put two containers in the same
Wes: network namespace. And so they share a network.
Wes: And then you can have, say, Tailscale, Netbird, Nebula, any of these mesh VPNs.
Chris: Cloudflare Tunnel.
Wes: Or you can have a Cloudflare Tunnel. And so Cloudflare Tunnel's agent handles
Wes: binding a VPN, a tunneling connection to them.
Wes: And then because they're also controlling all of the front side,
Wes: right, the load balancing, the DNS, the caching, then they can automatically
Wes: just route it through that tunnel back to you.
Wes: And so the Docker and namespace layer make sure that you don't have to mess
Wes: with any of the host stuff.
Wes: But as long as the actual Cloudflare tunnel agent itself can get outside via
Wes: the Internet, then everyone else can connect.
Wes: And you don't have to have an open port. You don't have to worry about that kind of thing.
Chris: That's the key thing. It doesn't even talk to the host network.
Chris: It's not even talking to the VPS network at all. It's just talking over this tunnel.
Chris: So then what I did, after it had stood up this entire thing,
Chris: as I reviewed the Docker Compose, it was clean. It was lean.
Chris: I looked at the Mattermost config. It was pretty basic. So I said to the bot,
Chris: I said, I'm going to go create you an account.
Chris: I'll go create you a bot token for the agent. Then what I want you to do is go finish the work.
Chris: Go set up the rooms, set up the permissions, dial in a full configuration,
Chris: give the rooms the descriptions, set descriptions for all the individual accounts, everything.
Chris: And then two minutes later, it was back, and we had everything there.
Chris: A complete lounge, rooms for the bots to talk, room for the people to talk, permission structure.
Chris: The entire process was probably eight to ten minutes.
Wes: Also, having the bots fiddle with the actual admin settings,
Wes: so much nicer than doing it yourself.
Wes: Especially for, like, I'm not a Mattermost UI expert, right?
Wes: But, like, we needed to rename some accounts, or, like, I wanted to make sure
Wes: that when Brent got in, he was going to be an admin on the instance.
Wes: And bots handled that just fine.
Chris: Yeah. And so the point that I'm trying to make here is this is not going away
Chris: for Linux system administration.
Chris: And it didn't deploy some vibe coded piece of crap insecure setup either.
Chris: It actually did a fantastic expert job. We went through and reviewed it.
Chris: It's good. It's solid. It's a it's a good setup.
Chris: And you have to kind of let that soak in for a moment because we have heard
Chris: these big tech CEOs promise all this ridiculous crap for the last three years.
Chris: But this is really working.
Chris: I did three things. In the morning, I told the bot to go check out the VPS.
Chris: In the afternoon, I gave it an API key, and I told it to go deploy Mattermost.
Chris: And then after that, I said, go set up all the rooms, the permissions,
Chris: the descriptions, give them emojis, all that crap.
Chris: And it did all of that. And it's all because these things all have API endpoints.
Chris: The documentation on how to set them up is extremely well documented and clear.
Wes: Yep. And in the case of open source stuff, you can also go have your bot spelunk
Wes: the source code and figure out exactly what it needs.
Chris: Yeah. And the API to then realize how to connect to it so then it can participate in the chat.
Chris: And Brent, we pulled you into some of that shenanigans. And you could see the
Chris: bots are actually coordinating with each other back and forth in our Mattermost chat.
Brent: Can I just say how much I wasn't expecting to be pulled into that kind of environment?
Brent: But it was impressive. Like, I don't know, this is a topic we've been talking
Brent: about for years to replace our sort of legacy internal communications tool.
Brent: And you guys just kind of pulled that out while you were doing the post-show
Brent: work? I kind of couldn't believe it.
Wes: But we were actually just playing with agents and not doing the post-show work,
Wes: but we were doing other stuff and not supervising this bot.
Brent: Like what a force multiplier if you look at it that way. And to stand up something
Brent: we've been wanting for quite a long time and having,
Brent: like you said, some confidence that it's been done with best practices better
Brent: than we could have in our little busy schedule.
Brent: Because this would have taken us longer to do it in a way that we were satisfied
Brent: that it was good enough to be a long-term tool for us.
Brent: and secure, and safe enough, and resilient.
Brent: That's just awesome.
Wes: Yeah, I agree. But I think there's another part I was thinking about,
Wes: which is like, this varies per person and group and all that,
Wes: but we weren't going to learn that much from standing up a Mattermouth server.
Wes: Like, it's sidecar patterns, we've done it before, and there's this whole mass,
Wes: at least for me personally, of work where I want to do it,
Wes: It's either not quite important enough, it's not going to rise to the top 10,
Wes: and I'm not especially motivated to do it, especially because I know it's kind
Wes: of just grinding it out. It's not a new thing.
Wes: I'm not learning some new application or some new way to do things.
Wes: And I'm totally happy to delegate that. Another thing I was doing just this
Wes: week was I had an old code base.
Wes: I ran a linter across it to get a bunch of lint errors. I know how to fix that
Wes: stuff. I don't need to do that again.
Wes: But a bot can fix it, and then I can just review the diff. And if it didn't
Wes: break anything, the tests all passed, like, totally fine.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah, and for me, I feel like it's in the experimental,
Chris: okay, I'm learning about a stage, but it goes into the this is something that
Chris: I will use for year stage when I can run a model that's competent locally,
Chris: you know, and privately.
Wes: Yeah, where you don't have to pay out the arm and leg for the credits,
Wes: where you don't have to worry that every little detail of your life is being sucked up.
Chris: Yep, yep. But there is something here. It is not going away.
Chris: even if like open AI were to crash.
Chris: Like this is not going away. And what we're going to see, and we're already
Chris: seeing it, is services are going to have to develop and deliver agent-specific endpoints.
Wes: You hit on the importance of APIs, and I think that is...
Wes: going to be helpful for us open source people because
Wes: if you have an open api system that's documented that's easy to
Wes: learn these agents can figure it out like when we
Wes: were playing around last week i had my agent figure out how to use this web
Wes: socket irc thing but then even just after we got the mattermost stuff i wanted
Wes: my agent as a test to send your agent a direct message but the security on the
Wes: open cloud would not let that happen my agent figured out how to use the Mattermost API directly.
Wes: Now, in that case, a little concerning, but in general, like in the old world, right?
Wes: Like the proprietary provider would provide the bindings.
Wes: So you had to rely on whatever set of bindings were going to be there,
Wes: but you don't have to rely on the default set.
Wes: If you can dynamically add the capability of new bindings yourself.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: So here's, so it doesn't matter if they only support Slack, we can add Mattermost if we need that.
Chris: Yes. This is the head shift that people need to get around and it's going to
Chris: impact open source projects and they're not going to take it gracefully.
Chris: We're already seeing it happen. I'll give you an example.
Chris: These agents are going to become an extension of whatever somebody can do online,
Chris: this agent will be tasked to do.
Chris: And that is from everything from hiring people to mow lawns,
Chris: to topping off its own API credits, to going through GitHub and looking for issues.
Chris: And we are going to see a lot of transitions between crap code and all that.
Chris: But focus on something that the open source projects need to think about.
Chris: And this is something that Debian's struggling with right now,
Chris: is Debian's had a problem with their CI system getting overloaded with what
Chris: they say are LLM scrapers,
Chris: essentially going through their infrastructure via a web browser and kind of
Chris: just going through page by page and generating so much load by doing this that
Chris: it's making the service unavailable for their existing developers.
Wes: Yeah, it's not just hitting, say, like the actual output text file from the build run.
Wes: They're like walking through the whole interface to go browse through it.
Wes: And then as a result, I guess there's not that much caching and just,
Wes: you know, it's a volunteer project. It's open source infrastructure. It's Debian.
Wes: So then it's going and pulling a bunch of results for like years ago build systems.
Wes: So now the system's turning on that instead of focusing on, you know,
Wes: the actual builds for the next release.
Chris: And one of the things that's challenging about this is it's difficult to distinguish
Chris: an LLM scraper, which might be training, questionable.
Chris: a bot that is just scraping this stuff or an agent that somebody has tasked
Chris: on their behalf to help them with their development in Debian.
Wes: You might want to go pull in those logs, say, so that you have your own personal
Wes: dashboard of the upstream builds to keep track of issues.
Chris: Exactly. And so maybe you've tasked your agent to go do that.
Chris: And what's going to have to happen here, what Debian has done for now is they've
Chris: just essentially taken this out of the public.
Chris: And you have to have special access and special whitelists and all of that to
Chris: be able to get access to their CI system now.
Chris: But the solution is not going to be to block these agents that are operating
Chris: on behalf of other developers.
Chris: The solution is going to be to develop API and data pipelines and then for these
Chris: bots, agents, and LLMs to respect those and use those data pipelines and APIs
Chris: instead of just crawling the website.
Wes: Yeah, and there's certainly some operator responsibility here,
Wes: right, to respect those things, to respect stuff like robots.txt and other.
Wes: Like, you know, there is an element of you put it on the web and there is some,
Wes: you know, depending on your law and jurisdiction, but there's some right to
Wes: just go do a curl request and get the results.
Wes: But you also need to respect that that costs people money and can interfere
Wes: with other people's right to do the same access.
Chris: I don't know if people remember, maybe I'm old enough, but there was a time
Chris: when web search engines first came out and they were crawling the web.
Chris: And even though they weren't permanently caching before, like,
Chris: Archive and the Google Archive stuff, even though they weren't permanently caching,
Chris: there were lawsuits over the fact that the web indexers had a copy of the information
Chris: in RAM temporarily while they indexed the website.
Wes: Often copyrighted things. Yeah.
Chris: Yeah. So it takes a little bit to figure this out.
Chris: And I don't think projects like Debian are going to want to completely sit this
Chris: out because there is use case for these agents. and if they can be more intelligent
Chris: about how to manage a Debian system, that's good for Debian as a project and
Chris: it's good for Debian as adoption in the enterprise.
Wes: I do think or suppose we might see a rise in more structured outputs and outputs
Wes: designed specifically for LLMs as an aside to the human-centric interface.
Chris: Just give them their own thing to ingest that is low resource.
Wes: Don't have them muck up with the human side, yeah.
Chris: Pretend like, and.
Wes: Honestly- It's less efficient for both sides.
Chris: Right, because they're spending a bunch of tokens to run that web browser to
Chris: browse the website like a human.
Wes: To parse out the HTML to go figure out where the links are.
Chris: And then they're probably just producing a JSON file on the back end anyway.
Wes: That's all they wanted.
Chris: So everybody wins, but we're not there yet. So what the Debian projects had
Chris: to do is they've had to go kind of private.
Chris: But I don't think that solves the problem long-term. But we really had a moment
Chris: with our Mattermost server.
Chris: We had a, you know, let's call it 10 minutes.
Chris: In 10 minutes, we had a fully working Mattermost server, like an expert had
Chris: deployed it, with clean configs, tight security, great performance,
Chris: because I sort of glossed over this.
Chris: But like you mentioned, it set up all of the caching and best practices with Cloudflare.
Chris: So this thing is running on a super old low-end VPS that is already doing other
Chris: stuff. And it is a faster chat experience than, say, Slack.
Chris: It was a really nice, responsive, performance system. And using this Cloudflare
Chris: tunnel made it really easy for security purposes. I didn't have to worry about
Chris: having a VPS address and all that kind of stuff.
Wes: Also makes it portable. You can move it around. It doesn't matter where it lives.
Chris: Especially the way this tunnel works. It's portable per machine, too.
Chris: So you could actually lift the entire Docker Compose, drop it on another machine,
Chris: and start it. And the tunnel would reconnect.
Chris: That kind of stuff is really impressive. and on a low end vps it's even better
Chris: because you're getting more bang for your buck.
Wes: And you you wouldn't you know you don't have to use cloud for you can tunnel
Wes: it over your existing mesh.
Chris: Network you can do an nginx.
Wes: Proxy and the bots can help.
Chris: Oh yeah for sure this is just because i was experimenting with using the api
Chris: to just do a complete totally end-to-end solution there's a lot of ways you
Chris: could solve it with networking and uh you know maybe it was two dollars and
Chris: 50 cents in tokens for the entire thing in 10 minutes and now we have a server
Chris: that we could use in production for years,
Chris: So there is something there. And when you get that kind of utility and that
Chris: kind of optimization, you know enterprises are going to be drawn to that.
Chris: And you know that's the kind of thing that Red Hat and SUSE are going to be,
Chris: and Canonical, are going to be leaning into. It isn't going away.
Wes: And it's important, I think, that the open source side stay engaged and pushing
Wes: on the values that we bring to technology generally.
Chris: And I think that's the most interesting and exciting thing about the last three
Chris: weeks is that it has been driven by open source.
Chris: We've been talking about AI, well, we haven't, but people have been talking
Chris: about AI for years now, sort of to ad nauseum.
Chris: It's just, ugh. And this is the first time where we've actually been interested
Chris: because open source is really biting in and making a difference.
Wes: And you can see it, like, just if you go look on Hacker News or other spots,
Wes: like, OpenClaw came out, and now there's a bunch of different versions.
Wes: There's smaller versions, there's Rust versions.
Wes: And especially because the implementations are open source, you don't have to
Wes: figure out how to give the bot memory.
Wes: I mean, you might need to customize it or tweak it or change it,
Wes: But you can go follow the patterns that are emerging in the upstream open source.
Chris: So what Wes is saying there is one of the things that's different this time
Chris: around with these new agents is the memory and the soul and the tools and all
Chris: the things that it memorizes.
Chris: So, for example, last night I messaged my bot. I didn't say anything else other
Chris: than, can you go get the weather report from Home Assistant?
Chris: That's all I said. And it knows, well, OK, Home Assistant lives on this host. This is the API.
Chris: This is my API key. the weather is this and it goes and gets all of that and
Chris: it just comes back with a rather weather report from home assistant.
Wes: That's another one of the big changes here is the agent is the interface.
Chris: Right and that memory and all of that is yours it's on your file system and
Chris: these other bots that are being built these other agent frameworks like you
Chris: mentioned can use this so it is portable because it's just text and other agents
Chris: can ingest this and learn from it so when you are building this,
Chris: you're taking something that is vendor agnostic, model agnostic,
Chris: and gateway implementation agnostic.
Wes: And you can change it. They can change it.
Chris: So that's a big difference. It's a big shift. And we're done talking about it,
Chris: but we wanted you to understand it because, man, does it matter.
Chris: Well, no spot, no ad right here. But thank you, members, and thank you,
Chris: boosters. We really do appreciate you for making this show possible.
Chris: You're doing the heavy lifting, that's for sure.
Brent: We got a few little fantastic pieces of feedback this week. Joe sent in this
Brent: awesome case for your ThinkCenter.
Brent: It's a ThinkBox V2 custom 4-bay serial ATA or SAS hard drive NAS that you can print yourself.
Brent: Yes, you heard me. It's a case for your system with a case.
Brent: It's basically, it's a custom 4-bay NAS that the ThinkCenter small form factor PCs just slide into.
Brent: So using an LSI HBA card
Brent: and the powerful brains of are much loved by
Brent: our community m720q or m920q by
Brent: lenovo it leverages many improvements over alternative
Brent: custom nas builds by basically providing
Brent: a stable direct disc pass through with proper air handling reliable drive identification
Brent: the drive bays to the think box also support both serial ata and sas drives
Brent: on a 12 gigabit per second backplane and everything just slides right into this
Brent: thing. This specifically.
Brent: Is exactly what I've been thinking about for the last two weeks.
Brent: And I have to say, Joe, how did you get into my brain? Because I've been deeply
Brent: investigating the M720Qs and all of the possibilities that these little machines
Brent: can do for us, including a NAS.
Brent: And I was like, ah, geez, I really would just want to throw one of these into
Brent: a case. I can support a couple hard drives and here you come along with a version two of this project.
Chris: Doesn't it? It looks OEM, right? It looks mint.
Chris: This is such a great find. Thank you, Joe. He says that he found this and thought
Chris: we would be interested, and boy, was he right.
Wes: Upgrade your pizza box to a cube.
Chris: We will link this in the show notes. I know what I want for Christmas.
Chris: The creator says, Lenovo's use of the coffee-like generation of CPU in the M720Q
Chris: and M920Q line gives access to native hardware transcoding through Intel QuickSync.
Chris: yeah it just it makes for such a nice home media server but it is a little bit
Chris: tight on the storage so that is a great find thanks for sending that in,
Chris: Our buddy Michael Dominick from the Coda Radio podcast has a great giveaway
Chris: going on right now for students. He's calling all students.
Chris: He has an Earth Day open source challenge. If you build something that helps
Chris: the planet, you could win a big prize.
Chris: Some System 76 hardware.
Wes: Oh, hey, we know that. We know that stuff.
Chris: Yeah, so if you've got a kid that's K-12 or even college students that are listening
Chris: to the podcast, the deadline is Earth Day.
Chris: I'll put a link to Mr. Dominick's post about it.
Chris: He's done this. His company, MadBotter Inc., has done this for a while now,
Chris: and they often give away some really nice System76 hardware for this.
Chris: So check that out. We'll have a link in the show notes.
Chris: Code for Climate 2026, the MadBotter Earth Day Open Source Challenge.
Chris: And the deadline is Earth Day.
Chris: You've got to code something up that helps the Earth. Go check it out.
Wes: Ooh, looks like we got a little feedback from our buddy, Only Mike.
Chris: Hey, Olympia Mike!
Wes: Guys, wow. I just wanted to say thanks for sharing my mini computer giveaway.
Wes: I received hundreds of emails from this amazing community with positive messages
Wes: and excitement for some free hardware.
Wes: I had all 35 units claimed in a couple of days and have mailed them all out as fast as I could.
Wes: I'm now on a first name basis with the post office employees.
Brent: I bet.
Chris: I bet.
Wes: I also wanted to say thanks to the many recipients that donated above the shipping
Wes: cost, allowing the Computer Upcycle project to have some extra funds for SSDs
Wes: and power cords to fix more computers.
Chris: Best audience ever.
Wes: This community is literally the best, and I'll be sure to do this again if,
Wes: when, I have more good home server hardware.
Wes: Thanks again, love community. I love you all and cannot wait to see you all
Wes: at LinuxFest Northwest.
Chris: Oh man, Mike, that's great.
Wes: Amen.
Chris: Thank you, Mike. Thank you for the update. Really, I love that.
Chris: I just love the growth of that too.
Chris: It's so great to see and appreciate the updates. You know what I mean? It's very good.
Chris: Well, the dude is definitely abiding this week, and he is coming in with our
Chris: baller boost, 77,777 sats.
Chris: He says, thanks for the wake-up call. I deployed Prometheus and Grafana,
Chris: and now I'm hooking up everything. My TrueNAS, ProxMax, my Unify.
Chris: That's right. And Home Assistant. I have no idea what I'll use all that data for.
Chris: The next step is to set up alerts, I guess. great episode as always and happy
Chris: belated birthday oh thank you the dude yeah uh i have been finding it very useful
Chris: just to monitor disk space and the cpu load on my home assistant those are like
Chris: the main things i have i have basic sort.
Wes: Of metrics and monitoring stuff.
Chris: Stuff that i'm like is this box struggling is it or is it okay.
Wes: Well anonymous comes in with 2021 sets but no sets just the value So also we
Wes: get a boost from Outdoor Geek. 5,000 sets.
Chris: Ooh, Scott, he's hot to trot.
Wes: Open WRT as access point tip. By default, if you connect another router to a
Wes: LAN port of an Open WRT Wi-Fi device, the Open WRT Wi-Fi device will operate as an AP.
Wes: However, if someone fiddles with it and forgets or doesn't know to use LAN port
Wes: versus the LAN, better to configure as AP for permanent installs.
Chris: Good to know. Outdoor geek coming in. Good tip.
Wes: Sounds like maybe you've seen that happen one or two times, huh?
Chris: Brent, did you do this? Are you okay?
Brent: I didn't even know this was possible. I like this little default behavior.
Brent: Although, you know, sometimes these kind of behind-the-scenes behaviors that
Brent: are trying to be helpful can be unhelpful if you don't know they're happening.
Brent: This didn't happen to me because I didn't know this was such a useful feature.
Brent: So maybe I'll try that next time.
Chris: Now you know.
Brent: Well, Zach Attack came in with 4,500 Satoshis.
Brent: It's been a long time. I never stopped listening, but just haven't found funds to send over.
Brent: I'm curious as to how your AI adventures go. So I look forward to the continued reporting on that.
Brent: I've been back on the distro hopping train with one laptop running Nick's book.
Brent: Ooh. And the other running Linux Mint, my main machine staying with Bluefin for now.
Chris: That's interesting fleet you have there. I like that. Good, good testing around,
Chris: You know, so talking about the Asian stuff just a bit more, just briefly, it ain't all great.
Chris: Because, you know.
Wes: Why does your wallet look so thin?
Chris: There's that. I'm basically an alpha tester, right? Because I installed it when it was called Clodbot.
Chris: Then it became Maltbot. Then it became OpenClaw. And then they've had three releases of OpenClaw.
Chris: And the first two releases of OpenClaw completely blew out my sub agents,
Chris: blew out my Mattermost config on the second install.
Chris: I mean, just like and then the stereotypical thing where you're talking to the
Chris: agents like, I've got it figured out now. and then it kills its own gateway
Chris: and then i'm in there repairing the gateway not not.
Wes: Just once on that one.
Chris: No i was getting pretty spicy about it so it hasn't all been great,
Chris: i've definitely learned what i do and don't like about the open claw uh infrastructure
Chris: but uh ultimately the uh
Chris: you know the reality is just that when you are learning
Chris: something when it's really new you learn a bunch you
Chris: have to throw it out you get burned you learn a bunch and then you throw
Chris: it out and you learn again and you learn again and you learn
Chris: again and being an early adopter has a bit of work to
Chris: it but you then at least know the language
Chris: you know the technology you understand the direction you know what's hype versus
Chris: what's actually just practically good and it it actually is valuable to experiment
Chris: with this stuff early on even if it is somewhat personally expensive in time
Chris: and money but i kind of consider it like this is this is my ongoing education,
Chris: And I don't go to college anymore, but I do invest in my ongoing education in
Chris: some of these ways within reasonable means, right?
Chris: I can't go crazy with it, and I sometimes just cut myself off.
Wes: And another reason, we need more local solutions.
Chris: We do. We do. And maybe somebody will even create a better agent framework one
Chris: day. Thank you, Zach Attack.
Chris: Gene Bean's back with 2020 Sats.
Chris: This is happy birthday to JB. Thank you, Gene. Always good to hear from you.
Chris: Hope you're doing good out there. Wonderful to see, Gene, in March.
Wes: I hope so.
Chris: I hope so. I hope so.
Wes: Well, Red 5D comes in with a row of ducks.
Wes: You mentioned the idea of having an agent read the show RSS feed for summaries
Wes: and stuff, but with the size of the RSS data, especially ours,
Wes: that would be a lot of tokens to process.
Wes: So I'd actually recommend using MCP tools to process and search the data first.
Wes: Here's an MCP server that I wrote to handle retrieving episode and transcript
Wes: data from podcasting 2.0 compatible RSS feeds.
Wes: I've really only tested it with JB feeds so far, though.
Chris: Well, that's a big one. The Linux Unplugged one's a little ridiculous, I will admit.
Wes: This is awesome. It's MIT licensed. It's written in Python over on GitHub.
Wes: We will definitely have this in the show notes.
Chris: Yeah, it lets your agent list shows, search episodes, get episodes, and get the transcript.
Chris: So my agent provides me a morning report and it surfaces certain boosts and
Chris: it put red 5Ds right to the top, right to the top.
Chris: And it said it had a specific call out.
Chris: Hey, he created this and this looks really useful. It saved tokens.
Wes: You should let me have it.
Chris: Yeah, that's exactly what Laura said. He's like, I think this would be really
Chris: useful. Let's set this up.
Chris: So it's funny because I have it monitoring the boost just so I can see what people are saying.
Chris: and you know it's good for signal and stuff like that and and and really good
Chris: sense of direction so and but this is the first time where you started surfacing
Chris: interesting bits like this and reds came right to the top so appreciate that
Chris: very very much thank you sir.
Brent: Well turd ferguson boosts in 13,333 sets,
Brent: So let's say you guys were right about agents managing Linux systems in the future.
Brent: Makes you wonder how the big cloud providers would take advantage of a technology like that.
Wes: Yeah, you do wonder, you know, what changes about fleet management and just
Wes: wrangling APIs. And there's already so much YAML to manage in like declarative systems.
Chris: Do they sit on top of like an Ansible and Kubernetes and then go out and deploy things?
Wes: Or do we develop other new agent first things or like whole systems to sort
Wes: of enforce more security layers or more review layers or adversarial layers
Wes: on top of that to make sure like that your change sets are really heavily scrutinized?
Chris: Do you think we would see cloud providers that lean into no AI agentic,
Chris: no agent stuff? Do you think that could be a market?
Brent: I doubt it. They want to take advantage of all of this.
Chris: They do, because it just sells more of their stuff. So they're going to lean in, you're right.
Brent: Well, I opt out of that. That's a good point.
Chris: Okay, all right. Well, there goes that dream. All right. Well,
Chris: that's an interesting question, Turd. Thank you.
Chris: Tomato comes in with a row of ducks, 2,222 sats.
Chris: I love the discussion on the bots and especially the talk with Abe.
Chris: Yeah, that was a lot of fun. Abe's been updating us, too, in the Matrix.
Chris: There's more going on over there in Abeverse.
Brent: Planet of the Abe.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I don't want to spoil it, but I'm on, I think,
Chris: the fifth book of Bobverse or fourth book.
Wes: Oh, fun.
Chris: And just a really, like a real, oh, crap moment just went down with AI.
Chris: Fascinating timing on that. Thank you, everybody who boosted the show.
Chris: Those of you who streamed them sats, we had 28 of you stream them,
Chris: and you stacked collectively 38,385 sats amongst y'all.
Chris: Very good job. It's a nice little showing right there. We really do appreciate that.
Chris: When you combine that with our boosters who sent a message, including even those
Chris: that were beloved below, we beloved them, below the 2,000-sat cutoff,
Chris: which we do it for timing. But we read them all. We love them all.
Chris: So our grand total, when you combine it all together, for this episode was 149,531 sats.
Chris: Now, I will say we have some big stuff coming up. We have our trip to scale
Chris: and Planet Nix. We have LinuxFest Northwest.
Chris: There's always a ton of expenses around that.
Chris: And we're always doing it on a really super lean budget. So if you want to boost
Chris: the dip while the sats are cheap and support our upcoming events,
Chris: this could be a great time to get a message on the show.
Chris: Even if you don't have anything that profound to say, if you just want to send
Chris: the value, we'll stack that and use that towards our upcoming trips.
Chris: And we really do appreciate it very much.
Chris: Fountain FM makes it really easy to get started. But there are a bunch of ways,
Chris: including self-hosted ways, they use things like Albi and Podverse and whatnot.
Chris: That's all open source, top to bottom, from the software to the payment infrastructure.
Chris: Thank everybody who supports us, including our members.
Chris: All right. So let's go through these picks because I found one and Brent found
Chris: one. And I think Brent's is going to be really handy for anybody that isn't using a stock ROM.
Brent: I sent this app immediately to Jeff because it fits his personality perfectly.
Brent: This app is called Plexus, and I just found it browsing the FDroid repository,
Brent: as you should do from time to time.
Chris: I do.
Brent: I like that.
Chris: It's calming and fun, which is also why I have like 400 apps on my phone.
Brent: Yeah. You need to also, I think you need a rule. One in, one out, Chris.
Chris: That's a good idea. That's a good idea.
Brent: Plexus provides insights into
Brent: app compatibility using the Google Play services. so it's a crowdsourced,
Brent: I guess, definition of which apps work really well without Google Play services,
Brent: also with the Micro G service, and which apps may or may not encounter issues
Brent: if you have these installed or not.
Brent: So if you're using a custom ROM like Lineage OS or maybe something like Calix
Brent: OS, you can see how compatible your current apps are if you are migrating from one system to another.
Chris: Can I ask you something?
Brent: Oh, yeah, sure.
Chris: Did you give it a go on your Paizo?
Brent: Well, I was really hoping Jeff would do that for me.
Chris: You didn't give it a go.
Brent: No, I didn't give it a go.
Chris: You're a paranoid guy when it comes to this kind of stuff. Not to use the word,
Chris: but you were kind of paranoid.
Brent: I have to report that using Giraffe in OS has considerably changed my level
Brent: of anxiety about this particular problem.
Brent: because Graphene has a sandbox Google Play, and that has softened me.
Brent: And I don't know if that's good.
Chris: Right.
Brent: But I'm going to blame you, Chris, because you brought me on this bandwagon,
Brent: and it's made me way more willing to install apps I would have never done before.
Brent: So maybe the community could tell me whether that was a good idea or if I should
Brent: go back to being a little bit more paranoid.
Chris: I have felt pretty safe about the Giraffe, you know, a sandbox Google stuff
Chris: as well, which is probably why I have 300 apps on my phone. why is.
Brent: It going down how many of them would work without it.
Wes: You said 400 last time.
Chris: I was exaggerating it is i think it's closer to five it is no it is closer to 300 you're.
Brent: Updating let's be terrible.
Chris: Oh no it's the optimizing that's terrible the updating's not so bad because
Chris: that just happens in the background okay so you guys know me i love markdown
Chris: if i could think in markdown i would and i often will write myself a little
Chris: to do for the day just in a text document and i'll just format it in Markdown.
Chris: And I came across an app. I think it's German developers. Anybody have a guess
Chris: on how to pronounce this one? Maybe Brenton, you have a.
Brent: I'm going to go with Reinshrift. Reinshrift to do.
Chris: Reinshrift to do. And it is a Rust, Eduardia app. That's right. That's right.
Chris: That is a front end to very, very simple markdown to do management.
Chris: So if you like to manage your to do's with the markdown, this is a front end
Chris: to it that is designed to connect to a web dev instance, particularly Nextcloud.
Chris: So you could have ongoing sync
Chris: to-do notes formatted in Markdown that just save to any web dev share.
Wes: Oh, that's nice.
Chris: Yeah. Obviously, the idea is to lean into NextCloud, but any web dev share would
Chris: work. You can make it versionable via Git.
Chris: And if you're so inclined, there's an optional download to download a local
Chris: Whisper open source audio model so you can dictate your tasks to the application.
Chris: And it will write them in Markdown for you.
Wes: Nice.
Chris: And it's lean it's mean it could fit on your machine no problem at all and because
Chris: the back end is all text should you decide to stop using it,
Chris: Bob's your uncle. You got your files right there.
Wes: Looks like it's a CC by SA 4.0 license, Rust, Python, JavaScript,
Wes: HTML, all in there. There is a Docker file.
Wes: And no NICs yet, but it's cargo, so that should be easy.
Chris: It is a little bit of all of the above. And you don't often see an app these
Chris: days with the Creative Commons license, but it works.
Chris: So we'll check it in the show notes. We'll chuck it in the show notes for you.
Wes: It's like Plexus is GPL3.
Chris: Yes. Plexus is a good one. Nice find, Brent.
Brent: Okay, I have to say I felt bad about not trying Plexus. So in the time that
Brent: you gave us a second pick, I tried it. And it's pretty fabulous, I've got to say.
Brent: You can just see the entire database of the apps that have been tracked or looked at.
Brent: Or you can just filter by installed apps. So Chris, you can look at your 300
Brent: apps and have a little homework when you're trying to fall asleep.
Brent: It is fabulous. And they rate, kind of like rating video games with how they work on wine.
Brent: It has like silver ratings, gold ratings, that kind of thing for various apps.
Brent: depending on if you're using Micro G or without Google Play services.
Chris: Oh, look, Audiobookshelf is gold. That's nice.
Brent: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Okay.
Brent: I'll be go. Not so great.
Chris: Yeah, well, that's fine by me. In a way, it's a badge of honor, I say.
Chris: The least compatible I am with Google Play, the better. It's a badge of honor.
Chris: So if you'd like to get links to our picks or anything else we've talked about,
Chris: linuxunplugged.com slash 653 is where you go for that.
Chris: In fact, we have a whole bunch of episodes over there. You could say a whole back catalog, perhaps.
Chris: In fact, maybe there's even hidden metadata that they can't see on the website,
Chris: but it lurks in the RSS feed.
Wes: Well, how else would that dope MCP server work if we didn't have fancy podcasting
Wes: 2.0 namespace tags for chapters and transcripts?
Chris: That's right. So the chapters are available as high-resolution data. Let's call it that.
Wes: And the JSON.
Chris: Yep, as well as the transcript, also available for you, all in the RSS feed.
Chris: And often a video version of the show is tucked in that RSS feed as well if you go through there.
Chris: And if you've got a podcasting 2.0 app, it just exposes all of that for you.
Wes: Just whisper alternate enclosure to yourself at night.
Chris: And of course, we also stream live.
Chris: Yeah, join us on a Sunday, 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern.
Chris: Make it a Tuesday on a Sunday. Hang out with our Mumble crew,
Chris: our Matrix room. Give it that live vibe.
Chris: jblive.tv, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar for your local time.
Chris: And remember, if you want more show, that's how you do it. You feel like you
Chris: need more, there's a bootleg, which is clocking in at a whole lot of extra show right now.
Chris: Oh, my gosh. That's a lot of show.
Chris: All right. Links to everything we talked about. Links to Unplugged.com,
Chris: Matrix Room, all of that details are there. It's a website.
Chris: Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of Your Unplugged Program.
Chris: And we'll see you back here next Tuesday.
Chris: As in Sunday.