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 finally doing something
Chris: we've wanted to do for years.
Chris: In episode 650, we're going on-site, and we're fixing a network and rebuilding
Chris: it with Linux at the core.
Chris: Then, of course, we've got some great feedback, some great picks,
Chris: and some fantastic boosts.
Chris: All that is coming up later on in the show. But before we get to that,
Chris: let's say hello to our virtual lug who's live with us right now.
Chris: Time appropriate. Greetings, Mumble Room.
Mumble: Hello, Brent.
Wes: Oh, hello, gang.
Chris: Hello, guys.
Wes: Thanks for joining us.
Chris: Everyone up there in the quiet listening, too. The Mumble Room's always a-rockin'
Chris: on a Sunday, which is a Tuesday but on a Sunday.
Chris: And you can get details at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble.
Chris: And a big good morning to our friends at Defined Networking.
Chris: Go to defined.net slash unplugged and meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking.
Chris: It's a decentralized VPN that is built from an open source project.
Chris: The entire thing is open source.
Chris: And as I was building out a network using this recently, what really,
Chris: really is nice is you don't need anyone else's permission to provision a system.
Chris: It's not somebody else's control plane.
Chris: Everything is under your control. And if you want something turnkey,
Chris: they have managed Nebula.
Chris: It's such a nice mix between the two. And if you go to define.net slash unplugged,
Chris: you can sign up for 100 devices for free, no credit card required,
Chris: and try it out. This would be a great way for like your home lab,
Chris: you know, experiment with this.
Chris: And then when it comes time to the enterprise, you can own it from the ground
Chris: up and you can watch where the project's going just by paying attention to their GitHub.
Chris: And there are some fantastic features nobody else is doing coming down the pipe.
Chris: Very excited about the future. And I think it's a great time to try it out.
Chris: So this is what I'm building on now because I want to own the entire stack, everything.
Chris: And I don't want to have any big tech between me and my network.
Chris: And I can trust that Defined is focused on building these things out.
Chris: But, you know, it's been around since 2007, Nebula has.
Chris: It was built for Slack, had to be good from day one, and now it's just everywhere.
Chris: It's in places you would never expect, like vehicles going down the road right now.
Chris: It's top, high-end, production-ready, on-the-road stuff, and you can use it.
Chris: Defined.net slash unplugged. Go check out Nebula.
Chris: It is that good. That's what we're using. And a big thank you to Defined for
Chris: sponsoring the Unplugged program.
Chris: Defined.net slash unplugged.
Chris: 48 days remain until Planet Nix and Scale 23.
Wes: Oh, boy.
Brent: That's not enough days. I don't like this.
Wes: I'm excited. Yeah, Brent, you're behind.
Brent: I got to get the van in shape.
Chris: Yes, you do. We have a promo code, Unpludge, U-N-P-L-G. You'll get 40% off your Scale tickets.
Wes: And that's what you got to do, right? Go sign up for Scale. And then you can
Wes: just attend Planet Nix. I mean, go sign up, too.
Chris: Yeah. I think we're probably going to have a meetup on Friday or Saturday.
Chris: We haven't locked that in yet, but I think it's going to happen.
Chris: And this is one of the big events in North America around free software.
Chris: And one of the things they do is they have these tracks, like Planet Nix, and there are others.
Chris: We are partial to Planet Nix, but there's some benefit to focused tracks as
Chris: well, which you might want to look into. There are other ones.
Chris: The dates to remember are March 5th through the 6th in Pasadena, California.
Wes: And then shortly— They always also have great Postgres talks, okay?
Chris: They do. They have a great Postgres community there. We also have LinuxFest
Chris: Northwest coming up just around the corner as well. That's in April.
Chris: But before we get that far, we would really like to have swag this year.
Chris: And none of us are really great at this, but we would love to have something
Chris: by scale, but definitely for LinuxFest Northwest. So we're putting a call out
Chris: for ideas to the audience for a shirt, maybe something to do with Linux Tuesday on a Sunday.
Chris: You know, anything you could think of from the show that might make a great
Chris: shirt. Send them to unplugged at jupiterbroadcasting.com.
Chris: Or maybe tag one of us in Matrix.
Wes: Yeah, you can tag me in the Matrix.
Chris: Thank you, Wes. He's taking one for the team there.
Chris: And let us know. And we'll work with you. Like, we'll kick a little back to
Chris: you or something. I don't know what, you know, because we'll see how they sell.
Chris: But we'll work with you and thank you for it.
Chris: And we'd love to have something great pretty quick.
Chris: So unplugged at jupiterbroadcasting.com where you can tag Mr. Wes.
Chris: And come up with a fun idea for the show, something that makes you think about
Chris: the show. Because why we love these is not only could it be a way to help cover
Chris: some of the costs of the show during the event, but it really makes it easy to find each other.
Chris: And that makes the conversation real smooth.
Chris: You've got an opener right there. Hey, you listen to the show.
Chris: And it makes the networking aspect of that for those of us that are not particularly
Chris: great at the conversation starting that much smoother.
Chris: And also means for the boys, we can see in the audience who's there from the show.
Chris: And it makes it easier for us to find people. And we don't have to have that
Chris: awkward conversation of, have you listened to my podcast before?
Wes: Well, and we feel more, you know, secure because we know we have reinforcements right there.
Chris: Call the army. So we'd love a great swag idea. Shoot them over to us,
Chris: unpluggedjupiterbroadcasting.com.
Chris: You never know. We might just use it.
Brent: Well, something we fancy ourselves doing is going out to listeners' businesses,
Brent: their friend's place, or I don't know, their family's businesses, maybe even home labs.
Brent: Maybe Airbnbs we stay at.
Chris: Nope, that's a great idea, actually. We should fix up people's,
Chris: oh my God, we should fix up people's Airbnbs.
Brent: Yes.
Wes: They're probably pretty bad.
Brent: We have practice. So basically helping people with their home network setups,
Brent: business network setups, Airbnb network setups, everything from Wi-Fi to storage,
Brent: find those pain points and solve them all.
Brent: With, of course, you know, as we do, as much Linux as possible.
Brent: And to get our sea legs, we started local, quite local.
Chris: Yeah, in fact, not long ago, my wife moved to clinics, and her tech setup has been rough ever since.
Chris: And I have been like the shoemaker here where my wife's tech setup is abysmal.
Wes: Embarrassing.
Chris: And I've been meaning to get to it, meaning to get to it. And I thought,
Chris: this is our chance right here.
Chris: Let's dip our toes and figure out what's going on.
Chris: And I knew immediately there was a couple of items we had to bang off.
Chris: Like, she's using a MiFi from AT&T for some of this, and it's an LTE 4G thing. Not even 5G.
Wes: Yeah, and not just as the upstream, like as the entire network.
Brent: Oh, my goodness.
Chris: Yeah, it's bad. And then she has no local storage. So let's just say the backup situation is bad.
Chris: And the Wi-Fi situation is bad.
Wes: Thankfully, though, you know, we didn't have to start from total scratch because
Wes: she did have some hardware, obviously that Wi-Fi, but also a potential server,
Wes: a Geekom IT13 Mini PC 2026.
Wes: from their mini Air series line.
Brent: That thing's cool.
Wes: Yeah, 13th gen Intel i5, 13600H, 16 gigs of DDR4 RAM, 1 terabyte SSD.
Wes: I guess it came with a Windows 11 Pro. Is that right?
Chris: Did you see that? I never even booted it, dude.
Wes: Okay, good. It was already rebooted into the Nix OS installer by the time I arrived.
Chris: Did not buy it.
Wes: It's got two USB 4.0s up to 40 gigabit per second, 8K quad display support,
Wes: Wi-Fi 6E, an SD card slot, up to two disk possible.
Wes: You can have a 2.5 SATA SSD, and there's also an M.2 slot in there. Total price was $600.
Chris: Yeah, so not the cheapest, but also when you think not...
Chris: What it can do, not that bad. You know, you get a more modern gen,
Chris: cheap, low power, cool Intel processor.
Chris: And I think the big thing for us was Wi-Fi 6E in there, two storage slots.
Chris: And this also has been blessed by folks in the Home Assistant community as a
Chris: good Home Assistant server. And we'll get to that.
Wes: Great size too. I mean, just lovely form factored, felt pretty premium, good product.
Chris: It's really a successor to the NUC. It really, truly is a successor to the NUC.
Chris: and it's a good little box and just right out of the box, great compatibility
Chris: with Linux and that's what we needed.
Chris: So then on the Wi-Fi side, we're going to move her from, I had this set up for
Chris: originally, but then she moved clinics and I'm going to put it back into action for her.
Chris: And so it's the OpenWRT1. We already had this and in fact, it was partially already set up.
Chris: And so this was just an obvious go-to to move her Wi-Fi clients over to this
Chris: instead of a Wi-Fi. So this is the hardware we brought.
Chris: We had this NUC killer, essentially.
Chris: We had the OpenWRT1 little blue box, the little physical hardware box,
Chris: and a few other items that you might find to be a little surprising.
Chris: Did you catch on the parts list here what else I brought?
Brent: I'm looking here. So, well, I see a Zigbee radio.
Brent: I thought you were a Z-Wave guy.
Chris: I am a pretty big Z-Wave stan.
Brent: What's going on here then?
Wes: Traitor.
Brent: You keep recommending things to me and then changing your mind?
Wes: Is this back to the don't do as I do thing?
Chris: It is. Yeah, it is. Yeah, call the launch. Well, so this, Zigbee's the right
Chris: tool for the job on this one.
Chris: This she already owned as well. It's a Sonoff Zigbee USB dongle.
Chris: And it's a nice little dongle, really good reputation. If she was purchasing
Chris: it today, I would have had her get the Home Assistant Connect ZBT2,
Chris: which is their nice new Zigbee dongle.
Chris: But her clinic isn't particularly large, and I think the coverage is going to be good.
Chris: And the Sonoff dongle has an antenna that sticks out and goes up a bit,
Chris: so you get away from the machine piece.
Wes: Yeah, all you had to do, we just had to plug it into the back,
Wes: and it showed right up on Linux. It was ready to go.
Chris: Yeah. And the nice thing this will enable is she'll have control surfaces around
Chris: the clinic for different lighting and music.
Chris: Yeah, and like cleaning mode, just turn everything up bright and stuff like
Chris: that. And so those will be Zigbee buttons because they're low power and they're low cost.
Chris: And then the other thing that we brought is the rather infamous speakers from
Chris: Ikea that have Sonos guts in them.
Wes: The Symphonisk.
Chris: Yeah. And these are killer. And I had her pick a couple of these up while they were still for sale.
Chris: You can still find them in some places because you essentially get a $300,
Chris: $400 speaker or more in a $150, $180 speaker package.
Chris: And it integrates perfectly with Home Assistant using the Sonos integration,
Chris: and you can control everything over the LAN.
Wes: Which, I mean, just seems ideal.
Chris: I'm hoping no Sonos app required. And so that'll be how she does some of the,
Chris: you know, like the wait music or the whatever music she wants to play.
Chris: I don't know, but she'll do it through these speakers throughout the office.
Wes: Sadly, as we're about to get into, that was sort of, you know,
Wes: one of the end goals. Sort of the nice, I'll go get to play with the fun new
Wes: speakers and set those up.
Chris: We didn't quite get there.
Wes: No.
Chris: No, no, we did not. No, we did not.
Brent: Well, Friday morning you guys were planning to roll up to the clinic and I would
Brent: imagine your first priority was to ask Adia what her top issues were?
Clips: It's a network makeover day, so I thought I should get from you,
Clips: what are your top three or so pain points that you're having right now?
Clips: Well, mostly that I just have to slow down because my internet's inconsistent.
Clips: I just don't have access to, well, it feels like I'm on dial-up,
Clips: which is no good. And then sometimes your printer drops off the network?
Clips: Yeah, and then I've got to go search for wherever it is.
Clips: I suppose it doesn't change where it is. But because my iPad will just switch
Clips: from whatever network it can get on, I go to print from it, and it's not on
Clips: the same network, and then I...
Clips: Yeah, and the fact that your network is switching on the iPad suggests that
Clips: the iPad's determined that there's no Internet available on your main Wi-Fi.
Clips: And it's like, oh, I have this one saved, so I'll just switch to that.
Clips: So that's definitely something we'll take a look at to see if we can't get that
Clips: more consistent. We brought some hardware that I think could solve that.
Clips: And I think that's job one. And then job two is I know you have lights and speakers
Clips: that we need to get working.
Clips: It would probably be good to move out of the 90s because I've been using a physical
Clips: CD player. So I think we'll do home assistant for that job.
Clips: All right. You're familiar with that. I'm familiar with that.
Clips: So that should be fine. Office assistant.
Clips: Yeah, we'll call it office. That's a good name for it. Clinic assistant.
Clips: Office assistant. That's what I'll name it. Okay.
Chris: Little did we know the Wi-Fi would be, and the networking in general,
Chris: would be such a challenge. So that's where we had to start, and that's where
Chris: we spent a good amount of time.
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Wes: Well, you heard the client. We got right to work on that Wi-Fi situation,
Wes: especially because, I mean, we wanted to set some servers up,
Wes: Home Assistant, and we're going to be pulling down a bunch of packages.
Wes: We wanted a connection that was going to be rock solid, not get an R-Way,
Wes: and actually work for Hadea long term.
Wes: So it'd been a little while, but we got to work setting up and re-familiarizing
Wes: ourselves with the OpenWRT1, which I think ultimately was pretty quick to set
Wes: up, even if it took longer than we would have liked to get everything right.
Clips: Okay, so the thing I was kind of the most worried about was networking,
Clips: and I think we have that working.
Clips: Though every eight or ten pings, I'm getting a dupe error message from the ping command.
Clips: So you get the ping that comes back with the milliseconds and all the normal
Clips: stuff, but then it's got this dupe error next to it. Yeah, I don't know if I've seen that either.
Clips: I don't know if this is some sort of double NAT thing that we're hitting,
Clips: because we are attached.
Clips: Her OpenWRT1 is attached to a LTE network. So maybe it's a carrier-grade NAT
Clips: thing. I don't know. But it seems to be working.
Clips: And the server's up. It's a basic config.
Clips: But the server's up. So what's next for the server will be NextCloud and a KVM
Clips: and then Home Assistant once we get all that going.
Clips: Once the basics are done getting configured. You feeling good?
Clips: Oh, yeah. We got NixOS running. How could I not feel good?
Chris: Of course. Of course. Now, so not only were we getting these dupe pings every
Chris: couple of pings and honestly the response time wasn't ideal,
Chris: You're thinking maybe we were having some sort of Wi-Fi weirdness in here as well.
Chris: So I wanted to know what the audience would use at this point.
Chris: If you think maybe there's maybe a channel congestion or honestly,
Chris: we thought perhaps one AP was just spazzing out because the one has a channel
Chris: analysis tool in it, which we used, and we could see that everything was just
Chris: stacked on top of each other.
Chris: And there's this massive gap in the middle of the spectrum that just wasn't
Chris: being used. So that's where we went.
Wes: Well, we ran into so many ridiculous collisions this time.
Wes: I mean, not only in like, oh, these are already on the same channel.
Wes: We should move one of those.
Wes: But then also in just like they were all using the most common IP address schemes in the 192.168.
Wes: So multiple times it was like, oh, we should have just moved this from the start.
Chris: Yeah, it was. And then we realized, too, like one of the things we could be
Chris: dealing with is, you know, carrier grade NAT. And there is a shop next to us
Chris: that has nice Wi-Fi hooked up to Fiber, and they have a guest network.
Chris: So maybe we just take the LTE out of the picture.
Clips: Okay, so we're still having some networking problems, and we've bounced around
Clips: a couple of things. So here's what we've tried.
Clips: To try to figure out why we're seeing these dupes in our pings.
Clips: And honestly, we're getting 8 megabits when we should be getting 80.
Clips: Yeah, we kind of expected, like, okay, maybe up to, like, 50% loss just from
Clips: all the extra Wi-Fi and the double hops and all that, but not a factor of 10.
Clips: So we also, as a troubleshooting thing, decided to swap over to the neighbor's
Clips: Wi-Fi, which they have a guest public Wi-Fi that's open.
Clips: And they're on Zip.ly fiber, so it's a good, solid connection.
Clips: Yeah, we're getting, like, 80 plus minus over there. And then when we connect
Clips: to the network directly, we can get 80 megabits, but when we do the bridge from the...
Clips: OpenWRT1 to their public network, again, we're getting like 8 megabits,
Clips: 10 megabits, and also do pings.
Clips: So it's got to be the configuration of the OpenWRT, but it's pretty simple,
Clips: and I'm not really, nothing's jumping out at me.
Clips: We've tried messing around with Wi-Fi radio channels.
Clips: Yeah, we did move to another channel, and that helped a little bit, but no major change.
Clips: There are two radios, and so...
Clips: Yeah, it's possible maybe we're not using the best radio for this job.
Clips: And it may be falling down to sort of the lowest common denominator of what
Clips: it can actually talk to our attempted upstream.
Clips: But we, of course, in this case, we don't actually know what the device we're
Clips: talking to on the other side is.
Clips: That's the problem with this particular troubleshooting technique.
Clips: So, I mean, it's workable.
Clips: I mean, 8 megabits you could live on, but it's not the 80 or 90 she should be getting.
Clips: So I think this is an item that we're going to have to try to figure out.
Clips: I mean, it's workable for today, but we need to figure it out.
Chris: And it turned out we needed to pivot our strategy a little bit.
Chris: And we also needed there are there are two different Wi-Fi antennae in this
Chris: thing. And one is better at the 2.4 gigahertz stuff.
Chris: And we needed that for the printer. We decided to split the labor up.
Chris: And Wes worked on a very unplugged solution for something coming up.
Chris: And we'll get to that in a moment.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: And he was, you know, banging on a plan B for our Internet problems.
Chris: And I decided to go back to my roots and get into some network printing and
Chris: network printing troubleshooting, which, trust me, guys, I just love.
Clips: OK, I've been trying to connect. There we go. Oh, my God.
Clips: So I just got a report from the printer here. It took five minutes to print
Clips: to tell me what it told me on the screen is that the connection failed.
Clips: Wow, that's what it was taking so long to print? It's this black and white page
Clips: with, like, monospace font on it.
Clips: Is it just because I didn't intercap the AP name?
Clips: Oh, maybe. Like, you can't figure that out?
Clips: It's got to be exact. Well, at least I have to tap it all out on this tiny screen
Clips: again. It's the world's tiniest screen. What is that, the size of a quarter?
Clips: I mean, oh, my gosh. That's stupid.
Clips: Well, maybe, do you think we're
Clips: going to get another fun print after we successfully connect? I hope so.
Clips: Don't you land? Well, we know that if I don't successfully connect,
Clips: we'll get another fun one.
Clips: I don't even know what's happening here right now, Wes. This is so bad.
Chris: So, I mean, I'm a big fan of brother printers, but the Wi-Fi stack on this relatively
Chris: new printer, I think it was bought late last year, so bad.
Chris: Thankfully, the WRT1 is flexible, and I could take that antennae that was good
Chris: at the 2.4, and I could just really make that a crappy security 2.4 gigahertz
Chris: dedicated IoT network, which the printer could then join.
Chris: But it's just got this tiny little UI where you've got to scroll through the
Chris: numbers and tap out your WPA password and all of that. Absolute murder.
Brent: I've recommended that series of printers to so many friends and family and then
Brent: had to be the person to connect it to the Wi-Fi network.
Brent: In that moment, you're like, why did I do this? They are rock solid once you
Brent: get it on the network, but that's like the biggest pain point.
Brent: The big question, though, Chris, is did you get that thing working?
Chris: Credit to Wes. It really was. Wes was the one that figured out that I needed
Chris: to ratchet down. Definitely, that was like the WPA security.
Wes: Yeah, we specifically had to do WPA2, PSK, and then there was a couple other
Wes: things, BGN compatibility.
Wes: I don't know, like there was three or four specific tweaks. Like you really
Wes: had to have a specific mode and a specific cipher that would really play best with.
Wes: I think one of the LLMs grabbed some of those details. Like,
Wes: yeah, this is kind of the profile you want to do. And once we got that specific configuration...
Wes: Popped on just fine.
Chris: Yeah, what surprised me is when it would do that ridiculous printout,
Chris: which would take forever, it would identify the network security that it was using in the type.
Chris: So it had the ability to recognize, like, WPA3 AES.
Chris: It just couldn't join it. Which I thought, like, what is that?
Wes: And it didn't say that that was the reason.
Chris: No, it didn't.
Wes: That was just a stat on the page.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: As helpful as you can be without being any help at all, basically.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah. So, but, you know, with that, thankfully, we're able to get that dedicated
Chris: what I'm going to call the IoT network.
Chris: So there'll probably be other IoT devices in the future that have similar problem.
Chris: That's fine. They're safe.
Chris: And really, the thing that I think was our greatest moment was part of all of this in the background.
Chris: Wes was pivoting to building a Linux router, and we made a few tweaks to this,
Chris: including one of the things that we decided about building this Linux router
Chris: is we're going to get this MiFi into shape and we're just going to disable Wi-Fi on the MiFi.
Chris: and plug it in over USB directly into a Nix router that we'll have do all the heavy lifting.
Clips: Okay, a little pre-lunch pivot. Might regret, but we were just looking at this
Clips: networking situation, and it's just insufficient.
Clips: And we're not experts in the OpenWRT1.
Clips: I mean, it's a great little device with great options, but we're fiddling around with the UI.
Clips: I mean, honestly, it feels like the last 45 minutes to an hour have just been
Clips: like us exploring a UI to find options. I think we could get to the UCI stuff
Clips: underneath and, you know, put even more. Yeah, yeah, true.
Clips: I don't know if that's what we want necessarily because we don't also know that very well.
Clips: Yeah, so we're going to do the right thing, and we're going to set up the server
Clips: that's our NextCloud and Home Assistant box to also be our router DNS and DHCP box.
Clips: And, like, primary connection to the Wi-Fi that we're using as the upstream.
Clips: So it will connect to the upstream Wi-Fi, and then using the Ethernet port,
Clips: we will connect to the WRT1.
Clips: which will then share that connection out via Wi-Fi. And we'll just have the
Clips: NIC server doing the routing and the DNS and the HTTP because that's an interface we understand.
Clips: And then, honestly, it might make it easier for me to make changes from remote,
Clips: too, the more I think about it.
Clips: Now I don't have to try to open up, like, a web UI in a remote browser kind of thing.
Clips: Or it's going to be a huge pain in our butt and waste an hour of our time. We'll find out.
Chris: I want to ask the audience in particular what tools you would have used to figure
Chris: out what's going on with these Wi-Fi problems we had.
Chris: And our solution was just remove as much Wi-Fi from the picture altogether.
Chris: But this was extremely crowded. I'd say on the low side, there was probably
Chris: 30 APs that we could pick up.
Wes: Easy, yeah.
Chris: And some of them were pretty strong. And some of them seemed like businesses, AP1, AP2, AP3, AP4.
Chris: And then others were obviously residential because it's a mix of business and residential.
Chris: It's business on the first floor, residential on the second floor.
Wes: Right. And like the open, you know, the one isn't like crazy underpowered or anything.
Wes: I don't know if it's like blasting anything out, but fine.
Wes: And we could see things that were at least as strong as it right there.
Wes: And it was sitting next to us.
Chris: Yes, right there at the desk. So I would like to know what you would use to
Chris: troubleshoot and analyze Wi-Fi in this situation.
Chris: Is there a particular tool that's beyond just Wi-Fi analyzer,
Chris: or am I discounting Wi-Fi analyzer on Android?
Chris: If you could boost in and tell us what you would use, because I think if we
Chris: did this again, that would be a tool I would like to have in our toolbox to
Chris: troubleshoot, because I could see that being an issue when we go to places like this.
Chris: And we were kind of left just blind with what was really going on,
Chris: with only what we could tell just by,
Chris: what was in the one and with the tools in the one and what we had on our phones or our laptops.
Chris: So that was, you know, a challenge. But I think once we moved over to USB and
Chris: Wes got a nice little basic config going with DNS, mask and DHCP and all of
Chris: that, we had started making some real progress finally on the networking.
Clips: Well, progress has been made. We have the networking all set up on the Nix host.
Clips: It's doing DHCP and DNS and it's routing out quite nicely. and we're using now
Clips: the OpenWRT1 as an AP that's connected to the NixOS box.
Clips: And I could not tell you why, but our throughput has gone from,
Clips: at best, 8 megabits to now 60 megabits.
Clips: We're not at the 80 we should be, but we're a lot closer.
Clips: Do you have any thoughts on why? Blame Nix, in a good way.
Clips: Or the magic of a full Linux kernel on x86?
Clips: I don't know. But we're going to take the W where we can take it,
Clips: and we're going to get Home Assistant spun up.
Clips: So we're working right now on getting a bridge interface, so that way Home Assistant
Clips: OS can run in KVM, but essentially get link-level access to the LAN so it can
Clips: find all the stuff it needs to find.
Clips: And we're setting up a little Home Assistant config, and then,
Clips: well, I mean, a VM, and then we'll get a booting. I'm looking right now because
Clips: Wes is doing the rebuild right now.
Clips: Doing a boot command, getting ready to reboot, maybe with a new fancy bridge
Clips: actually working. We'll see.
Clips: Yeah, we can sometimes get it up and sometimes it just gets shut down by the system.
Clips: But I think this reboot's going to do it, and then we'll have Home Assistant
Clips: up and running. Because it's just the image.
Clips: Once the VM starts, now we get Home Assistant configured. So we're really close.
Wes: Boy, you know, I think we were losing it a little bit there.
Wes: Clearly, we were getting hungry.
Wes: We'd kind of been going in circles for a while. I didn't mention it before,
Wes: but I think it's worth saying that part of the benefit of moving things over
Wes: to NixOS was making sure you didn't have to spend any more time in the OpenWrt1
Wes: web interface, which I think maybe might have cost you some sanity.
Chris: I've realized this about myself in the past, too.
Chris: I seem to have a threshold of fiddling with GUIs, as I put it.
Chris: And I've hit it before with TrueNaz. I've hit it with PFSense.
Chris: I've hit it with Proxmox.
Wes: We would get to a state where you were trying to set a particular value that
Wes: you'd know you'd seen where to set it, but then we're not that familiar with
Wes: this UI. We used it for one day recently, right?
Wes: And then so you're trying to hunt through the entire UI to go find it on which
Wes: page and which button to get to that setting screen.
Chris: I've already spent more than an hour on this, and I thought this would be a
Chris: 10-minute thing, right? And it's like, I just want to look at it all on one screen.
Chris: I just want it in a config all on one screen, and then I don't have to hunt like this.
Wes: So we thought Nick's would be the opposite experience. And for the most part, it was. Except.
Wes: tang bridge yeah we would reboot the bridge would appear and um just for background
Wes: right so what we're trying to do is run home assistant in kvm libvert virtual
Wes: machine but obviously home assistant wants to talk to all the stuff on your network so big.
Chris: Part of it.
Wes: We were going to make a virtual switch a bridge on the
Wes: linux host and then put the ethernet address
Wes: that we're using to talk to the wi-fi as the backbone of the network in as a
Wes: slave to the bridge and then that would be able to make sure that the VMs that
Wes: get added and are also added to the ports of the bridge can talk automatically
Wes: to the network and it'll just use all the same sort of DHCP setup and just get
Wes: a regular IP on the network.
Chris: Being Home Assistant to everything on the network just looks like another device
Chris: directly on the network which is that link layer you really need for Home Assistant to do all its magic.
Wes: But it would pop up, we would see it coming online successfully DNS Mask was happy about it.
Chris: Hey, there's our BR0, we've got a bridge, great!
Wes: And then it would disappear.
Clips: Okay, this is genuinely perplexing. It's got to be vert manager or something's
Clips: messing with us. But we reboot the system.
Clips: The bridge interface comes up. You can even list interfaces,
Clips: and for a few seconds, you'll see it.
Clips: We have the right IP address. I mean, I bet the SMS was happy for a moment.
Clips: And then, I don't know, 20 seconds after the system's loaded,
Clips: the interface shuts down.
Clips: And we don't have a network manager running on this system. Nope.
Clips: So that is weird. That's a little problem. We thought we just had fixed with
Clips: that last build. And yet it persists.
Brent: This is exactly how network troubleshooting or, you know, quote-unquote upgrading
Brent: always goes when I try it.
Brent: This is why I hate networking. So did you boys just, like, keep at it and try
Brent: to figure this out and an hour later make progress? Or how did this go?
Chris: Well, we came up with a viable solution.
Clips: You know, sometimes you just got to let the machine take a look.
Clips: So we kind of threw our hands up and we threw the machine at it and said,
Clips: hey, LLM, review all the logs and figure out why our bridge keeps disappearing.
Clips: And sure enough, it found a correlation. I think it would have taken us a little while.
Clips: And it appears to be related to our USB connection to the MiFi,
Clips: that is our primary Internet connection.
Clips: When it goes down and then comes back up, the bridge is getting shut down and
Clips: then isn't starting again.
Clips: And we need to make that independent of the rest of it. So it has it lined up.
Clips: It says we can rebuild. So I'd say rebuild and reboot, and let's see if it works.
Clips: Oh, also, look here. It has a line suggesting that we add USB power management to help.
Clips: I think it just disconnected because we rebooted. That's why it disconnected.
Clips: And I think it takes a bit before the interface appears. Right.
Clips: And it might be just enough. It might be waiting until the host even starts
Clips: to negotiate before it even creates an interface, because that thing also, port works for storage.
Clips: So it can do a USB storage, or it can be a tethering interface.
Clips: So it may have to do some sort of negotiation.
Clips: I don't know how that works, but I do like that it found it.
Clips: Do we have a bridge? Oh, this is looking better. We have a bridge.
Clips: The bridge has disappeared before, so we don't know if we have a persistent bridge. Oh, okay, good.
Clips: It's still there. Yes, and we just got an IP on our MiFi upstream,
Clips: which is, I think, when it was failing before. Yes, that would make sense.
Clips: Yeah, of course, right. I think we would have found that, but we don't have
Clips: a full graphical environment here, so it's not the best for reading through
Clips: files of system delay. It's just on a console. LM is perfect for that.
Clips: Yeah, reading through and finding that correlation, I think that solved it.
Clips: Nice. So now we have a bridge.
Chris: Yeah, to really underscore that, what worked super well is Wes was physically at the console.
Chris: You can imagine what that's like, a little headless server that we have a monitor attached to.
Chris: And then I'm on my little laptop, and I'm SSH'd in. And I have to give a shout out to OpenCode.
Chris: This is a killer LLM2E that really made this quick work, because it just was
Chris: able to review the logs super quickly, find the correlation,
Chris: and be like, well, here you go, dummy, this is your problem.
Chris: And it was something that, yeah, like Wes said, maybe we would have found that.
Chris: it found it very quickly. And the great thing about OpenCode is you can connect
Chris: it to local models, you can connect it to remote cloud models,
Chris: it has a lot of different options in there.
Wes: OpenRouter easily.
Chris: OpenRouter super easy.
Wes: Any of the big cloud providers. And they also give you some free usage on their
Wes: models without even logging in.
Chris: Yeah, they have like these Zen models that they've kind of vetted and they host
Chris: and let you use for a little bit.
Chris: But the big thing is that it's MIT licensed, it's vendor neutral,
Chris: and it's perfect for these kind of quick, I need to get something running and
Chris: diagnose and read through some logs.
Chris: And I think it made it go a lot faster for us. We probably would have had to
Chris: burn, you know, another 10, 20 minutes trying to find that correlation.
Wes: And it's nice to see this when every other provider has their own version, right?
Wes: And now you're seeing like folks locking it down more where only some plans
Wes: can be used with their particular version of these kinds of tools.
Wes: So it's nice to have an open source thing for a very useful tool.
Chris: Yeah, if you're playing around with something like Cloud Code,
Chris: you could easily use something like this. Then you're not tied to a particular
Chris: vendor. You could keep using the Cloud stuff if you want.
Chris: But OpenCode is vendor neutral. Like I said, it's MIT licensed. And it's beautiful.
Wes: It's really snappy.
Chris: It's beautiful. It's fast. And it's got a lot of smart features.
Chris: And it was just like it was taking a laser at this and just boom, found it right away.
Chris: Oh, here's your problem. And then it was so obvious. Oh, of course. Right. Duh.
Wes: Okay, so we've got the bridge. It was actually staying around doing its job.
Wes: So that means the Home Assistant virtual machine could actually start and get
Wes: on the network and actually start getting configured. It had a bunch of stuff
Wes: to pull down, some Docker containers, because we're using the whole Home Assistant
Wes: OS setup here. But we had a little more work to do.
Clips: And the final piece falls into place. We had one last thing to do, and that was?
Clips: Establish a Nebula network. That's right. By directional SSH,
Clips: because otherwise we can't actually do what we need to do. Yeah.
Clips: I mean, not only does it mean that we get to wrap up and finish anything that
Clips: needs to be finished remotely, but that's also what I'll use for off-site backups
Clips: as well. So it's really good to have that.
Clips: And that'll be something I can work on from my leisure at home.
Clips: And now you can print your lady love notes wherever you are.
Wes: Yeah, I signed you up for that. So you better make good on it.
Brent: This is awesome. I didn't know you guys were going to do the Nebula part of it.
Brent: How did that go? And, well, basically, Chris, I'm assuming doing all your work
Brent: from home is going to be much better than having to deal with the office internet?
Chris: Yes, very much so. Just being able to chill and do it from the comfort of home
Chris: is nice. Or support her when she needs it.
Chris: You know, because part of this also is which didn't work in the clips just for timing.
Chris: But we have a little basic NextCloud setup on there. And I'm going to offsite
Chris: backup that for her. But long story short, the nice thing I really clicked in
Chris: with Nebula is we didn't have to ask permission from any service or log in any service provider.
Chris: We just issued ourself the keys and set up a quick lighthouse,
Chris: which I almost had completely finished anyways. It just takes no time at all.
Chris: And then it was we had a private mesh VPN with no other person,
Chris: company, entity involved at all.
Chris: And it's perfect for a clinic, you know, trying to do offsite backups privately.
Wes: Yeah, and it was pretty easy to get it kind of connected to the rest of what
Wes: you needed so that you had a link from your existing setup in there when you do need remote access.
Wes: And then Nebby has a lot of nice firewall rules, too, so you can kind of make
Wes: sure that only the stuff and the directions that you want are allowed.
Brent: We started the show talking about what Hadiyah wanted out of all of this,
Brent: and you boys spent all of your time seemingly trying to troubleshoot the network.
Brent: Did you get there? Like, was she happy with the end result?
Clips: Okay, so it took a little longer. It's 6 p.m. I thought we'd be done at 3 p.m. Yeah.
Clips: But here's what we got for you. So that over there is your new server.
Clips: I'm pointing at the little tiny box. Great. We need it doctor.
Clips: Yeah, that's doctor server, server doctor. And it's going to run your home assistant,
Clips: which you can see we have up and running over there on that screen.
Clips: I see it. And that blue box is the WRT1. And that's going to be doing your Wi-Fi now.
Clips: Your internet connection is now connected over USB to your server.
Clips: And so we're just going to need to find a place for all this.
Clips: But I've tested your printing. The Wi-Fi network is way solid,
Clips: so the devices shouldn't drop off anymore. Good.
Clips: And your Internet is much better than it was. We were having some sort of weird,
Clips: like, IP conflict. I don't know what was going on.
Clips: How did you solve it without knowing what it was? We swapped out the hardware
Clips: and just YOLO'd into using the server to act as a router.
Clips: And then we switched from using Wi-Fi or Ethernet to connect to the Wi-Fi to using USB.
Clips: Oh, that's what I would have done. I should have mentioned that to begin with.
Clips: Yeah. Yeah, that would have saved us some time. We should have waited for you to get back.
Clips: I didn't want to step on you or woman's plane, you know? All right.
Clips: Well, we'll check back in and see how it's working in a few days.
Chris: I mean, the core thing she wanted was solid Wi-Fi, and I think we delivered that.
Chris: The NextCloud stuff, she and I need to work on more because we need to develop
Chris: a workflow for how she actually exports her backup data to the NextCloud.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: We haven't worked that workflow out yet. So that remains to be done.
Chris: And the Home Assistant instance is basic.
Chris: And so there's some refinement needs to be there. But some of that she'll do
Chris: on her own. She doesn't mind toying with that.
Chris: But I think, you know, there's probably room for improvement,
Chris: but we got the job done. And I actually would like to punt that over to the audience.
Chris: And, you know, a great way to boost in and support the show is how do we do?
Chris: Give us your grade, you know, A to F, what we can improve if we did this out
Chris: in production for a listener in the future or somebody's Airbnb or small business
Chris: or home lab and some Wi-Fi tools.
Chris: I think would be good. And also just general, like, what we could have done better.
Wes: What pro tips, setups you like?
Chris: I am very happy with how solid we got the internet ultimately.
Chris: And then the Wi-Fi LAN seems to be very solid too, so she's not going to have the drop-off.
Wes: Yeah, that's, I mean, at least even if there are sort of upstream issues or,
Wes: you know, service provider, etc., at least having a stable LAN means you don't go insane.
Chris: And ultimately, the reason why I wanted to use NixOS for doing the DNS and DHCP
Chris: is because it's just there in the declarative configuration.
Chris: And so I just need to back that up. And if I ever have to restore her server,
Chris: I just restore that configuration and all of her core network settings get restored.
Wes: That was also handy as we were like onboarding the VM and onboarding the printer.
Wes: And like it just was super easy to add reservations and check on things. And yeah.
Chris: That's a great point, Wes. As we started to build that stuff up,
Chris: it was just sort of obvious that this was a better route for us to go for the
Chris: kind of integration we wanted.
Chris: So I am happy with the results, but there is still a little bit of work left to be done.
Chris: I think if we hadn't spent so much time troubleshooting the different network stuff.
Wes: We did kind of spend half the day getting to the point where we even ended up
Wes: on the path that was the good path.
Chris: So that limited our results. Because we knew the WRT1 was good and we could
Chris: probably get it working, but just ultimately.
Wes: There really are limited know-how of how to properly utilize it.
Wes: It's probably part of it.
Chris: At the end, though, we switched to our strength and it worked pretty well.
Chris: Well, thank you very much to our members. The early year sales are lean,
Chris: and this is an area where we lean very much on the members to keep things going.
Chris: There's no understatement there. The members are making these episodes possible,
Chris: and I really do appreciate it.
Chris: You can get a membership right now at a great discount. I think we still have
Chris: some bootleg promo codes to claim for the annual or for the month-to-month membership.
Chris: You can apply them for the linuxunplugged.com membership. We'll get you a core
Chris: membership and that gets you the unedited bootleg version now in video in that
Chris: feed as well, a video version of the show.
Chris: Wave, boys. Hi. We see we're waving right now to the video version of the show.
Chris: And then – but notice how we haven't effed up the audio version because we love you.
Chris: And then also there is an ad-free version of the audio version that's still
Chris: got all of Drew's great touches that's available for you.
Chris: And then at jupiter.party, that's a whole network membership because we have
Chris: a bootleg thing going for launch and other shows that will eventually also be
Chris: on there. So that's jupyter.party for the whole network membership and then
Chris: bootleg for the promo code.
Chris: The bootleg really is where it's at. I got to say, there's some good stuff in
Chris: there. We had a good bootleg.
Wes: Some sneaky extras, you might say.
Chris: Thank you very much to our members for making it possible. And of course,
Chris: everyone who boosts each episode. These are the things that keep us going and sustain the podcast.
Brent: This week we were lucky enough to receive a little update from Olympia Mike, dear friend of the show.
Brent: He says, hey Lupp family, I got a great follow-up to the Holiday Home Lab episode.
Brent: My little Nixbook side project has all grown up.
Brent: The Computer Upcycle Project is now an official non-profit taking donated hardware, fixing it up,
Brent: and getting it into the hands of people who need it
Brent: recently we received a donation of 35
Brent: hp pro desk 600 g5 minis
Brent: they're 8th and 9th gen i5s 8
Brent: to 16 gigs of ram they generally have a
Brent: serial ata ssds in them they're small quiet fast
Brent: and easy to upgrade now there is one catch though
Brent: they don't have built-in wi-fi which makes them less than ideal for everyday
Brent: home desktops but these things make fantastic little home servers so here's
Brent: the deal i want to offer them completely free to the linux unplugged community,
Brent: you cover the shipping from olympia washington i send you a box no strings attached
Brent: and you use it for whatever you want home lab server experiments chaos it's up to you.
Chris: That is pretty great, Mike. So how do they reach out to Mike if they're interested
Chris: in covering the shipping and grabbing one of these HP Homelab boxes?
Brent: Yeah, if you're interested, just, well, shout out to Mike.
Brent: So it's Mike at ComputerUpcycleProject.org, and you can organize how all that
Brent: shipping is going to work and where to send these little monsters.
Wes: That is so kind and great. And congrats on the nonprofit and just this continuing.
Wes: I mean, also, I saw, we previously mentioned the license discussion that Mike
Wes: was having with his community.
Chris: Right.
Wes: Well, they kept going after we talked about it and had some great discussions
Wes: and reasonings shared from the project side and have ended up going through
Wes: the steps to get all the approval from all the contributors and are now officially licensed as MIT.
Chris: Hey, that's good to hear.
Brent: Hopefully.
Chris: Glad they got that sorted.
Wes: Yeah, right? So it's the next stage of the project in many ways, which is wonderful.
Chris: I want to give a huge thank you to listener Alex and also to producer Jeff.
Chris: They each sent in a Coral USB accelerator for the show, and I grabbed one right away as it came in.
Chris: And one just came in too. Wes has one now. I, of course, hooked mine up to Frigate.
Chris: I have now Frigate with accelerated detection.
Chris: And I'm really liking it. So if people are interested in an episode on Frigate,
Chris: the open source DVR, where you can take a bunch of different kind of camera
Chris: feeds and put them into one DVR and keep it all local.
Chris: And with this accelerator, I'm doing, you know, millisecond face detection now
Chris: and stuff like that and object detection and motion detection.
Chris: And so we have the second one here because listener Alex and PJ were both very generous.
Chris: And so while I think while we have it around, we should play audio tagging.
Chris: Wes, you were looking at ways to maybe do a little tagging with audio and whatnot
Chris: with the choral chatted about that. So I think that could be a fun project.
Wes: It does seem like there's got to be some wacky, fun things we can do with this thing.
Chris: And Brent rumor has it there may be a third one if you make it over here sooner or later.
Brent: Oh, I'm on my way.
Chris: I don't know. We don't know. Maybe it ends up, you know, sneaking out in the
Chris: hands of somebody else. But.
Chris: Thank you, Alex, and thank you, PJ. Really appreciate that.
Chris: And would love, love to hear what you can do with the West and be happy to do
Chris: a report on Frigate if people are interested. Just let us know.
Wes: Indeed.
Brent: Well, we received a baller boost. Wait, there's several baller boosts here,
Brent: but the top one, 100,000 sats from CJ McAdemy.
Wes: Macademy.
Brent: Yes, CJ Macademy.
Wes: Or CJ Macademy.
Brent: Thank you for the boost. Well,
Brent: CJ Macademy says, Hey, I've been a weekly listener for about two years now.
Brent: I am a macOS system admin with a little prior Linux experience,
Brent: and the show was recommended to me by one of our company's Linux devs as a place to dive into Linux.
Brent: Well, long story short, I run Nix packages and NixOS on everything possible
Brent: now. So here's some value for value.
Brent: See you all at scale and plan Nix.
Wes: Oh, great. Looking forward to that. Wonderful. Thanks for saying hi.
Chris: Yeah, thank you very much. Thank you for listening. I'm glad to hear that.
Chris: Interesting, too, because I think that's a really neat demonstration of the
Chris: demographic that listens to the show as well.
Chris: And I'm glad to hear that these tools are useful on all the platforms out there. Thank you, CJ.
Chris: Appreciate you being our baller booster. Mr. Hybrid Sarcasms back with a nice 25,000 sets.
Chris: Well, wouldn't you know it? He's on to actual budget. When I saw the actual
Chris: budget supports multiple users via OIDC.
Chris: Is that the Excel connection?
Wes: No, that's OpenID.
Chris: Okay. Oh, right. I'm thinking of whatever it used to be where you could connect Excel to SQL Server.
Wes: I love that idea.
Chris: I'm like, what is he doing? I'm thinking budgets, right? I'm thinking spreadsheets.
Brent: I implemented PocketID.
Chris: Oh, there you go. I should have just read the next sentence in my home network.
Chris: It's game-changing to log into an app using a pass you stored in BitWarn.
Chris: Now I'm O-dicking all the things.
Brent: Wow.
Chris: I have been very tempted by this, too. In fact, this is what makes me a little
Chris: pro passkey, is a setup very much like this.
Chris: And also, I think using Bitwarden or a 1Password password manager makes it a lot smoother.
Wes: For sure, yeah.
Chris: But then you've got to kind of commit for a while. So consider that.
Chris: That's why I like hybrid setup here. That's something I could commit to.
Wes: Yeah, very nice work, hybrid.
Chris: I could OIDick all over the place.
Wes: Curious how you like actual budget, too. That's been curious about that.
Chris: Yeah, good call.
Wes: The DudaBinds abides in with McDuck's 22,222 sets.
Wes: You brought back some memories with the disc burner.
Chris: Oh, good.
Wes: I remembered I used to use Nero on Windows and K3B and Bracero on Linux.
Chris: Uh-huh, you used all those, yep.
Wes: I don't know why, but I specifically remember the Tayo Yudin DVDs,
Wes: buying them by the hundreds back in the day.
Wes: I bought an LG Blu-ray writer in 2023, actually.
Chris: Same.
Wes: The flashable version, WH-16NS40.
Chris: That was the one.
Wes: But I hardly ever used it. If when I ever get it out of storage,
Wes: I might give this cold storage idea a go.
Chris: Do it.
Wes: Thanks for the content, as always.
Chris: And I was reminded via email this morning, when it comes to optical media,
Chris: why not burn two? Because one is none, after all. And you never know when it
Chris: comes to optical storage.
Chris: So, thank you very much. Appreciate it, dude. It's good to hear from you.
Brent: Well, Johnny Castaway boosted in a Spaceballs boost. One, two,
Brent: three, four, five Satoshis.
Brent: I'm just passing this along for your perusal. It's a little Reddit thread.
Brent: It's only an open source one petabyte NAS.
Brent: No big deal. Seems doable, right?
Brent: Might try building this one myself after Fosdom this month.
Chris: That's a lot of spinning rust. Wow, man.
Wes: You seem like you're sweating a little bit.
Chris: I just get a little nervous about babysitting that much spinning rust,
Chris: but that would be cool. It's usually one of these open enclosures. I do love that idea.
Chris: the closure and closure is printed and then it has the back planes in there
Chris: and wiring channeling for it and i mean it looks really slick it can hold up
Chris: to 45 discs so uh yeah that's how you get to a petabyte right 45 24 terabyte
Chris: that's absolutely we could.
Brent: Just build one of these for the jv colony to use you know let's put it in space
Brent: or something and we can all access it and have some off-site backups.
Chris: It will even contribute to the ipfs network you never know.
Wes: A networking dream.
Chris: Wow thanks Johnny appreciate it hey there's Gene Bean he's here with 4,813 sats
Chris: I think he wants some mac and cheese,
Chris: He says, I'm using Backblaze B2 for my backups. It's the way to go,
Chris: in my opinion. And he says, Chris, you made me nostalgic with your Blue Vault project.
Chris: And he links me to the old Svelte CD DVD case that many of us have.
Wes: Yes, look at this.
Chris: With the plastic bindings where you slide 96-disc capacity. Yeah.
Brent: I think I still have one of those, actually. It's got a couple of Ubuntu discs in there.
Wes: It works for car, home, office, or travel.
Chris: Honestly.
Wes: You need backups everywhere.
Chris: It's actually a good idea. That is actually a really good idea.
Chris: Because what am I going to do? Have a stack of jewel cases like an animal where
Chris: I could have one pack and it's only $10.
Brent: Did any of you have one of these in your car so that you could just like?
Chris: Oh, yeah.
Wes: For sure.
Chris: Oh, yeah.
Brent: All right.
Chris: I also had the one that clipped onto the visor.
Brent: Yeah, the quick switch.
Chris: Yep.
Brent: You pro.
Chris: And he shouts out to Unify for a great Wi-Fi hardware and stuff.
Chris: So thank you, Gene. Appreciate you, sir. Always great to hear from you.
Wes: Well, PCNORF boosts in with 5,000 cents.
Chris: Oh. Thank you.
Wes: Don't forget to do a dedicated burn for Jar Jar.
Chris: You always want to have an extra burn for Jar Jar, right? Because one is none,
Chris: and Jar Jar needs at least one.
Brent: Doornail 7887 boosted in a row of ducks. Damn it, Chris, your timing is quite suspicious.
Brent: I just wrote a very similar app, which is, granted it's a Python-based app,
Brent: for backing up my ever-growing data to a suite of old, small,
Brent: offline hard drives I keep in a safe.
Brent: I pull them out regularly and was manually managing which data went on which
Brent: drive, but that was getting quite a bit out of hand, and I needed some automation.
Brent: Maybe you should consider more than just optical destinations?
Chris: Hmm.
Brent: Huh?
Chris: Blue fault. If I could find a nice stasher of spinning rust,
Chris: that's probably the way I would go.
Chris: I had. Maybe if I dug through all the systems here in the studio,
Chris: I could probably come up with a few terabytes. You know what I mean?
Brent: Just pull them out of those old laptop stacks.
Wes: Why don't I think that every raid you make is a scary raid?
Brent: No kidding, right?
Chris: Except for my raid one. I had to
Chris: do a raid one over the week to save my Butterfest install. That one is...
Wes: Fair, fair.
Chris: All right. Thank you very much, Dornell. Appreciate that. Lymilus?
Chris: Imilus? What do you think there, Wes? What would you give that one?
Chris: Elmilus. Milus comes in.
Brent: Milius?
Chris: Yeah. It's good, though. I like it. It's good. It's good. They come in with 4,000 sats.
Chris: Wow, check this out, party member and listener since 2020.
Wes: Nice.
Chris: On the Self-Husted Show and then added love. Well, thank you very much.
Chris: Thank you for being here. So I ran out of episodes to listen to.
Chris: This is my first boost. Hey!
Wes: Welcome. Thank you for figuring it out.
Chris: He said, oh, good. I use Friggin on an Intel system, and you could try out OpenVINO. It's a detector.
Chris: Rather than getting a Coral TPU, it utilizes the iGPU on 6th Gen and later Intel
Chris: CPUs. inference time on my 6th gen has been reliable in the sub-20 millisecond
Chris: timing, you know, compared to the 9 to 10 you get on the Coral.
Wes: Not bad.
Chris: Run it for about six months. This is a great field report because we were talking
Chris: about OpenVino behind the scenes and maybe doing an episode on it,
Chris: and I want to know if you could tell me, and this is something I should look
Chris: into, but I have an Intel Arc, one of the first generation Intel Arcs,
Chris: in the machine here in the studio, and could I use OpenVino,
Chris: to start doing inference on that Intel Arc? Oh, that'd be great.
Wes: And then we could have it maybe it could watch Brent and we could tell when
Wes: he sneaks away or if there's a cat in the frame or not.
Chris: Definitely and whenever there's a cat in the frame we just switch to him.
Wes: Exactly for the clicks and the.
Chris: Views thank you everybody.
Wes: Maybe we should pull up advantage I think.
Chris: We should yeah let's do it.
Wes: So adversaries comes in here with the 1701 sets which maybe we should have an
Wes: exception in the script for that one I don't know I officially volunteer to
Wes: help with blue faults sounds like something I've been wanting to do for a while
Wes: and Rust is my preferred language.
Chris: Oh, really?
Wes: Send me a message on Matrix or Signal if you want to discuss.
Chris: Very nice. Well, I think we should. Signal, huh? Let's hook up on Signal.
Brent: Whoa. Are you feeling okay?
Chris: It'll be my... I know. It'll be my second person on Signal ever.
Brent: You haven't added me yet. I feel so...
Chris: Dude, you haven't added... You are the Signal ambassador in the friend group here.
Brent: I didn't know you were on it. You were so against it for years. You were like.
Chris: I ain't a gain it. I just didn't need it. I ain't a gain it. I ain't a gain it.
Brent: All right. We'll talk later.
Chris: I just didn't need it. Thank you.
Chris: So thank you. I did get a couple of PRs.
Wes: Nice.
Chris: And I got an issue or two, and I resolved a couple of them. I think the hot
Chris: dog colors are still outstanding.
Wes: Yeah, what's the deal with that?
Chris: I'll be getting around to that, I'm sure. I'm sure, yeah. What does GitHub do
Chris: with issues or PRs that sit around for a while?
Chris: Is there like a stale bot that comes around and.
Brent: Cleans them up?
Wes: I mean, you can set those things up. Or I could push some updates.
Chris: Oh! You want to just ride it yourself? You feel like doing a little rusty-roo?
Brent: I knew it would come to this.
Wes: I could get some help.
Chris: All right. Thank you, everybody, who boosted this episode to support us directly.
Chris: We had 24 of you stream them, Sats, as you listened to the show.
Chris: And you all collectively stacked 35,406 Sats. This is one of those nice boosts in this episode.
Chris: And when you combine that with our boosters, who also sent us a message,
Chris: this episode stacked 212,809 Sats.
Chris: Not bad at all. Fountain FM is going from win to win, making it easier and easier
Chris: to boost. There's also some self-hosted options.
Chris: Just look into AlbiHub, and you can find a bunch of great apps at newpodcastapps.com.
Chris: Thank you, everybody, who supported this episode.
Chris: Okay, this week we have two picks, and I'm pretty tickled with both of them.
Chris: And Wes, you've been playing around with Pocket TTS.
Wes: Yes, 100 million parameter model, text-to-speech, voice cloning abilities,
Wes: small enough to run in real time easily on your laptop's CPU.
Chris: On the CPU. So this is voice cloning anyone can play with.
Wes: That's right.
Chris: So probably should set expectations because you said it's kind of a smaller...
Wes: Yes, that's right. It's not like a giant thing, 100 million parameter model.
Wes: It's pretty small by modern standards.
Wes: But that's what lets it run on your laptop CPU.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: And it's just a PIP or UV install away.
Chris: So here's a little comparison just to set the expectations. We're going to play a clip of Editor Drew.
Chris: First will be the original Drew. And second will be the Pocket TTS version of Drew.
Clips: I get so mad.
Chris: All right. That's real Drew. And here is Pocket Drew.
Clips: I get so mad.
Chris: Right. And Wes, why don't you say it?
Wes: I get so mad.
Clips: I get so mad.
Wes: I get so mad.
Chris: Brent, why don't you give it a go?
Brent: I get so mad.
Clips: I get so mad.
Chris: Brent says, I think, the furthest off.
Brent: I get so mad.
Clips: I get so mad.
Chris: Okay, here's Chris. I get so mad.
Clips: I get so mad. I get so mad.
Wes: I like that one.
Chris: That's actually kind of fun. I like the little extra it added in there.
Chris: So you can play around with it and get different results. And you probably weren't
Chris: giving it like the most amazing sample.
Wes: No. So this was literally, I just took, Editor Drew is kind enough to clip and
Wes: save our predictions so that we have them to review for next year.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: I took the smallest or shortest samples of those, one for each of us.
Wes: So it's like 30 seconds or less of audio. And that's all it got is a sample.
Brent: Literally a one sentence thing.
Chris: Yeah. But pretty neat. and all
Chris: on your laptop cpu right so that's pretty cool too just a little python.
Wes: Yeah it has a ui you can do and then um it has an interface you just upload
Wes: your sample wave you do probably want to um you know a few things like make
Wes: it 16-bit depth and there's a few other things that are nice for these kinds
Wes: of generative generative audio in particular but real easy upload in the ui
Wes: has a text box to type in what you want then you hit generate and it'll stream it right back to you.
Chris: Yeah you could yeah you could put anything right now and do it live and they
Chris: can render it in the browser. That's a pretty good demo right there.
Clips: It's small enough to fit in your pocket.
Chris: There you go. Just played that live in the web page.
Wes: Yeah, and it's got, of course, built-in ones that you can use.
Wes: If you do want to do the voice cloning on your own, then you do need to have a Hugging Face account.
Wes: They are open models, but you have to sign in and do a little agreement that
Wes: says you're not going to abuse them or use it for whatever variety of nefarious things.
Chris: Okay.
Wes: But it's only like 250 meg download, and you're ready to do voice cloning.
Chris: So good. So this next pick is for- Also.
Wes: I just want to say, this opens the absurd possibility of having Chris or recording
Wes: your own voice and then having it read your own audio books or reading audio books back for you.
Brent: Chris would like his audio books read as Shatner.
Chris: Okay.
Brent: From now on.
Chris: I thought, whoa, there you go. I would. But I thought of a scenario like,
Chris: maybe if when my kids were young and I was traveling and I wanted to have some
Chris: books for them that I was reading to them.
Wes: Oh, yeah.
Chris: I mean, is that weird? Maybe I might actually consider it if it was close.
Chris: that could be kind of sweet we'll see or maybe it'd freak me out I'm not sure,
Chris: All right, this next pick is for those of us that like to slap an Android tablet
Chris: on the wall and make a Home Assistant dashboard or maybe a Frigate dashboard or whatever, Grafana.
Chris: I don't know what you do. You got dashboards, dashboards for days.
Chris: But the key of it is you just want this dedicated tablet that does nothing but show your dashboard.
Chris: Maybe it has some settings for when the lights go out, it goes to sleep.
Chris: It refreshes if the Wi-Fi goes out. And ideally, maybe you could even centrally
Chris: manage some of the settings from like Home Assistant or an automation platform.
Chris: And Fully Kiosk has served this role for many years.
Chris: It's a great app. In fact, it's still a little better what I'm about to talk
Chris: about, but it's commercial and it's not cheap. And when you start having five
Chris: or six tablets over the years and you're paying like 30 bucks a tablet,
Chris: you're like, is there a way to do this for free?
Chris: Well, friends, let me tell you about WebView Kiosk. You can turn any Android
Chris: device into a lockdown, full-page, full-screen kiosk.
Chris: And yes, of course, it is open source. It's AGPL 3.0.
Chris: So it's WebView kiosk, and you can get it directly from GitHub or FDroid or Google Play.
Chris: And it works essentially like I just described.
Chris: The way you do the remote management features is through MQTT,
Chris: which I'm an MQTT pro now, so no problem for me.
Chris: But once you hook up MQTT to this thing, you don't have to. But once you do,
Chris: you can monitor events, you can update settings remotely, you can execute commands
Chris: on the tablet, and of course you can build automations.
Chris: So you do need a mosquito broker, like a mosquito or something like that. And it's really great.
Chris: And it has all kinds of permissions, so you can access the camera feed if you
Chris: want. You can make sure it's the foreground application.
Chris: You could even have the, you could access the speakers and play audio on it.
Chris: It's very feature complete. It's not, I would say it's not fully,
Chris: it's not a fully kiosk killer.
Chris: WebView-Kiosk, we'll have a link in the show notes, is a free way to get a lot of the functionality.
Chris: And for me, I like to watch for Black Friday, and I try to snipe the cheapest,
Chris: best 11-inch or so Android tablet I can get.
Chris: And for a couple of years in a row, I've picked up like an $85 tablet that lasts
Chris: me two, three years running a piece of software, formerly fully Kiosk,
Chris: but probably this going forward.
Chris: And this is how I am then in each different areas.
Chris: I have dashboards for that area of the home. and this is how most of my interactions
Chris: and my family's interactions with Home Assistant are.
Wes: Yeah, and I mean, it seems I haven't tried it yet, but when I saw this floating
Wes: around, I thought you might like it.
Chris: Yeah, good for that.
Wes: It's 100% Kotlin, so it's, I think, probably pretty snappy and new.
Chris: And probably would work even on some of these slower, like Android Fire.
Wes: Yeah, and it's AGPL 3.0. Pocket TTS is MIT, by the way.
Chris: Yes. So we'll have links to that in the show notes.
Chris: Now, what'd you say, show notes, Chris? Yes. In fact, things are copiously linked,
Chris: including the hardware we talked about and all of that at linuxunplugged.com slash 650.
Chris: Halfway to the big 700, so we'd love it if you found time to join us live and
Chris: make it a Linux Tuesday on a Sunday.
Chris: That's right, 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern over jblive.tv.
Chris: And now for our members, we have a video version of the show in their feed.
Chris: It is just part of the podcasting tutorial spec.
Chris: So it is the same RSS feed. You don't have to resubscribe or change anything.
Chris: If you have a podcasting tutorial app like Fountain or Podverse that supports
Chris: video, you now have a video version of the show.
Chris: And we're not going to mess up the audio version one little bit.
Chris: It's still our top priority.
Chris: It's just an option that's available for our members. Or you can catch it over at jblive.tv.
Chris: You know, there's other things in that feed too, like extra data,
Chris: say transcripts or whatnot.
Wes: Wes. Oh, yeah, we got transcripts, diarizations, you know, who's saying what
Wes: silly thing. We've also got cloud chapters, so you can go right to your favorite segment.
Chris: Yeah, that's nice, too. All right, you know, you don't want to hear about the
Chris: pick? That's fine. Actually, the picks are great. Those are bangers.
Wes: Yeah, that's on you, but maybe jump right to the picks.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Who cares about our printer problems? Get to the picks.
Chris: All right, thank you so much for tuning in this week's episode of Your Unplugged Program.
Chris: This is a fun one to get out in the field and fix somebody's problems for the
Chris: real, real like you know real world stuff even if it was the wife it was a good
Chris: dip in the toe in the water yeah.
Wes: She has high standards.
Chris: And happy wife happy life that keeps the show going too like i said links over
Chris: at linuxunplugged.com and then we got a bunch of great shows over at jupiterbroadcasting.com
Chris: check out the launch with angela and myself and sometimes brent too the.
Wes: Best way to check it out is to call.
Chris: Yeah that's true weeklylaunch.rocks for that thank you so much for joining us
Chris: on this week's program, and we'll see you right back here next Tuesday,
Chris: which is really a Sunday.