Chris: Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux doc show. My name is Chris.
Wes: My name is Wes.
Brent: And my name is Brent.
Chris: Hello, gentlemen. Well, coming up on the show this week, it's easier than ever
Chris: to build your own custom live rescue environment.
Chris: So we're going to take a look at some of our favorite tools and some new ones
Chris: we came across, then recover some real data and also go over how to build your own.
Chris: Then we'll round it out with some great boosts and picks and a lot more.
Chris: So before we get to all of that, let's say time appropriate greetings to our
Chris: virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room.
Mumble: Hey, Chris, hey, Wes, and hello, Brent. And good morning.
Chris: And good morning to all of you. And shout out to everybody in our Matrix chat
Chris: room, too, that everybody joins us.
Chris: It's a Tuesday on a Sunday, and we have a lot of fun.
Chris: We've been going now for about 45 minutes or so just to kind of warm up,
Chris: you know? That's the secret to a good show is you don't just come in cold.
Wes: Certainly not.
Chris: And we do our warming up live. We also make it available for our members.
Chris: Also, good morning to our friends over at Defined Networking.
Chris: Go to defined.net slash unplugged.
Chris: If you're building network infrastructure, you got to think about the long game here.
Chris: Manage Nebula is a decentralized VPN built on the open source Nebula platform
Chris: for people who want speed, resilience, and most importantly,
Chris: real ownership of the stack that you depend on.
Chris: Nebula was originally built to securely connect Slack's global infrastructure,
Chris: and it still reflects all kinds of that scale-first design today,
Chris: with optional self-hosted lighthouse nodes for extra control so you manage the
Chris: resilience and the source of truth.
Chris: I use it, you know, just to host backups between two hosts, and companies like
Chris: Rivian use it for securing their entire global fleet of cars.
Chris: The range there is incredible. Get started, 100 hosts for free,
Chris: no credit card required. Go to defined.net slash unplugged. Check it out.
Chris: Support the premier sponsor of the show. We appreciate them very much.
Chris: Defined.net slash unplugged.
Chris: Well, next weekend is LinuxFest Northwest. Starts, as you're listening to this,
Chris: just five days away, which is probably physically less time than Brent has to
Chris: get here. How about that?
Wes: I think I was doing the math, and it puts you roughly at eight-hour days?
Chris: No, my math says 10-hour days.
Wes: Really?
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Brent: I did a little look up here before the show, because, like, someone should calculate
Brent: this, and I figured I should probably do that. 3,745 kilometers,
Brent: which in miles is, well, the same.
Brent: 36 hours, Googs claims.
Chris: 36 hours Google time, which means probably about 42, 43 hours van time.
Brent: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Still possible.
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Brent: Just a little time.
Chris: I hope everything's in great shape. I would go over everything.
Brent: Oh, yeah. I've been charging the battery for the last day because I left it,
Brent: you know, I left my little tracking cell phone plugged in, and it totally killed
Brent: the battery all the way down to zero. So starting off.
Wes: So road ready is what you're saying.
Brent: Road ready. Road ready.
Chris: I mean, the opportunity here for a betting pool, you know, does he make it on Saturday?
Chris: Does he make it after the live show on Sunday? That's good odds.
Chris: You know, good odds. We'll see. We'll see.
Chris: But we do have ourselves on the schedule. At least Wes and I will be there. Probably, Brent.
Wes: If you want to boost in between now and then, we can kind of see how folks did in that episode.
Chris: Yeah, you can make your prediction, and then the sats also go to his gas to
Chris: get him here. So, you know, it's a win-win.
Brent: You should also boost in which part of the van is going to fall apart halfway
Brent: throughout the continent and see if we win.
Brent: No, you don't like that. Does that stress you out? Oh, sorry.
Chris: Why are you putting that out there? What are you thinking? What are you doing?
Brent: Don't put that out there. I'd like a heads up before I get there.
Chris: You've got like 45 hours of solid. You have more than the average work week
Chris: of driving ahead of you and you're putting that out there.
Chris: You realize you're going to do more than a week's worth of work of driving.
Brent: It's going to be fun. You want to join me? You can fly out here. We'll do it together.
Chris: Let's do it. If I didn't have other shows, I would. I love you.
Chris: Also want to just keep putting it out there the BSD challenge for episode six hundred and sixty six,
Chris: we're still collecting your ideas on how to make that great I
Chris: think we'll technically probably kick it off in 665 and
Chris: do the completion in 666 don't you think that's the
Chris: way to do it we need a little time to yeah and then that's the canonical episode
Chris: of the actual challenge and the results will be 666 so that's our plan we'd
Chris: love your ideas and we'd love you to do it with us too we covered it more in
Chris: last week's episode in detail and I think the mission will be to try to have
Chris: all the details pretty solid for you,
Chris: in probably next episode or so the tricky thing about that is it's Linux Fest
Chris: so that might not happen but by 6.65 for.
Wes: Sure I'll be talking PSD at Linux Fest what's that just kidding it's a welcoming Unix like environment.
Chris: Yeah that's true that's true,
Chris: well we were taking a look recently because we have had some system outages,
Chris: different reasons, different stories, which we'll share later in the show.
Chris: And so it was a great opportunity to just poke our heads up and see what new
Chris: tools are out there to build a rescue session on Linux.
Chris: And there are new tools, some that are coming just around the corner that aren't
Chris: out yet that we'll tell you about.
Chris: And they are extremely handy because it makes it possible to extend these things
Chris: in ways that wasn't originally possible with these. So before we get there,
Chris: I wanted to talk about how the Windows side does this for a second,
Chris: because this time around, I spent some time trying out what is considered the
Chris: best rescue live session for Windows.
Chris: It's Heron's Boot CD, and it uses that Windows PE tool to customize it.
Chris: And guys, it's great. If you are a Windows user listening to this,
Chris: or if you are maybe at work in a
Chris: Windows universe, and you need a rescue environment that is Windows-based,
Chris: Heron's Boot CD is really good.
Chris: It's a very customized version of Windows 11. It's the best implementation of
Chris: Windows 11 I've ever seen because it looks like Windows 2000.
Chris: It's like all classically themed and everything. Basic standard start menu.
Wes: But it's real Windows 11.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: That's so great.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: Yeah.
Chris: I know. I know. It is. It has a plethora of tools, anti-malware and anti-virus,
Chris: which is something you need on these.
Chris: Lots of different backup and data recovery tools, hard drive management tools,
Chris: partitioning tools of various kinds.
Chris: Hardware analyzers to try to test your hardware or just give you a report.
Chris: Password recovery, specifically stuff that's designed for earlier and now newer
Chris: versions of Windows NT, both. I mean, I was telling the boys,
Chris: it's like it's a kitchen sink.
Chris: It's really a kitchen sink of utilities. But in the Windows world,
Chris: that's kind of what you want because you don't have a go-to package manager.
Chris: You might maybe you don't have a driver for the network card.
Chris: So in the Windows world, I think it is really nice to just have all this stuff pre-installed.
Chris: It makes it one of the bigger live CDs we're going to talk about because it
Chris: comes in at like 3.2 gigabytes.
Wes: Still, that's not bad considering Windows.
Chris: And just about every freaking recovery tool that runs on Windows is pre-installed
Chris: on this thing. And it's well organized.
Wes: This is what I've heard about. I just never quite intersected with it in my
Wes: Windows admin-ing days.
Chris: And it's, you know, snarky Linux user here. I'm like, oh, Windows is going to
Chris: do a live CD. Oh, that's going to be rich.
Chris: That's the attitude I went in. So I'm sitting, I got my notes up,
Chris: and I'm like, oh, I'm going to roast this. And I'm like, the first couple of
Chris: times I couldn't get it to boot.
Chris: And then I swapped a couple of my VM options, came right up after that.
Chris: I mean, it takes a little bit because it has to do some sort of pre-boot hardware
Chris: detection thing i don't know quite how they're doing and then once windows loads,
Chris: it has to run some pre-loaded modification stuff
Chris: to set up the networking all that but it does it all very quickly relatively and
Chris: it was immediately a great experience so if i were in this ecosystem and i was
Chris: more comfortable in windows to try to recover data this is absolutely a way
Chris: to go and i'll put a link to this in the show notes i ended up spending a lot
Chris: more time with this than i expected just because i liked it so much um now i.
Wes: Wonder if it could be in a nice environment just to have as a quick way to get
Wes: a windows thing running can you just could you just boot it up in a vm or something
Wes: if you just needed to do something quick to test on windows.
Chris: Yeah i wonder uh i think the limiting factor and i'm not is it like a.
Wes: Pe environment is.
Chris: It yes okay yes and i and i don't know i don't think you could i don't know
Chris: if you could sign into a microsoft account like so i don't know if you could
Chris: install things from the store so.
Wes: You might be yeah Yeah, limited in what you could actually get running on there.
Chris: But just straight up trying Windows.
Chris: Yeah, it works for that. It was good.
Wes: Or maybe you needed to run a quick random Windows binaries that didn't run a
Wes: line or something. Not a giant. I'm not saying install Office on there or anything, but just...
Chris: Or, you know, maybe you just need a quick Windows VM, right?
Chris: Yeah. You don't want to... Because you don't have to go through the whole install.
Wes: Which is so much fun.
Chris: Yeah. All right, now, we have to give honorable mention to the classic.
Chris: One of the OGs in this space, formerly known as System Rescue CD,
Chris: now just goes by System Rescue.
Chris: It's kind of the definitive Linux rescue toolkit out there. Bootable.
Chris: You go in there, it's got just about every tool you could possibly imagine.
Chris: A minimal GUI environment if you want it.
Chris: Data recovery tools. Now clocking in at 1.2 gigabytes.
Wes: Not bad.
Chris: And I'm going to try to make my case later in the show, but I'm just going to
Chris: present this now as we get into more.
Wes: I don't even know if you can find a smaller than 2 gig USB drive out there.
Chris: Well, that's a fair point. That's a fair point.
Chris: The next one we're going to talk about would still fit on a CD.
Chris: But before I get off System Rescue CD, they have so much stuff pre-installed.
Chris: I think these distributions should consider also adding open code to these environments.
Chris: And I know that's going to sound weird, but I'll try to make my case later in
Chris: the show. I think they should consider adding open code as a recovery tool.
Chris: And I think it matters a lot. We'll come back to that because first I want to talk about Phenix.
Wes: I will say, are you going to mention that, you know, System Rescue recently
Wes: added support for our favorite file system?
Chris: ZFS?
Wes: Well, I think it does have ZFS support already. But no, BcacheFS.
Brent: Whoa.
Chris: Oh, that's great.
Wes: Just recently, end of last month, they got the kernel up to long-term supported
Wes: Linux 6.18.20 and the BcacheFS tools and kernel module to version 1.37.3.
Wes: So, yeah, there's also a bunch of stuff like there's YQ now.
Chris: Others okay you got me beat there but phoenix is
Chris: great if a you're debian first and
Chris: b you want something that could actually still fit on a cd rom so phoenix clocks
Chris: in at 577 megabytes it's based on debian i forget whichever one runs linux 616
Chris: with some updated packages from that and this also ships now, Fenix as of 2.5.1
Chris: is the first version to release a OCI container image.
Wes: Ooh, nice.
Chris: And I'm wondering what you could use that for. It feels like there's something
Chris: you could use that for. I'm not quite sure what.
Chris: But could be useful. And it's Debian-based, CLI-focused, so that's really where
Chris: they go out with a number of comprehensive repair tools,
Chris: and they've done things like recently they've turned on ZRAM compression,
Chris: they've enabled SSH remote access, and other things to kind of make it useful.
Wes: I suppose one version might be if you just booted any old random ISO that had
Wes: internet access, you could pull down that container and then mount in whatever
Wes: actual disk you were trying to do recovery on, and you'd have all of its tools.
Chris: Yeah, that would be very useful. Sort of an on-demand rescue environment.
Chris: So that's Fenix, F-I-N-N-I-X. Link to that in the show notes.
Chris: Before we get into what we ran into recently, I want to talk about how this
Chris: is going to get so easy to create your own in just probably about a year, maybe less.
Chris: This has been in the works for a while, but Fedora 45 plans to enable persistent
Chris: overlays when you flash Fedora to a USB stick.
Chris: Now our buddy neil has been working on this in fedora since 2024 and his original
Chris: code he started on this since 2020 so that's how long this feature has been in the works,
Chris: and the idea is is that when you flash fedora to a thumb drive you leave some
Chris: unallocated space on that sucker and then by default when fedora 45 boots there'll
Chris: be a boot menu entry selected by default, by default,
Chris: that will just initialize that new partition and mount a writable overlay to it.
Chris: Now you have a persistent storage to install packages, tools like OpenCode or
Chris: DD Rescue, whatever it might be that you need.
Wes: Or a way even just for some of the stuff those tools write to dot files in your
Wes: home dir or whatever you could have.
Chris: And you take that thumb drive with you and that stuff persists.
Chris: And the next machine you go to, it has that. It has your SSH key set up perhaps.
Chris: Maybe it has your, you know, whatever you need to be logged into,
Chris: logged in, your password manager, whatever it is. It's got it.
Chris: Super neat. And all you have to do is just leave a little unallocated space
Chris: on the disc and Fedora 45 will just take care of the rest.
Chris: And that is going to be such an unlock for building your own custom disc.
Chris: And it's not there yet because it requires some upstream work in Drakkut and some other things.
Wes: It does make sense, though, talking about sizes of USB drives.
Wes: Like, if all you're doing is DDing this thing on there, there probably is some
Wes: space at the end of that that isn't actually being used.
Chris: Yeah, when do you not? Right? Like, even a 16 gig, really. I mean,
Chris: these images are, what, four or five gigs sometimes? Yeah.
Wes: You touched a bit on the, I don't know, the complexity, the things needed to
Wes: get across the line, and I just like the text here and the change.
Wes: Since we introduced live media in Fedora Linux 7, the
Wes: actual mechanism in which the live environment sets itself up
Wes: has been complex and intricately tied to the method in which we produce the
Wes: media using kickstarts the nature of the implementation of those scripts means
Wes: that they are hard to understand and debug which has caused problems in the
Wes: past whenever we've needed to update them so hopefully this kind of change would
Wes: also set to modern you know not only would you get some better features but
Wes: like better more maintainable plumbing too.
Chris: I think we could talk about this when it lands but it's also a great example
Chris: of I guess on the surface, it seems like a seemingly simple feature.
Chris: And yet it's been in the works for years and years because of just the upstream cooperation it takes.
Chris: And it's a great example of a small feature that just takes persistence to get actually shipping.
Chris: But when 45 lands, 44 is next.
Chris: So the next release after 44, when that lands, this will just,
Chris: in theory, be a default feature. And you just create your own live environments just by using it.
Chris: I mean, that is going to be massive for just everyone out there.
Chris: So that will probably be one of the ways you could just make your own with very little fuss.
Chris: What we're going to talk about is not that.
Chris: First, I want to thank our members for making this episode possible.
Chris: I mean, quite truly making it possible. You can support the show by going to
Chris: linuxunplugged.com slash membership or support the whole network and get access
Chris: to all the features for all the shows at jupyter.party.
Chris: When you become a member, you get access to the bootleg version,
Chris: clocking in about an hour right now.
Chris: Or you can get yourself the ad-free version, which still has all of Editor Drew's
Chris: nice touches and is a little bit tighter.
Chris: So if you've got a little shorter schedule, it's perfect for that and you don't
Chris: have to hear these segments over and over again. or you can just support the
Chris: show on autopilot and just do the right thing knowing that this show is made
Chris: for the community and possible because of the community.
Chris: And we really do support and appreciate your support and really try to do right
Chris: by you because of it because you are our number one client. You are the number one customer.
Chris: Thank you so much. And if you haven't done it yet, it could be a great time
Chris: with LinuxFest coming up. You can show up and say, hey, I just became a member. Shake a hand.
Chris: We'll give you a virtual beer at least because we can't afford to buy everybody
Chris: a beer. But the sentiment will be like we got you a beer, right?
Chris: Yeah let's go with that yeah.
Brent: Sure sure sure,
Brent: Well, I decided to do it not that way. Why would you do it the standard way
Brent: when you could do it the non-standard way?
Brent: Really, this whole rescue USB
Brent: drive has been a progression for me in supporting family members mostly.
Brent: Years ago, when I set up my parents and brothers and other family members on
Brent: Linux, I thought some stuff occasionally goes wrong.
Brent: Sometimes hardware sometimes you know they're traveling and you get
Brent: run over you know your laptop gets run over by a dump truck
Brent: or something like that and i always wanted some way
Brent: to be able to help family members from
Brent: a distance if their computer goes down because i felt responsible if i'm going
Brent: to switch you to a new operating system that i tout as you know better then
Brent: i want to have some way to help you if it's not better um so i have always convinced
Brent: uh everyone I moved to Linux to always,
Brent: always, always, always, always carry a live USB drive that's dedicated with
Brent: Linux on it so that something goes wrong, you can boot into that thing and I can help you.
Brent: Now that has been very useful. And I have to say, people have followed that
Brent: advice quite nicely because they typically forget the USB drive in their laptop bag.
Brent: And then like a year and a half later, I'm like, Hey, do you have that USB drive?
Brent: Like, Oh, do I look for that somewhere?
Brent: And yeah, it's in your bag somewhere. You just got to find it.
Brent: And sure enough, it saves the day.
Brent: But the hardest part I always had was that these were just live drives.
Brent: And so they were always vanilla.
Brent: So whenever I was booting it up to try to help someone, I was like,
Brent: okay, I need to now spend the next 15, 20 minutes guiding you through connecting it to the internet,
Brent: getting me SSHSS or some kind of remote access, maybe through something like a Rust desk.
Brent: So that process I wanted to eliminate.
Brent: And I started working on that recently where.
Brent: I iterated this concept and instead of
Brent: having a live drive on a usb just installed linux
Brent: to the usb yes that is a terrible idea most
Brent: of the time but with a rescue drive you're only
Brent: booting this thing up well hopefully you're never booting it up but
Brent: if you need to you're going to boot it up once or twice maybe a year right so
Brent: drive longevity with having a whole operating system running off of just the
Brent: flash drive is a bad idea generally but in this particular case i thought that's
Brent: maybe an okay compromise talk.
Chris: To me a little bit about before you go further because.
Brent: I actually.
Chris: Just did the same thing for my process i thought why am i using these custom
Chris: why not why don't why don't i just install to a thumb drive and then have something
Chris: i can install tools to and whatnot did you like download a distro installer
Chris: and run through the installer and point it at the thumb drive or did you.
Brent: Like do an image.
Chris: And flash it what was your process for that bit right there.
Brent: Well in this iteration i just installed directly to the flash drive so just
Brent: treated that like any old install nothing special just said hey please install
Brent: you know please install Linux to this flash drive.
Brent: And then I did a couple things like connected it to the Wi-Fi network that they
Brent: use most of the time and logged into my mesh VPN and things like that.
Brent: So that at least I had a couple of default tools available.
Brent: And so then it was really just another Linux system on a flash drive that you
Brent: could plug into any computer and it would boot up and have a couple,
Brent: you know, pre-setup configurations just to make the process easier.
Chris: How was the performance?
Brent: Well,
Brent: you know fine in a
Brent: rescue situation but you know you're running off a
Brent: flash drive so that's not great and what i
Brent: ran into was it works
Brent: great until you feel like you need to update that
Brent: drive yeah so yeah yeah so i made one you know for my mother which she carried
Brent: and forgot about which is perfect and then i was like hey i'm around like maybe
Brent: i can update your flash drive to something more modern considering it's a year
Brent: and a half old and we should have some modern linux on there and i went what.
Chris: A good son what.
Brent: You know i know i'm thinking ahead and then the update process was oh yeah painful
Brent: because it's been a year and a half so you're replacing every single package
Brent: on that thing and that is the exact thing flash drives are terrible at is the random,
Brent: you know, rights to all over the place,
Brent: it took forever to the point where I thought,
Brent: I need to iterate this idea again, because this is not working for me.
Brent: So while I was waiting for it to update, I was like, there's got to be a better way.
Brent: So turns out, of course there is.
Brent: So my next iteration, which I'm always looking for advice, you help me make this better.
Brent: But the next iteration just worked on that idea and did a bit of a hybrid.
Brent: So I used Nix OS because Nix OS
Brent: is It's really great for building your own custom versions of something.
Brent: So I already have a Nix OS configuration for my mother's laptop.
Brent: But then I was like, well, I just want to give her exactly what she's used to,
Brent: but trim that down to just the essentials.
Brent: And then let's do some other crazy stuff. Like maybe we could just boot the
Brent: entire thing to RAM because I don't think we need to be using the flash drive at all.
Brent: Right. Just use it to hold the information and transfer that somewhere more
Brent: useful when you're booting up the system.
Brent: So sure enough, that is extremely easy to do.
Brent: And the other way that helps is her current laptop only has one.
Brent: It's like a really super slim, low budget laptop.
Brent: She freaking loves that thing because it doesn't weigh anything,
Brent: but it only has one USB A port.
Brent: So if you're plugging in a live USB drive, perfectly fine.
Brent: But if you want to do anything like plug in a backup hard drive or something
Brent: like that you can't so moving the entire system to ram means you can pull that
Brent: live drive out and the system still runs perfectly fine so that is a big plus
Brent: as well and other nice things like um.
Brent: Not installing to the drive but
Brent: creating an image instead using the nix os
Brent: installer iso so you can use installation cd base dot nix module which is exactly
Brent: what the nix os installer uses and there's just pile on top a few of your custom
Brent: configurations so i just somehow managed to craft my own Nix OS,
Brent: not the installer, but a specialized Nix OS live boot environment with my own
Brent: customizations that automatically logs into my mesh VPN.
Brent: It has recovery tools on there that I like.
Brent: It even, you know, boots up fish on the terminal by default for me.
Chris: And it has custom.
Brent: Extensions in Firefox and takes out a bunch of plasma stuff that I don't need
Brent: by default on a rescue disc and it's fantastic.
Chris: Nicely done this is very very
Chris: similar to what i did based off my desktop for my
Chris: recovery process i was like i just could take most of
Chris: what is my desktop strip out some of the ancillary desktop applications and
Chris: flat packs and then i have all the tooling i need i have all my keys let's go
Chris: like it actually worked really really well but i did not do your copy to ram
Chris: idea which i think oh you gotta take that one yeah yeah.
Wes: Wasn't that easy that's one thing i haven't done either i mean i've done it
Wes: in the past with other isos but not in the combo.
Chris: With this.
Brent: Particular setup yeah i've used this trick for years actually um ubuntu certainly
Brent: has a kernel option just called to ram.
Chris: That you.
Brent: Can use so at boot even if you're just on any live iso at boot you can just,
Brent: change the kernel parameters before you boot and add to RAM,
Brent: and it'll do that for you.
Brent: So that I've used specific. I learned that specifically for my mother's laptop
Brent: because it had this one USB problem I had to get around. So that was,
Brent: that was a really nice trick.
Brent: In NixOS, it's slightly different called copy to RAM, but, but it is a trick
Brent: that the Linux kernel has been able to do for a very long time.
Brent: So it's a, it's a nice little thing to keep in, your hat.
Chris: It is really nice in a rescue environment to have things like your preferred
Chris: desktop environment, to have the ButterFS tools, or to have Firefox,
Chris: all these things that you kind of need to really get a system up and going.
Chris: It's nice to just have that.
Wes: Yeah, so you don't have to spend a bunch of time every reboot reinstalling it.
Chris: Yeah, exactly. So now you have something you can keep, but how do you keep it up to date?
Chris: That seems to be the next level of this would be something that would auto update somehow.
Chris: Like my thinking has been, what if instead of a thumb drive,
Chris: next time I install a system, the first thing I do is I install a rescue system in a little partition.
Wes: Yeah, that's something I've done before and liked a lot.
Chris: And then I install the rest of the system as a separate install.
Chris: And then maybe there's a once a week reboot into the rescue environment that
Chris: updates the rescue environment. And if the update is successful,
Chris: then reboots back into the main environment. That's the bit I'm.
Wes: You could probably set up a setup where you like flashed it instead if you wanted
Wes: to. If you isolated the stuff you wanted to keep.
Chris: That's a great idea. You build it, update it on the host system,
Chris: and then you just flash the update.
Wes: Yeah, which could also maybe work if you were still doing a USB drive too.
Wes: Again, you'd want to make sure you separate it out with partitions or some mechanism
Wes: for the data you wanted to keep.
Chris: And just leave the drive plugged in. And then you could just update it that way too.
Brent: I believe Pop! OS implemented this kind of feature when they first came out and users loved it.
Brent: One thing i would argue although i
Brent: most of the reason i was trying to
Brent: trim down this image as much as possible is that flashing
Brent: to any usb drive is just slow and painful and you should
Brent: only ever do if you really need to um but i it also saves for the use case where
Brent: if you're on the move and you lose a laptop it gets stolen you drop it in the
Brent: water or something like that Maybe you still have a USB drive and you can install
Brent: on a new machine you get, you know,
Brent: at Best Buy or something just on the go.
Brent: If you have a partition, obviously you can't do that. If you,
Brent: you know, your entire laptop gets stolen or you left at a coffee shop or something.
Brent: But you can easily have both solutions, I think. Yeah.
Chris: Sure.
Chris: Well, that's, it's funny that you and I kind of both went down the same path, but you had success.
Chris: You did recover pretty much all the data that you set out to recover with,
Chris: uh, when you were working on a separate issue.
Chris: So tell me a little bit about that because I think you told the members,
Chris: but I don't know if you told the audience that you were doing like two weeks
Chris: of drive recovery spelunking too. Just give us a, like the quick recap on that.
Brent: Yeah. When you love your family, uh, you do crazy things for them.
Chris: The things you do for your brother.
Brent: Ah so when your trend brother says hey i got
Brent: some old you know hard usb hard
Brent: drives i've been backing up to for years now all of a sudden today they don't
Brent: seem to you know be behaving like they used to so i thought okay i'll i'll spend
Brent: you know an hour helping him recover some data off some old hard drives that
Brent: he's been backing up to that i think i probably suggested that he do that years ago and uh,
Brent: Well, I was able to successfully use OpenCode to help me just like test my assumptions
Brent: on how I was going to approach recovering data.
Brent: Luckily, I was able to do it from a distance and I had a server already built
Brent: there that I should have moved all those backups to years ago.
Chris: Okay. So you had a remote box.
Brent: I did have a remote box with plenty of storage in it. Just sitting there waiting.
Chris: Okay. I got you. That's handy.
Brent: It is super handy and then like you had made.
Chris: You had made some assumptions about how you're going to recover the data and
Chris: then you you're like hey i'm going to run it past the machine see what the machine says.
Brent: Yeah so he was getting a couple read errors so i thought okay
Brent: one way to do is just you know use our sync to pull a
Brent: bunch of data off but i'm going to run into read errors obviously i could
Brent: log those and then investigate later but then
Brent: you know there's smarter people on the internet who've done it probably better
Brent: than i have so it turns out dd rescue is a fantastic tool that's perfectly built
Brent: for this use case i'd heard of it forever never used it before i always planned
Brent: hey next time i want to do this i'm going to use dd rescue but i'm not familiar with it so,
Brent: having a little i have to say having a little open code wrapper around some of these like,
Brent: bulletproof tested tools for
Brent: data recovery is so nice because i could just think about the big picture.
Brent: And then the implementation detail about which flags you need to use for a tool
Brent: that you haven't used before, I didn't need to think about.
Brent: So I could just worry about, are we keeping the data as safe as possible and
Brent: where to put it, how to treat it, what is an acceptable level of risk while doing the recovery?
Brent: And then the implementation was just taken care of by the computer,
Brent: which is a really nice way to do it.
Chris: So it was sort of pulling the strings on DD Rescue for you.
Brent: Exactly. So I could say, okay, let's use DD Rescue, but.
Brent: Treat the drive really kindly. It's a USB drive. It heats up.
Brent: So let's reduce the bandwidth that the rescue is going to happen so that we
Brent: don't heat this thing up.
Brent: And then of course, when I told my brother, I was making good progress.
Brent: He was like, Oh, well I found, you know, four other USB hard drives in my closet.
Brent: Would you pull the data off those two?
Brent: So, uh, I said, yes, cause I love my brother.
Brent: And, um, but that meant I could get open
Brent: code to help me just write some scripts to so that
Brent: i could just check in every couple hours and say okay
Brent: well pull all the data off all of the drives but do it
Brent: sequentially and uh there's different
Brent: file systems on here so use check tools for the
Brent: different file systems in line before you do the recoveries and
Brent: while you're doing the recovery reduce the bandwidth for all
Brent: the drives because because they're all usb drives but uh
Brent: you know so don't saturate the usb either
Brent: because i don't want the usb bus to like fail
Brent: for some reason four hours into the recovery of all
Brent: these things so it was nice to be able to put like safe
Brent: parameters around both the hardware and the
Brent: data on disk and the software to just do this as a gentle recovery from a distance
Brent: like i'm literally thousands of miles away and also to get a bunch of really
Brent: sweet looking reports about how the rescue went and all that stuff so yeah great experience and.
Chris: You got the you got almost all the data right you got like with with.
Brent: Yeah i got 99.889 percent of the data,
Brent: You know, that's not so bad.
Chris: Not so bad.
Wes: And a happy brother, I'm sure.
Brent: Yeah, I'll still have to break to him that one of his files isn't working.
Chris: Well, when you do that, what you do is you go over to like DriveSavers and you
Chris: just get them the cost to do data rescue from DriveSavers and then be like,
Chris: but I did it for free. I just didn't get this file. You know, like that's not so bad.
Brent: Buy me dinner sometime.
Chris: Yeah.
Chris: Now, Wes, I know you've been messing around with a few things kind of adjacent
Chris: to this area as well recently.
Chris: And we have some cool tools linked in the show notes. What from that batch do you want to talk about?
Wes: Yeah, well, I will just say that it is kind of delightful how easy NixOS makes
Wes: it to make your own, where you can build an actual ISO or have just a system
Wes: that you can flash on with an IMG file or just be able to mount or whatever.
Wes: I was just looking, because I need to update mine based on your two's brilliant
Wes: ideas, because I tried this, I don't know.
Wes: A year and a half ago two years ago yeah but it's under a hundred lines of code
Wes: because there are just these modules as brent was talking about that you can
Wes: import and then the rest is just as much like you can go all the way to having
Wes: like a most of a full desktop or you can have a minimal system that just you
Wes: know presents a cli that shows up on your mesh or whatever.
Wes: But i was kind of musing on like you know what is what would you want in terms
Wes: of like an installed system on your host or on a usb drive there's also now
Wes: you know we live mostly in like an efi world maybe you want to have legacy compatibility,
Wes: maybe you don't. It kind of depends on the fleet you're trying to support and all that.
Wes: And we live in like a world of UKIs and other things where maybe you could have
Wes: just a single file that you drop on your EFI partition that you boot into.
Wes: And I was kind of looking around to see what people were doing.
Wes: And we've used Ventoy in the past, but, you know, it has its quirks and issues
Wes: and skepticism, rightfully so.
Wes: And there's like a lot of baggage and history with Ventoy. And
Wes: I was interested to see that there was sort of a new project i
Wes: hadn't heard of called aegis boot that
Wes: i think plays a similar role that you guys might find interesting okay
Wes: it's a tool that creates usb rescue sticks capable of booting any linux iso
Wes: while keeping uefi secure boot fully enforcing unlike alternatives like bento
Wes: umi multi-boot usb they're required disabling it or enrolling custom keys aegis
Wes: boot leverages the same signed boot chain that distributions already use.
Wes: So it uses the Microsoft signed shim that a lot of distros are using,
Wes: and then it's using a canonical signed grub and their kernel,
Wes: and then it boots a Ratatouille Rust Rescue Tui.
Wes: And it has some custom code to go hunt around.
Wes: So it's a two-partition setup, kind of like how Ventoy does,
Wes: right? It's got its system code and the EFI stuff that it boots into.
Wes: And then it's got an ISO area you can dump these files onto,
Wes: and it mounts and scans the ISO files to find the Linux kernels and the parameters for them.
Chris: And?
Wes: And then, because this is a project I'm highlighting, it presents them to you.
Wes: It checks them out to see if they're signed and you can actually boot them or not.
Chris: Yes.
Wes: And then when it goes to boot them, because you're already running Linux, it uses kexec.
Brent: Oh, yeah.
Chris: There it is. Aegis boot. So this is potentially a Ventoy replacement,
Chris: maybe a little more modern.
Wes: Yeah, it's a single Rust EXE you can download.
Wes: They have some different profiles if you want it to pre-download a bunch of ISOs onto the drive.
Wes: It's all in one sort of flashing tool that's available as part of it it has
Wes: nix os windows arch linux fedora all kinds of support very cool.
Brent: Well leave it to west to find the most modern tool using the most uh i don't
Brent: know interesting and fun tooling under the hood chris i feel like we gotta catch
Brent: up again this week on the tooling that wets is using i know like well.
Chris: I want like a hybrid of yours.
Brent: And west's.
Wes: Setup well i think.
Brent: You can get.
Wes: That because you could you could make the USB with this Aegis tool,
Wes: but then put your custom NixOS or whatever ISO on there, and then it would just boot it.
Chris: The only thing you boys aren't considering, and it's a project we talked about
Chris: a long time ago, so fair enough that it's easy to forget these things.
Chris: We've talked about so many of these.
Chris: But do you remember, I think it was netboot. I'm going to it right now, XYZ?
Wes: Oh, yes. Netbooting was another thing I wanted to mention as part of this,
Wes: although it's a different whether or not you want to rely on the network.
Chris: Right. But if you've got a machine that supports network booting,
Chris: which is like all of them, you can run netboot and I actually do have netboot.xyz
Chris: running in a container on my network you do have to have DHCP and all of that
Chris: giving out it's a little bit to set up because you have to have DHCP that can
Chris: give out like the TFTP server information and the information to boot off of the IPIXI server,
Chris: But if you have the ability to set that, then you can have a network boot system
Chris: for all your systems on your LAN and just choose the network option and they
Chris: will discover this and boot the ISO image you have queued up.
Wes: Also another one where if you didn't, depending on your firmware,
Wes: you can also drop like a UEFI thing that does the Pixie as well.
Chris: Yeah. So I was wondering, I mean, could you have Aegis in there too?
Chris: Like there's a whole, like I'm just thinking with NetBoot, there's a whole angle
Chris: to this that could take this to the next level where you wouldn't even need a custom partition.
Chris: Or a thumb drive if you're just working on your LAN.
Chris: And that, to me, that could be a real unlock. If anybody out there has that setup, send it in.
Wes: You can almost imagine you're Pixie to Aegis, but then it's Linux,
Wes: so it can sort of mount the Samba share of your ISOs, and then it kegs X into one of them.
Chris: Oh, that's glorious. That's glorious.
Brent: I was just wondering how modern Aegis actually was, since I called it modern.
Brent: And it looks like the project is very active with the last commit eight minutes ago.
Brent: So Wes is right on the most modern activity here.
Wes: I've tried it all of once last night, so I just found it. Tester beware.
Chris: Yeah, it looks old. I mean, it looks new. It does look new, but it looks very
Chris: promising. It's a good find, Wes.
Brent: We have several ballers this week, but at the top of the list,
Brent: Greg the Lawyer sent in three boosts with a total of 122,345 sets.
Chris: Wow. Thank you, Greg.
Brent: I started listening a couple of years ago when I got back into Linux after a
Brent: long break. I was very pleased to discover the world of home labbing and to
Brent: see how far Linux had truly come.
Brent: My first distro back in the day was Slackware.
Brent: When I returned, I tried Debian and Fedora and then landed on Arch for quite
Brent: a while. Thanks to you guys, I'm now on that Nix OS train.
Brent: I'm just getting started, but I really like Nix. Everything about it is so intentional.
Brent: Everything I add is documented because, well, it has to be.
Chris: That's true. I do love that. It's great for people that are very,
Chris: very implicit about how their system must be set up to every detail.
Chris: And it's also great for people that cannot remember at all how their system is set up.
Wes: You wouldn't know anyone like that.
Chris: No, I wouldn't. No, I wouldn't. Oh, man. Thank you, Greg. Appreciate that very much.
Wes: Yeah, Greg, I have the full, it kind of got cut off. I have the full one and
Wes: Greg links to the next OS config repo that he has. So we can include that.
Chris: Thank you, Greg. Appreciate that. All right. Our next baller is optic gray and
Chris: he came in with 88,888 sats.
Chris: That's great. Forgeo sounds like a great GitHub alternative,
Chris: but why not use GitLab locally hosted?
Wes: That's another good option for sure. GitLab's like a little more enterprise-y
Wes: in feel and sort of setup and components and stuff.
Wes: Totally doable to self-host, but Forgeo is just a really easy sort of like turn
Wes: on one Nix OS service, and it runs like a mostly single sort of systemd thing.
Chris: And the front end's a lot like what you would expect if you were just coming
Chris: over from GitHub as well, which is nice.
Wes: I have used GitLab a lot, so that part would be fine. I like GitLab.
Chris: Well, there's a lot of free software projects that we use that are just on GitLab.
Chris: So it's definitely a great option.
Wes: Yeah, and there's a lot of, you know, there's more forges than that too to consider.
Wes: That was just one that I knew had functionality that I liked and was easy to get going.
Chris: Also just shipped an update after our episode.
Wes: That's true.
Chris: So a new version is out.
Wes: Well, the DudaBinds comes in with 77,777 cents.
Wes: Hey it's been a while i wanted to boost so many times but i didn't have the time we understand,
Wes: for the stage four bsd challenge i say you test how gaming works you pick a
Wes: game that's supposedly supported in bsd and you get points for managing to install
Wes: and play all right i'll try to participate i have a dell xbs and an x260 lying
Wes: around nice and then for what it's worth,
Wes: I like the AI content So.
Chris: The dude I'm writing this down right now Level 4 Chris frantically writing Taking
Chris: notes Thank you sir that's good.
Wes: Where'd you get the fountain pen?
Chris: It is dipped with the blood of my enemies Adversaries 20 Upgrade,
Chris: Adversary 17 comes in with 20,001 sats He says I think the other host name was
Chris: Alex or something like that Oh, okay, I'm reading them out of order, I see.
Chris: There used to be a podcast about self-hosting that was really done well for many years.
Chris: There was an episode about a self-hosted Code Forges, and other ones mentioned
Chris: DC roasting us, like Git T that automatically mirrors to GitHub.
Chris: I think one of the hosts had a name like yours. There might have been another
Chris: one in there, something like Alex. Oh my gosh.
Chris: Atversaries 20, roasting me.
Wes: Does send in a good link to episode 129 of self-hosted Forged Alliance.
Chris: There you go. talk about some get tea in there sounds good.
Wes: Spooky set come comes in with 10 000 sats,
Wes: live boost woohoo.
Chris: Hey thank you for the live boost this.
Wes: Was from uh last week.
Chris: That's awesome it's always nice getting those live thank you set come goofy.
Brent: Ambitions boosted in one two three four five sets,
Brent: Hello, Chris, Wes, and Brent. I'm a Jupyter Party member, and I primarily listen
Brent: to your show to get insight into new open source tools that will be useful for me.
Brent: I'm currently listening to
Brent: 661 for the second time, and I just wanted to say, keep up the good work.
Brent: I really appreciate your content on OpenAI Agents and NixOS. Yes.
Chris: Goofy, thank you for both the membership support and the feedback on that.
Wes: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Thank you very much. Appreciate that. JQube3 came in with 16,482 sats.
Chris: I really enjoyed this episode and would love even more in-depth coverage like
Chris: it. I enjoyed all your AI coverage. I know it can't all be AI all the time, nor should it be.
Chris: I think you guys are doing an excellent job. Keep it up. No, thanks.
Chris: Great. You know, and we are, like the last two episodes, it's come up,
Chris: but it's not the topic of the show. Thank you for the feedback,
Chris: everybody. That's good signal.
Chris: It'd be interesting to see what the vibe is at LinuxFest Northwest.
Chris: Wouldn't that be interesting? See if people are talking about it.
Wes: Podbun bussin with the road ducks. Maybe the chapters could be more granular
Wes: and include specific topics such as AI or Nix for the people that complain about too much of either.
Wes: I don't mind the topics, but some of the nerdy stuff does go over my head.
Chris: Shout out to Editor Drew's excellent chapter titles and always really great.
Chris: You could see a fun project where there's like a GitHub post or maybe a 4GO
Chris: of our chapters JSON that could get iterated on by the community. Oh, totally.
Chris: You could go in there and publish it and update it because it's just a JSON
Chris: file. That's the beauty of the cloud chapters.
Brent: I would also say if the nerdier stuff goes over your head now,
Brent: it's still sinking in somewhere. And if you pay attention, that nerdier stuff,
Brent: you will understand more and more and more of it.
Brent: That's just the beauty of hanging out with a bunch of nerds.
Brent: Well, Daja boosted in 6,969 Satoshis.
Brent: Oh, does anyone else have that problem of the boost audio clips slipping into
Brent: your everyday vernacular?
Brent: Well, I've accidentally dropped, they're doing a lot with mayo these days.
Brent: And that is a tasty burger in several conversations without even thinking about it.
Brent: I just called my coworker a rich
Brent: lobster. I guess it's just a sign of how integrated JB is into my life.
Chris: I love it.
Wes: Well, it happens to us.
Brent: That is another boost here. One thing that gets lost in the license conversation
Brent: is that, as it currently stands, LLMs are just large license launderers.
Brent: One of the great things about copyleft FOSS is that you know that all derivations
Brent: will continue to benefit humanity by also being FOSS.
Brent: But as it is now, we lose all freedoms as soon as someone makes a proprietary
Brent: derivation using an agent.
Brent: Roll over and take it because they're going to violate your code and the freedoms
Brent: of your users anyway isn't a very good stance.
Brent: And neither is put up a bunch of useless walls that also violate your user freedoms.
Brent: It just feels silly that the two leading arguments on the subject break FOSS
Brent: ethos in different ways.
Brent: I think if we can get both sides to come to an agreement on an interface that
Brent: lets AI access the code and also respect the license, we could get the best of both worlds.
Brent: Even if it's just a setting that you can give to your agent to include or exclude
Brent: source material that is compatible with the license of your project or something similar.
Brent: If you're also writing GPL, go ham. If you're writing proprietary,
Brent: then you can consciously make the choice on whether or not to abide by that license.
Brent: That's another benefit to something like that would be that folks at companies
Brent: that block copyleft dependencies can actually enjoy all the fun AI stuff we
Brent: have without worrying of getting in trouble.
Brent: Of course, that's all really easy to say than to do.
Chris: It is easy to say, like you could see just it could be a markdown file or HTML
Chris: file or a dot file that just says, you know, don't train. It could be very simple.
Chris: But I wanted to maybe reframe this a little bit, because I think maybe that's
Chris: where you're getting hung up and having a hard time squaring it.
Chris: And I think when you can't really square it, maybe that's an opportunity to
Chris: see if you got the math right.
Chris: And Wes, I'd like to know your input on this. But I think there is a broader
Chris: question that has to be answered before this particular situation can be sorted out.
Chris: And that broader question is, what is code laundering? Is an open source developer
Chris: that goes to Stack Exchange that gets inspired by a post on Stack Exchange and
Chris: writes a similar equivalent version of that in their own code,
Chris: was that code laundering?
Chris: And if that is the equivalent of what an LLM, is it code laundering when the
Chris: LLM does it based on your request?
Chris: Because it's not Google or Anthropic that's asking the machine to do that.
Chris: It's the user prompting the machine to do that.
Chris: But the user would also be going to Stack Exchange and just aping what's on
Chris: Stack Exchange or an example they find on GitHub.
Chris: And we don't consider that code laundering. We just consider that to be standard
Chris: practice, how you develop software. I'm curious to know what you think on that nuance.
Wes: Yeah, I mean, there's just a lot of nuance to go around because there's different
Wes: questions. There's the training time question and how that works and what code
Wes: was used there and the statistical nature and how you think that the system
Wes: works and the actual outcomes of all of that, right?
Wes: And then there is now this question of agents in practice and what if you have
Wes: one agent that sort of reads the code and outputs a spec that is an arguable
Wes: clean room sort of thing and then you have someone else do the coding. Does that work?
Chris: That's a whole thing. There's just all kinds.
Wes: And so there's just a lot of, I do think Daj is right that we have not really
Wes: maybe got to the part where a lot of the norms and expectations have adjusted.
Wes: And we need to keep having these conversations because there are a lot of nuances
Wes: and sort of things to discuss.
Wes: So I appreciate the thoughtful response.
Chris: It's almost like if we locked in something now, it would probably be too premature.
Chris: The thing continues to move forward while we're figuring it out.
Wes: It sure does.
Chris: Yeah, that is it right there. Great boost. Thank you, sir. Gene Bean comes in with a row of ducks.
Chris: I've had a basic Forgeo instance on Nix for a while, and I've had it offing
Chris: via PocketID, and I'm pretty happy with that.
Wes: Seems like a nice setup. PocketID is a cool little sort of minimal OIDC provider
Wes: for auth stuff, but it just uses passkey, so it's super simple.
Chris: I'll take Arctic, too. ArcticSpender comes in with another row of ducks.
Chris: For the love of all that is holy. You guys, enough about AI.
Chris: I work in IT and I'm sick and tired of every vendor talking about their AI offering.
Chris: You can't spell failure without AI.
Chris: I stopped listening about halfway through this one. Please don't give me a safe
Chris: haven where I don't have to hear about the joys of you know what.
Chris: You know, it was interesting. I was having a conversation with the wife last
Chris: night. And she finds some of these tools useful for her small business.
Chris: At the same time, absolutely hates that the vendor software she's using is shoving it into like.
Chris: She has a field for like filling out patient chart notes and they've literally
Chris: put an ai wizard in every field oh of the text field which now occludes all
Chris: of the text you can fit in there so she can't read all the text in there and none of it's useful.
Wes: It's extra javascript that's just kind of.
Chris: Floating around there's like tons of hipaa concerns that they haven't properly
Chris: explained to her so she's not comfortable with that yeah of course right and
Chris: it's like so she is both like boy it's really useful as a small business owner
Chris: for some of these things and boy I really hate this,
Chris: so I get it Artic I get it thank you for that feedback appreciate that hey Mr.
Wes: 20's back yeah this is a duplicate boost but we still got the SATs so we appreciate it 10,250 thank.
Chris: You adversaries you are great.
Wes: But then Woodland Geeks comes in with a row of ducks and an opportunity for
Wes: you Chris though I think you've already talked about this on the launch maybe oh it was a pre-show,
Wes: members you get the good stuff I wanted to share this link.
Wes: I'm sure you guys are on top of this, and probably will show up in the week's
Wes: episode, but head to share.
Wes: You can see many different sides of what is going on here. Chris Rant opportunity.
Chris: Talking about mythos.
Wes: Yes, and it's a link to a Forbes article, What is GLaD mythos and why Anthropic won't let anyone use it?
Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Brent: Well, there's a dude here trying stuff and succeeded in sending a row of ducks.
Brent: First agents, now private GitHub replacements. Y'all are reading my mind.
Brent: I'm currently starting my home lab from scratch over again on a new computer.
Brent: And I see infrastructure as code and AI are my two primary focuses.
Brent: It's great to hear y'all's input on that. Please keep it up.
Chris: Dude, that is such a fun time. you know when you're rebuilding like with everything
Chris: you've learned yes it's a lot of work and for me it would be a crushing overwhelming
Chris: amount of work but it's so fun when you actually like it's like how i dream
Chris: of i would never do this but i dream of building my own rv taking everything
Chris: i've learned and just building the ultimate rv you know that would.
Wes: Be a real.
Chris: Please keep us posted i'd love to know how that goes and glad to hear we're
Chris: helpful we'll keep trying to do so and if you screw something up now you know how you can rescue it,
Chris: Magnolia Mayhem came in with 2,000 sats and says boost thank you Mayhem appreciate you.
Wes: Tom Otto comes in with 5,000 sats,
Wes: I love the episode 666 demonic challenge plan. One idea for a challenge would
Wes: be to run Linux binaries or even a Linux container.
Wes: I think Brent in particular might enjoy NetBSD on some dumpster hardware.
Wes: They can run on remarkably small machines.
Brent: He knows your taste.
Wes: I think.
Chris: He does know your taste. You do like those dumpster machines. That's a great one.
Chris: I think I feel like maybe not hard enough because they have the Linux compatibility
Chris: layer, which gives you a lot.
Wes: You do have to set that up.
Chris: You do and that could be the challenge also what
Chris: i find and this is just me coming in with my preconceptions and bias eyes but
Chris: what i find is the bsd guys love to talk about stuff working great oh that's
Chris: a solved problem and then you go to use it and you realize it's about a 20 or
Chris: 30 solution that they're fine with but if you're used to something on linux
Chris: is inadequate maybe it'll be like that stay tuned to find out.
Brent: Boost in now complete noobs did boost in with a row of ducks.
Brent: It's just a link to a website here, v4call.com. v4call.com, Complete Noobs Project.
Brent: It says, this is a .0.1 concept phase. Use at your own risk.
Brent: Wes, what did you figure out here?
Wes: Well, I found an info page. v4call is a decentralized video voice and text platform
Wes: built on the Hive blockchain.
Wes: Users set their own rates for receiving calls and messages. Callers pay with
Wes: Hive's stablecoin or custom tokens.
Chris: So it's, okay, video and voice. All right, on Hive.
Chris: Interesting okay there you go v4v call our v4call.com well i do need to come
Chris: up with some sort of call system for the launch you know because i'm paying
Chris: for a hosted solution out of my paypal account but my paypal account's been
Chris: frozen because i used it how dare you i know so yeah.
Wes: That's the mistake really.
Chris: Yeah that's what i get that's what i get so now i have to
Chris: go through like a 20 point identification process i'm
Chris: not even kidding i think it's like 17 different documents and like several questionnaires
Chris: uh to get access to my account so that way i can pay the bill to use the thing
Chris: to use the call service so yeah i probably should work on that but you know
Chris: next week's linux fest so thank you everybody who boosted in and makes the show
Chris: possible also sends us the signal on the episode you really have no idea how
Chris: much it really means to us
Chris: it really is something and also thank you everybody who streams sats as you
Chris: listen 18 of you did it collectively you stacked 58,035 sats that ain't too
Chris: bad y'all that ain't too bad when you combine it together, though, with our boosters.
Chris: We really have a good one this week. Very grateful. We stacked,
Chris: 444,740 sats!
Wes: Wow.
Chris: Yes.
Chris: Fountain FM makes it really easy to boost these days with Fiat or SATs.
Chris: And of course, there's a lot of options if you go the self-hosted AlbiHub route.
Chris: Newpodcastapps.com will get you started on that. And you send in a boost over
Chris: 2,000 SATs and we will read it on a future episode.
Chris: And it means a lot. Your split goes to myself, to Mr. Payne,
Chris: to Brentley, to Editor Drew, and to the podcast developer.
Chris: And a little bit goes to the Index as well. So it supports the whole ecosystem.
Chris: All of that is in the RSS feed, open to you in the public. You can view it.
Chris: You can audit it. You can see if that ever changes.
Chris: That's just a little bit of how we do this.
Chris: So before we go, we got a smattering of picks this week. I found a GUI to clean
Chris: out metadata from various files.
Chris: You know, there's so many things that get just embedded in documents,
Chris: PDFs, images, especially.
Chris: And Metadata Cleaner is what it says right there on the tin.
Chris: It is a GTK GUI to go through and identify the metadata in a picture file,
Chris: a text file, a video file, whatever it might be, and then help you strip that
Chris: metadata out before you share it. And it is available on Flathub.
Chris: And it's pretty lean, pretty mean, not much else to it. Very simple UI.
Wes: Speaking of GitLab, it seems to be primarily hosted over there.
Chris: Yes, and it is GPL3. So that is just called simply metadata cleaner.
Chris: But Wes, you've been messing around with something a little different.
Wes: Yeah, well, I also kind of had this need. I mean, I have had for a while,
Wes: but just decided to solve it a new way for whatever reason.
Wes: So I searched around Nix packages as one does and i found mat2 which is just
Wes: a convenient little cli metadata removal tool you.
Chris: Just pointed out a file kind of a thing.
Wes: Yeah i put a little sort of demo here in the doc um
Wes: you can just run it right from nix packages with nix run if you want
Wes: but uh yeah you just kind of tell it
Wes: what file you want you could pass dash s just to show the metadata so
Wes: here's like a um an example from my phone you can see a bunch of details that
Wes: i probably don't need other people knowing necessarily great for your own archival
Wes: stuff perhaps right and then all you do is you run it with no arguments by default
Wes: it just makes a new it adds like base name dot cleaned so you get like okay
Wes: image dot clean so you know that.
Chris: One's safe that's the one you share.
Wes: Yeah so it doesn't touch the existing files it just makes a bunch of new files
Wes: in there it's easy to automate with something like x args or parallel or you
Wes: know those kinds of tools so it's clean simple easy to use i.
Chris: Do like the idea of just it's on the command line run it real quick don't.
Wes: Wrap it in a script if you want and you know so you just do it on regular files
Wes: you intake things through yeah.
Chris: Of course, with these days, you could probably still get a lot of information
Chris: just from the stuff that's in the photo, depending on where you take it.
Chris: But it's good at least clean that up, right?
Chris: Now, this next one's making some news. So we want to take a quick look at it
Chris: for you and mention it because it's one of these quintessential macOS apps that's
Chris: actually come to Linux this week. And it's called Little Snitch.
Chris: And you might be familiar with it. Every time an application on your computer
Chris: opens up a network connection…
Chris: It just does so in the background without you knowing, which is fine, right?
Chris: But wouldn't it be kind of interesting to have insight on what's opening up,
Chris: what applications are doing what, and kind of how much data you're using?
Chris: Linux didn't have this with Little Snitch until they released it.
Chris: There used to be a Mac-only app. Now it's available.
Chris: You can see exactly what applications are talking to what servers.
Chris: You can block the ones you don't want talking to those servers.
Chris: You can keep an eye on historical data and the amount of traffic volume over time.
Chris: The connection view has a lot of interesting things on there.
Chris: Current and past network activity by application. shows you what's being blocked
Chris: by your rules and block lists and tracks data volumes and traffic history.
Chris: This will run on any Linux distribution with kernel 612 or above.
Chris: It's not quite equivalent to the macOS version. It is missing a few things,
Chris: mostly because of the limitations, for better or for worse, I think for better,
Chris: of what eBPF will allow some of the tooling to get access to.
Wes: And yes, it is powered by eBPF.
Chris: That's right. So you actually got it working there on your machine.
Wes: Yeah. It is like the license situation. There's a bunch of open source parts,
Wes: but some of it is still proprietary. I think maybe ported over from the...
Chris: View and shareable, but proprietary. And so it's like the backend stuff is free.
Chris: The only thing that's, I think, proprietary is maybe some of the GUI stuff,
Chris: but it's viewable and shareable.
Wes: So there you go. But they provide precompiled binaries you can just download for Linux.
Wes: So I was able to download those and not too much work, a little patch elf,
Wes: got them running on NixOS.
Wes: So I made a, well, had OpenCode help me make a basic little slake for that on my GitHub.
Wes: So it was easy enough to run. So that means it'll definitely run on most standard
Wes: Linux distributions quite easily, I think.
Wes: You run it. It comes with a systemd service already with, like,
Wes: nice, exactly the permissions it actually needs. Or you can just run it with
Wes: sudo if you want to test it out.
Wes: Because it needs some of the, like, you know, sysadmin, or not full sysadmin,
Wes: but needs some of the network admin permissions to be able to hook things in and all that.
Wes: And then it runs a daemon in the background. So you pop it up as a web UI,
Wes: port 3031. and you can see i put a picture in the dock they're kind of clean
Wes: looking modern ui with a nice feels responsive drill down breaks down a lot
Wes: of the different traffic there it,
Wes: I automatically detected the stuff I was pulling down from Nix as I was building
Wes: something in the background while I was trying it out. So that was fun to see.
Chris: Huh. That is kind of nice when you're doing a system update or something and
Chris: you just kind of want to watch. Like I'll often use bottom for this. I love bottom.
Chris: But this is more specifically network level, which is great.
Chris: Did you try blocking anything?
Wes: No, not yet. I am curious to try that though.
Chris: Hmm. It is neat to see one of these quintessential Mac apps land on Linux.
Chris: Even if it's not fully the same.
Chris: With all of these Mac users switching over, it's great timing.
Wes: It really is. And I mean, kind of a long time coming. There'd been other open
Wes: source sort of like attempts at this kinds of software that we've even talked about on the show.
Wes: But I do wonder what it says that now was the time that it moved.
Chris: Me too. All right. Who snuck in PCAPDroid? Who snuck that in here?
Brent: Oh, I snuck in a little bonus pick on the same topic as Little Snitch that I
Brent: found recently for Android.
Brent: So this is a privacy friendly of course open
Brent: source of course but it's an android app that
Brent: lets you also do similar things track analyze and block the connections made
Brent: by other apps on your android device and you can dump the traffic inspect the
Brent: http decrypt some of the tls traffic if you want all sorts of stuff i use this
Brent: to just well you kind of get curious what's your cell phone really doing in
Brent: the back and especially my cell phone i'd.
Chris: Really like to know what my cell phone's up to yeah.
Brent: It is every single time you do this on any device you it is mind-boggling and
Brent: very enlightening so i recommend you pick up pc ap droid just run it for like
Brent: an hour and see what the heck's going on on that device of yours pcap.
Chris: Droid and we will have a link to that in the show notes that's a nice find gentlemen so now we'll.
Wes: Have more info uh not only on our desktops but on our mobile.
Chris: Devices we're cleaning up your metadata and protecting your network this week
Chris: while also rescuing your data. It's a very utility-focused episode, I guess.
Wes: Or we're having a lot of problems behind this week.
Chris: We've got to play it off. We've got to play it off. No, this wasn't that at
Chris: all. We're getting very, very excited about LinuxFest Northwest. It is next weekend.
Wes: What?
Chris: Yeah. So you will get the full report from the Pacific Northwest's largest community-run
Chris: Linux event and one of the OGs going for...
Chris: Something like 25, 26 years now. I don't know. I don't know how long I've been
Chris: going. It's been a long time.
Wes: It doesn't feel real yet, but it's going to be great.
Chris: I have been going to LinuxFest Northwest since I've been in high school.
Chris: And I'm a little out of high school now. So that's how long I've been going.
Chris: Woo! The first time I went, I went with a high school teacher of mine.
Chris: That's wonderful. Yeah.
Wes: Let's keep it going.
Chris: I mean, there's a reason I keep going every year, right? You don't go for 26,
Chris: 27 years unless maybe 28.
Chris: I don't know. I don't know what it is. You don't go for that long unless it's
Chris: really something special. So I hope to see you there.
Chris: Lfnw.org if you want more details. We'll put a link in the show notes too.
Chris: And of course, you can always make it a Tuesday on a Sunday.
Chris: Wherever you are, you can join us live 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m.
Chris: Eastern. We may be somewhere around there a little bit because we have a live.
Chris: We've got to do a lot of setup and all of that.
Chris: But jblive.fm or jblive.tv will be where you can catch it if you can't make
Chris: it physically to LinuxFest Northwest.
Chris: Now, Wes, before we go, we should tell people about some of the cool advanced
Chris: features we have around the show, because it's not just audio.
Wes: Yeah, that's right. We take advantage of the podcast 2.0 namespace.
Wes: In particular, that gets those mighty fine cloud chapters we mentioned earlier on.
Wes: Dynamic JSON delivered to you just when
Wes: you need it. And if you want more information, check out our VTT files.
Wes: Those are also found in the feed under the podcast transcript tag.
Chris: It is neat, too, to see more of these, particularly these ones we just mentioned,
Chris: getting picked up by more and more vendors and whatnot, including even Apple
Chris: Podcasts, which is amazing now.
Chris: So if your podcast client doesn't have support for this, you should message
Chris: the developer and let them know that they've been beaten by Apple.
Wes: It's all standard stuff, right? VTT, SRT files. There's lots of open source
Wes: libraries folks can bring in to help make use of this stuff.
Chris: And the other one that hasn't seen as much traction, but it is an app like Fountain
Chris: and Podverse and Cast-O-Matic, of course, is live stream support.
Chris: We are live every single Sunday. There's not a lot of podcasts that do that anymore.
Chris: JBLive.tv and FM is also where you can listen to it.
Chris: And we have links to just about darn near everything we've talked about.
Chris: We try to catch it all, and we put that over at linuxunplugged.com slash 663.
Wes: We also sneak an alternate enclosure into the feed these days,
Wes: so just go crep around for that.
Chris: There might be a video version in there for you with visuals of what we talk
Chris: about and stuff. You never know.
Chris: We are so much looking forward to seeing you, so we hope to see you at LinuxFest Northwest.
Chris: But if we don't, friends, we'll catch you right back here in the feed like we
Chris: always do next Tuesday, as in Sunday. Thank you.