Chris: Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
Brent: And my name is Brent.
Chris: Hello, gentlemen. Well, coming up on the show today, we just got back from Planet
Chris: Nix, and boy, do we have stories to share, guests joining us,
Chris: and insights from our week at Planet Nix.
Chris: Then we'll round out the show with some great boosts, some picks, and a lot more.
Chris: So before we get into all that shenanigans, I want to say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual...
Wes: My name is Wes.
Chris: Hello, Mumble Room.
Mumble: Hey, Chris. Hey, Wes, and hello, Brent.
Chris: Nice to have you there. JupyterBroadcasting.com slash mumble if you want to
Chris: get in on that action when we're live on Sundays.
Chris: And a big good morning to our friends at TailScale. TailScale.com slash unplugged.
Chris: That's where you want to go.
Chris: TailScale.com slash unplugged to support the show and try it for free on 100
Chris: devices, three accounts, no credit card required, not a limited time thing.
Chris: I mean, you must be on the free plan, Wes, right? Indeed.
Chris: Yeah, it's great. And then what we did is we all started on the free plan,
Chris: and we love it because you get a flat mesh network that is protected by.
Chris: And it's very quick to set up and get going. I mean, if you've got five minutes,
Chris: you can probably get it running on three machines.
Chris: I'm not kidding, was the easiest thing to get running on FreeBSD of all the things I tried.
Chris: And it's true for Nix, too. It's like a one-liner in Nix, and you've got Tailscale working.
Chris: So we all love it for our personal home labs and our networks.
Chris: And then we started using it here at Jupyter Broadcasting.
Chris: And I think that's true for a lot of our listeners out there because it is an
Chris: enterprise-grade system.
Chris: I mean, there are just tons of companies out there, ones you've heard of,
Chris: that are using Tailscale for their back-end infrastructure.
Chris: And you can bridge what would be otherwise very complex networks,
Chris: like multiple providers, multiple data centers, VPSs, on-premises,
Chris: mobile devices. You can bridge all of that into one flat mesh network.
Chris: That's why companies like Duolingo and Hugging Face and Instacart love it.
Chris: So try it out for yourself.
Chris: Get it for 100 devices for free when you go to tailscale.com slash unplugged.
Chris: Well, we're back in town. Last week was our eBPF special. while we were away,
Chris: hard at work, covering and capturing all of Planet Nix.
Chris: And I felt like we kind of found a pretty good groove for our Planet Nix and
Chris: scale coverage, don't you think? I think we, you know, we didn't overdo it.
Chris: There was a lot to take care of. Yeah. I think we went to more talk.
Chris: Yeah. Maybe put together. Did you enjoy the trip? Okay. I did, yeah. It was, you know.
Chris: Yeah, that was great.
Chris: True.
Wes: Yeah, a million years ago.
Chris: Or wants to know more. Yeah, that's true.
Wes: Yeah, you heard from the man himself.
Chris: Brandon, Greg.
Wes: Observability, performance, tracing, you know what?
Chris: I was reflecting on the trip.
Wes: There were some tough moments for sure. I don't think I'd rather do it with anybody else.
Chris: We as a unit have really got this work.
Wes: How hard drives don't like it when you yell at them.
Chris: And a big shout out to my wife.
Wes: Adia, who does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to the bookings,
Wes: figuring out where we can stay.
Chris: And all the logistics there. Brandon, you're a big world traveler.
Chris: I think we've got a good, tight little group now for covering these things.
Wes: Yeah, I think we have a pretty good routine going.
Brent: And we got, you know, we do an Airbnb and I'll hang out and that gives us a
Brent: little bit of downtime together between all of the extra coverage that we do during the day.
Brent: And we like, we didn't even have to this time talk about who was going to do what.
Brent: We just kind of know our place and our positions and who's going to handle what part.
Brent: And like a huge thanks to listener Jeff or producer Jeff, I should say,
Brent: who just helped us throughout the entire process. So thank you, Jeff.
Chris: Absolutely.
Mumble: Thank you guys. Always fun.
Chris: And it was nice to be able to have Jeff there with us because he's always down to help in whatever way.
Wes: It does do some networking stuff still to this day.
Chris: I was really glad that we had kind of figured, we kind of settled into a routine
Chris: because it meant every night we got the clips processed and.
Wes: You know, labelled and collected.
Chris: So we're finally at that point now where we have pretty much everything sorted by the time we get home.
Chris: And then there's just a little bit of, you know, final polish to put on things.
Wes: And, you know, before too long, in the same decade, it made its way over to
Wes: Linux in the form of TCP DOM.
Wes: And already you're seeing this thing, right, where you can kind of use user
Wes: space to help better observe what's going on in your system.
Chris: But they also made it possible for us to end up in Pasadena and bring you all the information.
Wes: And they didn't ask us to cover it in any particular way. They just facilitated us to get down there.
Chris: And they, you know, worked with us whenever we had questions or wanted to know
Chris: who was who. And I think they're really going to be something special going down the road.
Chris: What you have, right, is this complexity of Nix.
Wes: Yeah, and that's how the implementation works. And Flox is all about simplifying it for developers.
Chris: And so you get reproducible.
Wes: You get portable dev environments that are powered by Nix.
Chris: You don't have to have the learning curve.
Wes: The point is it's like a very limited, restricted bytecode that can only do
Wes: certain things relevant to.
Chris: At first, filtering packets.
Wes: And that lets you make sure that the company is crazy, you can't go into infinite
Wes: loops, all kinds of other nice things. You have to optimize it.
Wes: So Flox lets you manage and share environments effortlessly with people that
Wes: already have an existing workflow.
Wes: Packet and anything else that you need to focus on building great software and
Wes: then the machine executes and ultimately that's how you tell like do I accept
Wes: the packet or do I drop the packet,
Wes: but at first it was a you know a very limited I think I had like a two registers
Wes: to use super limited thing,
Wes: but eBPF extended BPF was introduced in Linux 3.18 and of course they got an
Wes: eye on you know so BPF have been around for a while there have been various
Wes: developments so we're super grateful for.
Chris: Their support so.
Wes: Check them out at flux.dev.
Chris: See how they're bringing the magic I think of NICs to everybody.
Chris: A big thank you to everyone. At Flox, we're making it possible for this episode.
Wes: It had some of those register limitations. So they upgraded to 64-bit registers,
Wes: added more instructions.
Chris: Now, Flox kept a pretty serious kernel.
Wes: Which is a big part of it that lets you analyze the PDF programs to make sure
Wes: they're safe. No infinite loops. They don't do invalid memory. We're fine with that.
Chris: We're there to work, too. Gosh darn it.
Wes: Right. It's because it's like you're loading something from userspace into the
Wes: kernel. That's a big security concern.
Clip: It is about 6 a.m.
Wes: So you want to make sure that you have that.
Clip: And it's Thursday.
Wes: And Planet Nick starts at 9.15.
Clip: A.m. But you've got to do the L.A. travel math and the getting your registration sorted.
Clip: So really, we're probably out of here about 8.30. So I'm going to go take my really awkward shower.
Wes: So that was kind of like the raw stuff. And then I'll be fresh and ready for
Wes: all the people. How exciting.
Chris: Oh my gosh. So I think I'm the biggest Airbnb critic on the planet.
Chris: Because I've never really stayed at an Airbnb I've liked.
Chris: And it's always in part because of the shower situation.
Wes: Their products have a bunch of EVPF stuff for Kubernetes offerings.
Chris: And this one was no exception. Plus, we got better compilers out in the public hall.
Wes: Or compile once run everywhere so like compilers have better support to be able
Wes: to make you can compile your BPF program and not have to worry about as much
Wes: necessarily depending on what you're doing with it about how compatible it will
Wes: be with the kernel where you compiled it versus where you're running it,
Wes: right,
Wes: this has been so successful that's not why we were there newer versions of D-Trace on Linux We.
Chris: Got the bodies cleaned and the stank off of us.
Wes: They're basically just some extra user space stuff that uses EBPF and other
Wes: kernel primitives under the hood.
Clip: It's just about time for the kickoff of Planet Nix. We've got our seats,
Clip: and Brent brought a gigantic backpack. How much food is in there versus gear?
Wes: One important thing with the extended product is they were also able to make
Wes: the instruction set be more sympathetic to modern hardware.
Clip: Wait, you didn't bring us food up.
Wes: And they implemented just-in-time compilation as well.
Clip: Now, Wes, do you have something to take notes with over there?
Wes: Really fast. I have my phone.
Clip: And I have log-seek. I have my phone.
Wes: And I have log-seek. All right, and I've got the audio. I'll take the audio
Wes: notes, West takes the text notes.
Clip: And Brent will do the snack.
Wes: If you do that, there's no guarantees.
Chris: And it works pretty well. That's kind of on the tin.
Wes: But there is some stable interfaces that you can use, which is nice.
Wes: So, the other important point to know is there's kind of various things it can do.
Chris: There's XDP, which is Express Data Path, which intercepts packets,
Chris: basically, like the earliest point that you can.
Wes: You have limitations on what you can do, but it can be super level and performing.
Chris: And so you can see this sometimes maybe on the DDoS attacks where.
Chris: We're getting flood-up traffic that you have.
Wes: Maybe you can identify various ways that you can program in here.
Chris: You show up just at the end of the talk, you can catch them in the room.
Chris: Hey, could you step outside for a few minutes and do a chat with us?
Chris: That kind of thing. So we're both trying to take in as much information.
Wes: Yeah, that's the idea. It doesn't do as much of the very general and powerful,
Wes: but, you know, full-featured Linux kernel networking.
Chris: There was a moment where Ron from
Chris: Floss talked about why Planet Nix and thought I'd share that with you.
Clip: A journey into Planet Nix. So this is a little sneak peek. I don't know if we
Clip: have any magic to gather fans out here.
Wes: Yeah, one way to say it's limited context, but maximum.
Clip: I'm kind of a geek on it. We're going to do something. You'll see.
Wes: Okay, so then you can also do various types of K-prones.
Clip: But otherwise, Planet Nix.
Wes: So Nix, obviously, it's Nix.
Clip: The other fact is that for years we've been trying to reinstate Pluto as a planet.
Clip: It hasn't been really successful.
Wes: You can hook almost any kernel function.
Clip: It's called Nix, right?
Wes: That's why it'll go call Nix Nix.
Clip: You can ask him later about that. There's no clear definition of what you're going to get.
Wes: You have to go look at the function you're hooking into. It's all going to be
Wes: dependent on that. You've got no kernel internals.
Clip: The thing is, we're starting a mission to try and reinstate Pluto as a planet. But a lot of them.
Wes: Yeah.
Clip: And then eventually have a real moon for a real planet called Nix.
Clip: That's why we call it Planet Nix.
Chris: I can get behind that.
Chris: I think Pluto deserves it.
Wes: So that's where a lot of some of the power comes from, right?
Wes: But that may or may not be stable. There's no guarantee about it being stable across Coral versions.
Chris: It's one of our biggest risks.
Wes: It changes any time. People can update the signatures. That's one of the things
Wes: that's been happening in the Rust discussion.
Brent: It's still a planet.
Wes: The kernel, many developers expect to be able to make a change like that.
Chris: Maybe that's where we can find it.
Wes: Because they have one big code
Wes: base, they can update it everywhere and be able to do it in a factory.
Chris: There was also an analogy made that I thought was pretty good.
Chris: Ron calls Nix kind of like his mom's veggie gulag. And this is how he explains Nix to his family.
Wes: The way I like to think about NICS to folks that are non-NICS initiated or maybe
Wes: not super technical is like veggie goulash.
Clip: So I have very mixed background in my heritage. So I had a great grandmother
Clip: from Poland, and she would make this amazing veggie goulash.
Clip: She sadly passed away a long time ago.
Wes: But the recipe lived on.
Clip: But everybody has these kinds of recipes that they kind of pass from person to person in the family.
Wes: It's ink on paper.
Clip: It tells you what ingredients you need it tells you how to put it in maybe it
Clip: tells you Fahrenheit or Celsius and you do the conversion yourself and at the
Clip: end of the day it never comes off as the same thing because recipes are not reproducible.
Clip: Here's a big but and how I like to think about Nick's I like to say hey mom,
Clip: imagine you had a magic cookbook,
Clip: imagine that magic cookbook was written by our great grandmother and again it
Clip: had all those recipes but when she wrote down two tomatoes one zucchini you
Clip: know little paprika or whatever it is that magic cookbook actually materialized,
Clip: that exact tomato that was grown in the exact soil with the exact acidity that
Clip: she had in her backyard or at the farmer's market and that showed up in your
Clip: kitchen when you were starting to cook that veggie goulash what.
Chris: Do you think,
Chris: And I think one of the insights and takeaways I had from Planet Nix this year
Chris: was what you just described is becoming more and more something that the software
Chris: industry is expected to provide to the enterprise.
Chris: The enterprise wants to know exactly what's in this.
Chris: They want to know if it complies with certain requirements.
Wes: And they want to be able to reproduce it and move it around every single time.
Wes: These tools, make sure you check all the regular system monitoring tools first,
Wes: because we'll see as a theme, like, you know, your H-tops and B-tops and all kinds of things.
Wes: Kind of get a broad look, and you can see some specifics.
Wes: Whereas you can make broad... And this is where Ron's chat with Kelsey Hightower came in.
Chris: Kelsey was on the show just a couple of weeks ago.
Wes: Kind of teasing what he talked about. Like one thing like disk latency or something
Wes: specific to the file system.
Chris: And he went in further detail about his discovery when he finally had a little
Chris: bit of time to read the Nix white paper.
Clip: Kind of what you think about Nix and maybe having kind of a frank conversation about it.
Clip: Yeah, I read the Knicks paper last year, and I was like, look at this,
Clip: in my view, this buried treasure.
Clip: And it feels like there was a fork in the road a couple of decades ago where
Clip: this problem was definitely apparent.
Clip: Back then, I was a big user of systems like Red Hat.
Wes: I started my career on FreeBSD.
Clip: And there was this situation of how do you get more than one thing on a system
Clip: without them overriding each other or fighting each other?
Clip: Then I spent the rest of my career putting one app per VM because no one solved
Clip: the problem 10 years later that just came to think you did then we got tools
Clip: like RVM in the Ruby community because your gem files would literally fight
Clip: with each other and you taught them to behave I also worked on tools like Virtual
Clip: N in the Python community,
Clip: and then Docker came out and I think Docker leaned into the reality was that
Clip: no one had solved this problem because every programming language also came
Clip: with their own package manager and ways of doing things.
Clip: And then Golang came out and it was like, forget libc altogether.
Clip: Build static binaries and we just skipped that entire step. And in many ways
Clip: it felt like Docker had won.
Wes: Not just because it figured out reproducible software.
Wes: So you can filter out a business system, but I think it's especially useful
Wes: on a system you think should be relatively quiet.
Clip: It's non-deterministic. people do all kind of weird things because the focus
Clip: went from operating systems to applications.
Clip: And Docker became the perfect format for people to get that done and distribute it to each other.
Clip: And so I read next paper after going through this whole journey.
Clip: It's like, where were you?
Clip: Two decades ago, when I was at that fork in the road.
Wes: Maybe we would have went in a different way.
Clip: And so a lot of my initial feedback has been.
Wes: This ain't usable for that.
Clip: When you show, it's like showing people Vim for the first time when all they know is Microsoft Word.
Wes: Yeah.
Clip: How do I get out of this thing?
Wes: I do. So a few years ago.
Clip: Why'd you turn off your computers? I was admin in the DPS box.
Wes: I wasn't totally in charge of it.
Clip: And I did that before, right? To get out of Vim, I had shame.
Clip: I just turned the whole thing off. Turned my computer back on.
Clip: I was like, I'm out of there.
Wes: I noticed some of the statistics first.
Chris: That felt sort of fair.
Wes: The metrics were a little long.
Chris: That felt like a fair analogy.
Wes: And I went on and I started just kind of doing regular updates and poking around
Wes: at the system. And I noticed that I wasn't able to actually update the data.
Chris: Now, you got to your point specifically around the bomb or the bill of materials
Chris: and how maybe Nix could improve software distribution even if we stuck with Docker.
Clip: And so the hands-on approach is like.
Wes: How could you make Docker better if you had something like Nix in the middle?
Clip: So if you've never used Docker before.
Wes: There's this Docker file. If you look at these Docker files.
Clip: It's like a big-ass bash script, the way most people do things, right?
Wes: So this was maybe closer to when I really started playing with these tools.
Clip: Download all the NPM modules just in case I need one.
Wes: And so they were already available.
Clip: And then you shipped this four-terabyte thing to servers. You like a repeatable software.
Clip: And then you spend half your time scanning, looking for vulnerabilities.
Wes: And then that led me to look at some weird file paths.
Clip: We're right back to where we were 20 years ago. And I also started, I did an exec snoop.
Clip: And that showed similar file paths running on them. They just packaged it in
Clip: another artifact this time.
Wes: And so people have worked on slinging technologies where.
Clip: You know, you try to start the app, look at the system calls.
Wes: Run an S-Trace, and figure out exactly what it needs.
Clip: You run it into production, and you find out you miss one. So we've been doing
Clip: a lot of reverse engineering, and I was like, what if we were able to do this differently?
Clip: So after the whole SolarWinds debacle.
Wes: There has been a rising interest in secure software supply chain.
Clip: And I think now people are open to a different approach. I think people are
Clip: a little tired of the brute force.
Clip: And so the premise of Nix is that we can be a little bit more exact.
Clip: So instead of generating an SBOM after you built the application through reverse engineering.
Wes: What if it could be way more explicit up front?
Clip: So that's been appealing to
Clip: me. So I've been looking at how do we take the current situation we're in.
Wes: Especially the one that's baked in containers.
Clip: And then can Nix add value to that scenario.
Chris: That seems like a pretty realistic goal.
Wes: Yeah, all kinds of stuff, file system-specific stuff. They've got things for,
Wes: you know, looking at network connections, TCP connections.
Wes: They've got stuff for monitoring databases. It's broad.
Wes: Definitely useful, yeah.
Chris: And of course, he was asked one spicy question.
Wes: And that was if you could only choose one.
Chris: Nix or Docker, which would you choose?
Clip: Like you mentioned Docker, obviously, Nix or Docker. You had to choose one. Right.
Wes: And the more, you know, depending on...
Clip: There's like a church of Nix out there.
Wes: See exactly where they're looking to modify the purpose. I have to say.
Clip: Kelsey was like, I'm super excited about talking. I'm like, I feel this is going
Clip: to be different. I'm like, hell yeah, that's going to be different.
Wes: It's a limited subset of C that does the BPS stuff.
Clip: If I had to choose one, I'm choosing Docker. And you would say, why would I do that?
Wes: But there's a bunch of Python utilities around it to wrap it.
Clip: Most people that are writing code, your whole number one objective is in the packaging.
Wes: Or to try to preserve specific things once you identify a particular problem or threat.
Clip: So if you're a developer, you look at all the things that you can ship to.
Clip: Heroku, Cloud Run, Lambda, IBM.
Clip: And then you got to work on a team of other people.
Clip: And the hardest thing I've seen in technology is to get global consensus.
Clip: We agree on something. ip addresses dns linux as a distribution that stuff takes
Clip: decades sometimes and so the docker ecosystem is rich why is it rich is it a
Clip: better packaging tool the next no do people know it yes,
Clip: that cute little well did something people identify with it so when you say
Clip: docker a lot of people understand what that means you're probably going to have
Clip: a docker file that move the needle in terms of at least knowing how to rebuild software.
Clip: There's still a lot of companies, maybe you work for some of them,
Clip: they pride themselves that only one person knows how to build certain software
Clip: on a specific laptop and no one
Clip: touches that laptop because it's the only thing that can build a thing.
Clip: And for a lot of people, Docker moved the needle for them. And the ecosystem's
Clip: rich. There's Docker registries, there's metadata, there's all of these things.
Clip: So if I had to choose only one, it would probably be Docker.
Clip: So what would you take away from that what makes docker work it's not one versus
Clip: the other it's just this usability curve,
Clip: it meets people where they are then shows them
Clip: what's next and i've been a part of a lot of technology movements that just
Clip: focused on here's the next thing it's like so what do i do now to go from where
Clip: i am to that and you're like i don't know man delete everything you have and
Clip: start the right way just doesn't work right but i'm hoping that the two can
Clip: find some synergies where it's pragmatic.
Clip: And I do think Nix inside of a Dockerfile for a lot of people will solve the
Clip: reproducible build problem without giving up the distribution and ease of use
Clip: for other platform problem.
Clip: And I think that's probably where you're going to get a lot of new people learning
Clip: about this technology for the first time. So when you see them, welcome them.
Chris: I think it was a good dose of reality to start the whole event,
Chris: right? That's the keynote. That's the, hey, here's your reality.
Chris: This is the state of the market.
Wes: Yeah, so there are tools that you can just run like we've been talking about,
Wes: but how did those tools come to be?
Wes: Well, that's where some of those abstractions and a framework comes in that
Wes: allows basically embedding C code directly within Python scripts.
Wes: And then BCC's tools also sort of handle. Okay, well, the first talk is done.
Clip: Kelsey Hightower and Ron had a great chat. You know, we're shifting things around
Clip: a little bit. I think it's sort of for there to be some scheduling issues.
Wes: It handles loading it into the kernel for you and attaching it to the right hooks.
Clip: Not too bad it started a little bit late really and it was a good chat i think
Clip: the room was pretty engaged lots of questions so the next thing that i'm looking
Clip: at is actually being hosted by an employee of anthropic the folks behind cloud,
Clip: onepassword.com.
Chris: Slash unplugged that's the number one then password slash unplugged all lowercase
Chris: go check it out this probably would have bought me another 10 years in it and
Chris: and this is how i So your end users always.
Wes: I mean, actually, literally.
Chris: Always, without exception, only work on company-owned devices and only use apps
Chris: that have been approved by IT.
Wes: He uses XTP. And so there's a simple C program that has a function called XTPDropAll.
Chris: I would love for that to be true. So the next obvious question is,
Chris: then how do you keep your company's data?
Wes: And so we get like a little data summary of the packet info,
Wes: which we're not going to care about.
Wes: All we're going to do is return XTPDrop, which is a magic value that tells the call.
Chris: Hey, just dropped this.
Wes: 1Password Extended Access Management helps you secure every sign-on for every app on every device.
Wes: It's built to solve problems that IAMs and MDMs just can't touch.
Chris: Go check it out because 1Password's award-winning password manager is not only
Chris: trusted by millions of users and over 150,000.
Wes: Businesses from IBM and Slack.
Chris: But now they're securing more than just passwords with 1Password Extended Access Management.
Chris: It's the first solution that brings all these unmanaged devices and apps and identities together.
Wes: Under your control.
Chris: And that's because we attach it to that specific interface. It ensures that
Chris: every app is strong, every credential is protected, and every device is known
Chris: and healthy, and every app is visible.
Chris: That's the power of 1Password. So go to 1Password.com slash unplugged.
Chris: Secure every app, device, and identity, even the unmanaged ones. Eat like contractors.
Chris: This would have changed the game for me. Go check it out. Support the show.
Chris: Go to 1Password.com slash unplugged.
Chris: It's all lowercase. They got a bunch of information up there.
Chris: It's a really great opportunity.
Wes: Check it out.
Chris: OnePassword.com.
Wes: I can't stop it, but I do have a sneaky console here.
Brent: What I really appreciated was Kelsey gave kind of the overall perspective of
Brent: how we should see the planet in Nix.
Brent: And then Anish, specifically from Anthropic, gave how to implement this.
Wes: Yeah, so like that wasn't that much work. This is just an Ubuntu 24-04 box.
Clip: I'm a proud digs user for almost a decade now since college.
Clip: My claim to fame is that I wrote the original implementation of Override Adders,
Clip: which we all use every day, back when it was four lines of code.
Clip: But for my career, I've been in the industry almost the same time,
Clip: and I've been really focused on developer experience and developer tooling.
Clip: Previously, I was at Lyft, leading their languages team for six and a half years.
Clip: And since about a year ago, I'm at Anthropic, which is an AI safety research company.
Clip: We make products like Claude, as well as we do AI safety research,
Clip: such as building a Claude. and have to worry about messing up my implementation
Clip: in a way that's going to crash the box.
Clip: And at Anthropic, I'm on the builds and deploys team.
Chris: I had high hopes for this talk because you know they got scale, right?
Chris: And they're solving problems that some of us have never even thought about.
Wes: And so in reality.
Chris: You want to do some sort of filtering. And he's kind of still new.
Chris: So he was coming in and discovering some of the issues they're having scaling.
Wes: Oh, is this one I want to block?
Clip: I got to Anthropic a year ago. They told me we use industry-centered tools.
Wes: Obviously a lot of Python.
Clip: Because it's an AI shop. we're using kubernetes and at the time the main point to show that.
Wes: Was that this bcc framework.
Clip: That image was 35 gigabytes large uncompressed tools but
Clip: normally when people talk about a large docker image they're talking like because
Clip: a couple hundred megabytes is big like a couple gigabytes is enormous and this
Clip: is basically another level like the closest thing to dtrace there's good reasons
Clip: for it if you don't want to use the email libraries will monomorphize their
Clip: kernels for different hardware architectures of accelerators you have researchers
Clip: adding things that they needed one time and maybe didn't remove since then um
Clip: there's good reasons for it um but,
Clip: There was also just some inefficiency in the build that hadn't been cleaned
Clip: up. When I got there, I pretty quickly cut out about 20% of it.
Clip: You basically get a nice targeted little scripting language to write tracing
Clip: programs that use the trace points.
Clip: We were seeing four-minute times to pull anything, which is really painful.
Clip: It's all meant that the rebuild times were almost an hour.
Wes: There are some other options.
Clip: There's a program called Ply
Clip: that I haven't tried, but it's also nice that BPF trace is quite popular.
Wes: We talked about XDP.
Clip: There's the Kprobe stuff. But a few months into my tenure, we had a new,
Clip: very high-priority initiative that require compiled software where people are
Clip: going to be changing this multiple times a day.
Wes: So you can do bpftrace-l or the BCC tools has TP list, which is also just a solid trace point.
Wes: It also shows you can do other users-based stuff, but we're not going to talk about that today.
Clip: We're going to talk about Nix Sidecar, which is a thing I built to address this,
Clip: and then we'll give some closing thoughts at the end.
Chris: We have the full link for the talk in the show notes with the time code.
Chris: And it's fascinating just when you realize the scale they're dealing with and
Chris: the limitations that they had to struggle with across, you know,
Chris: hundreds of thousands of servers.
Wes: So here's sort of like.
Chris: And he had to build some software to make it all work.
Wes: Dirty buffer. It tells you you get a dev device, you get a sector and a size.
Wes: And so, you know, those are the things you can work with. And then it has a
Wes: name and you just tell it that you want to trace that thing.
Wes: So this came up because, you know, we talked a little bit about BCC having file
Wes: system specific tools. Like, oh, I want to watch for slow operations from ButterFS, say.
Wes: Especially really competitive AI companies that you know are moving fast.
Wes: I suppose I should step up or someone should step up and add these,
Wes: but there isn't yet a BcacheFS version of these tools, right?
Wes: Obviously, probably what you want to do is just fork the existing ButterFS one
Wes: and modify it and make it work right for BcacheFS.
Wes: But if you want to be ad hoc about it, BPF Trace can handle this too.
Wes: So, I did tplist and then grepped that for things that said bcachefs.
Wes: So, here's just like a list of some of what the trace points look like.
Chris: I never knew that.
Wes: And so these would all be things that Kent or team have put in explicitly so
Wes: that there's a way to easily and with low overhead watch these things.
Chris: Right. And again, not an issue for me, but when you're talking hundreds of systems,
Chris: so you can't do certain tasks in parallel, it's a killer.
Wes: There's a lot of BPF terms. So here's one that stood out.
Wes: Copy GC, wait. and bcashfs is
Wes: a copy on write file system and it does this bucket based allocation and
Wes: so it has what's called a copying garbage collector so as
Wes: you're copying files it'll handle moving things around so
Wes: that it can then like get good bucket allocation and
Wes: defragment things on the fly that kind of thing so copy
Wes: gc wait is a trace point that tells you when
Wes: you're when bcashfs is waiting for copy gc
Wes: to complete so it can be a reason that your
Wes: file system is being slow or not responding especially if you're moving or copying
Wes: files around so you can see on your screen uh just a little tiny script yeah
Wes: sudo bpf trace dash e and then you pass it a little string and we tell it we
Wes: want to use the trace point bcash yeah they got in trouble i guess with aws just so much.
Chris: Bandwidth and that gives you an.
Wes: Idea of the scale when aws is knocking on the door saying hey
Wes: you're extracts you're using too much number from that
Wes: you don't have to do that and then all it does is print what device
Wes: we're waiting on and how much we're waiting yeah and
Wes: so it's you know i don't know 10 lines of code and you
Wes: get it and then
Wes: so on my system i'm just doing it on you know one rudifest disk so i knew which
Wes: disk it would be it was just kind of interesting to see like i went around and
Wes: i dd'd some big files and copied them around and i could see like oh yeah right
Wes: the operation completes and then immediately the print tells me that oh we waited that much.
Wes: So, like, it turns out that like this, there's actually probably a fair amount
Wes: of situations where single trace points just on their own might be something
Wes: you want to look at, right?
Wes: So other ones for BcacheFS, write buffer flush, that's an important event,
Wes: or journal writes, you might be wanting to know stuff about how the journal works.
Wes: But you can also use the scripting language and the fact that eBPF supports
Wes: basic data structures like maps and histograms to make more complicated combined programs.
Wes: So I had an LLM, I fed it the output of that TP list stuff that told it the
Wes: available trace points and what the structures looked like. So I knew how to
Wes: write the right code for it.
Wes: And BPF trace makes it easy to have stuff that runs at an interval, right?
Wes: So you can set up all the traces and then every five seconds it can print out
Wes: a little summary that it's done.
Wes: And so each time it traces it can update a variable and then it can calculate latencies or deltas.
Wes: So i made this is a quick one that it did that looks at that right buffer flush trace point,
Wes: and it samples it over every five seconds and then it tells you how many flushes happened,
Wes: how many buffers were flushed how many were skipped how many were fast path
Wes: flushes and then the total amount of data that was flushed so just like a quick
Wes: way to get you know an accurate little like every five second little printout,
Wes: it's one of the more performant ways to do it yeah.
Wes: So then to kind of further stress just how far this whole having an ai help me out would go,
Wes: uh i got i had an idea i did ultimately tone it back a bit but basically like
Wes: what if i wanted to monitor some of the mesh network traffic that was going
Wes: on there's a lot of options for that but can this do this too?
Wes: And so it built me a little script that you give it an interface and you bring
Wes: it all together and they're moving way faster.
Chris: And so the infrastructure goes from a bottleneck that's holding up the product
Chris: and product development in an incredibly competitive space to now facilitating
Chris: product rollout and product development and testing.
Chris: It's a massive shift. The IT infrastructure went from a holdup to a facilitator with these changes.
Wes: Yeah, right. And so the combination of the built-ins at eBPF and then the built-ins
Wes: into BPF trace, which has some of the stuff to do nice histogram display and
Wes: stuff from their print command.
Wes: It's, you know, this is a little bit longer. Some of it's kind of because there's
Wes: a print statement for each thing we're printing.
Wes: It's like five different things we're measuring, right? So it takes up some
Wes: space on the screen, but like it's a single page of code here.
Wes: So it's not crazy to start trying to understand it.
Chris: Another talk that we wanted to attend was the creator of Nix.
Chris: Elko Dostras had a bit of, I guess, an announcement and a demo to give on configurable
Chris: flakes. And he had our attention.
Wes: And so under the hood, it is tracing something called NetDev Start Transmit.
Clip: So I submitted this stock proposal
Clip: and it got accepted. So then I actually had to go and implement it.
Wes: It filters on interface name from that data.
Clip: But as proof that it actually works. I mean, I should say this is very work
Clip: in progress. and there are a lot of rough edges and certainly the design needs
Clip: to be figured out completely.
Clip: And then it also does a trace point for SID packets with NetDev transmit.
Wes: And then it grabs the start time if it exists for its thread identity.
Clip: And then it can compute how long it took to send from that. And then that's
Clip: where it can use the histogram stuff to print out a nice little thing now that it's tracking latency.
Clip: And then it has another trace point to use NetDev received and flags to them on the comment line.
Wes: And now you can. So here I have a little flake.
Chris: Explain this to me, Wes, why this is a significant development.
Chris: The fact that you can now pass arguments to a flake and whatnot.
Wes: Now it does mean, right, like you can't use it if you don't have trace points you care about.
Wes: And so you have to start understanding some kernel internals and like what trace
Wes: points might matter and what they mean.
Wes: But if you have a specific problem, or a mystery on your system that you're
Wes: trying to look into and you're willing to try to chase down hypotheses using
Wes: these tools, I think you could get pretty far. That's for sure.
Wes: Yeah, a lot of them.
Wes: There's also user space tracing you can do. So if you set it up right,
Wes: you can trace like JVM events or Ruby things or Python stuff.
Wes: And so you have products now too that'll use things like open telemetry or other tracing standards.
Wes: And you can have a trace then that can have both the kernel side via the eppf
Wes: stuff and the user space stuff without necessarily having to do as much custom
Wes: observability implementation in the code base because they can kind of do more dynamic.
Wes: And you might be able to then see stuff right where like oh there was a problem
Wes: on the kernel layer and then that's why we started seeing increased latency
Wes: in the application layer,
Wes: and but you don't know you can use that there's a lot of open source products
Wes: or open core things and there's just a lot of sort of primitives in one layer
Wes: above primitives that are probably already on the kernel I.
Chris: Don't think it's intended to be this it has to go this way but it's presented as,
Chris: I got the sense we're going to try this. This is an idea. This is our approach.
Chris: If this works, maybe people want to adopt it. Maybe something else will work.
Chris: But to me, it was just interesting to see this, like you said,
Chris: answer this kind of original complaint. Yeah.
Wes: Yeah. I mean, it's been around for long enough now that it's well packaged in most distros.
Wes: Well maybe we can add a trace point to firefox to keep track at least yeah,
Wes: hey i just got set up with them and it was in fact very easy.
Chris: That's fantastic yeah yeah i love that,
Chris: oh boy,
Chris: sure the configuration uh-huh,
Chris: but use the flake for other right you get a great message a little display,
Chris: yeah that's what i'm thinking,
Chris: Oh, that's nice. Okay.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Wes: Oh, hoo.
Chris: We have the full talk with the time code because they're like eight-hour streams.
Chris: We have the time code linked in the show notes.
Chris: And if this fascinates you, it's worth it to just look at the demo that Elko
Chris: gives. Yeah, he kind of...
Chris: Day one, we packed a lot in.
Clip: It is officially the end of day one of planet nix in fact we just got done visiting
Clip: the flocks after party dinner and i think one thing really stood out to everybody
Clip: we talked to they're super excited this is happening almost to the point where
Clip: they had a hard time absorbing day one.
Clip: Yeah i think so we were trying to pry out some details right like what are you
Clip: most excited for what were the things that like you know really got you keyed
Clip: up cool i think everyone was just I love success stories like this.
Clip: Vibin' hard on Nick's murdery.
Clip: So it's hard to soak it all in.
Clip: And you had to have a little pizza and maybe a beer or something.
Clip: Something to drink to, you know, relax and... Sink into it. Yeah,
Clip: exactly. Figure out what your next flake you're going to make is.
Clip: I think, too, it was like just the final chance, everybody finally getting the
Clip: chance to talk to someone else about something that they're interested and excited
Clip: about that is Nick's, right? because usually a lot of the people here are the
Clip: only person in the room that knows Nix.
Clip: And so even when they're at work, they don't really get to share in that.
Clip: And here, everybody knows the language and they get to talk about it,
Clip: much like it was when I went to the early Linux Fest.
Clip: Yeah, right. You don't have to assume like, oh, you've got the NT experience.
Clip: You don't have to explain what Linux is. And here, you don't have to explain
Clip: what Nix is or compare it and make a bunch of bad analogies to other tools.
Clip: I also really like seeing a lot of the folks who gave talks today were here tonight.
Clip: And you could tell that maybe the question that you have or have a question,
Clip: have a comment or like conversation starter that doesn't make sense to ask in
Clip: a room full of hundreds of people might make sense to ask while you're both having a bite to eat.
Clip: And you could see those kinds of connections or different folks working in different
Clip: companies all using necks in different ways, sharing tips and tricks.
Clip: Yeah, and that's what's great is you just get right to the problem-solving yeah
Clip: What do you do? Oh, yeah? Oh you solve this?
Clip: Oh, how'd you do that? And that's that's every conversation at dinner. It's pretty great.
Clip: Hopefully day two is also just as great.
Chris: So you've wanted to get in on the boosting fun, or maybe even stack some sats,
Chris: but you know there's a lot of crap, grift and scams in crypto,
Chris: so you've just avoided the whole thing. Your instincts are right.
Chris: 99% of all of it is just crap. There's a term for it, but since we're in polite company, I won't use it.
Chris: So let me tell you how I do it, the services and systems I use.
Wes: I've been following this industry since before.
Chris: It was an industry about 14 years. and I've really landed on just a couple of really safe paths.
Chris: The number one thing you need to look out for is Bitcoin only.
Chris: Wherever you're getting your sats, Bitcoin only. Don't mess with anything else.
Chris: If you think about it from just a technology platform.
Wes: Every stupid crypto is its own platform.
Chris: It needs its own nodes and its own software kit, everything.
Chris: So the more coins you support, the more just vulnerability surface area you
Chris: have, complexity you have, orchestration you have. Just go with Bitcoin only.
Chris: It's deep enough and complex enough that a company should focus on it.
Chris: And that's why I like River.
Chris: JupiterBroadcasting.com slash River is our link. That'll get you some sats and us some sats.
Chris: What I like about them is they are U.S., Bitcoin only, proof of reserves.
Chris: They have zero-fee recurring buys. They have free automatic withdrawal self-custody.
Chris: They give you all the tax information you need. They support Lightning.
Chris: And they have a bunch of great security features and they have a 3.8% Bitcoin interest on cash.
Chris: And it's a great way to safely buy sats and then send them to a lightning wall.
Chris: That's river at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash river.
Chris: If you're in Canada, I think the Bitcoin well is fantastic.
Chris: I've met with these companies. I have used these companies.
Chris: I am a customer of these companies and I have sat on video calls and had them
Chris: answer all of my questions.
Chris: Bitcoin well.com slash Jupiter. This is great in Canada and in the US.
Chris: They're really slick because they do custody first. Everything is self custody.
Chris: They never even hold your book. It doesn't fit every activity.
Wes: So it's sort of a general use in spring of time.
Chris: You buy it and it goes to your wallet or your Lightning wallet.
Chris: That's really slick. And it's great for a self custody setup.
Chris: And when you think about some of the properties of Bitcoin, the self hosting
Chris: and self custody is one of the most powerful aspects.
Chris: That's Bitcoin well.com slash Jupiter.
Chris: If you're outside the U.S. and Canada, if you can, I would use Strike,
Chris: another Bitcoin-only company, really solid infrastructure, run by great people.
Wes: I've got a dual monitor set up in the sort of main office.
Chris: Strike is an app, and it's available in 110 countries.
Wes: Just a single.
Chris: You buy the stats, and they're on the Lightning Network, and you send them over
Chris: to a podcasting app or your own wallet.
Wes: Sort of desk.
Chris: This is not a paid spot.
Wes: I'm just trying to make it clear to you how I do it. That's for the casual work
Wes: where I want to do stuff but with the TV on.
Chris: You know, sometimes there are very attractive looking companies out there,
Chris: like things like Coinbase that really try to lure you in or Crypto.com. Don't use those.
Chris: You're never going to hear me plug those or mention those on the show.
Chris: It's River at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash River. It's Bitcoinwell,
Chris: bitcoinwell.com slash Jupiter, or it's the Strike app.
Chris: I have no affiliate link for them, but I still recommend them.
Chris: And I just want to give you that tip because if you want to get it on the boosting
Chris: and support the show, those are safe, easy, cheap ways to do it.
Chris: I think probably strike is the cheapest of the batch and then river and then Bitcoin will.
Chris: That's my hot tip. Thanks for listening to my PSA.
Brent: Well, day two went pretty quickly, but we did get a recap from the night before.
Clip: Here we go. It's day two of Planet Nix, and the vibe is a little more serious.
Clip: It's a little more focused. It's a little bit more let's get things done.
Clip: In fact, just in our walk-in, we're hearing people that are here with their
Clip: laptops, and they're ready to take the plunge.
Clip: But I think some of us perhaps stayed up a little too late watching Star Trek.
Clip: Too late? I mean, isn't that tradition? Wes and I stay up later than everyone
Clip: else, and then we have our, like, moments together. there.
Clip: But Wes, you seem to be doing all right. Maybe you paced yourself?
Clip: I did. Yeah. I think, you know, I only had one or two beers,
Clip: had some pizza last night.
Clip: So, uh, and despite yesterday's enterprise being on, we managed to go to bed before midnight.
Clip: It is a great episode. It is a great episode. And then I woke up in the morning
Clip: before you boys and it was paused and I finished the episode.
Clip: We wrote down our time.
Wes: I do think that'll be in one of my future.
Clip: Oh, good. You You should. You should finish that one. So we're going to do the first talk.
Clip: One of the things we'll be doing in the first talk of the day is we'll be saying
Clip: hello to the crowd, introducing the podcast.
Clip: And then it's talk after talk. And we're going to try to cram in a few interviews.
Wes: This one's a busy one. What if I want a chain display together?
Chris: We are not famous people. We are not celebrities of any kind,
Chris: except for when we go to Nix events and Linux events.
Chris: So I had a chance to introduce the team to the crowd. But most of us,
Chris: I think probably most of them are probably familiar with this and we're listening
Chris: to the shows already. So hello, everybody.
Chris: Um, and one of the folks that we wanted to grab was Ross from Phlox because,
Chris: well, we always enjoy chatting with him just even off air, but he had a great
Chris: analogy in one of these sidebar conversations. And I was like,
Chris: you know what, boys, we got to go back and get that on mic.
Clip: Returning to the show at Planet Nix. Ross, thank you for joining me.
Clip: Thanks for having me. I have just like a couple of questions for you.
Clip: Number one is you gave me a great analogy yesterday, and I'm wondering if you
Clip: could repeat it for the audience now that we have a microphone.
Clip: And it was the selling seats to people that are already sitting down. Oh, yeah.
Clip: We're trying to figure out in the Phlox and Nix ecosystem what that barrier to entry is.
Clip: And more often than not, what I'm finding is that people are just like,
Clip: it's not the right moment.
Clip: And you're like, no, hey, we have this amazing thing for you.
Clip: It's going to change the way you do everything. And they're like,
Clip: I don't want to change the way I do everything right now.
Clip: And I've started to realize that what we're doing is we're selling chairs.
Clip: We're selling really comfortable chairs. And it's like, it's got a cup holder
Clip: and it's got a back pillow and it's got a seatbelt to keep you safe and a heater
Clip: and an air conditioner and all these things. And that's what we're selling.
Clip: And people are like, nah, I already stuffed this pillow behind here and I bungee
Clip: corded my drink to the side and I'm good.
Clip: I'm good. Don't bother me right now. I'm already sitting down.
Clip: I'm already sitting down. Exactly.
Clip: And we're like, no, but this chair is amazing. And they're like,
Clip: you know what? Catch me on the way back from the bathroom.
Wes: Yeah, you're right.
Clip: That's good. Maybe I'll try it then. Maybe I'll try it then.
Clip: Maybe I'll stand up and you'll get a moment there and I'll sit down in your
Clip: new chair and I'll probably find something that I don't quite love about it
Clip: because I'd already figured out my old chair.
Clip: Yeah. You know? Yeah. And that's when somebody's already comfortable. It's a tough sell.
Clip: It is. It is. And especially when you're doing something really disruptive like Nix.
Clip: Yeah. You're saying, I'm going to change the way you deal with all your software.
Clip: Right. I mean, that's not a tiny thing to ask somebody to do.
Clip: That's a huge thing to ask somebody to do. And so you have to be really clear
Clip: about what are the benefits.
Wes: What are the reasons.
Clip: What's driving you over that hill.
Wes: And that means it is broadly used, too.
Clip: What is filling your bladder enough to make you stand up and go and then come
Clip: back and sit down in a different chair? That's great.
Wes: Okay, so then something else that I noticed is yesterday you had, which is day one.
Clip: As we record, you had to talk about Nix in the Wild. Yes.
Wes: And so I sent you an example.
Clip: I guess I didn't really understand this last time.
Clip: You actually have people doing surveys of actual customers, asking them questions
Clip: of how it's going. You're actually collecting data of Nix in the wild.
Clip: Well, you might say it like that. I would say we collect stories.
Clip: So this is an interview process. Kind of probably similar to what you do a lot
Clip: is we'll find somebody who's using Nix in the wild, and we'll say,
Clip: are you willing to tell us your story?
Clip: We invite them onto a call with us. They talk for 45 minutes.
Clip: We ask them basic questions.
Wes: What are you using it for? How did you find it?
Clip: What is your process?
Wes: And all these things. And under that, there's rules.
Clip: And then we write an article.
Wes: What I want to do in the future is even more than that.
Clip: I want to have more data in these articles. I want to have more code snippets
Clip: in these articles and more guidance, more quotations.
Wes: And then I'd love to do some analysis. We have maybe eight or nine of them now.
Clip: But when we have like 30.
Wes: We can start to do some pattern matching. The things we've already figured out
Wes: are really interesting.
Clip: We figured out that generally Nix happens in a nucleus at a company and starts growing from there.
Clip: We found that generally it's not the first thing people choose.
Clip: They see it, and they go, oh, that sounds like exactly what I want,
Clip: but I am not willing to confront that yet.
Wes: And then they go and they try a few other things.
Clip: They attempt to circumnavigate the problem in 10 different ways,
Clip: and then they come back and go, all right, take a deep breath.
Wes: Let's climb this mountain.
Clip: And so we find that that's a pattern that's interesting.
Wes: But, you know, you can do specific reports that you want to watch.
Wes: You can do specific IPs, host names, TCP states.
Clip: I guess what I thought was interesting, though, is you're probably getting stories
Clip: after story of how people are solving problems with Nix. And I think one of
Clip: the things that I'm discovering this year in particular is a lot of people here
Clip: are a little bit more willing to talk about how they're using Nix in production.
Clip: And there hasn't been a lot of that. So I love the idea of publicly sharing these stories.
Wes: Maybe there's something you're trying to hunt for. You find it here,
Wes: and then you can go do the TCP dump to capture the traffic.
Clip: People are solving it. And even maybe some of the code they use to fix those
Clip: problems. That could really help people just solve the same issue.
Clip: Absolutely. I mean, if you look at the Nix community this year versus last year,
Clip: it's notably different.
Wes: Well, you kind of hinted at this a bit.
Clip: The level of conversations one higher. The things that people are asking about.
Wes: The things that people are trying to solve, are one level more sophisticated. We're starting to see.
Clip: I think, people having real production use cases. I agree. People who've gotten
Clip: to day 1000, and they're like, okay, here's the day 1000 experience.
Clip: And it's not what I thought it was gonna be.
Clip: More vibrant and more interesting and more challenging, but also more valuable.
Clip: Yeah, and you're not hearing people say, we got to this point,
Clip: and now we're sick of it, we're bailing.
Clip: What you're hearing is, we're going to continue to use it, we're going to go even further.
Clip: Yeah, they're like, we're waist deep, we're in it. Thank you, Ross.
Wes: So think of all those things like CYSTL.
Brent: Well, we always love chatting with Ross and getting an update every year.
Brent: But we also got to see one of our favorite listeners, Olympia Mike,
Brent: was there taking in the Nix, but also showcasing one of his newest Nix projects.
Clip: Man, this is wild, right? If you think about, I was thinking about this in the room.
Clip: We went from the summer of immutability, and I was like, what are these guys
Clip: talking about, this Nix thing?
Clip: And now we're sitting here, what, two, three years later, at Planet Nix,
Clip: you know, which is just wild. Are you blaming us for your trajectory?
Clip: Yeah, 100%. Okay, got it. I think I had a slide dedicated to blaming you guys
Clip: for my discovery of NixOS.
Clip: So what are you doing with NixOS these days? So, oh, boy.
Clip: Well, I'm doing a bunch of stuff. So I just got done finishing my talk on building
Clip: a Chromebook replacement with NixOS.
Wes: Yeah, and they kind of make the case here too.
Clip: I almost named it NixOS for your mom. You know, because the idea is like setting
Clip: up NixOS for a general user, basic user use. But like NixOS for your mom.
Wes: I'm not going to hand-tune all your dynamic web workers.
Clip: So you decided on a different name? Yeah.
Wes: So basically, you know.
Clip: People that want a Chromebook-like experience, but without the creepy Google
Clip: stuff, right? They just want it to be automatic. They just want everything to work.
Clip: They want everything to be one-click install.
Clip: And so, yeah, that's why I've built that with NixOS and I've been deploying
Clip: it out there in the real world for friends, family, and local people.
Clip: And yeah, so I give a talk on how I did that and hopefully get more eyes on the project.
Clip: Tell us a little bit more about why you built this, because it sounds like you
Clip: have a project in which you're giving back to the community,
Clip: and that was kind of the thrust to use Nix to make your job a little easier. Yeah, absolutely.
Clip: So if you were to look at a heat map of Linux users, there's probably a giant
Clip: red spot in Olympia, Washington.
Clip: And that's because for the past five years, I've been getting donation computers
Clip: from people, people that are just, I have this old laptop sitting in my closet,
Clip: don't know what to do with it, and they give it to me.
Clip: And I've even buddied up with school districts and companies that are getting rid of old hardware.
Clip: And so they know that I'm a safe place to bring it because I securely wipe everything
Clip: before anything goes out.
Clip: And some people want data off their drives or whatever.
Clip: So what I do is I take these machines and I Linux them up and donate them back out to the community.
Clip: And what I was doing was doing Linux Mint because Linux Mint is,
Clip: you know, love it or hate it, it is definitely the most friendly environment
Clip: and UI for somebody coming from Windows.
Clip: And overall that worked great, but I noticed there were some issues with Linux
Clip: Mint, people not doing updates, a little package confusion stuff.
Clip: And so what I thought was, what if I built this in Nix and was able to like
Clip: rebuild Linux Mint, you know, in Nix with all the upgrades that I wanted to do. And I did.
Clip: You said you basically built your own distribution, but I would imagine Nix
Clip: enabled you to do that in a way that you would have never considered doing without it. Oh, absolutely.
Clip: Yeah, yeah. Linux from scratch or even, you know, back in the day,
Clip: before I discovered Nix, how I did this was basically like Arch.
Clip: Shell scripts like install arch and then run this script sounds scary
Clip: already it sounds scary already yeah yeah sure enough and yeah it never bit
Clip: me sure i'm lying yeah it sounds like a little bit of pain points but also just
Clip: you mentioned you're now taking care of 400 to 500 laptop yeah so i have uh
Clip: there's probably four at least four to five hundred of these i call them nix books,
Clip: out there in the world and uh and and many of them are in my house as well so
Clip: i have my kids My parents, they're all using Nixbook.
Clip: And it's just, it's fantastic.
Clip: It really is that perfect zero maintenance.
Clip: Open it up and it just works. All the updates are done for you.
Clip: You just never need to worry about anything.
Clip: And it's just that all the guarantees and the security that you get with Nix
Clip: for a general user. I mean, it kind of is perfect.
Chris: It was great to see Olympia Mike. He had a great talk. and we wanted to wrap
Chris: it up with Ron, who we started this adventure with Ron, who is co-founder of
Chris: Phlox and of course the chair of the NixOS Foundation.
Chris: And we wanted to check in with him a day after things just to see how it had gone for him.
Chris: And now that he's just attending regular old scale, what's it been like just
Chris: with the average folks who are coming for a general Linux convention?
Clip: How do you feel the first Planet Nix went? I mean, I think it was incredible.
Clip: Yeah. I can only speak for myself for just the energy in the
Clip: room but seeing over 300 people standing room
Clip: only on two tracks yeah workshops talks
Clip: all that i think that was incredible you know what i noticed and i
Clip: wonder if you picked up on this is it felt like both in
Clip: terms of talks and in terms of attendees people were talking about how they
Clip: use nyx at work more out in the open like we're using it here we're replacing
Clip: this with nyx did you see more of that did you hear more of that this year i
Clip: 100 did and And I think that was the thing when we intentionally really tried
Clip: to communicate with Planet Nix.
Clip: It's going to be a bit different. It's going to be a bit more Nix beginners, Nix at work doing that.
Clip: And I think it was received so well that that's kind of the ecosystem that showed up here, right?
Clip: We have a good mix of advanced contributors, but also a good mix of folks that
Clip: finally felt really comfortable being able to talk about, hey,
Clip: I just want to bring it in. I'm not an expert. What do I do?
Clip: And I love those conversations. Yeah, because you walk away with like real solutions.
Clip: Like, oh, that's how you fix that. Like there's been a couple of conversations.
Clip: Where people just had breakthroughs. Like, oh, that's how you're doing that?
Clip: Oh, what a brilliant idea. Because there's always a lot of ways to solve problems.
Clip: Exactly, exactly. And I think it's, look, I mean, think about it.
Clip: We're a pretty tight-knit community. We're a pretty extreme technical community.
Clip: It must be, and it probably is, kind of scary to come in and say,
Clip: hey, how do I do this thing for a commercial reason, right? open source,
Clip: commercial, that already has a little bit of friction.
Clip: So when you're like, all I want it to do is to solve a problem.
Clip: Apple, at Anthropic, at, you know, take name of presenter that attended this year.
Clip: I think it's kind of scary, and I'm really happy to see that folks were talking about it.
Clip: I think it means that we kind of removed the barriers a bit and opened our arms
Clip: a bit wider for folks like that.
Clip: So putting your Phlox hat on, we're standing right here at the Phlox booth in
Clip: the scale side of the event in the Expo Hall.
Clip: What's the average scale attendee interest been in Phlox and the solving problems
Clip: that Phlox solves? I mean, I think we're seeing the transition,
Clip: right? We're seeing kind of that.
Clip: We were here two years ago, actually at a Nix booth, right? Because we hosted
Clip: the first Nix booth ever at scale two years ago.
Clip: And folks were coming by and being like, what's Nix?
Clip: Now, folks are coming by and being like, oh, you're that, are you that thing
Clip: that bridges all the gaps that I currently have with containers?
Clip: And they're coming to us with a, hey, I want to, I've started to use this instead
Clip: of homebrew, or I've, you know, this has improved my life over here.
Clip: So that's a really amazing feeling, right?
Clip: You're kind of, folks are starting to that discovery phase and the excitement
Clip: phase, both about Nix and about Phlox.
Clip: And I'm seeing a lot of scale attendees who are not specifically from the Nix
Clip: ecosystem come up, recognize, mention already being, you know,
Clip: looking into it, which is always a more lovely deep conversation.
Clip: It's such a great opportunity because the conversations are so high bandwidth.
Clip: So you just get so much more context.
Clip: You know, that's something that I really appreciated about us being here is
Clip: I feel like we just understand a lot more about what people are working on and
Clip: what's really kind of on front of people's mind right now and what they're thinking of.
Clip: Like there's just the bandwidth you get in these conversations.
Clip: It's so much richer than the online communications. I almost wish we could do it more than once a year.
Clip: I do too. I think that would be lovely. I mean, the fact that we can,
Clip: you know, user, a person, an attendee shows up and it's like, here's my problems.
Clip: Show me how you solve them for me. And what we do
Clip: is like crack open a laptop and you know
Clip: the person leaves with like a holy cow i think i think i got this licked i can
Clip: i can solve this yes yeah yeah it's hard to get not in person not face to face
Clip: and yeah and that's incredible well ron thank you thank you for bringing us
Clip: down here and thanks for putting on a great event we really enjoyed it we're
Clip: gonna do it again next year with you guys so i'm excited all right.
Chris: I hope so you know because before we went down i was like oh is it worth it
Chris: you know we could probably do a lot of this just remotely but man is it so worth
Chris: it just things to figure out the context you get the insights all of that is
Chris: just is really super worth it and you agree,
Chris: Brent, I wonder if you noticed this too, but it feels like there is an ecosystem
Chris: assembling here with different vendors providing solutions built on top of Nix.
Chris: That's been kind of fascinating to watch too.
Brent: Yeah, it seemed really exciting that the ecosystem is maturing,
Brent: even from what we saw last year.
Brent: And Chris, you mentioned this quickly, that it seems like the corporate world
Brent: is now okay to share what they're doing with Nix.
Brent: And we heard sort of in the hush hush that there's a lot of businesses who are
Brent: household names, really,
Brent: that are using Nix and maybe aren't willing to talk about it right now,
Brent: but are being sort of convinced to talk about all the really neat things they're
Brent: doing with Nix and NixOS.
Brent: So I thought, at least from a perspective of going from last year to this year
Brent: and seeing where that trend is going, I think we're in for a good time here.
Brent: Now you heard some of our biggest takeaways from Planet Nix.
Brent: We, of course, have so many more, and it's a treat if you're in person to grab
Brent: those, but we also have a little treat from our community.
Brent: So the first one was we had a little invitation by System76,
Brent: longtime friends of the show, to do a little laser tag.
Brent: And this was not planned. They just invited us last minute.
Brent: And Chris, were you up for this at first?
Chris: I mean, I was in full Let's Watch MacGyver mode.
Chris: So, you know, you think about it. You start your day 7 a.m.-ish,
Chris: which means you're really up 5.30.
Chris: And, you know, you're eating breakfast and you're getting out the door at 7
Chris: a.m. And so to get through this, plus all of the, you know, walking around all
Chris: day long and doing interviews, I thought, well, what we'll do is we'll have a super chill evening.
Chris: We'll get like some sandwiches and we'll watch the first episode of MacGyver.
Chris: And to make this possible, we were trying streaming, but the Airbnb connection was a bit spotty.
Chris: So Wes facilitated by quickly standing up a local jellyfin instance.
Chris: I agree. I think lesson learned. And Wes, being a long-time,
Chris: perhaps lifetime MacGyver fan, of course had the means and necessary access
Chris: to get us the MacGyver files.
Chris: So we had ourselves a night planned. And I was pretty committed to this idea.
Chris: You might say it's what carried me through the day, perhaps.
Chris: It was my shining star, my light at the end of the tunnel, to get through the hard day.
Chris: And we, no joke, we get home and we start talking about dinner.
Chris: And, you know, Wes has got the laptop running and we get a text message from Emma from System76.
Chris: And she's like, guys, you got to come out. You got to play laser tag with us.
Chris: And I'm like, no way, not going to happen.
Chris: We just are about to get our lazy on. And then like the next message from Emma
Chris: is like, tell Chris it'll be a lot of fun and he should do it.
Chris: She knew I was going to say something.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. So we're like, all right, let's do this. So we pile up in the rental
Chris: car that we had and we set off to the laser tag place.
Chris: Ironically, we beat them there because they were delayed by an ambulance.
Chris: So we started warming up by playing some air hockey, you know,
Chris: and I had surprisingly good luck at the air hockey for some reason.
Chris: I don't know what my deal was with that. That was about the extent of my luck for the night.
Chris: Then the System 76 crew showed up and Carl and team, most of the team were there,
Chris: no part of the team. And we were kind of concerned because they play laser tag
Chris: on the regular at this massive facility in Denver.
Brent: I had never played until this moment.
Chris: Neither did I. And my wife, Hadiyah, who was with us, had never played.
Chris: So we were total beginners going up against a crew that plays on the regular.
Chris: And it showed in our first round. We didn't do great in our first round.
Chris: And you could tell the System 76 crew thought they had us.
Chris: They were feeling pretty, pretty good.
Chris: And I'll be honest, I was a little nervous. But what I realized as the games
Chris: progressed is the boys just needed to get their laser feet at first.
Chris: And once the preceding games got on, I discovered that my two co-hosts are absolute
Chris: psychopath killers that not only can work as a team, as one killer brain,
Chris: but also work independently.
Chris: And they're absolute murderers. And I'll tell you, quite honestly, audience,
Chris: before we went into this trip, I figured, you know, in a hypothetical situation
Chris: where we're all walking around packing heat and we got into some sort of,
Chris: like, Old West gun showdown, I thought I'd be the one there,
Chris: you know, crouching down in a car shooting while the boys, you know,
Chris: went and got help or something.
Chris: No disparagement, man. But I didn't figure you'd be the ones that would be doing
Chris: the killing. I thought that duty would fall upon me.
Chris: Of course, I've thought of this. However, now that we've played laser tag,
Chris: I realized I'll be the one running for help and you two will be the one doing the murder.
Chris: And I'm totally safe. You got my back. I was surprised.
Chris: And ultimately, it meant that our team came out victorious.
Chris: And we beat the seasoned laser tag System 76 crew.
Brent: You know, going into this, System76 made some big promises to try to lure us
Brent: out. What was some of them?
Chris: I do believe some launch keyboards were promised, right?
Brent: They were for the top performers. And, well, Wes was the number one top performer
Brent: across all rounds that we played. And your dear Brent was number two.
Chris: Killer. I just like laser. And shooting people, apparently.
Brent: And turns out I placed number two.
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Brent: And the other thing they suggested was the loser would show up on someone's
Brent: podcast and admit that they had lost.
Chris: I don't see them in the mumble room. Do you see them in the mumble room?
Brent: I don't think they're here today.
Chris: That's okay. They're probably still hurting from their loss.
Chris: They're thinking, how did those lazy podcasters beat us, us Denver hikers?
Chris: That's probably what they're thinking. Everybody hikes in Denver, right?
Chris: I think so. It was a lot of fun. And we really enjoyed our time seeing them.
Chris: They also made it to our meetup, which was a blowout success.
Chris: Thank you, everybody. We had well over 100 people make it.
Chris: We told the restaurant there would be 40, and there was a bit more than that.
Chris: And so they quickly opened up
Chris: another wing for us, and we had an overflow room, and it was really nice.
Chris: Anish from Anthropic made it. Carl from System76. Noah from the Ask Noah program.
Chris: Of course, Alex from Self-Hosted made it.
Chris: Olympia Mike was there. Cessna Mike was there.
Chris: Yep. Yep. Hell 9000. Yeah, yeah, I got to meet Hell 9000. It was really great
Chris: to put some names to faces. Those meetups are always really good for that.
Chris: And they said, we're welcome back. Even though we blew it out, they said, don't worry.
Chris: Don't worry. We'll make it work for you next time. So maybe we'll do it there
Chris: again. They were super accommodating, even though we way, way overwhelmed them.
Chris: But we had so much fun. And it went on for hours. And then the next morning,
Chris: we had, you know, conference hard, right? And we've covered all of that.
Chris: But because we're pros at this now, we had scheduled ourselves a little bit of downtime.
Chris: So that way we could enjoy the fact that we were in Pasadena,
Chris: California, while the weather's nice.
Chris: But what do you do? What do you do with your free time? You got your boys there,
Chris: but everywhere you go, it's traffic.
Chris: And the tourist thing would be to go to the beach.
Chris: And our first thought was, well, maybe we could just do something to torture
Chris: PJ, you know, take him to some really touristy thing he hates.
Chris: Yeah. But, you know, we threw a couple ideas at him to just kind of see how
Chris: he'd respond. And he was like, cool with everything.
Chris: He's like everything. He just he just rolled with the punches.
Chris: So that wasn't going to work.
Chris: But since now Jeff, myself, and my wife were all awake, but you boys were still
Chris: sleeping, well, I have to be honest, we started scheming.
Chris: That's right. We loaded Brent up into the car, Brent and Wes,
Chris: and only kind of hinted what we were doing.
Chris: And out of all the things that were available to us, Jeff's mom's house was
Chris: pretty close to our location.
Chris: So we thought, let's go down there. We know that Jeff's had this van parked
Chris: there that he's been trying to get Brent to buy for ages, but we don't truly know the state of it.
Chris: We think it's in good condition, but it'd be really good to get our eyes on
Chris: it. And then, hey, wouldn't it be fun if we just for a couple of hours tried
Chris: to get this bus, which is a van, parked there for six years,
Chris: if we could get this thing running again? Wouldn't that just be a fun adventure?
Chris: And sure enough, as we're pulling up, we're like, hey, Brent,
Chris: look at this van. Brent, check this van out.
Brent: I was so clueless at that point. Because I, you know, how this typically goes
Brent: when we get together is we just have some free time.
Brent: Someone makes some crazy decision about where we go.
Brent: And then I just, I don't know, Wes, you and I are pretty agreeable.
Brent: We just tag along for whatever crazy adventure is going to happen.
Brent: And I had zero until the moment we pulled up to this thing. Zero idea this is what we were going to do.
Brent: And then it all just hit me. Hole lay. This is the van that Jeff's been sending
Brent: me photos about for the last two years, trying to convince me to take this thing
Brent: off his grandfather's hands out of the driveway.
Brent: And this, I mean, Chris, this is your fault. I'm completely blaming you because
Brent: for years now you've been saying, hey, Brent, you know what you should do?
Brent: I can't do it because I got kids and a big, huge rake, but I'm going to live
Brent: vicariously through you.
Brent: And you should buy this little, I don't know, a van or some kind of camper of
Brent: some sort and just tour around the continent just on your own time.
Brent: And so this has been years in the making. You've been razzing me about this.
Brent: And like some of the first bang bus songs are just like continuing that trend
Brent: of just convincing Brent he should live a different lifestyle.
Brent: And sure enough, when we pulled up, it was like, oh, it's on. It is on.
Chris: Yeah, what we saw was a 1990s Dodge B250 camper van built in Canada and modified
Chris: into a camper van in Canada, interestingly enough.
Chris: And it had been sitting, so it's rusted, but it had real potential.
Chris: And we are kind of like the Avengers team.
Chris: We came together. Wes did the audio recording.
Chris: Brent and I started going through the RV features of the van.
Chris: And we kind of quickly came to realization that, you know, it wouldn't be too
Chris: hard to see if this thing's functional.
Chris: And so PJ came in clutch because we needed a little electrical work.
Chris: Since the thing had sat for five or six years, the battery was beyond dead.
Chris: We couldn't jump it. We couldn't charge it.
Chris: But we needed to know if the motor turned. And so Jeff breaks out the old drone battery.
Chris: I mean, I'm talking like something that fits in the palm of your hand and starts wiring it up to the van.
Clip: This is what we've been waiting for. What do you want to do,
Clip: Wanda? Bubble, bubble, worries. Go ahead. Okay, turning on. Do it.
Clip: Crank it. That's way more power. Crank it.
Clip: There we go, it's smoking, but we got it. Yeah. Okay, kill it,
Clip: Brent, kill it. We're good.
Clip: So I think we're looking, it's dead now, Brent. I think we're looking at a voltage
Clip: issue. Yeah, it's battery, battery's dead. But it turned, though. Yeah.
Clip: Yeah, so the starters not get enough power. That's cool. That's cool.
Clip: It's already warm. Just a little bit. Dude, it was smoking, yeah.
Clip: Well, that's the wire that, yeah.
Clip: That's all we needed to really find out for sure. Thank you.
Clip: Yeah, that's great. That's good news. So the starter's in perfect condition
Clip: if we can get enough voltage to it.
Clip: So we could run to one of the auto stores and pick up a battery.
Chris: And we did just that. Because the thing is, it was like in pristine condition
Chris: under the hood. The oil, it was just changed before it was parked.
Chris: Brand new transmission fluid. Brand new transmission fluid in there.
Chris: And so we knew it now would turn.
Chris: And I think PJ was like, oh, we could just call it good there.
Chris: And I'm like, now that we know, let's go get a battery. And so sure enough, we load up in the rental.
Chris: We go get ourselves a $180 California battery because this thing's big old V8
Chris: with a starter that just requires a ridiculous amount of power.
Chris: And we put a little bit of starter juice right down into the mouth of the engine,
Chris: right into the carburetor, so that way it's got some fresh juice to start with.
Chris: And we roll the dice to see if it starts.
Clip: What do I need? We're going to crank it. You ready? Yeah, crank it.
Clip: What do you need me for? I'm just letting you know.
Clip: It's good. Are you ready, Brent? A bit airy in here, Mike. Fuck up.
Clip: Yeah, you're gonna get a lot of dirt. If it turns, it's gonna blow a lot.
Clip: The doghouse is open inside, so it's right at Brent's legs. Like,
Clip: right at his knees. We can put it back on. Are we ready? Yeah, we're ready.
Clip: Here we go. Sounds good.
Clip: Yes! Yes!
Clip: Give him some gas, but give him a little gas. Yeah!
Clip: Yeah, keep it going because we're going to start getting the shit gas now.
Clip: Yeah, it's good. It's good. Breathing.
Clip: Woohoo!
Clip: I did get a little dirty because it blew all over me because,
Clip: like, the engine's in the cab, which makes no sense to me. Yeah,
Clip: well, that's why it's got a doghouse.
Clip: It's sweet. You can just touch it while you're driving down the road.
Clip: Well, yeah, you got to go to the duct and everything.
Clip: You want to go okay we're starting to get a little belt squeak but not bad yeah
Clip: well yeah right like i mean star
Clip: trek they got an engine room you just got your engine room in your cab.
Chris: Yeah right there in the cockpit it's actually pretty handy so the whole story
Chris: is in this week's episode of the launch and there's a lot more to it weekly
Chris: launch.rocks brent joins angela and i and we go into the full story but long
Chris: story short because it ran so good and it can it actually smoothed out as it continued to run,
Chris: and the engine only has 60,000 miles on it, Brent decided to pull the trigger and pick it up.
Chris: So, uh, now we have to actually get back down there and get the thing on the road.
Chris: Tires are in rough shape. So it's going to need new tires.
Chris: You know, it's, it's probably going to get about somewhere between 10 and 15 miles per gallon.
Chris: It's got to get, you know, title and licensed. It's got a few repairs.
Chris: Brent's going to have some woodwork to do, but the bones are in really good shape, Brentley.
Brent: This is crazy. This is not what I had on my list.
Brent: You know my agenda for going to scale planet nix and like hanging out with you guys,
Brent: i didn't expect to come back with like a new lifestyle
Brent: and a new set of wheels but i gotta
Brent: say that was super fun to work on this thing with you guys we
Brent: had a great time uh wes thank you for sneaky grabbing a bunch of audio it's
Brent: reliving that moment when it just first started up is like yeah that's gonna
Brent: stick with me for a while but chris you and i have well i think a big project
Brent: coming up where we're going to head back down and really get this thing going,
Brent: put new tires on it and make sure it actually rolls because we didn't actually
Brent: get the chance to try that part of it and somehow get this thing back up to Canada.
Brent: And Jeff's going to join us too. So early May, is that what we decided?
Chris: May 1st, I booked the trip and we're going to fly down to LAX.
Chris: And then with Jeff's help, we're going to get back to his mom's house.
Chris: And we're going to try to get this thing on the road as fast and feasible as
Chris: possible and we're going to be doing shows, we're going to be doing LUP and
Chris: other shows from the road, from the van,
Chris: which is going to be interesting because the interior needs some work It may or may not work out.
Brent: We're going to find a.
Chris: Well, and you, you know, you get it. Basically, if the bones are in good shape,
Chris: the other stuff we can figure out.
Chris: So our thinking is if we can get it from L.A.
Chris: To Sacramento, where we'll have Jeff chasing us, then it's likely we have a
Chris: pretty good shot, at least a 50 percent shot of getting from Sacramento back up to Seattle.
Chris: We shall see. And we will not have it after we leave Jeff's house in Sacramento.
Chris: We will have no chase car. So we will be just on our own and we'll have to be
Chris: stopping and taking time to do episodes and shows from the van. It's going to be wild.
Chris: And of course, we could always use the help and support because not only was
Chris: this episode incredibly expensive to produce, but this wild trip is going to be crazy.
Chris: So if you'd like to help the boost, boost in with some BangBus support.
Chris: I got a specific clip for those of you who boost in. We have.
Chris: And another BangBus boost clip.
Chris: Yeah that's right so,
Chris: yeah we're looking forward to it i think it's going to be i think it's going to be really great,
Chris: and uh we'll have details on all of that in the future and
Chris: you'll know you'll know when we're on the road the van's right there it's gonna
Chris: be great friend will be giving out tours and talking about the wood he rebuilt
Chris: and where the batteries are at and you know we're pulling people in there Oh, yeah.
Chris: Oh, yeah. And you know we're stuffing as much Linux into this thing as possible.
Chris: Maybe we build in a Linux Reaper system.
Chris: A Home Assistant system is just absolutely going to happen, right,
Chris: Brent? Full Linux in your bag.
Brent: Yeah. Bring it on. Bring it on.
Chris: All right.
Chris: We do have some boosts to get into that help make this episode possible.
Chris: And our baller booster this week is The Dude Abides.
Chris: Coming in with a fantastic 100,000 sets!
Chris: The Dude Abide writes, welcome back. Thank you, dude.
Chris: Really appreciate that. That means more than ever this week.
Chris: That is a great time for a baller boost like that. Thank you very much.
Chris: Appreciate that. And you are our top supporter for episode 606.
Chris: Also a great boost. That's cool.
Chris: Oh, all subsequent kernels...
Chris: I mean, it feels like we're getting there with the six series.
Chris: You know how Linus gets once the number starts getting too high.
Chris: So it could be happening.
Chris: Would he go with seven forever? Well, he could if he was Linus for a day.
Chris: Thank you and i think that's a it's a good uh play you're you're kind of like hedging with ladybird,
Chris: oh good,
Chris: yeah yeah that's a great set of boost adversaries thank you very much and uh
Chris: i agree with you thanks for the boost now.
Brent: Andrew sent in two boosts the first one here 29,402 sats.
Brent: Short time, first time, but you have a new Linux convert. Windows hardware requirements got me good.
Brent: And now Nexus giving me quite a head spin, but wow, is it an awesome one.
Brent: Thanks for all the good work and cheers to many more invaluable episodes.
Brent: P.S. Get the map, Wes, because this is a zip code boost.
Chris: Did you bring the map, Wes?
Chris: Does.
Brent: Have extra stains I noticed.
Chris: First time booster and a Linux convert Andrew you're killing it love it it's
Chris: good to hear alright Wes so we gotta convert this,
Chris: Ideally with Star Trek. Oh, there you go. I see Andrew also liked the deep dive,
Chris: but he says we don't have to overdo it. I think that's good feedback. Thank you.
Chris: All right. Where's he at, Wes? Where's he at? Charleston, South Carolina.
Chris: Hey, I want to go there sometime.
Chris: I would love to do a North Carolina, South Carolina thing.
Chris: Yeah. Does that mean there's vinegar in the meetup? Why not? Okay. All right.
Chris: Hey, speaking of somebody we got to see at Planet Nix and scale,
Chris: it is Gene Bean, and He comes in with 36,510 sats. That's right.
Chris: He says, if you're going to use Gentoo, don't cut corners. Oh, gosh, we got him going.
Chris: Just as Nick's BSD wasn't free BSD, sidestepping what makes Gentoo unique defeats its purpose.
Chris: The point of a Gentoo challenge is to learn about the stuff other distros hide.
Chris: That knowledge is incredibly helpful when switching back to any mainstream distro.
Chris: I agree. I can't argue with that. I agree.
Chris: I think he's right about that. He did love the rust coverage in the kernel.
Chris: And he asked, we asked if people are liking the deep dives. He said he enjoyed
Chris: the EBPF deep dive. I wouldn't want it every episode, but once a month, maybe a quarter.
Chris: This particular one was well done. I really enjoyed it. Keep up the good work.
Chris: Okay. I think that's where we're starting to see a theme. It's like,
Chris: yeah, from time to time, don't mind those deep dives.
Chris: Just got to buckle up. Right. And then he wraps it up with Brent, Chris, and Wes.
Chris: This, which was 25,400 sats, should cover the beer or cider that I wanted to
Chris: get each of you during scale. as a thanks for all you do to keep this community informed.
Chris: It was great getting to chat with you all while we were there,
Chris: and I'm seriously looking forward to hearing your coverage of the event.
Chris: Well, Jade, being having lunch with you was a highlight of our event, so it was nice to see you.
Chris: Hey, thank you. I think we will.
Brent: Well, flyover friend sent in a McRove ducks.
Brent: JB Bang Bus, huh? Well, okay, go ahead and earmark this boost to help fund the interior cameras.
Brent: I'll watch, but I'll be weird.
Chris: Yeah, I like over flyover. I'm thinking cameras for sure. I mean,
Chris: on the outside. I don't know about the inside.
Chris: That's true oh oh god you're right okay here we go,
Chris: yeah you know and uh i like some people go to interesting places with the name
Chris: but of course the real story behind the name of the bang bus is that we just like alliteration a lot,
Chris: that's a good point that's a good point All right. Sire comes in with 20,000 sats.
Chris: Beer boost. Sorry, I couldn't do the benchmarks on FreeBSD. Okay.
Chris: I'm keeping an eye on the release notes, though, to see when my Goopoo will become supported.
Chris: Totally fair, Sire. That seems totally fair.
Brent: And ZackAttack came in with another 20,000 sets.
Brent: It has been too long since I boosted in.
Brent: I remember you guys talked about note-taking apps, and I recently switched from
Brent: Obsidian with SyncThing to Joplin with Tailscale and Nextcloud.
Brent: While I don't like the way they format files, I do like how it handles syncing across devices.
Brent: Made onboarding laptops that I tend to wipe and reinstall the OS on every quarter a lot easier.
Brent: Also, on the Rust in the kernel coverage, I like hearing it.
Brent: I can tell you guys spend a lot of time looking into the topics and give a good fair take on it.
Brent: Would be curious on what you guys think about the latest Firefox controversy,
Brent: and if it's going to cause you to jump web browsers.
Brent: Also, big shout out to everyone from Michigan.
Chris: Shout out Michigan! again we did talk a little firefox in our live stream members
Chris: show today uh and uh i think we're gonna keep watching it and we'll probably
Chris: do further coverage in the show it's a good question,
Chris: that's true that is true thank you zach attack good to hear from you and it's
Chris: great to hear from shy fox who comes in with 20 000 sets i'm on the wrong coast
Chris: to join y'all so instead here's to a good time p.s my first computer was a pentium
Chris: one that we won in a department store raffle,
Chris: Oh, what an era.
Chris: I wonder if that one had a fan on it. Some of the Pentiums that first shipped
Chris: didn't have fans, even though they needed them.
Chris: And so if you got a really early Pentium 1 system, you might have,
Chris: because you have to understand the 486 and 386 systems, while some of them started
Chris: having cooling, till the very end of the 486 one, they're still selling some
Chris: of them without active cooling. If you can believe a CPU.
Chris: But the Pentium 1s was a little bit tougher. That's a great boost.
Chris: Thank you, Shy Fox. Good to hear from you.
Chris: Thank you, Tomato. We did. Nice to hear from you.
Brent: Amitra Hat sent in 4,500 sats.
Brent: Longtime listener, core contributor, and first-time booster.
Chris: Hey! Thank you on both accounts.
Brent: Just wanted to say the eBPF deep dive was excellent, and I'd like to hear more of those such episodes.
Chris: All right.
Chris: That's great. This is really good feedback. The boys can attest,
Chris: before we started getting these messages, I was telling them maybe we don't do that again.
Chris: And I was like, oh, this is not looking good. But so far, now that we've actually
Chris: collected the messages and time has come in and they've rolled in,
Chris: I'm feeling like, yeah, we'll do it at a certain cadence, but we'll do it from time to time.
Chris: Thank you also for the membership support.
Chris: Night62 came in with 12,100 sats.
Chris: First off, I love the deep dive episodes. Please keep them coming.
Chris: All right, it's another vote for a deep dive, boys.
Chris: But I can understand they may not appeal to everyone. Second,
Chris: I just got back from Scale22x, which was awesome, primarily because the really
Chris: great people I met and got to talk with, many of which were from the JB community.
Chris: Shout out to producer Jeff, tech dev, Eric Kenji, Carl George,
Chris: Kyle from Bazite, and Noel from UBlue and Aurora.
Chris: It was also great to meet and hang with the JB crew, Chris, Hadea,
Chris: Brent, Wes, and Alex. Thank you all for making my first scale so great.
Brent: That's so sweet.
Chris: And I'm glad you got a chance to say hi to folks. That's always what,
Chris: you know, it can be a little, I know, nerve-wracking your first time to actually say hi.
Chris: But once you start doing it, it's smooth. And people there are so easy to talk
Chris: to. You'll be surprised.
Chris: That's all what makes the meetup magic. I agree. I agree.
Chris: You're of the two-y you're of the two-y huh love it,
Chris: Okay, so that right there, it's funny he said that, because before you read
Chris: that sentence, I was auto-completing in my head. The benchmark should be,
Chris: is it better than a web app? That should be the benchmark.
Chris: Yeah. I'm going to write that down. We'll talk about it after the show.
Chris: A TUI challenge could be fun. I'd be probably more inclined to do it,
Chris: if folks in the audience.
Chris: That's the challenges we like the most, is when you guys also do some of them
Chris: with us. You could also...
Chris: Yeah, something we can start looking at to see if it's feasible.
Chris: It's a great boost. We're going to write it down and talk about it. Thank you, Bean.
Brent: DistroStrew boosted in what looks like a binary boost here, 10,101.
Brent: Scale was great. I had been struggling with some Nix configs around Thunderbird,
Brent: and I figured chatting with the Nix geniuses would set me right.
Brent: They were also a little stumped, so I spent an hour with the engineer at the Thunderbird booth.
Brent: Long story short, I learned a lot. filed issues on both projects, and a pull request.
Brent: I could not make the JB meetup, but it was certainly nice to see you all.
Chris: That sounds like a great trip experience. Little hands-on, little FaceTime,
Chris: and working across projects.
Chris: I heard a few other folks that did that too. I had one problem,
Chris: I went to this booth, and I went and talked to people at the other booth.
Chris: Might not have solved your problem that day, but got the channels opened.
Chris: Yeah. Thank you for the boost. Routed Mood comes in with 18,000 two sets.
Chris: Just wanted to say, I enjoyed the technical deep dive at episode 605,
Chris: Live Long and Prosper. Well, thank you, sir. It's good to hear from you,
Chris: and you're doing a great job.
Brent: Can I just say, I think you guys are all trolling me with this deep dive stuff.
Brent: I mean, you just came out with that clip, Chris, and you know how much I hate the deep dive thing.
Chris: You think it's me? You think it's me?
Brent: I think you're all colluding. You're all colluding to just get me to...
Brent: Yep. Still hate it.
Chris: That is awesome. Thank you. That's the idea, and we really appreciate it,
Chris: especially this week. Thank you.
Chris: Thank you very much, WH. Nice to hear from you.
Brent: We also have a boost here from Magnolia Mayhem, another Spaceballs boost.
Brent: No message on this one, just a bunch of plaid.
Chris: Well, that's great. Thank you for the value. Thank you, everybody who boosted.
Chris: We got a bunch below the 2,000-sat cutoff for on-air.
Chris: Oh, we got one? We want to pull one up? Yeah. All right.
Chris: All right, you got it, buddy.
Brent: I hate you all.
Chris: Thank you, everybody who supported episode 606. We had 48 of you stream those
Chris: sats as you listened, and collectively, you did a nice lift there.
Chris: You stacked 102,434 sats. When you combine that with everybody who boosted live
Chris: or boosted last week's episode, we stacked a pretty handsome collective 564,906 sats.
Chris: We really appreciate it. Production costs were extremely high for this episode,
Chris: but we really gained a lot of great insights.
Chris: It's going to help inform coverage for years to come.
Chris: Thank you, everybody who supports the show directly with a boost.
Chris: It's a peer-to-peer network all using open-source technology.
Chris: Your message goes directly to us, and we collate it and put it into our show notes.
Chris: You can get SaaS from River, from Strike, from Bitcoin Well,
Chris: and then boost them into the show. We really appreciate it. It's a great way
Chris: to support each individual production.
Chris: Or you can set your support on Autopilot by becoming a member,
Chris: one of our core contributors.
Chris: And we have a link for that at linuxunplugged.com. And big shout-out to our
Chris: members. you've got a hulk of a member special show for you in the bootleg this week.
Chris: We hope you enjoy it. It's a big boy.
Chris: Now, our picks this week were inspired
Chris: by our stay at the Airbnb because I thought I was being real clever.
Chris: And this is the first time I've ever done this. I packed an Apple TV.
Chris: We have a spare one here. Well, it's not spare. It's one that's hooked up here
Chris: at the studio that's used lightly. When people are over or whatever it might
Chris: be, we fire up the old Apple TV.
Chris: And it's handy because it's signed into my stuff, like my Jellyfin server and
Chris: my friend's Plex servers. And it's also on my tail net. So it gets access to everything.
Chris: So I thought, hey, I'll be a smart guy. and I'll just bring the old Apple TV
Chris: because I know we're going to be watching Star Trek or whatever and it'll make it real easy.
Chris: We'll plug it in the HDMI of the Airbnb and we're good.
Chris: Well, I did just that, but of course, the genius that I am, I forgot the remote.
Chris: And we show up at the Airbnb, I'm like, oh, no big deal, we'll use a Wi-Fi app.
Chris: Well, it has to be on the Wi-Fi. So then we had to make a quick,
Chris: quick move and Brent suggested that I set up my phone to turn on the hotspot
Chris: and name it my home Wi-Fi.
Chris: The Apple TV joined that, and then we were able to control it and get on the
Chris: Airbnb Wi-Fi. But then we had the actual problem of how the hell do you control
Chris: an Apple TV when you don't have their little Apple TV remote and you don't have an iPhone?
Chris: And you found a Python library for Apple TV and AirPlay devices that lets you
Chris: control things that are iOS TV 15 and tvOS 15 and later.
Chris: It also supports apparently audio streaming via AirPlay to receivers like the
Chris: HomePod and the Airport Express.
Chris: Of course. And so you pulled that down, and you were using that sometimes to
Chris: control the Apple TV. Yeah, we all know.
Chris: Ultimately, there's a couple of.
Chris: Yeah. You remember whatever? Yeah. So, Pi ATV.
Chris: Wow. Yeah, in like the system tray area. Okay, okay. I don't,
Chris: Yeah.
Chris: It might work. Yeah. It may work. Yeah. If anybody has any other great ways
Chris: to control an Apple TV from Linux or Android that aren't loaded with ads or scans, I'd love to know.
Chris: Because that was like navigating a minefield in the Play Store.
Chris: Yes. Right. Thank you, Wes. Thank you. We try to remember to mention that.
Chris: We'll have a link to both of those in the show notes. Of course,
Chris: that's at linuxunplugged.com slash 606.
Chris: Also, just again, a big thank you to Phlox for getting us out to Planet Nix
Chris: and scale. We had a great time.
Chris: So many stories to continue to share and good connections we made too.
Chris: And I'm looking forward to next year already. And don't forget,
Chris: you can boost in to support Brent's Bang Bus efforts if you'd like,
Chris: but also your feedback on event coverage like this, because these are also tricky
Chris: episodes, sort of like the deep dives. They don't apply to everybody.
Chris: So we try to frame the coverage in a way that even if you're not a Daily Nix
Chris: user, you might still find informative.
Chris: And I'd love to know if we hit that note. So you can send us a boost with that
Chris: or go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact.
Chris: And I also invite you to join us live. Make it a Linux Tuesday on a Sunday.
Chris: Join us at noon. Nope. We now do it at 10 a.m. Pacific, which is noon Eastern.
Chris: Except for when we change it. But then we like to lock it in.
Chris: And if you just have a podcasting 2.0 app, you don't have to worry.
Chris: We try to mark it pending about 24 hours or so beforehand.
Chris: And we go live. Boom. Boom. It's just live right there in the app.
Chris: Yeah we do have time zones at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash
Chris: calendar also we have our mumble and matrix
Chris: info there we'd love to have you join us in those places as well but that's
Chris: really all you need to know other than the links which i already told you about
Chris: at uh unplugged.com slash 606 you know with the linux in front of it i think
Chris: that's it for us hope you enjoyed the episode thank you so much for joining
Chris: us on this week's episode we'll see you next tuesday as in sunday.