00:00SPEAKERWell now we can never repeat that.
00:01SPEAKERNo, I know it's never gonna be as good.
00:02SPEAKERWe just did a perfect intro and now it's completely wasted because I hadn't pressed record yet.
00:06SPEAKERWhat a dumbass.
00:07SPEAKERI was so excited about my NUT server.
00:09SPEAKERLook, we'll talk about your NUT server at the end of the episode where it belongs.
00:12SPEAKERIt's gonna make you wait.
00:13SPEAKERYeah.
00:14SPEAKERYou gotta build up the tension.
00:16SPEAKERNUT server is all about tension and release, I can tell you that.
00:20SPEAKERSo, look, the dick jokes happen on the stream, Brad, at thegiantbomb.com.
00:28SPEAKERThis is nothing but testicle jokes from here on out.
00:30SPEAKERThat's what we do here.
00:58SPEAKERWelcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod, I'm Will.
01:02SPEAKERI'm Brad.
01:03SPEAKERThis is the number one podcast where people talk about a single topic each week.
01:06SPEAKERWhat's our topic?
01:07SPEAKERWill.
01:07SPEAKERNAS.
01:08SPEAKERNetwork Attached Storage.
01:10SPEAKERThat sounds nasty.
01:12SPEAKERNeed another soda.
01:16SPEAKERNo one...
01:17SPEAKERYou'll need plenty of sodas as you bang away on your NAS trying to get stuff to work.
01:21SPEAKERLook, caffeine is...
01:22SPEAKERNever always SSH.
01:25SPEAKERYes.
01:26SPEAKERNothing seems simple.
01:29SPEAKERI think we're getting a little field of the topic here.
01:31SPEAKERBut yeah, so you and I have both...
01:34SPEAKERA few years ago, you sent me one of those messages that started a really,
01:37SPEAKERreally long thread that went for probably a year.
01:40SPEAKERWe were like, "Hey, you run a free NAS server, right?"
01:42SPEAKERQuestion mark.
01:43SPEAKERIt's like, "Oh, do I?"
01:46SPEAKERI did a video, I think a video, maybe an article about this that tested years ago.
01:50SPEAKERBut yeah, I've been running a free NAS server for like probably six or seven years now.
01:53SPEAKERIt's probably...
01:54SPEAKERWow.
01:54SPEAKERYeah.
01:54SPEAKERGeez, you've been in there for a good long while.
01:56SPEAKERI've been in through some major changes.
01:58SPEAKERYeah, I guess so.
02:00SPEAKERI'm coming up on two years here.
02:01SPEAKERBut I feel like at some point, NAS was a term that I heard about 10 years ago or something,
02:07SPEAKERand I assumed it was just something in the enterprise world that I would never care about.
02:11SPEAKERBut then I feel like it's a topic that has started breaching the mainstream and the consumer level
02:17SPEAKERa lot more than I would have expected in the last year or two.
02:19SPEAKERSo there's two ways to look at it.
02:22SPEAKERServers have existed for years, like small business.
02:25SPEAKEROne of my first jobs was building servers for small businesses, so they'd have a
02:29SPEAKERshared place to dump files in the world before Dropbox or Google Drive or whatever.
02:34SPEAKERBut now we're in a little bit of a different space.
02:38SPEAKERAnd it turns out that a lot of us have big media collections.
02:42SPEAKERIf you have a kid, you probably shoot 15 or 20,000 photos a year with your phone.
02:47SPEAKERThose have to be stored someplace.
02:49SPEAKERAnd as we move more mobile, it's been nice to move some of that big storage
02:53SPEAKERoff of laptop hard drives that are usually too small and into a shared...
02:58SPEAKERAll a network attached storage base is a hard drive that's connected to the network in your house.
03:03SPEAKERIt's just the storage volume on your network instead of hooked up to a PC.
03:06SPEAKERAnd they can range anywhere from a fully fledged PC server to a Windows machine that just has a
03:13SPEAKERbunch of hard drives in it, to a dedicated NAS box from a company like Synology, all the way down to
03:21SPEAKERWestern Digital sells hard drives that you can hook up to Wi-Fi.
03:24SPEAKERYeah, I forgot until we were about to start this, you reminded me that, yeah,
03:28SPEAKERyou literally can buy what is essentially just a hard drive that can connect to...
03:32SPEAKERThat is technically a NAS.
03:33SPEAKERYeah, it just looks like an external USB hard drive.
03:36SPEAKERAnd usually they even have USB ports.
03:38SPEAKERIf you want to copy the stuff over the first time fast, you can.
03:41SPEAKERThen they hook up to Wi-Fi.
03:42SPEAKERRight.
03:44SPEAKERSo there's a lot of...
03:47SPEAKERI feel like that's the definition, right?
03:49SPEAKERIt's literally just a bucket on your network that you can source up.
03:52SPEAKERSometimes they're connected to the internet, sometimes they're not.
03:54SPEAKERThat's a choice you can make.
03:56SPEAKERI'm sorry.
03:57SPEAKERI guess it really is just driven by the amount of media that the average person isn't.
04:00SPEAKEROr not media, but data.
04:03SPEAKERIt's just piling up, right?
04:05SPEAKERIt goes even beyond photos and personal stuff.
04:09SPEAKERWe back up our iPhones and put those on because an iPhone backup can get pretty big these days.
04:13SPEAKERWe put those on the NAS because that's a large amount.
04:16SPEAKERBut really, you do?
04:18SPEAKERThere's a little bit of a hoarding aspect there.
04:20SPEAKEROh, see, I...
04:20SPEAKERI'm just trying to play it safe.
04:21SPEAKERI paid the 50 cents a month or whatever for iCloud to back up.
04:25SPEAKERYeah.
04:26SPEAKERIt's the only thing I use iCloud for, is iOS backups.
04:27SPEAKERWell, I've got weird situations where I've got an old iPhone backup that's got text messages
04:33SPEAKERwith, let's say, someone who's no longer with us.
04:35SPEAKEROh, yeah, yeah.
04:36SPEAKERI don't want to lose that necessarily.
04:38SPEAKERYeah, you can pull those out.
04:39SPEAKERYeah, there are tools to export SMS or iMessage conversations and stuff like that.
04:45SPEAKERBut yeah, so that stuff exists.
04:47SPEAKERThat stuff is all out there.
04:51SPEAKERHaving a dedicated place to back up all of your local computers, really, really nice.
04:56SPEAKERHaving a place to store your photos, having just a machine that's always on that can run
05:00SPEAKERstuff that makes your photos always accessible, or that lets you do weird home automation
05:08SPEAKERhacks, like make things that aren't compatible with Siri or Apple HomePod.
05:14SPEAKERHomeKit.
05:15SPEAKERHomeKit, thank you.
05:16SPEAKERHome something, home whatever, Apple's home business.
05:19SPEAKERWork with Apple's home business.
05:22SPEAKERAnd there's benefits to all that.
05:23SPEAKERAnd there's different levels of capability at the different levels of complexity on the
05:30SPEAKERserver.
05:30SPEAKERPlex is probably the actual most common use case, I would say.
05:35SPEAKERI call mine "SmithFlicks" because it's like Netflix, but for Smiths.
05:38SPEAKERYou do.
05:39SPEAKERIt's true.
05:40SPEAKERYeah, and so Plex is a piece of software that lets you share movies and TV shows that you've
05:45SPEAKERpresumably ripped, but I guess also potentially stolen within your home, or also with people
05:53SPEAKERoutside your house, if you have fast enough internet.
05:57SPEAKERAnd it is fantastic.
06:01SPEAKERIn the days before Netflix and Disney+ and Hulu let you copy things onto a device to
06:06SPEAKERwatch when you're offline, like for example, if you're taking a small child on an airplane
06:09SPEAKERride, Plex was incredible.
06:12SPEAKERLike five, seven years ago, six years ago when my daughter was new and we would go on
06:17SPEAKERan air...
06:18SPEAKERFive years ago when she was two and we were going on an airplane ride and I could just
06:21SPEAKERcopy Totoro and Little Mermaid and whatever else she wanted to Winnie the Pooh onto an
06:26SPEAKERiPad and give that to her.
06:27SPEAKERSo she just zoned out in front of a TV for three hours on the airplane.
06:30SPEAKERSure.
06:30SPEAKERTerrific.
06:31SPEAKERYeah.
06:31SPEAKERAnd this is just anecdotal that having read through dozens, if not hundreds of conversations
06:36SPEAKERon the internet over the last few years about NASA's Plex is far and away the most cited
06:42SPEAKERexample of things that people want to do with their NASA.
06:46SPEAKERPlex and local backup are the two things that I did before anything else.
06:49SPEAKERYes.
06:50SPEAKERI guess we should kind of start at the bottom in terms of like what devices are available.
06:53SPEAKERYeah.
06:54SPEAKERLike my path to wanting a NAS was that I only ever had...
06:58SPEAKERI've never had more than two terabytes of storage in my Windows machine.
07:01SPEAKERI had like a single two terabyte hard drive.
07:04SPEAKERIt started...
07:06SPEAKERLike I just didn't need that much really.
07:08SPEAKERYou didn't get a six terabyte drive for like 75 cents.
07:11SPEAKERI mean, I bought that like eight years ago or something.
07:12SPEAKERSo I had one two terabyte drive that started throwing smart errors.
07:15SPEAKERWell, that's just...
07:16SPEAKERThrow it in the trash.
07:17SPEAKERYeah.
07:17SPEAKERI mean, it's still going.
07:19SPEAKERIt never actually died.
07:20SPEAKERIt still works, technically.
07:23SPEAKERLike I only had one two terabyte hard drive and like a small SSD that I can install a
07:26SPEAKERfew games on, right?
07:27SPEAKERYeah.
07:28SPEAKERAnd so at a certain point I saw that drive was starting to error out.
07:31SPEAKERAnd I was like, well, I guess it's time to buy another hard drive.
07:33SPEAKERLike what's big now?
07:34SPEAKERYou know, what can I get?
07:35SPEAKERA four terabyte?
07:35SPEAKERA six?
07:36SPEAKERWhat's going on?
07:36SPEAKERYou just went back for another two.
07:38SPEAKERNo, I didn't.
07:38SPEAKEROh, okay.
07:39SPEAKERThat's when I stopped.
07:41SPEAKEROkay.
07:41SPEAKERThat's when I stopped and took stock of like, okay, do I really want to go buy another hard
07:45SPEAKERdrive and throw it in this PC and then toss out this two terabyte one when it dies?
07:49SPEAKERNo.
07:49SPEAKEROr should I like step up and like make something that's kind of a cool central repository for
07:54SPEAKEReverything and throw it on the network?
07:55SPEAKERAnd that's when I started looking into getting the NAS.
07:57SPEAKERBut I actually spent the first few months pretty convinced.
08:00SPEAKERI was going to get a Synology because they're by far, I mean, I've never bought one.
08:04SPEAKERI've never actually used one, but from what I can tell, like by far the most like turn
08:08SPEAKERkey off the shelf solution.
08:10SPEAKERI mean, and that's the benefit is you get, it's a, I think they're usually like atom
08:14SPEAKERIntel atom processors or something.
08:15SPEAKERAnd that's what ultimately stopped me, but we'll get to that.
08:17SPEAKERSo they're a little lower power, but they're relatively inexpensive.
08:20SPEAKERAnd it's basically like a box with a little CPU and a little bit of memory that you can
08:24SPEAKERjam a whole boatload of hard drives into.
08:26SPEAKERIt looks like a little hard drive cave.
08:28SPEAKERLike if you, if you look at a picture of one, it's just a, it's like a black box with a
08:31SPEAKERbig gaping front where a bunch of hard drives can plug in.
08:34SPEAKERYeah.
08:35SPEAKERSo it's one of those things that so when I started, when I started on this path, the
08:39SPEAKERchoices were basically I wanted, I wanted a Plex server because I have a bunch of Blu-rays
08:43SPEAKERand DVDs and stuff like that.
08:45SPEAKERAnd I mean, this is slightly legally ambiguous territory, but like a place to dump ROMs.
08:51SPEAKERYeah, because solutions for running old games are getting pretty cool these days.
08:56SPEAKERYou know, you can like a Mr.
08:58SPEAKERIs Mr.
08:59SPEAKERIs the, is the prototypical example, but even raspberry pies will do a lot of cool stuff.
09:03SPEAKERYou know, we got to do a Mr.
09:04SPEAKEREpisode as well.
09:05SPEAKERI need to buy one.
09:05SPEAKERI need the same to actually start fiddling with one, but point being, there are a lot
09:09SPEAKERof cool.
09:10SPEAKERAnd then particularly a lot of embedded solutions for stuff like that now.
09:14SPEAKERYeah.
09:14SPEAKERAnd I wanted something where like, okay, I can just keep one collection of everything,
09:18SPEAKERone collection of like my movies, my music, like ROMs, whatever.
09:21SPEAKERAnd then any device I get down the line, like if I build a Mr.
09:24SPEAKERIf I, I want to get a raspberry PI four at some point, just having that one SMB share
09:28SPEAKERon the network.
09:28SPEAKERAnd I can always just point whatever device I'm tinkering with at that same share at any
09:32SPEAKERtime and not have to worry about like, Oh, I'm going to copy 500 gig of files over to
09:35SPEAKERthis SD card or whatever it is.
09:37SPEAKERYou know what I mean?
09:37SPEAKERWell, that's it.
09:38SPEAKERThat seems exactly right.
09:39SPEAKERAnd, and having that stuff all in one place makes it easier to back up.
09:43SPEAKERYeah.
09:44SPEAKERI like also makes it a little more challenging to back up.
09:46SPEAKERWe need to remember to talk about backups at the end here.
09:50SPEAKEROkay. So the NAS is a place to dump a bunch of files and then maybe run some stuff on
09:55SPEAKERtop that gives you access to them in interesting ways.
09:57SPEAKERAnd so we're like running stuff on top is where I kind of, that's where the record
10:00SPEAKERscratch happened when I was looking at the Synology stuff.
10:03SPEAKERWell, so in the two years, since you built your NAS that's that world has changed.
10:08SPEAKERThey have been getting better.
10:09SPEAKERYeah.
10:09SPEAKERThe low end processes have gotten more capable.
10:10SPEAKERThe software has gotten better at using the hardware extensions built into the CPU to
10:17SPEAKERdo like video training, like, like two years ago and NAS wouldn't have been able to do
10:20SPEAKERvideo transcode and now probably can.
10:23SPEAKERI think when I was first looking at them a couple of years ago, they were just barely
10:25SPEAKERhad that capability.
10:26SPEAKERBut like you said, they were all I think they were mostly Intel atom based.
10:30SPEAKERI think there were some of the low end ones were even arm based.
10:32SPEAKERYeah.
10:33SPEAKERLike not a lot of horsepower there.
10:34SPEAKERYeah.
10:34SPEAKERIt's you don't, you don't have the muscle.
10:36SPEAKERSo, so I went the other way when I did mine and just turned my old gaming PC into a NAS
10:41SPEAKERbox, which is the least efficient way in terms of power of electricity use.
10:47SPEAKERBut it's super easy.
10:48SPEAKERAnd, you know, there's some trade offs to that, but no.
10:52SPEAKERAnd I went with FreeNAS because it was kind of what was available.
10:54SPEAKERIt was either that or run a Linux machine and do everything yourself and do everything
10:58SPEAKERmyself.
10:59SPEAKERAnd not the benefit at the time of FreeNAS was that it supported a file system called
11:03SPEAKERZFS.
11:05SPEAKERAnd what ZFS does is lets you basically put a whole bunch of drives in a pool.
11:10SPEAKERAnd as long as they're more or less the same size, you can do redundancy and stuff like
11:14SPEAKERthat.
11:15SPEAKERIt does a lot of stuff.
11:15SPEAKERI mean, it's from the enterprise world.
11:17SPEAKERIt was conceived for servers, like what, a couple of decades ago or something.
11:20SPEAKERIt's been around for a long time.
11:21SPEAKERLike pretty much anybody who knows their shit about storage will tell you that ZFS is the
11:25SPEAKERbest file system on the planet.
11:27SPEAKERIt's a, it's a modern file system in a way that NTFS and EXTFS kind of are not anymore.
11:33SPEAKERRight.
11:33SPEAKERLike it supports, it supports RAID at the file system level or at the command line level.
11:37SPEAKERIt's got checksumming built into it for, you know, error correction and detection.
11:42SPEAKERIt's got a lot of redundancy features.
11:44SPEAKERIt's got native snapshotting so you can have multiple versions of a drive that...
11:48SPEAKERExactly.
11:48SPEAKEROr like shadow volumes is what Windows calls that, but it works way better.
11:52SPEAKERRight.
11:52SPEAKERAll that stuff is built in at the base level.
11:55SPEAKERWell, and more importantly, when it fails, you can replace a drive and it'll resilver
11:59SPEAKERout, resliver out, sorry, the, like the data that was spread that was on that drive back
12:06SPEAKERfrom the other drives over a period of hours.
12:08SPEAKERSo it's designed to be seamless.
12:10SPEAKERIt's a kind of overkill for home use.
12:12SPEAKERKind of.
12:12SPEAKERYeah.
12:13SPEAKERBut if you're talking about ripping a collection of like a thousand Blu-rays and DVDs, it was
12:18SPEAKERat the time when like four terabyte hard drives were huge and $500, it was the only way to
12:24SPEAKERkeep that many movies on one volume.
12:27SPEAKERAnd the thing about the server is it turns out you don't really need to keep that many
12:34SPEAKERvideos on one volume just because of the way the Plex server works.
12:40SPEAKERI think Plex can combine multiple physical storage locations into one library seamlessly,
12:47SPEAKERbut it wasn't the case back then.
12:49SPEAKERSo, and one of the things we got a lot of, the reason we're doing this episode is when
12:53SPEAKERwe did the questions episode a couple of weeks ago, we got like six or a significant percentage
12:59SPEAKERof the overall questions we received were about.
13:01SPEAKERYes.
13:02SPEAKERWe got just enough NAS questions that I was like, oh, we should save these and just do
13:05SPEAKERa NAS episode probably.
13:07SPEAKERSo I think the most basic question was basically, hey, I want a NAS, should I get something
13:11SPEAKERlike a Synology or a QNAP, one of those embedded boxes, or should I build a machine and put
13:16SPEAKERlike a NAS oriented OS on it?
13:19SPEAKERAnd honestly, where we are now, it's nice to have my own collections.
13:23SPEAKERI like that a lot, but the ability to save stuff on an iPad or phone from Netflix and
13:30SPEAKERHulu and Amazon and Disney Plus and all of those over the top services.
13:36SPEAKERIt's like 90% of why I started with the Plex server.
13:39SPEAKERLike I've had a lot of fun doing a lot of different stuff with mine that I hadn't expected
13:43SPEAKERto do in the first place.
13:44SPEAKERBut it's been interesting to see a lot of people actually go the complete opposite direction
13:48SPEAKERwith the stuff and just completely issue any collection at all.
13:51SPEAKERTry to like banish local storage from their lives entirely and just go cloud everything.
13:55SPEAKERAnd I think that's totally doable.
13:56SPEAKERYeah, that is absolutely even like two years later after I built all this stuff is like
14:01SPEAKERkind of a valid option.
14:02SPEAKEREven if you want compute, you can spin up AWS.
14:05SPEAKERYou can run Plex on AWS.
14:06SPEAKERYeah, you can run on EC2.
14:08SPEAKERYou can run cloud compute nodes to do some of the stuff you would like to do in your
14:12SPEAKERhouse.
14:13SPEAKERSo it's expensive.
14:14SPEAKERIt's not.
14:15SPEAKERYes.
14:16SPEAKERYou're looking at like minimum probably of 20 bucks a month for AWS if you have a small
14:19SPEAKERcollection.
14:20SPEAKERRight.
14:21SPEAKERBut yeah, it is totally doable.
14:25SPEAKERSo yeah, I think you have to think about what your use cases are.
14:29SPEAKERIf you just want to back up a bunch of machines locally and you're talking about laptops
14:34SPEAKERthat have 256 gig SSDs in them, you should be able to you want to think about the amount
14:39SPEAKERof data space you need for backups as enough to keep three days, three weeks and one month
14:47SPEAKERor maybe three months up to three months of storage.
14:51SPEAKERSo what that means is you keep if it's January, that means you'll have a monthly backup from
14:57SPEAKERyou'll have daily backups for the last three to five days.
15:00SPEAKERRight.
15:00SPEAKERSo it's Saturday, you'll have like a checkup on Friday, Thursday, Wednesday, Tuesday, Monday
15:06SPEAKERthat are all diffs, just the differential backup, just the stuff that's changed on the
15:12SPEAKERhard drive from the Sunday backup.
15:14SPEAKERRight.
15:14SPEAKERAnd then you'll keep three Sundays, right?
15:16SPEAKERSo you'll keep the Sunday, the current Sunday, Sunday a week ago, Sunday a week before that.
15:21SPEAKERAnd then you'll keep the first Sunday of the month for the three preceding months as well.
15:25SPEAKERLike it's basically the Mac OS time machine model, right?
15:28SPEAKERExactly.
15:28SPEAKERIt's just like you've got by date sort of previous iterations of your storage volume.
15:33SPEAKERWell, but time machine goes constantly.
15:34SPEAKERIt's continuous.
15:35SPEAKERIt never stops.
15:36SPEAKERBut I mean, when you browse it, they break it out by date.
15:38SPEAKERYeah.
15:40SPEAKERBut the upshot is, and the reason this is a good time to talk about this, I talk about
15:44SPEAKERthis a lot, I feel like, but the difference between redundancy and backup, redundancy
15:47SPEAKERis when we talk about RAID, which is a redundant array of inexpensive disks.
15:52SPEAKERAnd what that means is if one drive fails, the machine doesn't go down.
15:55SPEAKERYeah.
15:55SPEAKERRight.
15:56SPEAKEROr you don't lose any data.
15:57SPEAKERYou don't lose any data.
15:58SPEAKERThere's a bunch of different ways to do that.
16:00SPEAKERRAID and redundant disks like ZFS don't save you from things like viral attacks, like virus
16:08SPEAKERattacks, malware that locks you out of your computer, things like that.
16:11SPEAKERBackups can actually do that.
16:12SPEAKERYeah.
16:13SPEAKERSo you like having a RAID array in a NAS box does not replace backing up that NAS box.
16:19SPEAKERRight.
16:20SPEAKERWhich is for the love of God, back up your hard drives, back up your business, because
16:27SPEAKERfor example, if you realize today that you've deleted something two weeks ago that you really,
16:31SPEAKERreally need, then you can actually go back into the backup, find the file you need and
16:36SPEAKERit's there.
16:36SPEAKERYeah.
16:37SPEAKERThe RAID, ZFS might have it.
16:39SPEAKERYeah.
16:40SPEAKERMost systems won't.
16:42SPEAKERA hardware RAID won't.
16:44SPEAKERAnd back your stuff up.
16:47SPEAKERThat's the TLDR.
16:49SPEAKEROne of the neat things about using a NAS box is often you can pay, rather than paying for
16:53SPEAKERa cloud backup provider for all of the computers in your house, you can just back up the storage
16:59SPEAKERvolume on the NAS box and you don't have to pay anybody else, which is nice.
17:03SPEAKERYes.
17:04SPEAKERSo yeah, I think if you're trying to decide like, "Hey, I want storage on my network.
17:09SPEAKERShould I go whole hog or should I just get one of these integrated solutions?"
17:13SPEAKERBasically ask yourself, "Do I just want storage on the network?
17:16SPEAKERLike, do I just want a place to put files?"
17:18SPEAKERStore photos and music and yeah.
17:20SPEAKERAnd if the answer is yes, something like a Synology is totally adequate.
17:24SPEAKERYeah.
17:24SPEAKEROr if you're just doing backups and you have a bunch of laptops, like an eight terabyte
17:28SPEAKERUSB hard drive that connects to the network and let it rip.
17:31SPEAKERI mean, there are even routers that you can plug USB hard drives into that essentially
17:35SPEAKERcan perform the same functions.
17:36SPEAKERI mean, they're going to be real light, but it gives you a place to store back.
17:39SPEAKERSo the benefit of going with a more powerful machine, and Synology fits into this category,
17:44SPEAKERis that you'll actually be able to saturate your network connection with even a low power
17:48SPEAKERdedicated NAS versus an external hard drive that has network connection.
17:52SPEAKERSure.
17:53SPEAKERAnd definitely compared to any WiFi device.
17:56SPEAKERYeah.
17:56SPEAKERSo the thing that stopped me when I was looking at the Synologies, and I feel like the sweet
18:00SPEAKERspot is probably like a four bay.
18:02SPEAKERProbably, yeah.
18:03SPEAKERThat's something you could plug four hard drives into and that gives you some redundancy.
18:06SPEAKERBecause you want at least...
18:07SPEAKERBasically, when we're talking about redundancy, what you're going to be looking at in practical
18:10SPEAKERterms is losing at least one disk's worth of storage.
18:13SPEAKERSo if you plug in four drives and you have one drive's worth of redundancy, that means
18:18SPEAKERyou can lose one of those drives and not lose any data.
18:21SPEAKERBut that also means that the total amount of usable storage is number of drives minus
18:25SPEAKERone.
18:25SPEAKERSo for example, if you have four terabyte drives and you plug in four four terabyte
18:29SPEAKERdrives and you set them up to be redundant, then you'll have 12 terabytes of storage versus
18:35SPEAKER16 terabytes of storage.
18:36SPEAKEROr if you like, there are a lot of people that will tell you that you should have no
18:40SPEAKERless than two drives worth of redundancy, which means that you would only have eight
18:44SPEAKERterabytes of usable space out of 16 total.
18:48SPEAKERSo that means you can lose two drives and still not lose anything.
18:51SPEAKERBut this is...
18:52SPEAKERAnd with FreeNAS, the software that runs on the Synology boxes and the software that we're
18:56SPEAKERboth running, we'll talk about different software in a sec, you can choose how much redundancy
19:00SPEAKERyou want when you set up the drive array.
19:02SPEAKERIt's just a question of how much storage you're willing to lose in the process.
19:07SPEAKERI'm about to say something controversial.
19:08SPEAKEROh, no.
19:10SPEAKERIf you have a good backup scheme, I think having a good backup scheme, then that means
19:15SPEAKERhaving something that you run and that you test and you can restore, that you know works.
19:19SPEAKERYou mean like a secondary backup?
19:20SPEAKERI mean, just a backup.
19:21SPEAKERI mean, a backup for the server.
19:22SPEAKERA backup of the NAS.
19:23SPEAKERYeah, backup of the NAS.
19:24SPEAKERA backup of your backup.
19:26SPEAKERI mean, yeah.
19:28SPEAKERTrust me, I get it.
19:29SPEAKERBackup, you know, dog, backup your backup.
19:31SPEAKERIf you like backups, you can backup while you're backing up.
19:34SPEAKERIf you have a good backup scheme, that's more important than having redundancy.
19:38SPEAKERI agree with that, sure.
19:39SPEAKERI think redundancy for home use.
19:41SPEAKERLike if you're in an office environment, and the weird thing about FreeNAS specifically
19:45SPEAKERis people use it for small work group servers all the time.
19:48SPEAKERSmall business.
19:49SPEAKERPeople use it for big work group servers, like 50 and 100 person work groups.
19:52SPEAKERAnd then people also use it to play pirated movies on their flex machine in their house.
19:56SPEAKERRight.
19:58SPEAKERSo it's a real wide range of use cases.
20:01SPEAKERIt's a broad spectrum NAS solution.
20:02SPEAKERYeah, and if you're the dude that's pirating a shitload of movies, probably don't bother
20:06SPEAKERbacking that up because they're just going to pirate them again when the hard drives bomb out.
20:10SPEAKERRight.
20:11SPEAKERBut again, if you've got like, like I said, if you've got stuff that's like personally
20:14SPEAKERimportant to you on there and hard to replace or irreplaceable.
20:17SPEAKERYeah.
20:17SPEAKERRedundancy is nice.
20:18SPEAKERMake sure, yeah, you shouldn't not have it, but it's not the end all be all of data retention.
20:24SPEAKERAnd then it can still fail.
20:26SPEAKERThe nice thing about the redundancy is usually you get a smart error.
20:30SPEAKERSmart is a thing that tells you when your hard drive is behaving out of the normal.
20:35SPEAKERA smart error, which tells you you should go to Amazon and buy a new hard drive right then.
20:39SPEAKERSmart errors mean that a dry failure may be imminent.
20:41SPEAKERExactly.
20:42SPEAKERSo other things to think about before you step down this path is that this isn't a cheap project.
20:50SPEAKEREven if you're using like an old gaming PC, which I think both of us did for the motherboard CPU
20:55SPEAKERand memory, the drives you should plan to replace the drives, especially if you're running them 24/7
20:59SPEAKERevery three to five years at most, you'll probably run out of space depending on what you're using
21:06SPEAKERthe drive for before that time. But you want to have a motherboard with a lot of SATA ports
21:12SPEAKERbecause you're not going to be using like M2 SSDs or anything like that right now.
21:17SPEAKERAnd you want a budget for replacing and probably upgrading the drives at least every,
21:23SPEAKERlike I said, three-ish.
21:24SPEAKERI start getting nervous when the drives are three years old.
21:27SPEAKEROkay.
21:28SPEAKERYeah.
21:28SPEAKERI waited for a sale and bought a fifth drive of the type that I already had.
21:33SPEAKERAnd it's in the closet just in case.
21:35SPEAKERWell, so then the nice thing about this is you can, if you know that you're going to
21:40SPEAKERmove your four terabyte array to a four, eight terabyte array drive, you can kind of keep an
21:47SPEAKEReye on sales and you can ride that sweet spot where you're paying a hundred bucks per drive,
21:53SPEAKERbut you just have to be aware of it.
21:55SPEAKERYeah.
21:56SPEAKERSo ultimately when I was going to, I was pretty close to pulling the trigger on a
21:59SPEAKERSynology until, like I said, I started looking at like what the CPU was in there and how much
22:03SPEAKERthey cost and like you're kind of paying a lot for what you're getting horsepower wise.
22:06SPEAKERWell, what you're paying for with the Synology is drive cage and hot swap ability and stuff like
22:10SPEAKERthat. And also the fact that you don't have to futz with the OS at all.
22:14SPEAKERRight. It's like an ease of use. It's a turnkey integrated thing. But I started looking at like,
22:19SPEAKERoh man, these enclosures are getting three, $400. And then like you said, I started looking at like
22:25SPEAKERwhat PC hardware I had in the closet doing nothing and thinking like, I could spend about the same,
22:30SPEAKERmaybe a little bit, 150, $200 more and build like a whole PC with what I've already got here.
22:35SPEAKERAnd then you don't have to transcode videos.
22:37SPEAKERYeah. And then you've got a, like a modern real proper ass, like quad cores,
22:41SPEAKERIntel CPU in there and a lot of memory and a lot of headroom to do other stuff,
22:46SPEAKERwhich is what I ended up doing.
22:47SPEAKEROkay. So, so I've gotten to the point I've decided, I think this is a good idea. This
22:51SPEAKERis something I need to do. What are the choices I have to make?
22:54SPEAKERIn terms of like what, what hardware do I use? What software do I use? Let's start with software,
23:00SPEAKERbut like there's a bunch of software options that weren't there when I started doing this.
23:03SPEAKERThat's where things have gotten weird because like, like you've been in,
23:06SPEAKERyou've been deep in freelance for a long time. Like, like Vinnie from China bomb is another,
23:11SPEAKERhe's another friend of ours who was deep into that world. So like I was able to kind of draft
23:15SPEAKERoff you guys and like kind of, you know, pick people's brains and stuff like that.
23:19SPEAKERBut the point I'm making is like, it seems like when you guys got into it,
23:21SPEAKERthat was kind of the only real well-supported option. And now there's a lot of stuff out there.
23:25SPEAKERSo at the time, like if you were really reasonably comfortable doing Linux stuff,
23:29SPEAKERyou could build something that was comparable, but it probably wouldn't support ZFS. And ZFS
23:34SPEAKERwas a big part of the draw. Cause one of the, one of the other benefits of ZFS is you can,
23:37SPEAKERyou can clone drives across pretty much any pipeline. So like if you have,
23:43SPEAKERif you have eight drives in the machine, you can make an exact copy of one array really easily.
23:48SPEAKERBut also if you have enough Slack space on your system or have four extra drives in your system,
23:53SPEAKERwe can connect using cryptography and the internet. And like, I can back up my stuff to you and you
23:58SPEAKERcan back up your stuff to me. Literally use like a pipe at the command line and pipe the entire
24:03SPEAKERcontents of your storage volume through SSH over to your house. If you wanted to, or like some
24:09SPEAKERcrazy shit, I could bring my server over here and we can make a copy of my server on your server.
24:14SPEAKERAnd it would take three days to copy over, but like it's wild. Like when you really start digging
24:17SPEAKERinto how flexible, and again, this is stuff like to be clear, you really need to be, you need to
24:22SPEAKERbe not only comfortable with the idea of spending an entire Saturday tinkering with this stuff,
24:26SPEAKERbut you need to feel like that might be a good time. If that's not you, then this is not something
24:31SPEAKERyou really want to get into. It requires a tremendous amount of, of toil. But only,
24:37SPEAKERbut in like sporadic chunks. Yeah, totally. To do like, to do like really esoteric stuff like that.
24:42SPEAKERI mean, yeah. So, so I went with FreeNAS. There's other options out there. I think if I were doing
24:48SPEAKERthis today, I would probably just do a Ubuntu server. Really? So that's the thing that I'm
24:52SPEAKERseeing a lot more people getting into these days because like Linux is just such a more active,
24:59SPEAKERactively developed community platform. And CFS support has gotten really good on Linux.
25:04SPEAKERCFS support is good on Linux. At the time when FreeNAS was relatively new or when I got into
25:10SPEAKERFreeNAS, it wasn't relatively new. They had a plugin architecture so that like you didn't have
25:15SPEAKERto fool with, with I can't remember what the apt-get equivalent is on FreeBSDM. You didn't
25:23SPEAKERhave to find a good package maintainer who's maintaining packages of Plex and whatever other
25:29SPEAKERsoftware you wanted to install. You just matched a button in the web UI and it worked. We should
25:32SPEAKERstep back a little bit and say basically like all the things you might want to do on a NAS that has
25:37SPEAKERthe headroom to do stuff besides storage. Ideally for the end user would exist in like a plugin kind
25:43SPEAKERof format. Or as a package maintainer. Or as something that is like as self-contained and
25:48SPEAKEReasy to install and implement as possible. Yeah. The challenge of installing stuff on
25:52SPEAKERBSD and Linux is that there's usually a boatload of dependencies. So like in order for Plex to work,
25:58SPEAKERit has to have H.264 codecs and has to have transcode software and it has all this other
26:02SPEAKERstuff. And all those libraries need to be installed in some fashion. Like nothing works,
26:07SPEAKERnothing just works. Well, so at worst case you want to use like the built-in package manager to
26:10SPEAKERdo that. Which works kind of like the App Store in a lot of ways. You just see all the other stuff
26:17SPEAKERthat gets installed, whereas the App Store just does it for you. Or even better in some... I don't
26:24SPEAKERactually use any Free NAS plugins anymore. I do everything at the command line in jails because
26:29SPEAKERthe plugins were too limited. Yeah. So that's the thing. I was going to say, that's a benefit for
26:36SPEAKERSynology users who don't have the extra horsepower to run stuff in containers. I'll explain what
26:43SPEAKERcontainer. So container is like a virtual machine that runs inside the OS and lets you run a whole
26:49SPEAKERother minimal version of free BSD inside like a virtual machine that's somehow very lightweight.
26:58SPEAKERI don't know how that stuff works. I think it uses like virtualization, hypervisor stuff. I'm
27:02SPEAKERnot super clear on that stuff. But the thing I was going to say is it seems like the biggest knock
27:07SPEAKERagainst using Free NAS right now is that it's moving away from this containerized model at
27:11SPEAKERexactly the time that the entire rest of the world is going like head first in that direction.
27:15SPEAKERI think, I mean, well, the jails... So Free NAS and Free BSD have a concept called jails,
27:21SPEAKERwhich basically lets you isolate processes that may be like security risks or whatever.
27:26SPEAKERIt's a little sandbox version of the OS.
27:28SPEAKERYeah, exactly.
27:29SPEAKERAnd that's where I run everything. But like you said, it means you have to get in there.
27:32SPEAKERAs things stand right now, you have to get in there at the command line. And if you're lucky,
27:36SPEAKERjust download like a pre-compiled binary package of something. If you're unlucky,
27:41SPEAKERyou're going to end up on the GitHub repo of the thing you want to run and literally talking to the
27:45SPEAKERguy who develops it. In the one case where I had to do that, he was extremely friendly and I helped
27:50SPEAKERhim squash a couple of bugs because that was fun.
27:52SPEAKERThat was for your NUT server?
27:53SPEAKERThat was not for my NUT server.
27:54SPEAKEROkay.
27:55SPEAKERThis is for the little music server that I run. On one level, it's super gratifying because I
28:00SPEAKERactually went through the install script for the Free BSD compilation process and had to tweak some
28:05SPEAKERstuff to make it work. And once I got it working, it was awesome. On the other hand, you really want
28:09SPEAKERto spend your time doing stuff like that.
28:11SPEAKERI was much more into spending my time doing stuff like that when I didn't have a seven-year-old
28:15SPEAKERthat I could be playing with and hanging out with instead. So yeah, this is definitely a place where
28:22SPEAKERthe software is free, but your time is not. So be aware of that.
28:30SPEAKERAt this point, I'm probably on Freeness until the next time I upgrade hard drives,
28:34SPEAKERjust because it's enough of a pain in the ass to migrate for 12 terabytes of data or whatever
28:40SPEAKERI have on my array right now, that I'm not going to do it. I'm not confident enough in my web
28:48SPEAKERbackup, my internet-based backup, that I would just say, "Fuck it, I'm going to format these
28:52SPEAKERdrives and reinstall from scratch Ubuntu." There's other options now too, which a lot of people are
28:58SPEAKERrunning hypervisors. We talked about this a little bit before the show, but a hypervisor is just a
29:03SPEAKERvirtual machine manager that lives just above the BIOS level of your computer. And then you can run
29:08SPEAKERlike Ubuntu and Freeness and whatever other nonsense you want to run all in the same machine.
29:15SPEAKERIt does a lot of the stuff that jails do in Free BSD, Freeness, off the shelf.
29:21SPEAKERSo unlike the extreme other end of the spectrum from the jails in Free BSD,
29:26SPEAKERyou hear the term "Docker" a lot. That's the containerized stuff that I was talking about
29:30SPEAKERbefore. The model that people are moving to now is stuff like Docker. You just download a container
29:34SPEAKERthat has everything set up inside of it already for you. That is a true plugin, really.
29:39SPEAKERIt's what's a virtual machine. Docker is kind of like how EC2... It's similar to old school
29:45SPEAKERvirtual machines, but you can do individual applications in them, is the key.
29:49SPEAKERYeah. The upshot is that a lot of the work is done for you. You don't have to compile anything. You
29:54SPEAKERgenerally don't have to configure much. It's kind of ready to go out of the box.
29:57SPEAKERIf somebody is maintaining a Docker container for something that you want,
30:02SPEAKERand they didn't make weird choices, which sometimes happens because it's all open source,
30:06SPEAKERthen Docker containers are a really good way to do a lot of that stuff. Ubuntu supports Docker
30:09SPEAKERcontainers much better than Freeness does now. They're actually deprecating Docker support
30:13SPEAKERentirely in Free NAS. But BHive is the same concept.
30:16SPEAKERSimilar stuff. Yeah. But the support is just not great there. The Linux world,
30:20SPEAKERthat stuff is a lot better supported. I almost feel like there is a real opportunity for a
30:26SPEAKERLinux-based competitor to Free NAS to come in and maybe do that stuff better.
30:30SPEAKERI'm surprised that there isn't some front end for home server.
30:33SPEAKERThere are. There's stuff like Unraid, which is a paid closed source Linux-based.
30:38SPEAKERNo, thanks.
30:39SPEAKERBut they use different file systems. I don't think the robust storage support is there.
30:44SPEAKERThere's Open Media Vault, which is another Debian-based NAS kind of front end.
30:50SPEAKERI don't think there's anything on the level of Free NAS out there right now in terms of feature set.
30:53SPEAKERThat might not be a bad thing given the scope of Free NAS is problematic sometimes. It's so big.
31:00SPEAKERI guess so. I mean, it does a lot for you. It's a web-based front end.
31:03SPEAKERYou administrate it through a web browser.
31:05SPEAKERThat's true.
31:06SPEAKERAnd it's relatively simple to set up your storage volumes,
31:09SPEAKERand it'll automate periodic file system checks to make sure everything's cool.
31:13SPEAKERBut you also have to do a lot of reading before you set up that machine the first time.
31:17SPEAKERYes, yes.
31:17SPEAKERBecause you can make some choices that will really haunt you.
31:20SPEAKERYes.
31:20SPEAKERAs I did until the first time I upgraded my hard drives in the Free NAS box.
31:24SPEAKERSure. Yeah.
31:25SPEAKERAnd then the other option is just to keep running Windows on the Windows machine.
31:29SPEAKERYeah, totally.
31:29SPEAKERBecause you can run the Plex server on top of that.
31:31SPEAKERI actually, I meant to, when we were talking about like Synologies and the kind of
31:34SPEAKEReasier entry level stuff at the top of this, I meant to mention that like, I don't know,
31:38SPEAKER80% of the stuff you can do with some elaborate open source setup, like a Free NAS box,
31:43SPEAKERyou can just do with a Windows machine with drives plugged into it.
31:46SPEAKERPretty like you can run a hyper, you can run VirtualBox and run your,
31:50SPEAKERyour, or put a Docker container. I think you can put Docker containers on Windows.
31:53SPEAKERI'm not sure about that.
31:54SPEAKERI think so.
31:54SPEAKERI mean, just in terms of like, you know, storage spaces and Windows will let you do basic RAID.
31:58SPEAKERI don't think it's as robust as, it's definitely not as robust as what you're going to get with CFS,
32:02SPEAKERbut like, you can RAID drives and Windows, you can run a Plex server on Windows.
32:06SPEAKERYou can do a lot of that basic stuff.
32:07SPEAKERExactly.
32:09SPEAKERLike you're probably not going to use CUPS to provide an AirPrint server.
32:12SPEAKERAirPrint support for your 10-year-old laser printer.
32:15SPEAKERWait, does CUPS support?
32:16SPEAKERIt took a lot of work. I had to find a Python script and some homebrew driver somebody wrote.
32:22SPEAKEROh man, I already have a web interface for mine.
32:23SPEAKERSo I can show it to you later.
32:26SPEAKERThat's going to be fun.
32:27SPEAKERLike I'm running all kinds of cool shit on, on my Free NAS machine,
32:29SPEAKERbut it took so much work to get a lot of it up and running that like, I,
32:32SPEAKERI can't recommend it unless it really sounds like it would be fun to you.
32:36SPEAKERIt's like tinkering with an old car, not something you do.
32:39SPEAKERYes.
32:40SPEAKERYeah. Okay. So the other thing to think about is how much is power consumption.
32:44SPEAKERIf you have an old desktop PC that's running a NAS for you versus taking a small embedded processor
32:50SPEAKERand a Synology or something like that, you're going to use a lot more electricity.
32:53SPEAKERLike a Synology is going to be very low cost in terms of your electric bill.
32:57SPEAKERIn, in I mean, the hard drives still have to spin, but, but which is a lot of the energy.
33:02SPEAKERRight. But you don't have like a, you don't have a gaming oriented CPU sitting there.
33:05SPEAKERYeah. Well, and also at least in the old days,
33:08SPEAKERa lot of the older BSD kernels were really bad about power management because they were designed
33:11SPEAKERfor servers. They actually still are. Yeah. So really, I don't know in the weeds you want to get
33:15SPEAKERon this stuff. So the CPU is basically running a hundred percent all the time. Like I'm running,
33:19SPEAKERum, basically what I ended up doing was like, you could run a Free NAS machine on like a, um,
33:24SPEAKEReasily like a Core i3 or even like, don't they still sell Pentiums, right?
33:29SPEAKERPentium is a, yeah, it's a straight down. It's like a, it's a sub i3.
33:32SPEAKERYeah. It's between Atom and Core. Like you could, from what I've read,
33:36SPEAKERyou could run a Free NAS machine on a Pentium just fine. But I had a mother,
33:39SPEAKERI had an old motherboard, but not an old CPU. Okay.
33:41SPEAKERAnd I was going to have to buy a CPU to put in that board. And when I started
33:44SPEAKERlooking at the price difference between an i3 and an i7, it was like 50 bucks.
33:48SPEAKERYeah. And you bought the i7? No. Well, so yeah, what I did was like,
33:51SPEAKERwait, I could buy a better CPU for my gaming machine and put this old CPU from the gaming
33:55SPEAKERmachine in the NAS. Oh, perfect.
33:57SPEAKERSo that's how everybody wins. So that's how I ended up with 6,700 K in my NAS.
34:01SPEAKEROh, okay. The reason I brought this up is that what you said about the power consumption is
34:05SPEAKERdefinitely true because I found after I got that thing up and running that even right now,
34:09SPEAKERFree NAS out of the box will not put that CPU into a low power state when it's idle.
34:13SPEAKERNo. So I looked at the power consumption
34:15SPEAKERand it was sitting there running at four gigahertz, 24/7 for no reason.
34:18SPEAKERDid you figure out how to fix that? Yeah.
34:19SPEAKEROh, I need to talk to you about that. Yes. I can show you.
34:22SPEAKERI did it on the last machine that I built and then the new one,
34:25SPEAKERI haven't figured out how to do it again. You can set the C-state of the CPU. C-states
34:29SPEAKERare our power levels, basically like frequency and voltage.
34:33SPEAKEROn a boot up or something. Yeah.
34:35SPEAKERYou set it as a tunable in the Free NAS interface.
34:37SPEAKEROh, interesting. You need to set it to C3, I think.
34:40SPEAKERI mean, I looked at my power consumption for my Free NAS server and it's like 20 bucks a month.
34:43SPEAKERYeah. I think it added somewhere around $10 a month for me.
34:48SPEAKERBecause of the way the tiers work where we are, it pushed us into the next higher tiers,
34:52SPEAKERwe started paying penalty. It kind of sucks.
34:54SPEAKERYeah. But at the same time, like I said,
34:56SPEAKERI've got that print server running on there. I'm running Homebridge, which I know we've talked
34:59SPEAKERabout before, which gives you Apple Home support on home automation devices that don't natively
35:04SPEAKERhave it. Stuff like that. I'm running a bunch of little services in the background that do
35:09SPEAKERlittle stuff around the house. It's very useful.
35:11SPEAKERSo it is useful to leave that thing on all the time, even if it does kind of cost.
35:15SPEAKERYeah. 240 bucks a year versus buying a new $100 printer.
35:21SPEAKERBut you didn't send a printer to landfill, Brad. That's the important thing.
35:23SPEAKERI made use of something I had. Exactly.
35:25SPEAKERReduce, reuse, recycle. Which is always the goal.
35:28SPEAKEROkay. So we can talk about what we run a little bit. You've done it. I'm running an X99 board
35:32SPEAKERwith whatever my last, I think a 6850K, which is a hexa core, old hexa core.
35:37SPEAKERI'm actually using an ASIS gaming. I had a motherboard in the closet that I've never
35:42SPEAKERused that I got as part of a bundle, but I didn't necessarily want that board,
35:45SPEAKERbut that's what I ended up with. So I had bought a different board.
35:48SPEAKERSo the one thing that's really nice that I wish that the board that I'm using now
35:52SPEAKERhad that it doesn't is the serial port over network support. So you can basically get the
35:58SPEAKERserial console, which gives you console into it without having to go into the other room.
36:05SPEAKERBecause like right now it's up on a shelf in my garage. And in order for me to get it down,
36:10SPEAKERwhen I need to fix something that breaks, which happens like realistically, maybe once a year,
36:15SPEAKERI have to turn it off. That sucks.
36:16SPEAKERI have to unplug it. I have to carry it down into the living room. I have to plug it into
36:19SPEAKERa monitor and keyboard, put a video card in. Wait, you can't just SSH into it?
36:23SPEAKERDepends on how broken it is. Oh, that's very broken.
36:25SPEAKERYeah. If it's broken enough that it's not booting into free, it's stuck at the boot menu.
36:27SPEAKERI see. I see.
36:28SPEAKERThen I have to unplug it and plug it into a monitor and keyboard. But I mean,
36:33SPEAKERall the other side of that is that the motherboards that support that console over
36:39SPEAKERnetwork standard are like server motherboards. So you're gonna have to buy a separate motherboard,
36:43SPEAKERwhich may or may not be something you want. IPEMI, I think is the name for that.
36:46SPEAKERIPEI. Then he has one of those.
36:48SPEAKEROh, really? His board has that. Of course he does. Jealous.
36:51SPEAKERStorage. Let's see. One of the questions we got was about which drives to buy.
36:57SPEAKERThe manufacturers are making drives that are labeled NAS drives now.
37:00SPEAKERWestern Digital codes theirs by color. It's like...
37:02SPEAKERReds, I think.
37:03SPEAKERYeah. So I think greens are the cheap or the budget drives. Blacks are sort of like your
37:07SPEAKERgaming performance drive. Nobody should buy black drives anymore. No,
37:10SPEAKER'cause you have an SSD for that stuff. Oh, sure. Yes. Yes. And reds are the
37:15SPEAKERquote unquote NAS drives. Yeah. So the difference is that they're rated for different MBTFs
37:20SPEAKERbecause the NAS drives are assumed to be always on.
37:22SPEAKERIs that mean time between failure? Mean time between failure. And the way I buy drives
37:28SPEAKERisn't by looking at what type they buy. Backblaze, which is one of the online backup companies,
37:33SPEAKERdoes a few times a year, a really good roundup of here are the drives that we've bought over
37:38SPEAKERthe last year and they're buying tens of thousands of drives a month. Here's what's failed at what
37:43SPEAKERrates. Yeah. They've got really detailed statistics on their failure rates. That's how I ended up
37:47SPEAKERbuying my drives too. And I go and look at specific model numbers there and buy the drives
37:52SPEAKERthat they're... There's always stuff on the edge that looks good, that they've only bought 500
37:57SPEAKERdrives. You wanna get into the fat part where it's like, we bought 10,000 of these and a 10th
38:02SPEAKERof a percent have failed after three years. Something that they have healthy five figures of
38:06SPEAKERin their network. One thing that's worth pointing out. So when I was looking at drives, I almost
38:11SPEAKERbought some 7,200 RPM drives. Yeah. Don't. Which is, yeah, totally not worth it 'cause not only do
38:16SPEAKERthey put out more heat and use more energy and I'm guessing maybe don't last as long. I could
38:20SPEAKERbe wrong on that. More heat, more energy usually means that they don't last as long. I can't say
38:24SPEAKERfor sure that they fail faster than a 5,400 RPM. But it's not necessary. But yeah, the big thing
38:28SPEAKERis... The big thing to know is that your storage is gonna be constrained by your network speed.
38:31SPEAKERYeah. Like you're not... I mean, some stuff you do on the machine itself is gonna obviously gonna
38:35SPEAKERbe accessing the drives. Maybe it's... This network tops out at like a little over 100...
38:42SPEAKER950 megabits per second. Yeah. So it's a little over a hundred megabytes a second.
38:46SPEAKERYeah. I don't think spinning potters will get over a hundred megabytes a second probably.
38:52SPEAKERMaybe. Maybe. Maybe it's equivalent. I don't know. I can't remember. It's been a long time.
38:56SPEAKERYeah. But the point is you're gonna put a cache... I would recommend putting a cache.
39:02SPEAKERSo there's three types of storage that are gonna be in your free NAS box. You're gonna
39:05SPEAKERhave something that you boot off of that the OS is installed onto. And in the old days,
39:10SPEAKERthey recommended you use a USB thumb drive for that.
39:12SPEAKERThey still do, but that can be spotty because those USB thumb drives are such shitty products
39:18SPEAKERthat they fail a lot. Yeah. So you can buy a 128 gigabyte SSD for 20 bucks now. That's what you're
39:25SPEAKERgonna install your OS to because it's reliable and good. Yeah. That's a good thing to put your...
39:29SPEAKERYou're gonna have a cache drive potentially. So that...
39:34SPEAKERThis is optional. Maybe less true than it used to be.
39:36SPEAKEROh, really? But yeah. Oh, well, I just put an old 128.
39:39SPEAKERListen to this old man. It's been a while since you've been in the game.
39:42SPEAKEROh, but I can buy a day. I have to have a cache drive.
39:46SPEAKERMy understanding is that that's relevant to some workloads, especially in workplace type.
39:50SPEAKERHeavy reads and writes. Yeah. I think it's only really relevant to heavy sequential reads.
39:56SPEAKEROh, good to know. Oh, okay. Well, I'll investigate further.
39:59SPEAKERThe free NAS people... And this is for free NAS only. I can't speak to other stuff,
40:02SPEAKERbut they have a lot of recommendations out there now. They straight up have a blog post
40:06SPEAKERthat you can Google pretty easily. Oh, that's like a media server?
40:09SPEAKERWell, no. Specifically, it's like, "Hey, what hardware should I buy?"
40:11SPEAKERYeah. And it's just like, "Okay,
40:13SPEAKERhere's how much memory you actually realistically need for how much storage you want. Should you put
40:16SPEAKERin a cache drive like you mentioned? Maybe, maybe, probably not, depending on what you're doing with
40:20SPEAKERit." They have good guidelines out there now for if you really want to build a machine like this.
40:25SPEAKERYeah. They didn't have that when I did it last time.
40:27SPEAKERThat, I think, a blog post is three years old or something.
40:29SPEAKEROkay. So maybe you made it out of cache drive, but definitely installing on the SSD. I was
40:34SPEAKERlosing USB thumb drives at a rate of one a year for a while there.
40:38SPEAKERI had to die in the last six months. Even buying expensive... I was buying nice brand name...
40:44SPEAKERTotally. Yeah. I'm buying the nicest... It's funny. I started to say I was buying the most
40:48SPEAKERexpensive Samsung flash drives I could get. And by that, I mean they're $12 a piece because that's
40:53SPEAKERliterally for a 32 gig flash drive, that's the most you can spend on one. And I was like, "Surely,
40:58SPEAKERthese will last because it's the nicest." But yeah, and I had one fail or start failing,
41:04SPEAKERlike throwing errors and put off. I was like, "Ah, the other one's fine. I can let it go."
41:08SPEAKERI put it off for like three months and then the other one started failing and then the whole
41:11SPEAKERmachine went down. Yeah. No, it's not great.
41:13SPEAKERRecovering it was terrifying. So yeah, I like backblaze. I've had really good luck
41:19SPEAKERusing the backblaze method to figure out what drives to buy.
41:21SPEAKERYeah. But do you feel like NAS drives are generally worth it?
41:27SPEAKERI think... They tend to have better warranties.
41:29SPEAKERSo they have better warranties. They're usually three-year warranties rather than
41:32SPEAKERone-year warranties. So you might get a failure in that three years?
41:35SPEAKERI have had warranty replaced NAS drives. The other thing is, at least the time I had the
41:40SPEAKERdrive fail, the NAS drive fail, they did a cross-ship for me, which was nice.
41:45SPEAKERSo they shipped me the new drive. I had to give them a credit card, obviously,
41:48SPEAKERbut they shipped me the new drive and that never happened when I had a consumer drive fail.
41:53SPEAKERThey are supposedly made to be a little more resilient and more...
41:57SPEAKERSlightly better lube on the bearings.
41:59SPEAKERMaybe. Yes, I don't know.
42:00SPEAKERBut they're made to run 24/7 for longer periods of time.
42:04SPEAKERI'm always terrified turning off a drive. My guess is that probably they do use a
42:09SPEAKERdifferent lubrication on the bearings because they're designed to be on all the time.
42:12SPEAKERYeah.
42:13SPEAKERBecause the scary thing, when I was starting out in IT, my boss told me, "Oh yeah, on this server,
42:18SPEAKERif you turn it off for more than an hour or two, you got to whack the hard drive with a hammer
42:22SPEAKERwhen it spins back up," which basically just jars the lubricant in the bearings enough that
42:28SPEAKERthey were able to get over the rotational friction from the... Yeah. Anyway, it was scary.
42:34SPEAKERI don't like that.
42:35SPEAKERI'm always scared turning it off. I just like to leave it on all the time.
42:37SPEAKERYeah. That's probably safe.
42:38SPEAKERI mean, another issue you run into in this category is should you pay for the ones that
42:44SPEAKERare actually labeled NAS or should you do like a lot of people do now and shuck drives out of
42:49SPEAKERthe Western Digital enclosures because supposedly those are the same thing.
42:52SPEAKERI'm always scared to shuck drives.
42:53SPEAKERYeah. Same here.
42:54SPEAKERAnd also sometimes they have non-standard interfaces on the shuck drives.
42:57SPEAKERYeah. Occasionally, you'll have to put a piece of tape over one of the pins or something to
43:01SPEAKERget it to spin up.
43:02SPEAKERWhen you say shuck a drive, you mean take an external enclosure that they sell at Best Buy
43:06SPEAKERfor cheap.
43:06SPEAKERYes. Yes.
43:07SPEAKERYeah.
43:08SPEAKERFor a long period of time, at least the internet scuttlebutt was... I don't know how well this was
43:12SPEAKERever actually confirmed, but supposedly the white label drives in those enclosures, and by white
43:17SPEAKERlabel, I mean unmarked OEM labeled drives, were supposedly reds.
43:22SPEAKERThat would make sense.
43:23SPEAKERSo you were getting the nice high-end NAS drive for two-thirds of the price or something like
43:27SPEAKERthat? That's never really been confirmed? Yeah. I'm like you. I'm not brave enough.
43:32SPEAKERI would rather pay the premium.
43:33SPEAKERIt's cheaper to pay the extra 10 bucks because the thing is it's not that much of a premium.
43:37SPEAKERYeah. Again, I'm putting old family home movies and stuff on this thing. Data that is personally
43:43SPEAKERimportant to me, I'm willing to pay a little bit extra.
43:46SPEAKERSo a blue one-terabyte drive is 45 bucks right now. A red... Well, they don't make red.
43:53SPEAKERI don't know if they even make one-terabyte reds anymore.
43:54SPEAKERNo, they don't make red one-terabytes. So a 12-terabyte... Jesus, I got to get new drives.
43:58SPEAKERA 12-terabyte red drive is 363 bucks on Amazon right now.
44:03SPEAKERMine are six. I think they were like 180 bucks each.
44:05SPEAKERI think my guess is eight is probably the sweet spot right now.
44:08SPEAKERYeah.
44:08SPEAKERSo red...
44:09SPEAKERThey go on sale a lot. The 10-gig reds were like 130 bucks for a little while there.
44:15SPEAKERSo red eight is getting... So the other thing is sometimes things get expensive because demand for
44:19SPEAKERa specific size goes up because somebody who's a data designer buys 4,000 of the same drive from
44:25SPEAKERAmazon. So 10-terabyte reds are not available right now. That's weird.
44:30SPEAKERLike I said, they were on sale a while back.
44:32SPEAKEROh yeah, they were on a hell of a sale if they were 150 bucks because they're 250 used on Amazon.
44:35SPEAKERMaybe it was 180 or something like that, but they were on a deep sale.
44:38SPEAKERAnyway, the point is you don't want to buy the biggest drive, even though that's going to be
44:43SPEAKERyour initial... You want to buy middle of the back because that's where your price per...
44:47SPEAKERLook at price per terabyte or price per gigabyte, not overall price for your drives.
44:51SPEAKERYeah.
44:52SPEAKERLet's see what an eight-terabyte blue drive costs just for comparison.
44:56SPEAKERAnd blues are 7,200 RPM, I think, usually. Maybe not.
44:59SPEAKERSo six-terabyte single drive blue is 137 bucks. So it is a pretty good premium there.
45:04SPEAKERAnyway, we talked about add-ons, the other stuff you can run.
45:09SPEAKERThat matters much more if you're buying an embedded NAS, something like a Synology
45:14SPEAKERor something like that. I think Synology, you can get to a command line, you can run more and more
45:18SPEAKERof what you want on it. But if you're buying something that doesn't run in an x86 CPU,
45:22SPEAKERespecially, you're going to be limited in what you can run based on what their package is for.
45:27SPEAKERSo look at that stuff in advance. That's it. I like Plex. I used to run Subsonic until
45:38SPEAKERSpotify added Beatles and Led Zeppelin a few years ago.
45:42SPEAKERYou don't need that.
45:42SPEAKERAnd then I was like, "I'm probably fine now."
45:44SPEAKERLike I said, I'm running that little home music server to stream my...
45:48SPEAKERThat's what Subsonic does, basically.
45:50SPEAKERI'm running my... I mean, we could sit here all day and talk about the stuff. I'm running
45:53SPEAKERthe controller for my Wi-Fi access point.
45:55SPEAKERI think you're running much better stuff than I am.
45:57SPEAKEROn the NAS.
45:57SPEAKERWhat's the controller for your Wi-Fi access point?
45:59SPEAKERIt's the UniFi controller. It's Ubiquiti stuff.
46:01SPEAKEROh, okay.
46:02SPEAKERThe interface, the management interface for the Wi-Fi access point does not run on the access point.
46:06SPEAKEROf course not. You have to run it on an external machine.
46:09SPEAKERThis is why people shouldn't... Anyway, okay. Different conversation.
46:11SPEAKERYou could run it in Windows if you wanted to.
46:13SPEAKERYou're running your power, your NUT server.
46:16SPEAKERNever even talked about my NUT server.
46:18SPEAKERI know.
46:18SPEAKERYou've been wanting to talk about your NUT server for ages.
46:20SPEAKERI bought a UPS that has been sitting in the box under my desk for the last six weeks.
46:24SPEAKERUninterruptible power supply.
46:26SPEAKERFinally spent the last few days setting it up.
46:28SPEAKEROkay. How does it work?
46:30SPEAKERSo modern UPSs have USB ports on them.
46:32SPEAKERYes.
46:32SPEAKERAnd they can report out a ton of diagnostic info over that port.
46:36SPEAKERThere's an open source package called Network UPS Tools, or NUT.
46:40SPEAKERI'm shaking my head.
46:42SPEAKERThat... It's pretty flexible. It can do a lot of stuff,
46:45SPEAKERbut I ended up installing it on a Raspberry Pi and plugging that into the UPS.
46:49SPEAKEROkay.
46:49SPEAKERAnd then...
46:50SPEAKERWhy not just run it on the FreeNAS server?
46:52SPEAKERI wanted it running on a separate... So we could sit here all day and digress about this stuff.
46:57SPEAKERFreeNAS is an appliance. That's how the developer looks at it.
47:00SPEAKEROkay.
47:01SPEAKERLike they don't want you in there monkeying with stuff more than you really should be.
47:04SPEAKEROr if you do, they want you to stay in jail.
47:06SPEAKERYou should do it all in jails, like running system level services in FreeNAS
47:10SPEAKERthat are outside the scope of FreeNAS is not the best idea.
47:13SPEAKERThis is a really important point because I did this at the beginning and I really messed myself up.
47:16SPEAKERYes. You really... You should not be
47:18SPEAKERinstalling external software directly on the base FreeNAS system at all.
47:21SPEAKERThe reason you don't want to do that is when FreeNAS upgrades,
47:24SPEAKERit will wipe away everything you do that's in the base OS.
47:27SPEAKERAnd you can end up overwriting things they've customized and screw stuff up. It's a bad idea.
47:32SPEAKERYeah. But the jails give you the flexibility...
47:35SPEAKERYes. There's no downside to using jails.
47:37SPEAKERI very well probably could have run in a jail, I guess. Although in this use case,
47:44SPEAKERthe base FreeNAS system is also a nut client.
47:46SPEAKERYou could do that.
47:47SPEAKERProbably could, but I wanted something low power to run the thing that manages the UPS on
47:52SPEAKERin case the power goes out so it doesn't drain the battery fast.
47:55SPEAKERAnd you want to be able to run that after the FreeNAS machine is off.
47:58SPEAKERThat's what that's really... Yes. That's actually what I'm getting at.
48:01SPEAKERSo Raspberry Pi uses like what? A watt and a half or something.
48:03SPEAKERYeah. It's like a phone. So I'm using that as the nut server.
48:06SPEAKERAnd plus what's a fucking... What is a Raspbian installation on in terms of sentimental value?
48:11SPEAKERYou can just hose that thing and start over. It takes like 10 minutes.
48:13SPEAKERIn 10 minutes, if you feel like you screwed something up.
48:17SPEAKERPoint being, I've got that thing monitoring the NAS... I mean the UPS.
48:20SPEAKERSo it keeps track of what the charge level is. Is it on wall power or battery, etcetera, etcetera.
48:26SPEAKERYou can set up conditions on it. So I have it set up so that when it either hits 50% battery
48:32SPEAKERor 15 minutes left of runtime, whichever comes first. Okay.
48:35SPEAKERI'm running the nut client service on the FreeNAS machine and my Windows machine.
48:39SPEAKERSo if those machines are on, the Raspberry Pi will tell them to shut down.
48:42SPEAKERWow. They shut down.
48:43SPEAKERWait, are those machines plugged into the UPS too?
48:46SPEAKERYeah. Okay.
48:47SPEAKERYes. So if I happen to go out, if I happen to leave the house with both those machines on
48:50SPEAKERand the power goes out and the battery gets down to half,
48:52SPEAKERthen the Raspberry Pi tells those machines to shut down.
48:54SPEAKERDoes it turn off your monitors too? They're so small.
48:57SPEAKERThey're not plugged in the electricity. Very funny. They're not plugged into the UPS.
49:00SPEAKEROkay. That's probably best.
49:02SPEAKERAnyway, like whatever. I won't sit here and ramble about it, but like my,
49:05SPEAKERmy router also runs Linux. So I figured I should try to get that gracefully shut down in case of
49:09SPEAKERpower outage. Sure.
49:10SPEAKERSo I spent some time figuring out how to get the, wow, the nut server to also tell the router to
49:15SPEAKERshut down because running nut on the router was not an option.
49:18SPEAKERThis is a deep level of nerdery. I wasn't expecting that today.
49:21SPEAKERI had figured out that I could tell the, I could have the Pi SSH, a shutdown command through the
49:25SPEAKERrouter, but I needed it to work without me being there to type the password in. So I generated a
49:30SPEAKERprivate key pair. Wow.
49:31SPEAKERSo that the nut could tell the router what to do without authenticating.
49:34SPEAKERSo I think the weirdest thing that I run on my Plex, on my server, I run home kit,
49:41SPEAKERwhichever, which if you do any home automation stuff is really handy.
49:44SPEAKERHomebridge. Homebridge.
49:45SPEAKERYeah. Yeah. I've got that.
49:47SPEAKERI used to run my DVD ripping software in a virtual machine.
49:52SPEAKERHuh? It stopped working when they,
49:54SPEAKERwhen they took away PHP, the, the virtual box client for free NAS a few, few versions ago.
50:00SPEAKERBut I rebuilt it in Docker and that worked okay for a while.
50:03SPEAKERNow I just do it on the desktop because my desktop machines way faster.
50:08SPEAKERBut I run a tool that organizes media in my folders.
50:14SPEAKERSo I just dump when I rip something, I dump it in a folder and it looks at the file name,
50:19SPEAKERwhich is usually like blues brothers 19. It's the, it's the movie name and the year
50:24SPEAKERthat it came out and it goes and hits the free DDB databases for movies,
50:30SPEAKERthe movie database and all that stuff at TV stuff.
50:32SPEAKERIf it's a TV show and it, it puts it in because Plex now is recommending
50:37SPEAKERthat you put movies in a folder. Plex has a weirdly insistent that you name
50:41SPEAKERall your files and directories in a certain way.
50:43SPEAKERWell, and, and if you want to do like extra features,
50:46SPEAKERcause I've started ripping extra features on all old DVDs.
50:50SPEAKERYou got to put everything in subfolders. Yeah. That sounds like a huge pain.
50:53SPEAKERSo it does it all automatically for me. It's just some script I found that some dude wrote.
50:57SPEAKERAnd those are always the best, some script or some tiny program that somebody wrote.
51:02SPEAKERYeah, exactly. I mean, that, that is the cool thing about this. Is it like somebody
51:06SPEAKERwill have had a problem and they'll solve it by going and writing this big long bash script
51:11SPEAKERor something. And then they just check it up on GitHub with some documentation.
51:15SPEAKERLike that. I mean, again, not to ramble about this forever,
51:18SPEAKERbut that might be the most gratifying interaction I've had with a human being
51:20SPEAKERon the internet in years was trying to help the author of this little music
51:24SPEAKERserver debug a couple of problems. He didn't call you a noob or anything.
51:26SPEAKEROh, he was super, he went, he went and forked. He, he forked the repo with a custom
51:31SPEAKERdebug level logging change specifically for me. That's awesome. He said, Hey,
51:35SPEAKERclone into this branch and compile that and run it. And then send me the log.
51:40SPEAKERLike, yeah, it's kind of amazing. There's something really fun about
51:43SPEAKERrunning a machine that you can do almost everything from the command line on.
51:46SPEAKERTotally. And the best part is like when he did that, I didn't actually go through the
51:52SPEAKERget process of cloning that repo. I just went and looked at the branch. I went and looked at
51:56SPEAKERthe change he made. And then I went into the source that was hurting on my machine and changed
51:59SPEAKERit myself. I just recompiled it. Like it's so fun messing with that stuff.
52:03SPEAKERSo there's some stuff that I learned along the way. And I think there's stuff you learned
52:06SPEAKERa long way, and they also are doing much better about giving guidelines to people who are like
52:11SPEAKERbuilding home servers now. Cause when I started, it was pretty much like, Oh, you wanted to use
52:15SPEAKERthis for home. You're crazy. The big one is memory requirements. Well, okay. Actually the very biggest
52:23SPEAKERone that I found is that it's really important when you set up a machine to document all the
52:26SPEAKERstuff you install on it so that if it ever fails and you have to rebuild it or you want to like,
52:31SPEAKERwhatever, if something bad happens, it's much better to find out that you forgot to reinstall
52:36SPEAKERhome kit by looking at the list of things you have installed. Like I just have a Google doc
52:40SPEAKERthat is basically, here's all of the stuff that's installed. Here's whether it lives in a jail with
52:44SPEAKERsomething else. Here's whether it lives in a July on its own. And, and here's like, like the, like,
52:50SPEAKERhere's the command line flag that I tripped to set the CPU power state. Cause I like,
52:56SPEAKERlike you don't want to have to remember because you will forget about all this stuff. Like right
52:59SPEAKERnow I'm like super hot on all this UPS stuff. I spent all this time setting up, but six months
53:03SPEAKERfrom now I've forgotten 90% of what I did. Yeah. And like, like I'm going to make an image of the
53:08SPEAKERSD card in that raspberry PI, just in case that thing dies and I need to restore it without doing
53:12SPEAKERall that work. Well, and you want to save, not just like the information, the settings, but you
53:16SPEAKERwant to save the source so you can go back and figure out like, like where, how you, how you
53:22SPEAKERbacked into getting this Debian port of something to run on a free NAS jail. Right. I've got an
53:26SPEAKERentire folder of, of links to web tutorials on stuff like that. Exactly. It's a deep ass rabbit
53:32SPEAKERhole and make sure that this is really something you want to spend your time on. And I've even on
53:36SPEAKERsome of them, especially if it's on message boards, I've copied the actual information and pasted it
53:40SPEAKERin because those links will change. You're worried that stuff will go away at some point. So yeah.
53:46SPEAKERWhen I was starting this out, they told you to do one terabyte of storage of Ram for every,
53:51SPEAKERsorry, one gigabyte of Ram for every terabyte of storage in your ZFS, which I think is not.
53:55SPEAKERThat is the, that's that has been the common perception, but that's not according to that
53:58SPEAKERblog post from the free NAS people. Like I said, it's not necessary anymore. I said, I want,
54:02SPEAKERI think they said up to about a hundred terabytes of storage. You're good with, I want to say 24 gig
54:06SPEAKERof memory or maybe even 16. That's pretty good. Yeah. I've got 16 and it's totally fine. So I
54:13SPEAKERhad some Ram fail last year and went down to, I think eight for awhile. That was definitely
54:18SPEAKERnot bad. I guess that I guess it was constantly paging with a 16 terabyte CFS started as a server
54:25SPEAKERfile system, like portability and like efficiency. I don't think we're probably primary design goals.
54:30SPEAKERNo. ECC Ram. They used to always recommend that you use ECC Ram. ECC Ram has built an error
54:37SPEAKERcorrection and it's a little bit slower and a lot more expensive. Usually requires a special
54:41SPEAKERmotherboard and processor. Oh, right. And tell us about that stuff. Sometimes depends on how
54:47SPEAKERold the processor is. Well, last I checked, this was two years ago, but I threes could use ECC
54:53SPEAKERmemory and I sevens could not, of course, because they want you to buy a Z if you want the horsepower
54:57SPEAKERof an I seven, they want you to pay for a Xeon. So it's, it's forney. But the upshot is the reason
55:03SPEAKERyou need ECC is in case a cosmic Ray hits the Ram while something that's about to be written in ZFS
55:08SPEAKERis in memory. Yeah. You're probably okay. Yeah. I mean, it's the same as every other file system.
55:13SPEAKERYeah. Like it's not, you're not increasing your chances. There's some weird urban legend that
55:17SPEAKERthere, the CFS is prone to data corruption, which is the opposite of true. Yeah. But if you have
55:23SPEAKERmission critical data, then if you're building a server for work for this by ECC, we want ECC.
55:29SPEAKERYeah. If you're doing it to save your movies at home and like it only matters during rights.
55:35SPEAKERAlso, that's the other thing. It's not, it's not going to like, you're not going to lose something
55:39SPEAKERduring a read. And for most of most home uses, rights are infrequent and reads are more frequent.
55:45SPEAKERThis, this, this whole thing about ECC memory turned into like an old school internet flame war
55:49SPEAKERfrom what I saw. I'm sure we're going to get comments to the point that there's like a,
55:53SPEAKERthere's kind of an infamous forum thread where one of the authors of ZFS stepped into this thread and
55:57SPEAKERbasically said, no, no. Yeah. You don't have to worry about this. It's not actually like that.
56:01SPEAKERIt's no more prone to this than any other file system. Yeah. I think that's it. Yeah. I think
56:07SPEAKERthose are the big ones for me. I feel bad. This was a really rambly episode of this thing.
56:12SPEAKERIt's a big topic. There's a lot. And it's, it's, I mean, kind of running one of these
56:17SPEAKERservers is a big rambly topic. Yes, it really is. I can feel my beard growing longer and turning
56:24SPEAKERgrayer as we talk about this. It's one of those things that like, you'll be, you'll have a problem
56:29SPEAKERyou want to solve and you troll down a bunch of message board threads. It's really important when
56:34SPEAKERyou're searching for information on this to look for the version numbers specific, specifically the
56:38SPEAKERversion you're running, like the whole string, it's like 10.7.639-U3. And that'll, that'll help
56:46SPEAKERcut down a lot of the noise. I ran into a problem with my wifi controller last week because they
56:51SPEAKERdon't support the current version of MongoDB. They only support the previous version, but this is why
56:55SPEAKERI want to switch to Ubuntu, but the package had gotten updated to the newer version. So it broke
56:59SPEAKERpart of the controller. So yeah, it's oh, other, other thing I learned the hard way. Don't if you
57:06SPEAKERdon't upgrade without making sure you read the release notes really thoroughly to make sure
57:10SPEAKERyou're not doing something that's going to break the upgrade. If you do upgrade, you can always
57:14SPEAKERroll back to the last version really easily because it's all just stored in ZFS. I have,
57:17SPEAKERI have fully become the guy who doesn't want to update anything that's working at this point. No,
57:22SPEAKERno, no. Yeah. If it's working and it's still supported, still getting security patches,
57:25SPEAKERnever update. Like the thrill of updating firmware and seeing the version number go up. Like you have
57:29SPEAKERto a hundred percent let go of that because it will screw you more often than not for no benefit.
57:34SPEAKERAssume you're going to spend at least an afternoon fixing shit after you do a big upgrade. Like when
57:38SPEAKERyou get stuff working, just lock it in and let it go. Just learn, learn to appreciate uptime rather
57:45SPEAKERthan version numbers increasing. That's the cool number. Yeah. But I think that's, I mean,
57:48SPEAKERthat's a high point. This started out as an ass episode, but I feel like it kind of turned into a
57:53SPEAKERgeneral like Unix running open source software kind of episode, which is really where this whole
57:58SPEAKERkind of thing leads. I think I used to have a friend who ran a magazine call. I still have a
58:02SPEAKERfriend, but he used to run a magazine called maximum Linux when I was at maximum PC. And he
58:07SPEAKERsaid, one of the first things he said that got him in trouble with the unit Linux community was
58:11SPEAKERthat Linux is only free if you value your time at nothing. Sure. And it's very true in this case.
58:18SPEAKERDid you know that Linux is not a Unix? Yeah. Free BSD is a Unix.
58:21SPEAKERFree BSD is a Unix. Mac OS is a Unix. Well, Mac OS is free BSD.
58:25SPEAKERWell, no, but I mean like Unix has a definition that you have to meet.
58:28SPEAKERLinux is POSIX compliant, but not Unix. Yes. You have to meet specific requirements
58:31SPEAKERto be considered a Unix. Yeah. So Mac OS is and Linux is not.
58:34SPEAKERLinus wanted nothing to do with that nonsense. I guess not.
58:37SPEAKERYeah. That's going to do it for us this week. If you liked the podcast, tell your friends.
58:42SPEAKERYeah. Use the social medias.
58:44SPEAKERYeah. Post the good word. Spread it. If you have
58:47SPEAKERquestions about NAS stuff that we didn't get into here.
58:49SPEAKERYeah. This was so scattershot. I'm sure if there's any clarification.
58:53SPEAKERYeah. Fire them off. That you'd be interested in.
58:54SPEAKERIf you'd like to yell at us about ECC Ram, you can send your comments to
58:58SPEAKERnotus@techpod@content.town. Those other guys with that other tech pod.
59:04SPEAKERYeah. Somebody else. I don't know. Send it to the bomb cast or something. I don't want to
59:07SPEAKERhear about it. But we'll be back next week with more Tech Pod. Thanks for listening, everybody.
59:12SPEAKERWe'll see you all next time.
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