Proxmox, Docker & Containers Explained (EP 848)

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals and managed service providers, helping you run your business better, smarter, and faster. Folks, this is part two of my interview with Mike Weiger. I introduced him last episode, a gentleman that I have gotten to watch on another show, and we're talking Synology, NAS alternatives, and other techie geek stuff that I would never talk about, but I found somebody on here.

Mike, welcome back. Appreciate it. Great to be back.

All right. For those who may be listening out of order, you do definitely want to go back and listen to part one of this. We talked about Mike's interest in this home network thing, and it is amazing how many people that aren't techs during the day but are super techie at night.

Now, I do know some that they'll work all day and then go home and game all night or do whatever. I am not one of those. I have nothing set up at home.

I don't have a home lab. I don't have a server. I don't have Synology.

I took the Amazon lady out of our house because it got to be annoying. The most home automation I have right now is a Rain Bird sprinkler system. I love it.

Isn't that the best thing ever, though? I just installed one of those last year, and I really love the automatic sprinklers. It's great until I'm out of town and the wife calls and says, hey, can you turn on the sprinklers or turn off the sprinklers because somebody came up to do work? Right. Yeah.

Because if yours is like mine, there's no dial anymore. It's just you had to do everything through the app. Everything through the app.

Although there is a way, our guy, there is a way to turn it off. Got it. So she was able to figure that out because one day I didn't answer.

Yeah. So it was fun. So Mike, last time we talked about the fact that you're doing all of these different, you know, NAS solutions, you know, Unraid and TrueNAS, you're also doing Proxmox, which is kind of like your virtualized operating system that you still ran TrueNAS on, which was pretty funny.

Inception. Yeah. You started I want to go back and clear up one thing before we continue on.

You kept mentioning Docker. Yeah. I've heard Docker mentioned.

I just assumed Docker was another app, but it sounds like it's much more than that. So some of my listeners may know this, but I know that most don't. It's playing Docker to us.

Yeah. And this is where, you know, you're extremely technical. People are going to call me out probably on this being a little bit too 30,000 foot view, but that's kind of where my knowledge is.

So Docker is a way to deploy containers. So I think sometimes when people say, hey, I'm running the Docker of the what insert any app here. Nextcloud.

Right. I'm installing Nextcloud. I'm installing the Docker.

Really what they mean to say is they're installing the container. Containerization is the technology, right? And Docker is one way to deploy containers. There's Pod man.

There's a lot of different ways you can deploy containers and use containerization in your network. Docker is just one. It's probably the most prevalent and most popular.

But I think a lot of us tend to run Docker. And what's interesting is a lot of times you're running Docker and you don't even realize that's a technology behind the scenes. I kind of hinted at for TrueNAS, for example, when you're running TrueNAS as an operating system and you're getting apps from their app library in the background, it's running a Docker container is what it's doing.

So it's pulling that down. It's pre-filling in a lot of the information that Docker container needs. But the great part, the reason people love Docker is back in the day, if you wanted to spin up an app, you might have spun up a full virtual machine, a full like Ubuntu environment just for that one app, right? And there's a lot of overhead to that.

There's a lot of overhead in running an entire VM just for that one app. So now with containerization, you get the same sort of sandbox environments where everything's contained into one environment, but it's a lot easier on resources. So when you run it through containerization, it's a lot easier to deploy.

There's a lot. I mean, containerization is one of those things that I know just enough to be dangerous, but I'm no expert in it. But it's definitely kind of a technology that's really changed the game, especially for us home lovers who are very resource constrained.

So if we don't have 10 servers at our disposal, we have one. Containerization is a really good way to go to run your apps. It's also what we've seen in development, it's a really good way to deploy your apps.

When Docker and containerization kind of really got popular, some developers like Nextcloud and Plex and all these people might not put out their apps in a containerized format. But now with almost every single app that you would want to run that's open source, you can grab the Docker Compose file and easily run it and pull it down. And it's already pre-packaged that way, either by the company themselves or by some third party that's kind of known to put together these packages.

But all it is, think of it as just, it's a way to run apps and that's the easiest way to describe it. So Synology, I just call those apps because that's what they call them, but are they containers? They're containers. Yep.

They're running containers. And a lot of those things that you're, when you go to add one of those and there's some fields you have to fill in, right? You have to fill in maybe a port that you want to use for a certain thing on that app or you maybe you have to map, hey, when I'm telling this app where to look on my Synology for storage, right? That's a variable technically in the container that you're mapping the container to the host. Because by default containers are, they don't have access to anything, right? They're literally, think of it as a container, everything's in here.

You have to tell it, hey, I'm going to allow you to talk to the host to see the storage. I'm going to allow you to talk to the host to connect over that port on the network. So all those things are variables, but what you're doing is you're just setting up a container.

They're all containers. Now, what I don't know is I probably should know this. I don't know if Synology is deploying Docker or some other version of it, but I do know it's all container-based.

Yeah. So one last question on the idea of Synology versus Unraid versus TrueNAS. I know we talked about the fact that when I went to look at these, and again, this is at least five years ago for Unraid, and I did Unraid one year and TrueNAS the next.

But I think TrueNAS at the time was Active Directory compatible, but it wasn't as easy as I would have liked. Correct. On your stuff that you're doing at your house, are you setting up user accounts for everybody so that if your wife wants to go look at pictures, she's got to sign in? Yeah, and I've tried to actually... So right now, the answer is yes, I am setting up user accounts.

The problem is that it's a separate account for just to log into Unraid. So if she wants to map to her network drive, that's one login. To go to Image, Image is a photo app.

It's like a Google Cloud, Google Photos replacement. If you want it, that's a different login for her. If she wants to log in and watch some movies, that's a different login.

So I have not brought that all in into one. That's another thing that's taken off right now in the Home lab is different platforms, not Active Directory, because that's a little overkill for the Home lab, but things that are like that, that are smaller weight. So running an authenticator type of app so that you could have one sign in across all of your different apps that you're running in the Home lab.

All right. So let me do a sideways question. If you are this geeky individual, what led you to become an attorney in the first place? That's a fantastic question.

It's one of those where I think for me, I think this is true. Okay, so you mentioned, for example, you don't have any servers at home. You don't do any of that.

I think most people, they don't do what they do for work at home. And I think my concern was I love helping people so much with the technology side. And I never charged anyone for that.

I worried that if I started to do that as my main career, I would not enjoy it as much. And I really enjoy messing with technology. So for me, it was, I've always liked a difference between my activities in my life that generate income for me and my family, and my activities in life that truly bring me a ton of joy.

Now, I still love my job. I love work. But I don't love it as much as I love tinkering with technology, right? That's a totally different thing for me.

So when I was in business school, actually, I made the choice to go to law school kind of late in business school. I was going to go the accounting route and really found that that wasn't my bread and butter. But I took one business law class, and I just fell in love right away.

And it was business law in business school. So it wasn't even part of law school. Immediately went out and took the LSAT and decided I was going to law school right after.

And it's been a fantastic career. And I love it. And I get to kind of blend my business side with my law.

But then that truly frees me up to my technology is, it's not work-related. It triggers no stress in my life. It is truly just a pure joy of something I get to go home and enjoy when I'm not working.

Okay. Now, how much has it overtaken off work hours? Way more than my wife would like. Her favorite thing is, you know, my kids are like, hey, dad, the internet's not working.

Or, hey, dad, you know, I can't watch my show. And it's, okay, Mike's tinkering again. Mike's over there.

And if I had my laptop up and they know I was probably tinkering with something and broke it. I'm also do, and I think this is really important, especially for a younger individual these days, because I'm seeing it in my own kids. I have two kids and one on the way, but my boys are getting to a stage.

I think what I love about IT is when you're learning, and the benefit of having a home lab is it's not a production environment. There is no critical infrastructure. If that thing blew up tomorrow, it wouldn't be the end of the world.

No businesses going out of business because of it. Breaking things and learning how to fix them, I think is a really important trait for humans in general. It's something I'm trying to teach my boys.

And I think a lot of, especially my age group and younger, and this may be getting too philosophical for this show, but they're sometimes afraid to fail. They don't want to get to the point where it breaks or where it fails. And I am such a believer in you learn from your failures way more than you learn from your successes.

So that is I think what I've been obsessed with when it comes to IT is when I was learning PFSense and networking, how many times I fricking took the whole internet down and had no idea how to fix it. Like zero idea what I just did. But then I learned about network masks and I never knew about that, right? But now I do because I learned of what I put at the end, that slash 32, slash 24.

I had no idea what that meant. So I just plugged in a random number and it broke everything, right? So you do those things, you break them and you learn. And I love that I have an environment where I can do that and it's just like a safe place, right? It's my safe place.

I can break to my heart's content because that's how I like to learn is by breaking things. So you did mention that you've done some consulting for real clients. So let me ask, how did that go? What was it that actually made you say, yeah, I can do this kind of in a business sense? Right.

And what have you learned, you know, that you may take going forward? Yeah, I learned a few things. So what got me down this path was, you guys all know how this goes. You become the IT guy.

If you know a little bit about it, you are everyone's IT, you're friends and family, right? You're the guy they call when things break. But where it started to go was the main questions I was getting. Number one was about Wi-Fi and network.

And I think what I like to do is I like to make really complex things simple for people to understand. So I like to take really big concepts and I like to kind of boil them down and explain it to someone that has never even heard of Wi-Fi, right? Or they don't know how Wi-Fi works. And they're wondering why they're not getting the full gigabit speed they're paying for over Wi-Fi.

And it's like, okay, how do I explain that to someone? So I really liked that concept. And then where the favorite part that people had on my home lab was my security systems and my home automation. So security lab, my security cameras all being self-hosted, right? That's all going to my server.

I run Frigate. If you guys need a great container for running security cameras, Frigate is amazing. So I do that.

And then I am a huge advocate for home assistant. The home assistant project is, I think, one of the best things for home labbers. And so when people would come over, they would see those things and they would start to ask, okay, how do I do that? I want security cameras.

I want my lights to do all that automatic stuff. I want my blinds to be doing everything. I just love it.

And so the business angle I actually took originally, where I thought this was going to go, was helping people who own Airbnb’s. So it started with, okay, people would say, for Airbnb owners, they're like, I need security at all these, right? At least on the outside of the perimeter. Home automation would be nice for when the guest leaves.

I can kind of see and make sure my energy usage is low. You know, make sure the lights are off. Make sure the AC is on just enough so houses don't get too hot.

Those sort of things. Home automation and security for Airbnb owners was kind of my main focus. And then when I started to post about it on Facebook and everything, the friends that naturally just saw this and said, well, I don't have an Airbnb, but Mike, my law school buddies, I started a law firm and I could kind of use some help on the IT side there.

Could you help? I was like, well, sure. I mean, those skills kind of translate. I could help you out with that.

And the dental practice, the same thing. The other law firm, the same thing. So I actually never worked on one Airbnb.

I thought that was going to be big. And I kind of tried to find a niche there. And I think really, I probably could have found that niche.

But what I found out is your guys' industry, it is very hard. You cannot do it part time. Because I think a lot of the events when a client has an issue, they want to call you.

That's during my time where I'm, you know, being an attorney, right? I can't just be jumping on a call to fix something. Very rarely is that happening between the hours of 8 and 5 a.m. When I thought, hey, I can dedicate my nights to answer calls, my weekends to answer these calls, to do installations and stuff. And it just, that didn't work out.

So I kind of, I put a pause on it. I didn't take any more after those first three. I still work with them and still help them out.

But until some time in the future when I make it my full time thing, I had to kind of put a pause on it. But it was a lot of fun. And I kind of learned a lot through those different experiences.

Yeah, so the whole reason my business exists is because when I was working at a tech shop, we had a lot of people coming in asking, you know, hey, can you come to my house or can you come to my office? I don't want to unplug my stuff and bring it in. And our owner wouldn't do that. And we would do it on nights and weekends.

And it was great. It was good money. And two issues with it.

One, he wanted us to buy all of parts that we needed from him. So we couldn't go out and, you know, and source products and stuff. And second of all, we couldn't take calls from those customers at work, just like you said.

So it got to the point, I think I was doing it about six months. What I'm thinking, you know what I can, I'm almost making the amount of money on nights and weekends as I am during the day. I'll just make this all during the day.

Right. And that's what happened. So I hear you.

I get that. You're an attorney or you were an attorney. You're, you're not officially an attorney now, right? Not, not anymore.

I mean, I'm still licensed and everything, but in my day to day, I kind of took off the legal hat and I do more of the business side of mergers and acquisitions. So yeah, not, not in my day to day capacity. All right.

My industry hates attorneys. I hate attorneys. I'm right there with that.

I'm with you guys. That's why I took that legal hat off. I was going to ask you, can you help explain why that is? But I really wanted to ask you, you were kind of that, that model where if we had come to your firm, attorneys, not all of them, but a lot of them think, you know what? I can do this myself.

I can do it cheaper. I can do it better. Blah, blah, blah.

Did you, did you have that in, in your travels? I should say. Luckily not the, the main one that I still work with. He was fully transparent that this is not his world and he doesn't want it to become his world, right? He's like, the whole reason I would bring you in is because I don't, because he was just, it had been just him and one assistant and they were going to grow and add a few individuals.

And he, he's not going to grow it into a huge law firm, but he's like, it's just enough where we can't be saving files on our personal computers anymore. Remember what is, you know, right? We need something. And he goes, I just, I don't want to touch it.

So luckily I, I didn't run into that, but I can totally see where you're coming from on, you know, I was blessed a few years ago when I took off that legal hat. Now I get to talk to business owners every day instead of attorneys every day. And it is, it's a very different shift.

And I think attorneys in general, first of all, they live in the gray area. So everything's gray. And it's always hard to communicate when your whole career, your whole life is living in the murky middle, trying to find out it's not black and white with the law.

Well, it's not that it's not black and white. It's which side is going to pay me to argue, you know, which side of the argument. Yeah.

The margin, especially for those attorneys, especially the ones making the decision, every single dime is affecting their compensation. And so they're trying to do it as efficient as possible at all times. And if there's anything that they think they could possibly do on their own, they'll try it.

But yeah, I think that that's a difficult part. That's it's, you know, I'm in the wealth management industry now. And for wealth advisors, they often say the same thing about engineers, engineers by trade.

They want to understand everything, right. They're very, they're, you know, they understand the math. And so when they come in and talk to their wealth advisor about their investments, that conversation is a lot different than when you're talking to, you know, someone else in a different industry.

So I kind of equate, it's probably the same sort of thing where you just have that type of individual that with the line of work you're doing, it can make it a little more difficult. Yeah. Ever come across any tech companies in your M&A and ventures? From at work.

Yes, we do at work. But on the personal side, when I was in the consulting side, not really. I think what these firms were finding was that they were too small for some of the larger MSPs, but not quite, you know, so they did, they felt like they didn't fit, right.

Like they're definitely not big enough for the big guys. They didn't want to go the cloud easy route. And, but they didn't, they didn't know who to call, right.

Which business that could work for them. And so I think when they saw a post from a friend on Facebook that, hey, they know how to do tech stuff. And they're thinking about doing it over here.

Like, oh sweet. Like, yeah, hey, I've been trying to do this for a while and I'm not good at it. Can you just come in and do it for me? Which is, which is interesting.

All right. So you've mentioned some of the stuff that you're running your home lab. So first of all, Home Assistant, I didn't realize that was a whole different thing.

I thought that was owned by one of the big boys, but that's a whole open source thing, right? Yes, open source. So, and the way they've set it up is fantastic. So Home Assistant has been a project that's been around for years.

And the whole idea is we all have these smart home devices from a bunch of different brands, right? You might buy Philips Hue light bulbs, and then you might buy TP-Link smart switches for your wall. And then you might buy a Reolink security camera, right? So you've got this house full of all these random smart things, but they all don't talk to each other. So Home Assistant is trying to be the bridge, the one interface for all of your devices, really no matter the brand.

And so that's their goal, is to kind of, this is the place you go, the one dashboard you go to, to set up automations. And so when I hit my TP-Link branded light switch, it can turn off my Philips Hue light, right? So it can talk between everything. That's what Home Assistant really tries to be.

The ownership structure has been fantastic because actually they have essentially, they have a way to monetize through, it's called Nabu Casa. Nabu Casa is kind of the company brand. But the way that ownership structure is set up, it's never going to turn into a corporation that tries to make money for profit.

So what they saw was all these other really cool open source projects that then got bought and tried to monetize and left their loyal user base in the dust a little bit. So Nabu Casa and Home Assistant have tried to really tackle that in a unique way, which I just love. They've also started developing their own hardware for their operating system.

So now you're starting to see hardware that's officially from them to run Home Assistant, which really in my brain, in the past Home Assistant, you've kind of needed to be a nerd to run it, right? You need a virtual machine or you need a Raspberry Pi or you need some device to run it on and you gotta install the operating system. But what they're trying to do is, okay, hey, if I want to set this up for my parents, I can go get the Home Assistant box that was directly from them. They have the hardware, it's pre-installed.

We put it in their home and it's getting really, really user-friendly from a setup perspective has been their main focus, which has been really cool to watch over the years. So they're going to make a little money on the hardware, but still nothing on the software. Yeah, you can do, so a lot of us, they do have a monthly subscription that you can do.

It's a toy add-on. What that gives you is the ability to have cloud backups. So you, all the backups of your config, it's like $5 a month, so really affordable.

And then they also, and what I love is they've never changed this. What I hate is when a project has something that's free at first and then they put it behind a paywall. Now because on Home Assistant, it's always been, you always get the core stuff, that's open source, that's yours.

And then there's some extras that are nice to have that, hey, that's how we're going to make some money. So the other thing is how you can connect your Amazon A-Lady or your Google device, the voice boxes in your house, connecting that so that it can see your smart home and your Home Assistant. They do that bridge automatically, but again, you have to have their subscription to do that.

So I really like how they've monetized because those are two features. And I'm like, yeah, those are nice to have. Not necessary to have a working environment, but automatic cloud backups and being able to use my Amazon A-Lady device in the house to talk to the rest of my automations are great features.

All right, I see Home Assistant green and Home Assistant yellow. You know the difference? Yeah, those are their hardware offerings. Those are, okay.

So again, you don't need the hardware. You could run this on any machine you have already in your house, but if you don't have something to run, those are great boxes that'll run your things really well. All right, so let me ask you, you say you have three primary servers.

Yeah. How many real devices do you have that would be considered servers, Home Assistants, virtual machines or whatever? I don't know. Great question.

So on the server side, so it's those three servers I mentioned. So I have a Proxmox machine, Unraid, and TrueNAS. So those are three separate distinct boxes that are in.

I have a 42U server rack in my basement. They sit in there. And then I run PFSense for my router.

I run that on a Dell R210. So I run, so PFSense is, if you haven't installed it before, great routing operating system that you can install on almost any hardware. Again, so that's running on a Dell R210.

So you could call it four server-ish devices. And then I think if you looked at my network, a lot of client devices, but a lot of those client devices are like smart home IOT things around the house. So those all connect in.

I have one main kind of gaming call it desktop that I run. And then between the wife and the kids and her work items and my wife, I have a lot of client devices that are connecting into that. And then I don't know if you want to count, and I don't even know if we want to go down this rabbit hole, but I use Oracle for virtual private servers as well.

So I have a couple of VPSs that are out on the cloud and for a couple of different reasons that are kind of, they're necessary to be not on my local LAN, especially for routing traffic back in. So if I want to access my photo server I told you about from outside of my house, and if I want that to be easy for family members with a URL, I like to route that out to a VPS first and then back into the house. So a lot of different things.

I host my Unify controller out in the cloud. So for all my Unify devices for myself, and I do manage Unify networks for friends and family. It all connects up to a Unify cloud controller.

And then the final thing I put out on the VPS is my password manager. And the only reason I do that is because, you know, your home can lose power. Your home internet just today, my home internet was out for seven hours.

Luckily I've been here all day. So I didn't notice, but I wouldn't have been able to access my password manager when that was out. So the password manager and the Unify controller, I host that out on the Oracle VPS.

So you're a ubiquity guy. Yeah, I like to be. It can get a little expensive, but yes, really the final piece of the puzzle for me there is I have always run PFSense as my router.

I just know PFSense like the back of my hand. Whenever I need to do anything on the router, I just know how to do it. And I haven't taken the plunge to go Unify on the router.

I have their access points. I do have one Unify switch. And it would be great if all that talked on the one dashboard, but I don't have the router.

So it's like the one critical piece that my dashboard looks really incomplete on my Unify because it doesn't know that piece of the equation. All right, I was going to ask you because Ubiquity now has their own cloud server where you don't need the cloud key. Yeah, which I did.

So I will say this with a disclaimer as well. I did at one time get two Unify access, Ubiquity access points. I set up one with the cloud key that I put on a workstation that died or something happened to it.

And I couldn't go back and access that. I'm like, you know what? I'm not, I am not doing that. That just seems ridiculous to have this cloud key that could get lost.

Which at the time, I didn't know about, there's a couple of Unify hosting services out there. Yeah. But I didn't know that at the time.

So I probably could have done that, but. You can, or so for me, so those hosting services, all they're doing, going back to, we talked about containers. So Unify cloud controller is just a container.

So I was running that actually at home on my Unread machine. And anytime I would go to a family's house to set up their Unify access points, I would just say the controller and I would give it the IP address. And I would say it's, so it all was being managed by my one controller in my house.

That again, the reason I moved to the VPS, when my internet was down, they were getting notifications that their AP wasn't able to connect to the controller. So I just ran the Unify container on my virtual private server over an Oracle. So it's just a, it's an Ubuntu VM that runs that as the only thing it does.

It just runs that one container. So are you going to start to move stuff to those cloud servers? Because I mean, did you say you were running Plex? Yeah, I do run Plex. Well, no, I actually, I got rid of Plex.

I use Jellyfin only, mainly because of Plex. I don't know if the same sort of situation Synology's in on being bad with their core user base. Plex has been making a lot of decisions lately that are just kind of against the core user base.

So I actually turned off the Plex container and I only use Jellyfin, which is the open source essentially version. Okay, I only knew Plex as a place where people hosted movies, videos, and stuff like that. Is that what Jellyfin is? Yes, exactly.

Okay. Yep. So it is the app that gives you a really nice front end to all of the media files you have on your server, just like Plex was.

Okay. Wow, that's a lot of stuff. Yeah, yeah.

So how much money do you think you could make if you actually did decide, yeah, I'm going to pimp myself out as a consultant again and do all of this stuff? Because I thought you did this full time when I heard you on the other show. Yeah. Oh, I should ask you that.

I don't know. I don't see that. And that's my thing is I don't really, I guess I don't know the going rate for what that would cost.

And it's funny when you do it as a passion project and I've never, you know, except for those three clients. And honestly, I probably really undercharged them because they were friends and family. And I just, I enjoy this so much.

I don't really, I don't know. I don't know what I could make doing that. It would be interesting because part of me thinks that you would run into people in the open source world that knew that stuff, well, if it's open source, it's free.

So why are you charging me? And it's like, well, I got to charge you for my time. And that's where the battle always gets. Well, how much is your time worth? Right.

Right. I, that's why, I mean, honestly, if they're, if you're thinking about kind of the high end market of homeowners who want all that cool stuff they're seeing their techie friends have, right. Oh, I want the smart home.

I want, you know, the golf simulator, all that kind of weird tie-in, but like all of those. You have a golf simulator at your house? Yeah. I love the golf simulator tech is another whole rabbit hole.

And I've helped a lot of friends set up their, their golfs. Cause honestly, that's very technical because of the computer requirements and everything running in the launch monitors, but that's a whole nother side. Again, if you kind of found that niche of the high end homeowner that wants to have their whole kind of their network all redone, I want really good Wi-Fi over the house.

And then I kind of want to add, oh, I do want to get away from Google. That's becoming a really popular thing that people say, oh, I'd love to get rid of Google. I'd love to get rid of, you know, iCloud if I could.

Okay, well, we can talk to you about a server that's in your home and I can talk to you about the replacements for those. And they are starting to become intrigued. Now, again, it's the, what could you charge them? What would the price be that they saw was a fair trade-off for setting that up? But they always ask like, how do you do it? And I always kind of tell them, well, you kind of, it has to be your hobby at this point.

You had, it has to be, you're something you really enjoy. Cause it's a lot of tinkering. This isn't commercial point and click.

I installed the app and now I'm good to go. This is number one. How do I set up a server? What operating system do I install, right? What is Docker? What is a container? How do I install it? It's like years of just tinkering where I could have you up and going in an afternoon if we really wanted to.

So that would be interesting. I've thought about that often is, is there a market out there for that? So even if you take out the small business clients, would just the everyday person, do they have any interest in kind of going down this route? Eh, no, I'm going to say. Probably not.

I'm going to say, I'm going to say, well, they would have the interest but they wouldn't want to pay for it. That's where you run into it. That's where, um, in our industry, so the managed service providers, the big push is to dump residential clients because they won't pay for what we do.

And they definitely won't pay recurring, right? They might pay a one-time big fee to come in and set it up, but there's not going to be any sort of recurring revenue in nature from, from that, from the residential, I'm assuming. Yeah. Cause it's like, I just want it installed and it works for X number of years and then I'll pay to repair it or replace it.

So I don't want to see you every month. Right, right. All right.

Well, Mike, we kind of, uh, so we did the Synology stuff last show and then this show, we just got into you and your geekery. Um, is there anything else that you think you would want to share, uh, with the listeners to kind of, uh, bring us home with the, with any of this? I mean, it's, we went down so many rabbit holes Yeah. I mean, I think if, if you're in this industry, um, that you're in and you're kind of listening to the show, um, and especially maybe if, if you're newer, right and you're, you're, maybe you're more green, right? You don't have Mars level experience.

You're just starting out. I would maybe recommend starting a home lab, right? Go on eBay, buy or Facebook marketplace. And a great place to start is get an old Dell OptiPlex that some business is getting rid of.

You can get them for like 50 or 60 bucks, right? So now you have this computer that you can run anything on and start, you know, start down the YouTube rabbit hole of what a home lab is. And I think what it would allow you to do is to play at, at home and tinker and break things. But all of a sudden find one thing that you really want to accomplish.

Um, I want to be able to host a Minecraft server, right? That's an example. I want to be able to host media files, um, accomplish that goal. And you'll kind of be surprised all the things you have to learn along the way, right? Think about how many things you have to learn about networking to get this home server to be accessible from outside of your land, right? That's not an easy thing for someone who's never done it.

Do I do port forwarding? Well, that seems pretty insecure. Do I install a VPN? Awesome. But what about if I want someone who's not on my VPN to access it? Okay, now I got to think about a reverse proxy, right? So you start to go down and you start to play with all these things.

And I think all of that knowledge could only benefit someone in this industry, right? If you're, if you're having a conversation with a business owner and they're going to say something, who knows? You might find a whole new service offering that you could offer your clients because it's something you did at home for fun, right? Oh, they're trying to solve some issue and now you've maybe tackled that issue. So that maybe, maybe that would be it. Is that as your one, maybe home lab representative guest, it can be really, really beneficial for learning new skills, giving yourself an environment to play and tinker in and have some fun.

Would you recommend Unraid as the place to start? Oh, great question. Only if you are going to see that your storage requirements are going to drastically increase over time. Meaning, if you're going to be hosting a lot of media on there and maybe you're starting out with two, four terabyte drives and in the end you're going to end up being a data hoarder with a hundred terabytes, Unraid's a great place to start.

And I guess maybe, yeah, I mean, maybe it is a good place to start. I, if I could really convince someone it's going to take a little more work on the front end to maybe look at Proxmox. I would probably recommend either Proxmox or Unraid to get started.

What type of Raid are you running on your Unraid box to get 120 terabyte? So that's the interesting part about Unraid. So remember they do their storage differently. So it's not your typical like Raid Z setup, like for ZFS.

It's not your typical Raid 5 or Raid, you know, whatever it is for Raid type setups. Synology does their own, or sorry, Unraid does their own. So the way it works is you have this array of disks.

And so let's say I have four disks in there. One of those disks is going to be your parity disk. The rest are going to be actually used for storage.

So N minus one. Yep, exactly. Or you can do N minus two, right? You can have more than one parity, but most people for the first few disks, you just have one.

The great part about Unraid is, what that means is the only requirement is that the parity disk has to be your largest disk. So if you had an eight terabyte, a four terabyte and a two terabyte, your eight terabyte has to be your parity disk. So it always has to be the largest.

But then all your other drives, you can have a mixed match of one terabytes and two terabytes and four terabytes. And the way that the redundancy works is essentially if you have one parity disk, that means that you can lose one of your array drives and still everything's okay. It can still rebuild the array when you replace that drive.

Now, if you had two go bad, then you're starting to get into trouble. But the other thing about Unraid that's different, most Raid environments, they're going to stripe the data across all the drives. Meaning let's say I had one large video file.

That video file is going to be broken up into chunks across a lot of different hard drives. So if you truly lost one of the hard drives and the Raid wasn't able to be rebuilt, that whole file, you can't reconstruct. Unraid does it differently.

Unraid stores the whole entire file on one drive. So if you lost one drive and let's say, or let's say you lost two drives, that meant your parity, you can no longer rebuild the pool. The only data you lost was the data that was on that drive.

All the other data on their drives is clean. Now it's going to be a random array of your data. You're not really going to know what was good and what's not.

But since it writes whole files to the drive, you don't end up losing all of your data in the event that your parity and you lost two drives, which was more than what you had in parity. So for 120 terabytes though, I'm going to assume you've got in minus two, right? Uh, I should, I don't. I've still got in minus one.

Because that's a lot of data to put across. Because what's, what's your parity drive? 18? Yeah, it's exactly right. I mean, that's not, that's not much when, when you compare it to 120.

Yeah. So I got 18 and I got, you know, I got maybe one other 18, a lot of 14 terabytes or 12 terabyte drives. I can't remember.

It's a hodgepodge. The reason for me is all that data is replaceable. The data I keep on that main box, right? I could, I could easily, you know, get that data again.

So I'm not too worried about it. And I've never, fingers crossed, I've lost one drive, but I've never lost two at the same exact time. And that's the only time it's an issue is if you lose two devices on the array at the exact same amount of time.

So as long as you're only losing one at a time. But yes, it's a very risky. I would not recommend the way I do it.

Don't do as I say, not as I do. Right. That is true.

Yeah. All right. Let me bring this back full circle now and talk about the NAS drives.

You mentioned QNAP as the one you started, the one brand name and last name brand in your arsenal there. What was it that made you choose Synology for those consulting gigs? Yeah, it started because my parents wanted a NAS device. Actually, they were doing a project where they were scanning in all their old family photos, right? So they had a lot of family photos they were scanning in and they needed some sort of place to store those.

So I kind of convinced them that, hey, something on the network can be a lot easier, showed them it and they needed something small. So we just happened to grab a Synology two bay unit. That's just what we landed on.

In setting that up for them, I was like, wow, this ecosystem is phenomenal. I really like it. And so when the first client really needed something, I had always kind of kept up on Synology.

I am a YouTube addict. I don't watch any TV. I watch a lot of YouTube and it's all tech YouTube.

No Naked and Afraid? What? No Naked and Afraid? No, No Naked and Afraid. A few shows here and there with the wife. But I actually, I would watch this guy and he, I can't remember his name.

I'm sure you know him if you do Synology. He does great Synology videos. And I would just constantly get the updates from him from a business perspective on all the different apps and everything.

So it was just kind of a natural choice for me where this client number one is a 14 hour drive. So, and not close to any airport. So I was, there was no way for me to get there.

So if something were to go wrong, so that really, for me, took out TrueNAS, took out Unraid, took out Proxmox. Cause I'm like, I need this to be a pretty rock solid system with some level of support from the company. So that's really where Synology kind of just became the clear choice for me.

And I think I had been off put a little bit by QNAP in the past. I didn't like their interface as much when I had it. Their offering might be a lot better to an internal fairness.

This was years ago that I had that QNAP device. Probably about 11-ish years ago that I had that, those little two bay QNAP. But yeah, so it just seemed like the natural option.

And then after you do the first one, I'm sure like a lot of you guys, you just like, okay, now I know that really well. And it's really easy to set that up again and you get better and better every time you do it. Would you consider Synology being brought back into the home? Um, no, not really.

I don't really have a need for it. I think when you, especially when you look at the cost of a Synology device, compared to a build your own, this it's almost exactly like a little bit back in the day when you're comparing a Mac to, for a gamer, for a gamer, they were looking at Macs versus Windows. And they're like, well, the Windows machine, I can just buy a case, buy a motherboard.

And whenever I want to upgrade the CPU, I swap the CPU out. Whenever I want to upgrade the GPU, I do the same thing. I add more RAM, very customizable.

I'm addicted to that on the server side. So all three of my servers, I can upgrade to my heart's content, right? If I want to switch operating systems, let's say I get tired of unread. I just trash that and install TrueNAS and I'm good to go.

And so I really like hardware flexibility and being able to fully control whatever I want to do. Even think about that 10 gig, we were talking about upgrading 10 gig a while ago. Like that's one example of just how much easier it is in my environment with being able to swap the motherboard out, put in a new one, if I've already used those PCIe slots.

So no, I think for the home lab, I'm addicted to the upgradability on that piece. Okay. One last question.

You talked about getting 10G cards and Proxmox supposedly you can install on any hardware. How do you install new devices? Like if you were to go out and just, you can't just go buy any 10G card, can you? Almost. It's really all of those operating systems that I mentioned are based off of Linux, which has pretty decent support.

Now, what I will say is in networking, what I have learned is if you just want to know you're not going to have any issues, go with the Intel card. Like pay the little extra money, get the Intel NIC. It's going to be leaps and bounds ahead of the Realtek or any of those other brands.

They all will work. And I'm not, again, I'm not practicing what I preach. I just put TP-Link branded two and a half gig NICs in.

But in my router, in my PFSense router that had space for an X16, I did, I just went Intel. I'm like, I know that's going to work. It's a dual SFP plus port 10 gig card.

And I was like, okay, I'm going to go Intel, especially because for PFSense, FreeBSD does have a lot of issues with other branded cards, but Intel is just known to work. Both things like Proxmox, I really haven't had too much in terms of hardware compatibility issues, knock on wood. All right.

I just thought of another question, but I'm not going to ask it. So we're going to do that another time if I can get you to come back on. But thank you, Mike, for coming on the show and chatting.

Of course. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Now I get to go tell Jim and see what he has to say. Exactly. Mike Weger, folks, home enthusiast, aficionado, guru, whatever you want to throw that in there.

He has it all from your NAS device to your home assistant, which that scares me. Putting those things in my home, that scares me. That's the best part about home assistant is you keep it local, right? So a lot of the things that I buy have no way to talk to the internet.

So I turn that all off and that's why I love it because now home assistant's all local controlled and I feel a lot more secure that my security camera's number one. There's no way to access them. They are recording to a local hard drive.

My home assistant devices, for the most part, 99% of them don't have any access to the internet. It's a nice way to give you peace of mind. So nobody's listening.

Exactly. And you're not going to get, you're not going to open up your social media app and find ads for home assistant. Exactly.

Yeah, that's the goal. All right. Mike, thank you very much once again for coming out and thank you for doing this extended version.

Ladies and gentlemen, his information will be in the show notes, but I'm going to say you can't contact him during the day because he doesn't do tech during the day. But I'll have some links to some other shows that he's been on. And like he said, he did a long run with my friend Jim Collison over there on the Home Gadget Geeks Network.

And they talk a lot of home stuff. So if that's what you want to listen to, that's where you'll find it. So that's going to do it, folks.

We'll be back. And it's going to be a great run of shows coming up, of course, PAX 8 Beyond. The Pitch It series is starting.

And as soon as those are done, we are going to go MSP only for the rest of the summer. So that'll do it, folks, for the IT Business Podcast. Thank you much for listening.

We'll see you soon. Holla!