And we're live welcome to vlog Thursday number 342 some AMD actually me bringing the microphone closer There we go AMD and horizon mini PC testing. We're gonna play with that a little bit and Then we'll talk about some feedback I should let's start with the feedback and then I'll jump right into that rise in testing stuff And I seen someone asked if we're gonna do any Synology talk. Hey, why not? Excuse me. Why not? I like Synology as well We're gonna go ahead and throw something else on the screen though Banners as always you can email vlog Thursday at learn systems calm That's been the easy way for people who say hey, I'd like to ask you a question And I don't feel like joining your forums because the forums is a better way to engage with me But hey, I'll accept emails to vlog Thursday at learn systems calm Don't expect a reply. I'll accept her on blog Thursdays occasionally. I have replied to people I I do have that set up as an actual email address that I can reply as But you know not always Nonetheless here. What do we got? Let's run through the questions because you're pretty simple in One of them was because I reviewed the Zima board someone said how would I cool the hard drives for TrueNAS? Well, the same way you power the drives if you use it for TrueNAS It's probably the same way you're going to cool it in terms of if you're using enough drives more than two that Can the Zima board can plug into you're gonna have to get a fan for it So there's not there's not any like easy simple use these pins There's only so much power coming out of it You'll probably have to find some external way to power the fan on that Zima board now the Zima itself doesn't get hot No, it does but it dissipates the heat well enough that I didn't have any issues with it But as far as cooling drives that I was using SSD so it didn't really matter for my testing This is an interesting question with same same person and I thought this was a fun one it says over the years I guess the end users have changed maybe and The younger generation do they ask different questions and the answer is Kind of but not really the same problems persist and I always just assumed And this is me. This is a wrong assumption. I had that with young users Growing up on a more tech focused world. They would just have better tech experience now granted They're better at opening PDFs than the previous generation But the reality is it's like any other tool just because the car has been around for a long time Doesn't mean people know how the car works. They know how to get to work with the car But they may not know how the details of that car works. They are for the questions are still Usually more technical. I think they have a better understanding of it But I wouldn't say that the tech support has just gone away because of their tech savviness and most of the problems They face are all the other stupid problems that come with computers and the ever-increasing complexity of computers They they've in some ways have become easier, but they've also become pretty complex Next question was since you're focusing on social media side of things rather than running the business itself Are you planning to full-on create a video tutorial for pf sense analogy to your nance and others from beginner to advanced? I'm still going to do I don't know how beginner because that is a weird debate in my head And of course in the audience's head of what does beginner mean? I tend to stay on the more advanced unless the one on one side, so I don't plan to go any More basic. I do plan to create those longer form tutorials Which are ones I've done before like the pf sense video and things like that. I've done one previously I'll be doing a new version of it because there's enough changes to Make it worthy of a new version, but I'm not going to cover the one-on-ones and I've had people complain where they're going Well, I want some extremely basic. I'm like, well, I don't tell you how to turn the computer on I will tell you how to load pf sense on it So there's there's always figuring out, you know, how basic do you start and I'm usually the person I think people find after they've gone through some iterations of getting things set up Now on to the mini PCs Let's talk about those because they're pretty novel now specifically the one I'm going to be using here Let me start sharing it I want to make sure this is all at the beginning because I babble and the later and people always complain You had a topic in there Tom and I want the topic covered first So we're going to cover the topic first actually where did I put I? Guess I was dragged this over here, too I thought I must have closed that window no big deal I have some review notes and specifically it's the specs of the machine because people will want to know and I got an Amazon link Hey, let's get that up here, too. So we'll pull we'll drop an Amazon links We're all talking about the same thing and that's going to be one of these little rise in systems I'm only gonna talk about one of them today and maybe I'll do a review on the other one coming soon and We'll share this tab. There we go. So the first one's gonna be this AM 60 pro. Let's go ahead and pull this up so you can have a link to it if you'd like and Well, actually, let's start with the link of what it is and I'll drop this in for people who don't want to do the search. I'll drop this in the chat Do do there we go This so these go under a few different names They're called ace musician. They're ace magician and come more K. M.  Kumrui I think that's how you pronounce that But I've been testing this little rise in five system and I've been running XC PNG on it We've got a few tests. We ran here with it using about and actually The higher end we've seen on it is I think using like 32 or 40 watts I got a I still got to work that out I will do a review where I cover the wattage But it idols down all the way at like nine watts, which is kind of neat But they're definitely nice little boxes here to do some testing on or Matter of fact, people are probably looking at like, hey, can I use this for my home lab? And yeah, I would say this makes a nice little lab system and More specifically the question comes around to like hey does it Does it run XC PNG matter of fact runs it quite well I was actually impressed with just how well this ran and it's got only one two and a half gig So this is not a box that's gonna be screaming fast in terms of being able to deliver that speed But maybe that's not what you're looking for Maybe you just want to run a few virtual machines on there and by the way This is something you may find interesting if you look at the virtual machines that are running on here You'll find we go over here to the VMs That all of them are off, but I'm using Zen Orchestra I wanted to bring this up and maybe I'll do this as a video topic as well But you can do this with and we're gonna log in here This is to me just a simple use for lab environment Share this tab instead. Let's go to applications. I have Zen Orchestra running inside my true NAS because you don't have to this is one of the things about the way XC PNG and Zen Orchestra work together you can run Zen Orchestra in Something like your NAS or another box and then I can orchestrate all the other Testing and then I can just delete all the VMs move them around that are over within Zen Orchestra Or when in XC PNG and manage it Externally so saves you happen to use any of that memory because I've dockerized it over here Via true charts and by the way if you're wondering yes It seems to work quite well inside of true NAS And this is not a very fast particular true NAS system But hey, this is another way you can help run and manage these but back over to the device Share this tab I got my actually me get rid of one of them I have on here I don't need that's testing and I compiled Zen Orchestra on here I'm gonna delete it because I don't really need it anymore, but it boots up and runs just Really fast like all everything's very very snappy on it. I've had no compatibility issues I we had it running for a couple weeks at the office just doing load testing for on X testing and At no point did it ever have a problem now I do you want to take it apart because it has a fan in it I just want to make sure I get some photos of the fan when I finish my final review But my overall feelings of this little device if you're just going hey, Tom, is it worth the buy? I don't think it's a bad price To get you know 16 gigs of DDR4 512 m2 I believe there's a spot you can plug a SATA drive into it as well and 279 this not not that bad of a price on there. So that's my quick short review We'll poke at it here if people ask questions How's the clavicle broken You already start fairly basic and don't get much more further than intermediate. Oh, if you say so all depends on who you ask Do you have any guides or scripts and how you would audit someone's windows environments? They 80 and audit policies for me a new client coming launch systems. Um, I Don't cover that. We ask we do We have all kinds of stuff we do as part of the audit But maybe I'll bring on some people to talk about that. I'm just not I don't do the 80 audit So I'm not the person to talk about that Hi, Tom. Are the vlogs going compared to the reviews and how are the vlogs going compared to the reviews? Hold on in the past by myself Not watching your videos as much. I used to since you started blogging. Maybe it's me personally I don't know the vlogs get the least amount of engagement The fun thing about vlogs is they lose subscribers Some people don't they subscribe to my channel for a tutorial and they're like, oh, he's babbling about something And I don't feel like interacting. So the vlogs Don't gain me any subscribers rarely do and usually lose me one subscriber per vlog But I gained enough on all the other videos that I haven't decided to stop doing them Hopefully it makes sense My problems with mini PCs is they are almost never have PCA slots. Yeah, I wish they did I don't care about ECC memory not for home lab stuff. I mean, this is home lab I don't even ECC memory kind of a waste in a home lab unless you just want it for reasons Off topic is inter VLAN through PF sense a big bottle not compared to a layer three switch client connected to your tris That that's a very it depends question How fast is the switch and how fast is the PF sense the PF sense can do inter VLAN routing pretty fast If it's a fast BF sense box any switch can do inter VLAN routing pretty fast If it's a fast switch that can do that so it comes down to which one's faster the switch You're using or the PF sense. For example, you can do inter VLAN routing on that It's a 10 gig hundred dollars roughly hundred and ten dollars. I've reviewed it before it's one of the only me critiques I've reviewed that will do 10 gig that will do inter VLAN 10 gig Well, no, I should say you can plug two 10 gig ports into it You can inter VLAN route between them, but you won't get full 10 gig speed So it kind of depends on the device and how fast that device is for both the PF sense and for the switch I'm gonna try some a mini forum and test restores to it. Oh, okay, cool I would love a video or more information on that. Yeah, I'll see if I can do it I Don't know like the people asking are the few and I don't know how much demand there is for that content so maybe we'll produce some content on it, but the demand seems low is been my perspective so if the the efforts high because I got a I got to find someone in in my You know company that can do it and explain it well And then I have to edit and make that video So there's a lot of effort that goes into the video because it's just not me doing it because I don't like I really like I don't like doing Microsoft stuff. I've always just been aggravated by it. I Know you like whiskey. What do you think about beer? Beer is good, too Is the x670 here compatible with the Ryzen 9? I have no idea That is not something I would I'm the best person to ask on I love listening to the blogs on road trips. Cool Love a lot more guest videos where you bring on some members of your team and talk with through subject of if they're teaching about the process Yeah, it sounds good Some of those videos have not gone as well it it's a It's something that I don't know how to say other than some people don't do well in front of the camera That's not what they may be incredibly talented at their job. They're not as articulate in the camera So those can be a little bit harder to do But I'm working on it. I'm actually we're actually are working on a vmware video So that may happen. I'll see if Jason's got time to do some of the other stuff if he does Jason's very good in front of the camera So He's the president of CNW are and he knows how to do a lot more Windows things than me What's the best caching drive for one? I don't really know Which one would be better than the other any of the any of the Western digital ones are gonna be popular for it I Don't really review them specifically. I usually use whatever I have laying around It matter of fact the Synology we have that has a year. I haven't logged into it in a while. Let's log into one of my other Synologies It has a cash drive in there and let's look up what's in there because I don't remember what we put in there It's been in there for over a year So there's that I don't know if that means it's good or bad, but it's good because it's working He's got a log in now. Ooh, it's got updates But before we go there, let's go to the drives and figure out what's in it Actually, you gotta go the storage manager. Does it tell us which M2s you're in there? Firmware serial number There's actually Synology branded ones that are in there right now So I have some unknown drives here and I've actually got Synology ones Synology SSDs that are in there right now. So Those oh, I didn't share a screen though. I got the Synology ones in there right now. Can I make this bigger? So those are the cash drives I have in here are the actual M2 Synology ones They've been working fine. I've been this has been kicking around my office for a while doing stuff This particular Synology does have a 10 gig nick all not all of my my others not all my Synologies have some do some don't I Don't mind blogs or tutorials. I if I don't want to listen to a vlog. I just skip it Yeah, I think that's probably the easiest way and the idea why there's so many mini PCs, but so few NAS options Back to our back planes that hard kind of that's is demand There's there's not enough demand to really push it. I'm sure remember who did the There's one of them one board. I'm sure remember it was top 10 made a board that had a whole lot of SATA ports That was a pretty good NAS port, but it there's not a plentiful supply of those so it's just kind of challenging Finding the perfect NAS build because it comes back down to demand I kind of maybe if they knew there was enough demand for it I think they'd probably sell pretty good if if a company could come up with something with a you know Just give me a whole lot of SATA ports in that would kind of solve it Happy almost Friday. Thank you William Daugherty and thank you very much for the donation What is the best use case for dual LAN ports usually wanting to be in more than one network? That is a very common use case the next use case is going to be Bonding them together to get a higher aggregate thorough put for having multiple interfaces With the forums you better at that and can't be just in general I feel Feel like my processor shuffle your forums are generally probably where you're gonna find more on active directory auditing stuff P2B I First time I've seen a question about P2P bridges and unify, so I don't know what your question is Peer to peer bridges and unify you can there is a model that supports bridging So there's that What brand do you like best for many PCs B-Link etc? I don't have any particular brand I like I've got some of these other ones like I said these and this is where it even gets more confusing so this one's called the Cam Rui Cam Rui sounds like how we're gonna say that now, but let's go ahead and do a quick search and When it comes to a lot of these and we'll pull this tab up over here now Hey, look this one's called ace magic, and it's the same specs, and it's the same box And this is the challenge. It doesn't oh man. Whoops. Hold on. Keep forgetting to share the screen Add to stream look at this box And look at this box Hmm. They look suspiciously the same with the same specs and the same parts They're just a different name. That's the problem with these is they go by there's only a couple manufacturers essentially in China and they just all send them out under different names and vary the specs maybe or like what SSD they put in it, but the base box is the same so I don't have any particular favorite they're all made by just a couple different manufacturers and I think they work well enough I mean they make for some fun lab projects and that's about it Like I don't have a particular like I like this brand other than other ones now Specifically one.  I think that's how that said protect Lee your number one appliance now Oh, these are once again, I think it's quote Tom makes these is you can find these on Alibaba they Have basically they're an importer if I understand correctly and I may not But I as far as I can tell they're like an importer that offers some level of US support rather than getting them cheaper from Alibaba So these are maybe a little bit nicer, but I've Talked about having some of these die That happened, but you know any of them can die that's just something that goes on with these things There's no easy way like I can load them up and do some stress tests to see if they can survive it and all the ones I've tested so far have it's what do they look like after several years is always the big question There's no easy answer now. This is why we don't use these really in a commercial setting with clients because clients It's just the downtime is very expensive It's not only our reputation for selling something that broke. It's the downtime and cost that may be incurred So generally with businesses, you're gonna see that we're gonna buy a genuine super micro a Lenovo a Dell Something that's gonna be like more dedicated towards that. You're just gonna get I think a better overall reliability with things like that I've got a WD red at one terabyte and buy two of my Q-Damp mostly because they had the highest endurance rating for the price Backblaze is still my favorite place to go to find out a lot about hard drives I love their I haven't done a video about it in a long time. Maybe I should because I think people forget about it The back plays drive stats. Oh, I'll drop these a link right now like they give you so much detail on What do you call it the Drives the endurance how long and how many hours they were running it's just really really great Problem for me is L3 and unify layer 3 and unify has a lot less options So considering L2 to adjust traffic send up and on a pf since many CC. Yeah, I don't recommend layer 3 inside a pf sense Have you had any soundly spinning drives? Are they good does now do you have flash storage for enterprise? Yeah, all the soundly stuff has proven to be very reliable anything. We've had that has been Synology has been Really good like it hasn't caused any problems. I do have a bunch of crucial SSDs in there as well What's my opinion on traffic? I don't use it. So I don't have an opinion on it I don't know any reason not to use it. I just don't use it Many PC depends on what you use. I've got to for Ali express Pf sense still Opti flex and I3 for browsing that editing. Yeah, one of the things is It's a good way to learn redundancy and it's a good reminder that all things all things that you care about Should be backed up if it's something you think you should care about you should back it up so if you wanted to buy a few of these mini PCs and You know, put them into maybe a cluster of Cluster network of like, you know, for example my friend Raid Al. I think he did a cluster video on the I am looking because I have it sitting over here my desk one of those Zima boards and it's a cool thing to build a cluster on I think the Zima boards reliable but hey, it's a good way to learn and Build out a redundancy in your network or in your OS build to do it So it it's kind of the big advantage is having these at a really reasonable price So you can get a few of them matter of fact to this ace magic one the same one is a little bit cheaper it looks like on Amazon and With prime delivery, I can have another one by Saturday if I want it so Back plays do good data. They do for sure Well, if you're putting links in it's gonna get shadow band. That's why I have forums PfSense or open sense. I prefer pfSense. I Um, I don't know any problem if people want to use open sense. Go ahead. It's not a bad system I definitely has more updates than pfSense which seems to get the homelab people excited But it does not get the enterprise people excited because we have to manage all those constant flow of updates And so we like a very stable Maybe seems boring to the homelab people that pfSense is very stable very well documented and extremely reliable and secure And that's the part that matters Well, you are triggering words that YouTube doesn't like if it's not if it's eating your posts YouTube is just going yep You are putting words in that we do not like this is nothing. I have any control over there's not matter of fact I wish I did this has been a constant discussion between me and other creator friends is why why can't we have more control over what's in the chat Why not like if we could have an easier list or easier way to manage and ban words and things like that It would be helpful, especially with all the spam that comes through even on the comments Like that is just we've got some ability, but it's not like we have nice global filtering tools, but it's such as life Morning Lawrence 6 a.m. In Western, Australia here. So hey cool from the land down under Are you happy hosting uniform controller in a VM or prefer bare metal? Oh in a VM for sure What a VM be an issue for troubleshooting network outages? That depends on your skill level. I have not had any problems. We run 60 or 70 companies in ours something like there's a little more now With the merger there's more. There's a whole lot of companies running in our VM I don't have any networking issues with it It matter of fact it works really really well and being that it's a virtual machine. I can and we have several Servers we could just migrate the machine to other servers So if we had a new maintenance on one of our servers We can migrate the VM around and we don't have to worry about dying downtime as we do maintenance And of course being a VM means anytime there's an update It's easy for me to snapshot it update it and if I do something dumb or If I end up accidentally goofing up something I can just quickly roll it back Which really hasn't been much of an issue, but hey, I like that confidence that um If I make a mistake, I have a snapshot. That's usually I do is I grab a snapshot of it to Just before I do any of the updates. I Don't want to switch harbor But it'll sort of change flow. Okay, so I see what you're talking about of the challenge of the layer three issues Does air fiber integrate into ufi? I don't think the air fiber one does so there's there's a model It does we just don't use it because it costs more and the only thing it does is display in the unify Interface and it I can't remember which model it is. I've seen Cody from Mectelcom Networks is here He'll he'll probably know the model off the top of my head but Or off the top of his head. There is a model that does integrate in unify But it's I don't get it like you don't get cool extra features. It just displays in the unify list Why would you pay more money for that? I'm trying to ditch dattle for backup thoughts on a cronus axiom MSP 360 a low-synology But your frequent issues with ABV needing to be reauthenticated We use beam and MSP 360 that's what we settled on a cronus I didn't like their interface But beam and MSP 360 is currently our stack my go-to reverse proxy is HA proxy Always cautious having veiled windows license on these low-cost boxes Yeah, I never run windows on them I put Linux on them right away, but I think it's weird when they say they can I think that's actually what it says It can run windows Set on the license here You're right though, I a lot of these say windows and yeah, I agree with you. It's probably kind of sketchy But not a problem like it works Also running Linux no bra on the Dell my first real use of Linux is daily driver For sitting under savings a week electricity compared to my AMD worth it as a home user. Yeah our port 80 80 Neat 43 open or is a VPN to the unify controller? For so the way we sell host it is we leave the stun port I can't front of the number off the top my head is it 5743. I think stun. Anyways stun It's under what's on our website. I'm stun and 80 80 We have 8443 behind a VPN. So 80 80 is open and the stun port whatever port that is and 80 80 so Proxmox or vmware or hyper v none. I use xcp and g my go-to is Been for a long time xcp and g that's why I got running right here It works wonderful. It's my favorite hypervisor based on the Zen server fully open source. So definitely a nice system Building to bridge What do you recommend? Whatever the newest I don't know the newest models on their sites for the bridging I don't we don't we sold enough bridges, but we don't we don't sell a ton of them We've definitely done a few we've got a handful that we've deployed I need to do some videos on them. I actually have footage and everything for the install I just never got around to making a video on it As far as I know Arista is done a good job with untangle. So I don't see a reason not to use it UDP Obstucation science. I don't know what that means. I Have a pf sense of any PC with four two and a half gate connected to unify with 8x two and a half all client connected new five PC server IOT some VLAN separation cool This sounds like a fun setup Yeah, description says it comes to windows. Yeah What is beam pricing like for a full featured homeland multiple day? I was back up several data set CFS desktops laptop phones I have no idea I Don't know the pricing on that. That's not my department and then I I think your pricing probably varies with the volume You're buying so I think they have this beam have pricing on their website They have a whole pricing calculator. It looks like so But like I said, pricing is not my department So not not something I know as much about on that See XC PNG. I have a mini PC to run proxmox server hosting only pf sense being able to snap shots As you mentioned tips for how to configure proxmox servers network. I don't use proxmox. So I don't know I don't really have any tips J from learn linux TV has a whole series on proxmox I believe techno Tim has some videos into proxmox. I have no videos on proxmox because I don't use it We're gonna share your unified VM management setup Do you deploy a VM per customer and then VPN to their unify? No now? We have one controller We keep them off. We we do not want to maintain a VM for every individual client You can have the the system is multi-tenant so you can have your instances Where each client's in their own instance? So you have one controller, but all the different clients are in a pull-down list So I can I can go in there and it will I think I'll pull some of this up Yeah, I can't show you all my customers But so if we share this tab, I have my house in here too or my studio I should say so this one's my studio And I can hit this button over here and switch this same account to another one. So let's say We take this out. Let me switch it to our lab. We'll switch it to the office Actually, I can share it now See how it says LTS lab LTS test site LTS Jeremy's lab or LTS office There's actually way more I filtered down just to those ones right there the LTS one So because the controller is multi-tenant I can I don't have to have a controller for each individual client that we manage I keep hearing about your setup, but I've yet to have a chance to stop and think about it I'm mainly concerned confused about what configured network at Proxmox customization. So it won't be plugged into another router I'm managing have to set everything static on it. Do you only use VPN to connect to site or data center? We use that with sometimes How do you run Docker next to be just a Linux with VM with Docker correct There is no There's not really right now any native Docker support built into XC PNG. So I just in matter of fact I have a Portainer instance, so if we pull this up. So for example, I have a bunch of 22 running Docker Portainer and And so I have a bunch of Portainer Docker stuff running in here This is more lab things that I have going but it's it's a Portainer instance Oh, you thought beam and VMware are better same company. They are not What do you recommend while I'm boarding new clients so they scan the network and get all the things inventory? Run zero has been one of my favorite tools that it just works really well for doing that There's actually more tools that I will be talking about soon that we have but primarily it's going to be There's a difference, you know when like run zero is great because I can just throw it on a network grab all their inventory And it gives me a great list But there's some other tools that we use at CNW are that go more in-depth But those are more for when we sell an assessment of someone's network not just an onboarding But like I said run zero and I'll pull it up real quick here, which by the way you I have videos on this But run zero is definitely a really cool tool for scanning a network and finding all the things Oh The companies you support running Linux which just showed you see it's most I don't do Linux support for companies Well, we do but not it's not the distros. It's usually going to be enterprise support So it's not like anyone's running distros under desktop that we offer support for what we are supporting is usually back-end Servers that they have so we are doing Linux admin at for a handful of clients where they have a bunch of Linux servers Frequently, it's going to be Red Hat sent OS. Maybe some Debian, you know, it's but it's not it's not about the distro It's usually whatever was recommended for the application that runs on top of it The the driving factor isn't like oh, I prefer this distro That's definitely what's the driving factor in the homelab market But the market for the businesses is usually they're running the distro that they're lying a business application has to run on Any opinion an enterprise VPNs any can't global connect 40 client I've done a video on 40 net. I have a lot of opinions on 40 net. The other ones are what they are Do you think VATS lad Docker support to host? I doubt it. I don't think it's really on the roadmap What are you for RDP VSE landslide of things neither? We use a tool called screen connect I love screen connect part one is an alternative to open Alternative for open-sense like tool where I can give me source destination kind of logs of the traffic behind the unify Part two. I don't want to double net things with pinhole So I know that's going to be out. Um, I mean you're looking for some type of network monitoring tool you I use PF sense with end top that gives me all the traffic and That works really well. So that's I don't know what to do in open-sense or unify unify I don't think has a way to track it But you can Do this I I don't not I'm not going to anytime soon write a tutorial on this Because it's just not something I see here often, but you can sub end top and build port mirrors on things So you can do that So there's a way to do it with port mirroring You just got to build a server that can Ingest the port mirror and collect the data matter of fact you can actually do this with security onion But once again, it's a pretty extensive setup, but there is a way at that point you can monitor all the traffic You know, I've not used rust desk. I think it looks interesting But I will admit I don't know how good the security is on it. I mean it looks cool, but I don't know how secure it is Use at your own risk If you had to guess what percentage how much of equipment is standard professional variant mainly regarding switches I don't understand that question when is tom's next Not tech event vacation saw kodi in jamaica um I don't know. I don't really think about I I don't know. I don't really know. I'm not sure I mean, I'm going to I have some tech events. I'm going to I just make my vacation or As a matter of fact, I am I'm going to be in dallas for vid summit and I make my vacation around there Because I'm already going to be there So I'm going to vid summit in dallas and then I will be there for a few extra days because I'm already in dallas and yeah Screen connect is definitely amazing. It's a it's a commercial product, but man hands down screen connect is solid You so n-top does exist in open sense. Okay. I did not know I worked for a 40 net reseller and wound up running a company data center We use them just not a fan support is severely lacking. Yes Performance to rust that is fantastic if each real vnc and no machine Yeah, vnc is dated and I don't I've never found vnc to be performant screen connect is still like what I would compare things to it's kind of like the gold standard of things but yeah, the Vnc has never been my favorite Basically is a reason to use a pro version of the ub switches rather than the standard ones in a home lab If you look at the features does it fit your requirement? That that's the part that I hammer to people constantly First list out your needs and then go find the product instead of going does this product fit my needs? So I need the pro one. Well, do you need the features of the pro one? The pro one has more wattage. Are you going to use more wattage? You know, that's how we decide it. We will look at a project like we're gonna we have a bunch of cameras We're putting in okay. How many watts while those cameras what's the likelihood the company will want to add more cameras later Oh, we better spec it for you know, if they only want four cameras I don't necessarily need to sell them a 48 port switch But if they have four cameras today and tell me they would like 20 more cameras sometime in the future We will then suggest they buy a switch to accommodate the expanded plans for their future These are things you have to figure out when you're selling any type of equipment It's like now you don't plan for the storage server you need today I ask you what your data run rate is what how much data you plan to accumulate how much you plan to accumulate over time What's your predicted growth rate? Let's talk about that so I can sell you a server that doesn't just fit you today But will fit you to whenever your budget allows for the next server That's the I mean ideally just buy all the storage, but you know the budget doesn't always lend itself to that I bring it up because we have a client that Through I believe there's some compression. They're able to stretch how long they've had their server to a lot longer and now that they've Filled up or getting closer to filling up their petabyte of storage They need two more petabytes of storage because they understand their run rate better and the compression around it so yes Look at the number of sfp plus parts and say do you need those? Yeah, look that you know, there's watted differences There's a number of port differences. Do you need those ports? I mean I want the ports so I will buy something with all the ports But there comes a point where your budget may not fit a device that has all the ports You know, I didn't mention it, but I did order a new chair. It's really comfortable Now I actually have freedom of my arms because I can support that's why I'm able to move both hands now I can actually support my arms better on this chair because I can move the arm up to hold it I don't usually I mean I don't know if I need to do an update an office torque or hasn't that much change in my office, but This chair was expensive, but I was so hesitant to buy it. But boy, is it nice. It is a um, I'll just mention it In case curious, this is not an easy choice figuring out what chair you should buy uh, this is a It's called the steel case gesture and uh, it's it's man I like it a lot.  It's just It's made it it's made things better because it it, uh It has allowed me to get out of my sling a little bit more often, which I think is pretty cool But that is the chair I bought it is not it is not a cheap chair.  I it's it's expensive, but boy, do I like it That's my little uh side note on chairs Hey, Tom regards the pf sensor grade 2.6. It says 2.6 to 2.7 Is it advisable to remove additional packages before the upgrade? I would say yes There's no harm in doing it because the package settings are all saved and I think it's a Step in the right direction to avoiding problems always have a backup no matter what but if you run into especially because from 2.6 to 2.7 There's a big jump in not just the version of bsd, but also the version of php from 7 to 8 something and the new version in php means If you have some of these applications and there's some dependencies on there They may have a problem doing that So I would definitely recommend removing it and by the way the default npf sense unless you change this Is when you remove a package all the settings are still saved for that package So when you reinstall the package all the settings come back so other than the Tediousness of uninstalling and really installing packages you're it's not too painful versus how hard is it to reload? Hey, how's it going? I'm doing well because I've uh with the new chair. I have movement of my both hands now This was the biggest thing so as long as I don't put weight on this hand Or arm so it doesn't pull down on my class So I'm kind of leaning this way to make sure I'm always supporting it Because I can take it out of the sling. It lets me type a whole lot better Oh, no big deal things come up. It was really early in the morning for you So I was uh, I'm fine if you want to reschedule not everybody's a morning person like I am Your back has decided the choice. Yes Yeah, my last chair, um That lasted I had um Herman Miller Aeron I probably had that chair for 13 years before it just got goofed up On my usg-4 router having sfp help because the cop report got a lightning surge. Well, that's That's not good Do you think frequent scheduled bad block runs on ext45 rate are enough for my home use or should I be converted to zfs rate? The array would be syncing up to additional ext4. I really like zfs the way it handles it I just feel way way way more confident with zfs handling rate Now synology because I've actually talked to engineers at synology They use butterfs and combined with uh, their own rate system that does its own checking I feel pretty confident in the rate system. Synology uses I really It that's actually a direct experience because we've got so many synologies deployed and we haven't had a problem managing rage yourself is a little bit harder, so Um, it depends on how you set it up But I zfs all the way is my preference for just absolute like rock solid reliability Do you prefer saster stated for backup storage and true dance and enterprise environments? I mean enterprise systems are all gonna be uh sass and you know much higher end for the enterprise We're not really using consumer stuff in the enterprise market. Um When we have clients with mission critical stuff we use mission critical hardware It's a lot more expensive, but you know, that's what it comes down to is That reliability you need Too much noise going on in the background. There we go Oh, I figured you overslept or woke up and go, uh, not today So no worries my friend Oh, yes. Well the Herman Miller Aeron chair, uh, is like a mesh one. So I washed it several times It's not it doesn't have fabric on it. It's a mesh that you can wash Zfs or death. I don't know if I go that far, but I have been called a cult leader of zfs and I'm okay with that Couple months ago. I've created pf sense plus from ce and since then the package manager has been empty Uh, have you run into this before? Yes, if you go on their forums, you'll find that exact problem I can't remember the commands you run, but It's a there's something it's like a broken package That you can run from the command line to clear the old packages and force it to update I don't remember the command off the top of my head, but if you search that you'll find in their forums I think there's a few reddit posts with the same thing and an answer on there What build of the ui network controller? Are you running? Um Whatever the latest is Let's look I keep it very I keep my unify system up to date. So let's look here and share this tab Uh, seven four one six two. I think that's the latest. So let's look at uh, unify Find there. Oh man Software downloads. Where is their version? It's on here somewhere Manner site. Oh, this is the past releases. There we go So one six two that appears to be the latest one from July fifth All hell zfs cow. Yes It's a cult with integrity Do you know any fosco iss central management? No, I do not Right below and yeah on the front page A lot of people are saying exos makes a lot more noise than ironwall pro But uh, many also say they do not I trust me I You know, I never paid like for the big systems full of drives. I never pay attention to the noise They're usually in server cabinets and the fan noise in the server cabinet far exceeds whatever the hard drives are doing I mean, maybe if you're chattering away at something, but uh for the most part I'm not really, um noticing any of the drive noise You know the picture of the picture of one of them show bigger what drives are in there Somewhere there might be a picture of this Or not Man, we go through a lot of systems Do you remember how many drives? Oh, I have a picture of the not the drives. I think this system here These were I think these were exos drives. Can I I see the green on the side of her exos I mean, I I could hear these being a little bit louder When I was setting it up without the lid on but once I put the lid on I didn't really You know, uh I don't know. I didn't really see an issue I tried to convince my uncle who watches you to take cfs box replace my wd cloud boxes Hence my exe four acres links would answer awesome. Cool More for home nas like snell gds ex exos is often cheaper. Okay I've used proxmox for less than a year Uh rocket for mvme Anyone had windows vm that didn't move files around or anything, but the disk usage would degrade too fast Not a problem. I've run into yeah, there's There is this issue that uh, he brought up here consumer great drives to great faster if you run them in a server with lots of small Log writes and always on conditions will degrade them faster yeah the Enterprise ones have more wear leveling options Then you'll find in consumer, but I I've been impressed with how well a lot of these drives do hold up Over time even even the consumer ones the The thought that they're going to die soon has finally kind of gone away because it seems like a lot of people really like to Um Harp on it like they're just going to die. They just won't last and I've got tons of these consumer drives That we've set up that seem to just keep working despite us doing a lot of reads and writes on these so Let's go update this Senior is an update and while I'm logged in over here I figured hey, why not people like to ask about technologies If you're doing something like zfs and it's the Zill drive. Yeah, you probably want to run that in a mirror if it's a read cache on zfs. It doesn't really matter Because if you lose your read cache, it just pulls back from the main vdobs. So it's much less of a big deal um in that circumstance One of the downsides is using astrology rs 243 with a seagate with the seagate 22 terabyte drives biggest supported drives um The problem is and they usually update this the when the way the manufacturers work is They'll list that they support at the time of release the biggest drive that's available then So going from an 18 terabyte to a 22 terabyte I mean if the 22 terabyte were not made And they have not been tested They may not work in astrology until there's an update and because sonology has software updates If there's an update that fixes it then they'll update the compatibility list So it may support it there may be an update that supports it But when a drive first comes out the companies aren't in a hurry to hurry up and validate their hardware with it right away Not well at least say it's validated. They start testing right away and then they later will validate. Oh, yeah This works back to moving over here. Here we go I'm cool. It's all up to date. Is there any any more updates? DSM is up to date I think the only thing this is running. I don't know what it's running right now This is one of our lab systems. Oh, it's got a bunch of backups of our uh people at the office We'll see what we use this for Travis Brett miles Now some of these are old because they've disconnected them Ooh, Kyle needs an update. Well, it's because I updated this so now they need updates I want to try um some macOS backup on this. I'm getting curious about that because Because someone I was gonna post this I know someone will say something about it let's see But let me uh Share this tab instead So we had a mac book here at my office and I um I went ahead and switched to it And I I kind of like it a lot a lot more than I expected to now I don't care for macOS I just like the device and all they use it for is when I'm not at my main computer here when I'm upstairs it's like I just need something to reply to slack messages emails read the news Send more emails and ssh into things occasionally that Fits the bill very very well with the macbook air and I'm not gonna lie. It's an older m1 But man does that I can't find a good pc equivalent to the macbook air m1 in terms of battery life and screen quality The screen is really better than I expected. The sound is good. I'm just like, uh You know, I'm not big on the macOS and I don't the shortcuts I'm getting there, but they're because the keyboard is different I'm learning some of the different shortcuts for things, but it's not been too hard to do It's not like they're not documented and the os seems to work well enough. So it's uh, it's not been bad It's been better than I expected Can you make a video review of portainer? Uh, maybe at one point I will I started to and then I stopped and there's other people who have some really good reviews of it I'm sure remember who does is it techno tim? The the people who do have reviews have done such a good job I I didn't feel like I could offer any more insight than their video If you're asking for a recommendation of whether or not to use portainer I give it a thumbs up, but I don't know that I can offer any more Insight than some of the other videos. I've seen on it With consumer nas like sonology and qnap Um, they will be very conservative about the hardware to support it because enables them to provide full support They can it's rarely to do with it won't work. Yeah Yeah, and this is something I I'm hoping We see in the pc world get caught up with is something that matches the battery life So I set the laptop up on Monday and I plugged it in today Because the battery after oh, I mean, I'm only using it really in the evening to send my emails But just sitting on my desk I'm just like, yeah open it up send some emails will set on my table upstairs And I'm just sitting there in the kitchen typing away and I'm just like, yeah The battery is like only gone down one more percent and another percent the battery life on it is absolutely insane Uh compared to some of the other devices I've used and and it still feels snappy. It doesn't feel sluggish So I've been pretty impressed with it. I I I feel weird. So I've always dumped on mac and I I'm definitely Um, not an apple fanboy, but I was like, yeah, I might have kind of switched to the I'm my Even jay from learning x tv. He's definitely someone who's in the mac side He likes the mac a lot and he kind of talked me into you should probably give it a try Because we had one we weren't using at the office I gave it a try and i'm not gonna lie. I liked it more than I expected And I went in there not wanting to like it Oh man, let's start closing tabs here's too many things open Hey, look, there's my portainer system If you haven't looked at portainer if anyone's looking at something just kind of Play around with here. Let me log into it Well, you know what I got in right now. We don't run any product nothing production isn't it Well, no, I'll kind of take that back. I guess I could consider um my Pull it up here Uptime kuma I guess this is production it monitors all my stuff We got to expand so it monitors the cnwr stuff as well But I love uptime kuma it's just awesome and It lets me know and sends me notices if any of these things go down It runs on a raspberry pi, but it's managed on portainer Can portainer automatically back up your doctor containers? No, that's not how you would use portainer Because it's not about Backing them up for example if you have something in here But in fact, I I sure I forgot I have chasm running inside of here um If you set something up in here you want to point your data where it belongs and then you Back it up.  It's the Data storage that you set up that you attach those docker images to I have backbook bear m1 and the one thing that puts me off for keyboard shortcuts and a macOS They are so different than windows or linux. Yeah, that's the one thing that's I mean, I'm figuring it out from muscle memory, but my keys go in different places on those and It's not end of the world, but it's definitely annoying Are the effects your features are useful is the question if you're if you're going to do full xcp ng I would say yes because with the free version you don't get backups I personally like to have all the backups in there. So I say yes compile it for the home lab It's it works really well, but if you were going, well, I don't care about backups then That's that's probably the biggest difference is the backups on there I have no idea about docker Um, if you typed in how to get started with docker and youtube, there's definitely plenty of You know people who have videos on the basics of how to get started I only have a couple of videos not where I talk about docker specifically but I talk about using docker for something along the lines of like a Gray log for example, I have a docker video on Yep, in theory if you reinstall a container and point the data at the container and effectively restore to where it was Yes, that is the beauty of docker Inters a ton of people have videos on it is the program is separated from your data when you set it up properly And that means you can just blow away the program anytime you want and grab the new version and reattach it to the data and You're up and running and then you're only ever worried about your data What's your electricity rate here in San Diego?  Uh, running old less efficient home lab is so expensive um great again I have no idea right now. I did know because I looked this up before Looks like ours is 19 cents a kilowatt So, yeah, we're wow if you're all the way there. Yeah, you're at uh, 36 2.80 ours is only According to the quick lookup I did and that sounds about right. It's somewhere around like 13 cents. Michigan has pretty cheap power good thing about switching from proxmox to thinking about switching I like the integrated backups you get that's something I just mentioned where You have All these backup options. I well, let me switch over to my main one So being able to do this like let's say we wanted to take a snapshot right now Um, the last one was from four days ago for the backup and it's set to be automated But we can just force it to do it right now Let's hit this and it's going to go through and run the backup on this particular system So that's nice the um The way it handles Jobs the way it handles many users inside of here are all just things I like the plugins are kind of cool I don't use all of them. I'm just using like the uh load balance I'm not even using load balance right now. It has really good net box integration Uh performance statistics performance statistics, uh soft certified networking controller. That one's kind of neat I've talked a little bit about that. I don't think I've ever done a full video on it I don't I've played with it in the lab. I didn't really have it deployed right now anywhere I don't know. I just overall like the way xcp ng works the way it handles storage Uh, to me, it's just a very smooth system, but I don't have any problem with proxmox. It's just not what I use High electricity costs for the reason I got rid of 10 years plus equipment replaced with modern more performant and more power Fish and hardware. Yeah, that's a huge issue Will I be at LTX next year? Yes. I very much plan to be Yeah, proxmox has integrated basic backups. Uh, you can get really advanced with the backup. So if we look at the Make sure I'm the right one the backups are Very granular very detailed You can have many deltas folds mix and match so if I can restore them I can migrate these to anywhere I want. So here's all the snapshots of the backups I have for this particular vm And if I wanted to restore it somewhere else, it's pretty easy. Matter of fact, I think I got a new one in here for devian Do I guess I do cool But here's my uh, another devian lab. I just built if we want to restore it We can just say yeah, let's go ahead and throw this version. We're doing want to throw it These are completely different storage repositories. I can just grab one of them and say hey Let's restore it to their journey to the new mac on it like to me It's very smooth and how I can duplicate replicate Systems and it's just it just works. I can migrate them between all the hosts I have So like right here's my devian 12 lab. Let's go ahead and fire it up real quick I don't know. I just really like the interface like it's very fluid to me and and how to use it You're doing vms instead of containers. Yes Special rate from dte at this time of day takes that point 19 up by several percent Yeah, there's some some variations back and forth on it. Um They have like a split rate. Well, I'm in I'm in the detroit dte market And if you google that they have a whole explainer of the different rates Uh, does it support zfs? Yes, it does So now this is booted up and uh, let's see if we wanted to make some changes real quick to it so eight No upgrades cool Let's stop We'll do a backup of it real quick here Oh, I don't have the backup set up here. Hold on the backup Ha, this is kind of an interesting thing I have a lab system and I have a production system and I can go back and forth between any one of them There we go The backups attached to this one here. Yeah, this is the interesting thing about it is you can actually have this One to many relationship Between each of them, but it just it works so well Like it's just smooth to be able to go through all these systems and move around like this Uh, does it have automated an api you can it doesn't just have that you can even integrate terraform if you want um I don't do this so don't ask me to do a video on it because I just don't use terraform But there's some explainers in their forums if you google um that talk about using terraform with it So yes, it's api driven So there's apis that you can use to create move and manipulate the vms and you can get fancy with things like terraform There's a few posts on it Their forums are great, by the way, I go here visit and answer questions. So uh, definitely check out their forums Let's see Okay, they have some articles on it too. So not just forums. Here's some of the articles and how to set it up So terraform is a pretty neat way to do that if you're into doing that Do you have any vm naming do you start using star consolation names, etc? Um It's much dumber than that How about uh, where's that here? So if we look at the host themselves We have one called rise in one rise in two And rise in the lab art lab art is the name of our lab server Um, they're not very clever named then the vms. I mean We we have gray log. We know you got to have a log bit warden has a lock icon Um invoice dingy has a dollar sign I got a king of room a jump box because you know it's a jump box So as I said, um much much simpler Oh, let's see just shipped sg 2100 from neck gate two out to a customer as my son and saw a tail scale package Hey, it works great with that I do recommend that Oh, I got more notices to me mute all those all right speaking in net box uh Had another homeland friend recommend that box for me recently net box is pretty cool Uh, I don't use it right now, but it's been something like I've been on my to-do list to get set up I just never got around to it yet Oh, yeah, I mean emojis if you if you're not using emojis in your vm names. I mean come on Azabax has some eyeballs and wiki has got the little books on it. I mean That's my unify controller Which by the way my unify controller here was me logging into it to look at something But for the most part it doesn't do much it just kind of chills out not doing much at all because uh Yeah, it doesn't take even running all the sites we run on here. I mean, there's a pretty steady amount of network connectivity There's a lot of little packets coming back and forth, but that's about it Yeah, it's kind of neat. You can put images of your server racks and everything else in there um, it's kind of neat and there's a lot of uh, Plug-in the the plug-in support for xcp and g so as you build your vms You can have net box uh controlling the inventory all of it. So I don't think you can do I I've never tried doing emojis and dns My assumption is you can't but I don't know And if you try what will break I don't know Uh pool of zen is what I call the resource pool as well. So if you look at the pools It's rise and lavert pool and pool of zen zen is our this is a production one Oh, let's see. What else are we going to talk about? Uh, what is the unify controller running on? Um, I think you're referring to the distro Looks like it's oh, it's a buntu server I forgot which one it runs on debbie and it runs on a buntu. I built it on a buntu for Reasons, I don't remember what those reasons were But it's it's a buntu server and it works ain't broke. Don't fix it Like there's reasons to dislike the snap controversy around a buntu. Um, but I'm not running into that So it's yeah It's one of those just worked I wonder if net data could be installed on xcp ng host. Well, yes but uh, one issue with that is I do have net data on the host but The problem is it's a slight it's not the newest version And that's because of the way they do the updates. They're, um, behind So because the updates are behind the you can have net data It's actually a feature that they've got built in. It just is always going to be a little bit behind That's all it's not going to be the latest version. I think you probably could install the latest version It would probably work fine. I haven't tested that in a while Um, but you're in lux. I think I can test that today Maybe it's something I'll play with can you run xo a and ha mode behind ha proxy for high availability failover and seamless upgrades um, sure I imagine you could I don't see well, I don't know. I never tried I said I'll have a reason to um, you can stop zen orchestra And it doesn't stop anything but the backups that it's doing generally what I do is When I'm moving around, uh zen orchestra, which where does it live right now? Lab there we go. Where does this one? Where's the disc of this one? This one's on local storage We can migrate the disc so let's migrate the disc to a shared storage This is make sure I'm moving right one. Yeah xo community lab. So we'll do it live We're gonna live migrate the storage over here to a shared environment So while that's moving Let me close all these crazy tabs I have open So I'll get lost And let's answer someone else's question here while I'm waiting for that to move So we have our little Amo 60 here and we're going to ssh into it and we're going to kick off net data Let's see if net data works on this All right, I'm trying to figure out what's the fastest way to share my screen How long is this task? This task has got three minutes. Can we get net data loaded in three minutes on another system? Let's find out Which network component failed the most in large setups? Uh hard drives always hard drives Any any large set hard drives and power supplies. That's what fails Um and people misconfiguring things The failures that are from misconfigurations are definitely going to be the most common of them all all right So we stop present share screen Window Share all right Got a little bit bigger find the net data script install net data They have like a kickoff script. We're just going to run the kickoff script. Where is that script at? Oh, it wants me to add it as a node. I don't want to add a node I just want the install script There it is I think this will work. Let's just paste it in and find out Doing it live Okay, so I guess it doesn't want to work on here failed failed So, yeah, I guess it doesn't I mean, I'm sure I could troubleshoot and figure this out attempting to static build Net data kickstart didn't work cannot can it sort of appear common no common encryption outcomes So hold on. Do I have network access? So I have like general network access strange Oh, well Uh I can solve theirs. It's just not going to be the same. It's going to be older so That works Actually, so if that works Hold on But if we kick it off again, will it fix it? Yes Failed. Okay Yeah, I tried All right, let's go back over to the other thing I was talking about so remove that stop share share screen Back to the question of how we handle that so the now that this is on shared storage, which is going to be The lab so currently it's on the rise in two system When we're doing maintenance you maintain high availability of it if you will Is I can just take this system and just migrate it back and forth so we can just um Migrate from rise it's on rise in two, so let's take it over to rise in one hit okay And it's going to migrate over to the other system See how long it takes to do so 9 8 12 um What was this about 12 seconds? Okay, maybe 12 seconds. So within 12 seconds I can migrate it over to another system So if I'm doing maintenance on one of the servers, this is how I can maintain zen orchestra up and running while I maintain the servers That's generally my solution to it just move it where I need it move it off the system I'm servicing and into another and with some of our clients to have larger Resource pools if they got we have clients got like 25 really high-end systems in a resource pool There's always some system. I can shuffle everything to to take down and maintain systems You can even use the rolling update feature to update your host and tell it to Migrate all the VMs shuffle them all around there's strategies You can set up for doing that if you have some real high demand like you need to keep these systems up and running you can build out resiliency like that with the xcp and g and zen orchestra and this is fully all open source There's no license needed to make that functionality work Back at you from scotland awesome Well, I am going to is much fun as all this is I am going to wind this down because I probably have to go take my son and get him some food and It's usually pizza time about now. It's pushing 7 p.m. Here any last minute questions before I wind this down I've been kind of just bouncing all over the place for the last little while As I said in the beginning I have all the well share my net data stuff I do love net data. It is just I really like the UI and everything they have on there Uh, oh if the VM's in a cluster, how do you cold start a cluster? I'm gonna go Over here and there's a million ways to do this You can load an xo a wherever you want I can load it on my computer if I wanted to a matter of fact right now I've got it loaded on my true nas box So I can fire it up on my true nas point it at the backup repository and start Controlling it so it's not even it's like a bare metal restart is easy Can you run multiple instances of xo? Are there any benefits for redundancy? Just the redundancy if you want to you can run them but xo if xo stops the vm keeps running so for example Let's go over and open this So this is connected we'll go in settings servers So this is the server that's connected right here. So this is the mini am 0 6 0 the one I was playing with earlier today and If I disconnect or stop this instance of zen orcish or even disconnect from here So let's disconnect it. So now there's nothing showing here because there's nothing connected. We go back and enable it We go back over to the VMs those VMs are also running because they run on the host So if I restart stop Reboot my true nas server and my zen orcish stops where this instance of zen orcish is running doesn't really matter it just It the only thing I can't do is run any of the automation tools that are in zen orcish while it's restarting How do you keep your VMs up to date versus using portainer watch tower and docker? Um, I don't have any production docker stuff With the exception of gray log, which I update manually, but watch tower is definitely a way to do it Um, I just update them manually myself, but yeah, there's automation you can do for uh With your docker portainer will do I think the business version of portainer will do automation for that as well Hey, thank you very much for the donation now something else. I'll mention here That's worth noting if we go here to my lab. So if I pull up an instance of my zen orcish uh Lab So that's this one we go to settings Servers and we're going to connect This is actually across the vpn by the way So this is located at my office this particular instance you're looking at here It's connected to two different systems and at the same time This instance is local and connected to the same system. So we go back over here saying the servers This one's connected to that same ip address you can have multiple zen orchestra systems connected to a single host And it looks kind of interesting because if I were to go here and Let's see where let's go to the VMs So this is our debi and 12 demo Right here says debi and 12 demo. I'm on another instance completely and what i'm going to do on this instance is uh demo YouTube And it changes on this one. So the changes are always done to the host But zen orchestra is reading from the host. So you can have more than one instance of zen orchestra connected to the host but because it's real-time updating it'll actually um It'll it'll give you those Updates in real time on the other hosts that are connected to it Question any experience of open v switch actually multiple hosts across virtualized network uh, I don't use open v switch, but We have in our lab Switch to our lab system We have a bunch of lab networks set up and it's kind of the same where i've got 101 102 103 104 105 And what all of these are are the different vlands that we can uh, we have broke down matter of fact, let's display all of them So we have quite a few networks in here that we can attach to I don't really need open v switch because if I want Different things to communicate like we have lab 109 here What i'll do is I go to any one of these VMs and we'll go to the networking It's in lab, but then we can attach To one of these so I can put all of these on lab 106 So now i'm going to build something out with lab 106 and I can build that across all of you You don't really need open v switch to do any of that that you can do natively within xcpng because if you Assign all those different networks It's how I build out all my virtual lab stuff I it's one of my to-do lists to do a video on how that works So this it's really smooth. It makes my life really easy to do a matter of fact if I wanted to Go over here and we just put this one back at lab or I'll get confused So we'll put this one on lab Hey, we'll do it on this system here So if we go here to the network and I want to add a network I don't even have to restart or anything. I can just take this network here test The vlan entry so whatever the vlan is and that's it It create network All right, that network's created. We have this test network go back over to our vm's Take this one here network and just hit the pull down and I can Switch it There's my test network. There we go. We've now switched the network on this vm That's how easy it is to create a new network reattach it to a vm and be done with it So yeah, you I just said I'm not using open v-switch, but I don't need to use Open v-switch either to make that work. That all is native Inside of xcpng and if we want to get rid of it, I got to make sure no thing's using it. So actually Which one was it on? Now I've forgotten which network it was on. That's okay. There's a way to solve that too Solve that too Because I only have so many networks we go on here Pool wide a zero. No, let's look at the pool again Which one's connected? Probably that one All right, I'll fix that later a lot of big deal Open v-switch or vx sign would be used to create overlay l2 across l3 infrastructure Yeah, the um, you do have the ability to create vx lands in here plugins It is within Here I believe So you set up the stn controller and then from there when you build networks you go to the pool And then you have the ability to build a network Either gre or vx land. So there is Oh make sure on the right tab. There we go. You have the ability to gre or vx land encrypted So there is an option where you can build that out as a network For vx land that's built into the software to find network controller So if you needed to build those that's I'm not using them right now, but that is another option you have So hopefully that makes sense. Hopefully it's enough to get you interested in playing with xcp ng like I said I like it. It's a lot of fun But I'm gonna leave I got stuff to do and I got some pizza that I'm sure my son He wanted some pizza. He said so that is on my to-do list Thank you all for joining in loved hearing from all of you love chat with everyone It's definitely not a fun. Thank you for those who donated it is greatly appreciated It does go a lot way long way support channel and I will see you next time and in the forums Ping me at forums.loren systems.com easy sweet to have a more engaging discussion about this and other topics on my channel. Thanks


You know okay part two of the big blizzard The first snowstorm of 2015 this is northeastern, New Jersey Make a life 21 janes p. Madonna speaking Let's take a look out here and see if we get a decent image Oh boy Still coming down It is nighttime, so I'm not sure how good this video is going to be but windy out here and it is freezing All right That's about all I could take it is cold Good night everyone


It's pretty easy to critique other people's data visualizations. You didn't have to make it, right? You didn't have to deal with the constraints and restrictions that the developer of that visual had to make. Well, I think I've perhaps been leading you down a path of thinking that there is an ideal way or perfect way of visualizing relative abundance data for microbial communities. In the last episode, I showed you my preferred approach. I didn't mean that it was perfect, but it's my preference. It's what we call a jitter plot or a strip chart, where we can see each individual point for a categorical variable. Now, the downside of that, as I showed in the last episode, was that if you have hundreds of points, then it just looks like a big blob of points. And it doesn't really tell you everything that you might want about your data. Well, today, we're going to add some more summary statistics to our plot, perhaps get rid of those points, and see if we don't come up with a better visual. Hey, folks, I'm Pat Schloss, and this is Code Club. As we've been marching through recent episodes looking at a variety of approaches of visualizing relative abundance data, there have been a few themes that I've come back to time and again, as I've tried to evaluate my data visuals. So we've talked about things like, is it easy to discriminate between our different taxa? So for example, with the stacked bar chart, as you add more and more taxa, the discrimination between your different colors in your color palette become harder and harder to make. Is it possible to make comparisons across different treatment groups? So if we have one taxa that we want to compare across different treatments or different groups of, say, patients, can we easily make that? And so we talked about the problem of stacked bar charts again, is that perhaps you can do that with a taxa on at the bottom, or at the top if you're, you know, thoughtful in how you design your visual. But those ones in the middle are harder to compare. And so that's why we talked about bar plots. So we put every taxa across the x-axis, and that way we have a common baseline on the y-axis to make our comparisons. Another theme that we've talked about is how difficult is it to see the amount of variation in the data? Well, in the last episode, we showed all the points. And that was helpful to some degree, because we could see all the points, we could see the variation in the data. Whereas if we look at something like a pie chart or stacked bar chart, bar plot or the heat map, we're showing the average and we don't show the amount of variation in the data. But that strip chart really did show us the amount of variation across all the individuals within each of our disease status groups. The fourth consideration is how difficult is it to see the end or the number of subjects or samples that you have in each grouping. Now, we did that, we showed all of our points in the last episode for that jitter plot or strip chart, whatever you want to call it. But you get to a point where there's so much data that is really difficult to see the distribution of the data, right? That our points kind of glom onto each other and make this looks like blob of data. And so it's hard to see what's going on. Sure, you can see the distribution, sure, you can indicate the median with, you know, that crossbar. But there's just too much data. So there are tradeoffs, right? And so, like I said, there is no perfect way to visualize the data that might get all four of those aspects right when visualizing relative abundance data. The other thing to consider is that we perhaps want to look at a lot of taxa. If we're looking at the phylum level, we might have four phyla and an other category. But say we want to go to the genus level or the O2 level, we might have 20 taxa that we want to represent.  So again, there are tradeoffs, there are constraints. And so in today's episode, what I want to look at is perhaps, how can we add more summary information to the data, so that we don't have to show all of the data, all of those points, and that, you know, we'll tell our readers, hey, we got a lot of data. We're not, we're not showing you summary statistics based on three values. We're showing you summary statistics based on 100 values, right? And I think that's far more compelling. And hopefully, you know, the reader is just going to have to trust us that we're not being loose with our statistics. Yeah, I mean, if you're, if you're showing a box and whisker plot and you've got three points, I mean, what's the point, right? Anyway, so that's what we're going to dig in today. Let's go ahead over to our studio and we'll see if we can't get this going. As always, if you want the code that I'm starting with, down below in the description is a link to a blog post where you can get this code that I'm working with today. Also across the top, there is a link to another video episode where you can see how I installed our studio, got the data, got the packages all installed, and you'll be right where I am and then ready to press play and follow along with me, which really is the best way to learn this material.  You really got to engage the material and practice it with yourself, practice it with what I'm doing. And then the pro move would be to move it and work with it on your own data. That would be so much more powerful than just sitting back and watching it and you'll learn so much. And in the end, hey, you'll have a plot like mine, but for your data and isn't that a win? All right, so I'm not going to go through everything in this code, but basically what we're doing is we're reading in O2 data, taxonomy data, metadata, throwing it all together, and then calculating relative abundances. And as I have here, we're looking at it at the phylum level. Then we're also pooling together any taxa that fall below a 3% threshold for any of the different disease status groups. So if the relative abundance is above 3%, for a taxon in any of the three disease status groups, we're going to keep it in the final output. This code chunk here from line 61 on down, goes ahead and builds a jitter plot, strip chart, whatever you want to call it, using geom jitter, and then uses stats summary to put a bar across each of the clouds, indicating where the median is. I'm going to go ahead and run all this and show you where we're starting. Again, we've got our jitter plot here of formicides, bactyroidettis, proteobacteria, rucomycrobia, and that pooled category of other for three disease status groups, people who are healthy, people who have diarrhea and are C. difficile negative, and people who have diarrhea, but are C. difficile positive. And again, those horizontal black lines indicate the median of the distribution of all the points. So the first thing I'd like to do with this figure is go ahead and convert it from a jitter plot to a box and whisker plot. I'll go ahead and comment out my geom jitter and stats summary lines, because I might want to reuse that code later on. I might want to add a jitter plot on top of the box and whisker plot. We'll see. It's always best to comment things out and then delete them later than delete them now and wonder, gee, I wish I still had that code. Anyway, so we'll do geom box plot. And let's start there and add the plus sign. This is the box and whisker plot version of our jitter plot. You'll notice the solid line in the middle of these rectangles. I guess it's not the middle, but in the midst of the rectangle is the median. The top and bottom edge of the rectangle represent the 75th and 25th percentiles. That's the intra-cortile range. The whisker extends one and a half times the intra-cortile range, the IQR. And so we then have these extra points at the top and for bactoid eddies over here below the whiskers indicating extreme values. Something that you may have noticed or remembered from looking at the jitter plot was that there are actually a handful of points up here around, you know, 95, 100 percent for the fremicides and proteobacteria. Those are all kind of getting collapsed into the same x-axis coordinate. And so this point actually represents many more points than what we're seeing here. And so with that in mind, what I think I'd like to do is go back, remove these outlier points and overlay on top of my box plot, my jitter plot. So again, we'll come back up to our ggplot and instead of fill, I'll do color. So that will set the border color. I'm going to leave my geombox plot. Let's get geomjitter back in the game. Instead of pch21, I'll use 19. I no longer need the stroke or the size. Those are things we did to kind of game the system, if you will. And if we look at scale fill manual, we want scale color manual. And let's just double check that there's nothing else we might want to change. And I think that all looks pretty good. So again, this is our box and whisker plot with the jitter plot incorporated as well. There's a couple things I want you to notice. First of all, we still have our outliers from our box and whisker plot. So here, you can kind of see this blue point. It looks a little oblong, right? So there's a point there that is the outlier from the box plot. And there's a point there that's there from the jitter plot. And you can kind of see that better, maybe up here at the top of this diarrhea-cetaph negative proteobacteria column. So we need to turn off the outliers. The other thing I kind of noticed is that if again, if I look at this proteobacteria triplet of three columns, that the blue box seems to do a pretty good job of enveloping the cloud of points. But the red seems to be shifted to the left, just a smidge, and the gray to the left, or to the right, or whatever, just a smidge. So I think I need to play with my positioning of either the jitter plot or the box and whisker plot. First, we'll come back up to our geombox plot, and we'll do outlier.shape equals na. And that will get rid of the outlier. The other thing that I'll do then is position equals position dodge. And I will then give it width 0.8. And so now I no longer have those extra outlier points from the box and whisker plot. And it does appear that that gray box is better centered on the cloud and the same for the red. So that all looks pretty good. So I think this looks pretty reasonable. One thing that I kind of feel like is that sometimes the box and the median line kind of gets lost in the data. So if you look at like the firmicities on the far left side here for the gray, that it gets kind of hard to see where the box and whisker are for the gray, because there's so many points there, right? Certainly if my jitter were wider, you might not even be able to see any of the gray box. So that's a that's a challenge, right?  And I don't know that we really need to show all of the individual data points, we could do different things like changing the alpha of the points, making the points smaller. But in the end, if we make things smaller or make them more transparent, then they're harder to see. So what are we really gaining by having all those points? Before we totally ditch the idea of the jitter plot, let's go ahead and convert this to look at the genus level to see what this looks like when we have a lot more data, because I think that might also further convince us that there's just too much data in the jitter plot for when we have a large number of samples, I will come back up to the top of my code here. And you'll recall that I have this filter on level phylum, let's do genus, and we'll run it and see what things look like. And again, what we've seen before is that the names all kind of run into each other. And what you also notice, of course, is that I will, you know, for these other classes from about the fifth set to the right, you can't even see the box and whisker for any of the taxa. And for most of these on the left, it's really hard to see those as well. Let's go ahead and flip our x and y coordinates. So I'll make tax on y relative abundance on x. And then I'm going to come back through and make sure that I update everything. So this should be scale x continuous. You know, I don't even know why I have scale x continuous in here. We'll do y for null and x for relative abundance. And then my axis text, x needs to be y. And I think that all looks good. So this looks like a bit of a mess. I think you can get a sense of what's going on the data enough to know kind of the strengths and weaknesses of this approach. Again, because we have so many points, it's really difficult to see the boxes and boxes whiskers the median lines of the box plot along with our points. Things just get lost in the cloud of points because we have so much data. Maybe this would work better if we had say 10 to 20 samples in each of the taxonomic groups. But as it is, I think we just have way too much data to be showing this way. We might do a few things again, we might make the figure longer than wide. That might give us more separation. We could also perhaps make the box and whiskers like black or a different shade of gray, blue and red. But ultimately, you know, I think I think there's just going to be so much going on in the figure that that's not that's not what I want to do. You might give it a shot and decide you like it. But for my aesthetic purposes, that's not really what I want to do. So I think what we'll do is maybe step back from the box plot and let's look at incorporating some of the stat summary functionality to see if we can replace kind of this mess of data to make it a little bit more of a cleaner depiction of the relative abundances. As we build that out, I'm going to come back up and recreate my plot at the phylum level. So let's come back up to our GMs. Again, one of the things that I really like about organizing my code by putting all my GMs together is that if I want to go change a GM or add in a GM or take out a GM, they're all in the same place. And that just makes it nice to have my code organized. So I always know where the different parts of the plot are. I encourage you to do the same. All right. So I had GM box plot. I'm going to go ahead and remove that for now. I'm going to uncomment stat dot summary. And you'll recall that we used fun median with GM crossbar. So the crossbar GM is the box with the median line. Let's go ahead and replace fun with fun dot data. And I will do median underscore high low. And so median high low is a function that returns the median, as well as the upper and lower confidence interval on our data. And again, GM is that the box of the box and whisker plot. And here we go. We have our boxes. But what you'll notice is that the boxes are much longer than what we had with the box and whisker plot. Something I'm curious about is what is the confidence interval that median high low is using? If I do question mark median high low, because that is a function that returns the median, as well as the Y min and Y max, I learn over here in my help that these are wrappers around functions from the H MISC package. And so it is designed to make it easier to work with stat summary. So we can see the H MISC documentation for more details. So we're using median high low, median underscore high low as a wrapper as a replacement for S median period high low. So we'll click on this. And if we come down and we look at S median high low, we see that the confidence interval that it appears to be using is 0.95. Indeed, if I look back at my figure, that makes a lot of sense that 95% of the data is within those rectangles. So I wonder how do I change that confidence interval? I'm going to go back to stat underscore summary in my help. And again, looking down through the usage description here for stats summary, I see these various fun arguments. And I see a fun args, which allows me to give it a set of arguments to go into the function. And if I come down somewhere here, optional additional arguments to be passed onto the functions. So let's go ahead and try that out with with our stats summary, where we can do fun dot args equals let me put this on a separate line list as a function. And then I will do conf dot int equals 0.5, add that comma, great, we see now that by using that fun dot args argument, we can change the confidence interval on the median high low function. Let's try a different geome. Perhaps we could try geome point range. And so here we've got I see a line. But it's hard to see anything else. So I'm going to go ahead and turn off the geome jitter and see if we can't get a better looking plot. Wow, that cleans things up a bit, right? So now we see that we have our points indicating the median, as well as a line indicating the 50th percentile. And so I think this looks a lot cleaner than what we had previously. I am getting an argument that it doesn't know what to do with the parameter width. And that again, makes sense because we don't typically think about using a width with a dot plot or line plot. I'm also going to turn off that size. I'm curious what happens if we turn off position if it naturally dodges, or if it puts things right on top of each other. Yeah, so it puts those right on top of each other. Let's go ahead and turn back on the dodge. Yep, so that dodge got those points separated apart, which looks good. I noticed we also lost our legend along the way. So back up here in stat summary I had show legend equals false. Because we got rid of geome jitter, which was providing the data for the legend, we need to keep that. So we'll go ahead and re insert that. I'm also going to change the position dodge to be say width equals point four. And that brings those in a little bit tighter to give perhaps more separation between the different taxonomic groups. And we see, of course, that we've got our legend back in the upper right corner of our plot. Let's come back and now look at the genus level. Again, I will change my level from phylum to genus. So again, this is still a bit of a mess with the ordering and the position of the legend and all that. Again, we've removed the jittered points to give us a cleaner figure. Yeah, we're not showing all the data, but we're showing the 50th percentile, right? So 50% of our data falls within those lines. We could come back and let's look at, you know, let's look at the 95th percentile and let's see what that looks like. And that gives us really wide span and variation in our data. And for some of these things like chronobacter focaliocola interococcus vectorities, the range is so wide that I don't think it's really meaningful. So I'm content to stick with the 50th percentile. Something I've noticed in previous episodes with the genus level is that a lot of our data are falling into that other category. So like the median between 20 and 30% of our data is falling into that other category. So let's go ahead and change our threshold for pooling from 3% to 1%. I'm also going to change the dimensions of my outputted figure to be a height of let's say seven. And maybe I'll make it a little bit more narrow of a width of five. Great, we've got a lot more genera depicted here. One of the things I'm really enamored with with this code is that I can very quickly pivot between phylum, genus, different pooling levels, different numbers of taxa without my whole figure just kind of blowing up. I think that's just such a slick thing about ggplot and why it's so nice to work in that environment. Anyway, one of the things I'm also noticing is that from Akramanthia back on up to this unclassified bacteria pool that I can't really see any difference between those different groups. I know because I set the threshold that one of the three disease status groups is greater than 1%, but I can't really see that difference. Sure, maybe I can for this like Agathobacter you know, Pheasant or Roseberry, but I can't really see it. Something we might think about doing in a future episode is seeing how we can put the relative abundance on a log scale. That will introduce other complications, but we'll deal with that in another episode. So maybe what I'll do is go ahead and put this back to 3% because again, I can't see the difference when I go down to that 1% threshold. The other thing I'll do is flip the order of my taxa as well as my disease status groups. So first things first, we'll come back up and we'll change this pool from 1% to 3%. And then up here, my disease status groups, I'll change the order, put in case first and non-diarrheal control last. Because of the way the factoring works in the plot, it actually turns out to be the opposite. Again, let's not think too deeply about it. We want things to look right. And then down here where we define our taxa as a factor, we reorder by the mean relative abundance across all three disease status groups in a descending order. So I'm going to set that to be false so it's in a ascending order. So it looks a lot better I think. I'm noticing that my legend is in the way and also that some of the points in the point range, the dodge isn't enough. So I'm going to move the legend and increase the dodge width. So again, we did that dodge width up here in stat summary. So let's give that 0.5. And then our legend position is currently in that upright corner. I think the exposition of 0.8 is good. Let's go down to 0.6. So we've got the legend to a good position, but I'm going to change the dodge width just a little bit. You all if you've watched this before know that I am really good at puttering with things and just tweaking and tweaking and tweaking. So I think this looks pretty nice. I've got my genera across the y-axis again and then across the x-axis, my relative abundances. I've got my points to indicate the median as well as the range to indicate the confidence interval. Of course, in a caption, I would need to indicate the n for each of the three disease status groups as well as what that line range represents. I could even if I wanted, go ahead and insert the n into this legend here. I guess if you're looking at this at first glance, I'm really hoping that you'll trust me. You'll trust me that I'm not trying to pull a fast one on you in terms of what I'm showing in the data. And so I'm more content to leave kind of the nitty gritty of the details down in that figure caption at the bottom where we put those things for our scientific papers. So otherwise, I think this looks pretty good. I'm happy with the way it looks. Let me know down below in the comments if there's anything you would change. Again, it's a sacrifice, right? We're getting rid of that jittered data, but it's just cleaner. It's easier to see what's going on. And we are relying on our audience to trust us a little bit in what we're showing them. I think sometimes we worry so much about showing all the data and making things as transparent as we can that we lose something in the storytelling of what we're trying to say with our data. Again, what I'm trying to say with this type of figure is that there are individual populations of bacteria that are differentially represented between my three disease status groups. So healthy people tend to have a lot more bacteriities than people with diarrhea. People with diarrhea tend to have more enterococcus than people that are healthy and so forth. So another thing that we all know is that this is kind of me telling a story visually or me looking at the plot and making inferences. I haven't run any statistical tests to tell you that any of that's actually statistically true. So in a future episode, we'll come back and we will identify which of these comparisons is statistically significant. And maybe we'll even use that information to get rid of more taxa so that we're only looking at the comparisons that are statistically significant. So anyway, that's for a future episode. For now, I'm happy with the way this looks. Again, let me know down below in the comments what you think is getting rid of the jittered data. Too much of a sacrifice for you or are you cool with that? I think because we have many taxa and we have these three groups and we have so many points that those clouds of points just get kind of smushed together. And also if you're to plot on top of that like a box plot, you can't see the box plot because there's so many points again. There's just so much going on. So again, I know it's a sacrifice and I'm trying to talk myself into this if you can't tell. But I think this is the superior way to show that this type of data for again, trying to identify populations that are differentially represented between our different disease status groups. Let me know. Tell me if you're convinced. I think I'm finally convinced. Again, take this code, apply it to your own data, see what it looks like. And again, that is the best way to learn how to use our use the ggplot functions to make attractive figures. I think this is an attractive figure. I would be happy with publishing this if I were to add on the statistical information. Anyway, keep practicing with all this. Please tell your friends about Code Club. Make sure they're subscribed. Friends don't let friends watch videos without them being subscribed. Anyway, we'll see you next time for another episode of Code Club.


What is going on guys welcome back to the channel and I do appreciate you being here. Today I am back with another Destiny 2 community highlights and damn some of these clips are pretty epic thanks to everybody who has submitted. Now if you do enjoy the video leaving a like really does help me out and if you have any amazing clip you'd like to share with the world send it into the email I'll just link to the top of the video description but guys thanks as always for stopping by hopefully you enjoyed the video and hopefully I will see you on that next.  What?  I don't know if you're shotting, you're bouncing off him!