We're going live. So I think we are live. So hello everyone, welcome back the Latin American webinars on physics. My name is Joel Jones from the PUCP in Peru and I will be your host today. This is webinar number 156 and we're having Diego Portillo as a speaker. Diego is currently a third year PhD student working at the same staff in Mexico under the supervision of Gabriel López Castro and Gerardo Hernández Bon. So today, Diego will give us news about attempts to distinguish between Dirac and Majorana neutrinos in leptonic four-body decays. We are very happy to have him as a speaker today. Now, before we begin, let me remind all viewers that you can ask questions and make comments via the YouTube live chat system. This question will be passed on to Diego at the end of the talk. So, we're all yours, Diego, you're muted, sorry. I will start sharing my screen. Here's it, you can see it. Everything. Okay, so let's start. We'll screen. Here's, now you got it, right? Okay, well, once again, my name is Diego Portillo Sanchez from same staff, and I really wanted to thank Joel for the invitation to give this seminar and sorry for all the inconvenience. Well, today we'll talk about on the Dirac Majorana neutrinos distinction in four-body case and also want to mention that this work was in collaboration with Juan Manuel Marquez and Pablo Roig Garces. And here's the reference you wanna take a look. Okay, well, the motivation, well, the outline of the talk will be as follows. I will give you a brief introduction and motivation for the work and present basically the problem that we want to solve here. After that, I will give you some information about the Majorana versus Dirac observables that we currently have. And after that, I will give you the introduction to the four-body case that we want to study here. Basically, it is the radiative leptonic decay. And after all that, I will give you a brief summary of all that I saved here. Okay, as is usual in this kind of talks, let's start briefly with the standard model just to give some context. Well, as you already know, the standard model is a guess theory with these local groups over here, but we also have another kind of symmetry like the accidental ones like the lepton number, barium number, et cetera. And regarding the matter content of the model, we know that the neutrinos are matterless particle in the standard model, but nevertheless, due to the experimental observation of the neutrinos relation, we know that the neutrinos must have mass. And this opens on questions in the neutrinos sector as we show here, as I show here. First, are the RAC or Majorana fermions? These neutrinos are the RAC or Majorana fermions? Or, and what is the mechanism that the neutrinos have to, in order to acquire mass? Well, I will focus in on the first one, but for this, I will give a brief introduction of what is the mechanism of the mass energy. Well, basically, we have to add a right-handed neutrino to the standard model in order to give a Yukawa coupling with the Higgs in order to, after the spontaneous symmetry baking, obtain a direct mass for the neutrino. And given that this right-handed neutrino is a singlet of the gauge group of the standard model, we also can write the corresponding Majorana master. And this is basically one operative that breaks the left-hand number into units, okay? Then we can use this breaking of this accidental symmetry that does not represent any inconsistency of the model, but give us with really interesting phenomenology in order to distinguish between Dirac or Majorana fermions for the endurance. Okay. There are several observables that let us distinguish between these, but as I will say later, these are really suppressed and the most promising one are the neutrino less double beta decay. Essentially, this observable is the search of a process that I show here. We have a nucleus with C number of protons that decays into another that have two more protons and two electrons. And basically this is a left-hand number process, left-hand number violation processes and essentially because we have this theorem that we described here in this reference, if we observe the neutrino is double beta decay, then we will be sure that the neutrinos, at least one neutrino is Majorana fermion. How does this theorem work?  Also, apart from these observables, we have all the left-hand number violation processes that we can apply this specific theorem. And on other observables are the electric default moments or the magnetic default moments that we will discuss a little bit later. Well, what is the problem with the neutrino is double beta decay? Basically it's that the neutrinos, well, these processes have an amplitude that is proportional to this factor that we call effective Majorana mass described by this equation three over here. And essentially, depending on the combination of the Majorana mass phases that appears once we consider Majorana fermions, we can have different behavior for this parameter. Essentially in the inverted hierarchy, we have the green light over here and for the normal hierarchy, we have the red one over here. And as we can see, the red one is compatible with zero with values of the Majorana mass equals zero. And even if we cannot observe the neutrino of the double beta decay, we cannot say anything about the neutrinos or the nature of the neutrinos. Another important feature of here is that this matrix element that appears for the nuclear transition have a lot of uncertainties coming from the computation of this nuclear process. Then in order to have another kind of observables, well, this kind with lepton number violations, we also have the one that came after the decay of mesons and tau. Well, just to summarize this, all this process with Majorana fermion in this transition can be described by this diagram over here at field order where we have a massive neutrino propagated in this as it can see in this diagram over here. And essentially, we have different behaviors of this amplitude depending on the range of the mass of these massive states. For like neutrinos, we have the one that we call effective Majorana mass, but if we go to a more heavier state, we can integrate it out and obtain that the Wilson co-efficiency are essentially an inverse of the mass of this new state. And well, we also have another kind of processes where we can produce this neutrino on shell and have a resonant effect on the amplitude. Well, summarizing this, we have the meson decays with lepton number equals two, the tau decays with this diagram also with lepton number violation equals two. And the current experiments, the current experiment that tried to measure this specific process I described in this table over here where the more restricted one upper limited are described by the kaons decays. But we also have some restrictive quotes coming from the B mesons and the tau decays. Well, going to another kind of observable that let us distinguish between Dirac and Majorana, we also have that if we measure the electric depot moment or magnetic depot moment different from zero of the neutrinos, we can be sure that the neutrinos are Dirac particles. Essentially, the current upper limited that we have for these two quantities are of really, really restricted ones. We have that the magnetic depot moments are around 10, the upper limit for this is around 10 to minus 11 more magnetons or for the electric depot moment, we have this upper limit over here. So as we can see any of those observables that we are talking about are really suppressed and experimental balls cannot say anything about these two natures of the neutrinos nowadays. So another alternative to measure or to distinguish Dirac and Majorana are using the statistics, the quantum statistic of the neutrinos with two neutrinos in the final state with that process. Essentially, if we have two neutrinos, one neutrinone, one antineutrino, if those are Majorana fermions, then we have to antrisiometricize the amplitude in order to satisfy the spin quantum spin statistics. So instead of having for Dirac fermions, this amplitude over here, we have a second contribution coming for the exchange of the two particles in the final state. And as we can see later, as we will see later, these difference between these two different natures are also proportional to mass of the neutrinos. So if we are taking into account only like neutrinos, we will have a really suppressed observable for this. So basically here in the practical Dirac Majorana confusion term, what we're trying to say here is that if we integrate all the variables of the neutrinos, we only have 10 terms that are proportional to the masses and the energies. And then it will not be possible to distinguish in future or present experiments. So some alternatives to overcome this problem is to add new physics effects to the specific problem that we want the specific process that we want to study. Or on the other hand, try to measure any of the variables of the neutrinos in order to distinguish this. And we have several works about it, references here. Essentially, the new physics effects are also really suppressed by the coupling of these new interactions. And we will have more interest about the measurement of the variables or trying to infer the variables of the neutrinos in any specific configuration as we will see later. Well, another method proposed last year is to try to measure the B0D case into a muon, into a two muons and two neutrinos and go into the back-to-back kinematic scenario, which I will discuss later in order to avoid the practical Dirac Majorana confusion theorem and give an observable that it is not suppressed by any mass of the neutrinos. Okay, using this specific idea, what we try to do is to reproduce this computation using this less suppressed decay, which is the radiative left and right decay. Well, L can be muon or tau. And, well, that's it. So the things that we have to do for now is to have a process with two neutrinos in the final stage and compute the corresponding Dirac amplitude and the Majorana amplitude. After that, compute the corresponding differential decay rate and apply the back-to-back configuration in order to see if there is any difference between these two differential decay rates. Well, let's start. Well, before going specifically to the left-on, radiative left and decay, we have to go to the Majorana, well, to the mass basis where we can see that essentially the left-handed neutrinos or the flavored one neutrinos can be described as a sum or as a linear composition of the massive states where this U basically is the PMNS matrix as we know. And essentially this computation can be used in any value of these massive states, but we only consider three neutrinos. Okay, essentially if we add inquirently all these quantities over here, we can have the estimation of the total decay weight for the process that we are interested in. Well, essentially for this specific process, we have two different diagrams described here for the initial radiative transition and the final radiative transition. And we, for use a simplified notation, we will use the question 10 that we have the indices for the massive states described here and the momentums of the final state described by this order over here. Well, essentially if now we are considering Majorana neutrinos, what we have is two anti-symmetricized these amplitudes and obtain these four diagrams over here. Then basically the Majorana mass, well, the Majorana amplitude can be described by this permutation of the neutrinos for the second term where we have JK P2 P3 for the data case and the exchange one, it will be KJ P3 P2. And in order to be consistent with the Kaiser theorem and et cetera, we also compute the interference once we square the amplitude and obtain that this interference term is proportional to the mass of the neutrinos square. And for small neutrinos, we can neglect it or taking it equals here. Well, then the amplitude square for the Majorana case can be described by these two terms over here and the direct case will only have one term described here. Okay, now the second point that we did was to sum over all the possible massive states as we can see here in equation 40 and equation 50. And this factor, one and a half comes by the double cone of this sum over J and K, basically. As we can see, if we integrate out, well, if we integrate all the momentum P1 and P3 in all the possible configurations, this will be domain indices. And basically, the Dirac and Majorana, once we integrate the neutrinos variables will be the same, the differential decorates. Then basically, again, the Kaiser theorem is wall-side fire here. But in order to go to the specific enigmatic configuration, we need to describe our phase space in a specific way. So we use this variable described by this figure over here where phi basically is the angle that describe these two planes for the neutrinos and the lepton gamma. And the angle theta nu and theta L are the one that is described by the momentum of the final lepton and the boost corresponding to go to the center of mass frame of this system. Well, as we already know, all of these four body decays phase space are described by only five independent variables. And in order to give a simplified expressions we use two energies of the neutrinos, well, the energy of the neutrino and the anti-neutrino, the cosine of the angle between these two particles. And basically, these two angles are variables that are described in this figure over here. Well, essentially, we can then describe the differential decorate for Majorana and Dirac case in equation 17. And once again, because it is not enough to prove the practical Majorana confusion theory in one, we want to use as many as is possible. And once again, with this specific configuration, we obtain that the difference between Dirac and Majorana integrating over all the variables of the neutrinos is equal to here. Once we neglect the mass of the neutrinos. But now what about the back-to-back configuration? Well, the back-to-back configuration basically is the one that is described by these two equations over here, where we have that the two neutrinos goes in opposite directions and the left-on and the gamma also in opposite direction. And these two equations over here basically give us some restriction of the phase-based variable that we choose. And we have this one described here. Where the energy of the photon and the energy of the final left-on is equal once we neglect the mass of this left-on. And basically we have a relation between the energy of the neutrinos and the energy of the final left-on, as we can see here. Then if we measure the angle, well, the energy of this particle, we can infer with this relation a variable that is related with the neutrinos. That is one of the things that we want to compute. And on the other hand, the other two angular variables that we have for the phase-based are fixes to be equals pi in order to have these restrictions of the back-to-back scenario. Well, with all that, then we can fix the differential decay rate in this specific back-to-back kinematic scenario and obtain basically the equation 20. Where clearly we have a completely different relations for Dirac and Majorana case. And once we use this difference over here between Dirac and Majorana, we obtain an expression that is now not proportional to any mass of the neutrinos. So in principle, it is not suppressed by any other factors. But it is important to remark here that all of this difference is proportional to this angle that we call theta. That is essentially the angle between the lepton and the neutrino. And because we cannot measure this variable, we have to integrate it and see what is the spectrum of the energy in this specific kinematic configuration. Well, in order to write this angle in terms of the phase space variable that we described before, we have this relation over here in the back-to-back where we have essentially a non-trivial description or relation between the angle theta and the angle theta L, theta nu and phi. Okay, it is important to mention that this angle theta nu, basically we don't have any restriction over it. So we can fix it in any possible because what we want is the difference between the angles of the neutrino and the final left. Okay, I'm sorry, here I have a typo. I want to say that if we integrate over the theta angle, then we can plot the differential decay rate in terms of the energy of the two neutrinos and obtain that the Dirac and Majorana are basically the same spectrum. Here we have basically the spectrum that we will have and here basically is the infrared regime for this radiative decay. Well, but what happens if we are interested on the difference between Dirac and Majorana that are not proportional to Majorana? I mean, let me say it again. Yeah, let me say it a little bit different. What we're trying to say here is that essentially motivated by the word proposed in this reference over here, we expect that the difference between Dirac and Majorana will be not identically clear, but nevertheless given by all the detailed explanation that I have for the phase space integration, we obtained that the difference is equal zero. So we have to track the difference with the method used in this reference and the ones that we use. And basically we found that the relation that we are using for the angle between the leptone and the neutrino is different from us and from the Key and Semi method. Basically we have to say here that the angular variable phi, it is fixed in this case, but it's not fixed in our case. And we don't have any restriction in this angular variable as I said before. So essentially if we fix using all the results that we have, if we fix this phi equals zero, we obtain different energy spectrum for the Dirac and Majorana case in this radiative leptonic decay that can be measured in four common experiments. So what is the problem here is that basically phi cannot be fixed by any restriction for the back-to-back isn't that. Essentially as we can show before, the only restriction that we have for the back-to-back scenario is that the two energy of the neutrinos are identically between them and the angle between the two, the one of them are equals five. But we don't have any other restriction for the angle phi over the angle theta nu, et cetera. And as we say before in the next slides, if we fix this angle of phi equals zero, we will do some other configuration that can be described by one plane described by the neutrinos and the lepton gamma system, okay? I will try to summarize here what we are trying to do is that here is the general schematic scenario. If we go to the back-to-back scenario, then we have to neglect this boost that we have that connects the rest frame of the particle that decays and the corresponding center of mass frame for the neutrinos and this lepton gamma. And essentially we have a corresponding relation that we have for the angular variable that we are trying to describe and the different plots or the different planes that describe these two vectors over here. And essentially the most important thing here is that for any value of phi and theta l that we have, we always can reproduce a back-to-back scenario. So any of these planes can be considered in the total decay width and not only the one that is described here in this diagram A, where it's coming from the phi equals zero isn't it? Well, I also want to say that apart from the angular treatment that we have in the phase-based integration, we also made some consistency tests in the corresponding reference that I mentioned here and we obtained that basically the branching radio of this back-to-back scenario is really, really suppressed compared with the ones that we could obtain in experiments, in four common experiments. So basically this is of order 10 to minus 10. And I also want to say that a fixed in phi equals zero fixed, well, it is compatible with all other observable that we have. Well, all the consistency tests that we made. Well, I think I went too fast. But a summary of this is that basically in this paper, we consider the radiative lift and decay as an independent approach in order, as an independent approach for this novel method proposed in this reference over here and try to see if we can obtain any observable little distinguish between Dirac and Majorana. And the main conclusion here is that using the phase-based integration that we made and doing any consistency test that we did is that we do not obtain any difference between Dirac and Majorana in this specific scenario with two back-to-back configurations. Well, we also want to mention that we discussed in our paper the detailed arguments that why phi could not be fixed by any kinematic restrictions and also say that the problem is still open for trying to search any observable that are not neglectable once we take the mass of the new trinium sequels here for this Dirac-Maiorana problem. Well, I also want to mention that this novel idea could be applied in any other kinematic configuration, not only the back-to-back or not only the forebody decays, whereas we can show that it is not the case. We probably in forebody or three-body decays, we can find a configuration that let us distinguish because essentially the amplitude is not proportional to any mass of the neutrinos, the difference of this amplitude, but once we integrate again the inaccessible angles of the neutrinos, we have the same result that we have for all other processes that try to distinguish between Dirac and Maiorana. And that's it. Thank you. Thank you very much, Diego, for the very nice talk. So usually we get questions from the YouTube audience, but there is a time delay. So let's start by answering questions from the Zoom audience. So I'm wondering if there's anybody else who has a question who would like to start? I have a couple, but... Okay, let me start. Okay, so first question is when you're calculating the forebody decays, you are attaching... So you're taking the forefirmion operator and you're attaching a photon on the charged leptons, right, on the initial and final charged leptons. But in principle, this forefoton operator... Yeah, exactly, right? Slide 15, yeah, there. So in principle, this forefirmion operator, it's built with an intermediate Z or an intermediate W, right?  Yeah, we're not considering here the intermediate radiation because basically it could be neglectable because it is one order of magnitude suppressed by... Let me say it again. Basically, this diagram with the intermediate state radiation could be neglectable because it's proportional to a power of G-fermie more than this one, yeah, exactly. So we are only thinking to account the leading contributions. Yeah, you have an extra W, you know? Yeah, exactly, yeah. You have another Fermi constant in the amplitude, yeah. But it's true, we have to add it in order to have all these gauge invariance and all these relations to be, yeah. Yeah, that was the second thing I was thinking, right? Making the diagram gauge invariant. Yeah, but essentially it is neglectable so we cannot add it here. Yeah, so then, yeah, and given it has got a different structure, maybe the gauge invariance can like, cancels, the non-invariance cancels between itself. Yeah, that's what I would expect. Yeah, bro. Coming right up. Okay, so thanks for that one. I'm wondering if your result, it's a shame that at the end of the day the branching ratio is so small, but I was wondering if you still have your Rana neutrinos, but you replace one of them by a heavy neutrino, like the ones coming up. CISO model. Would you get information from that? Maybe having the heavy neutrino being produced elsewhere and then decaying into a tau instead of having the tau decaying into the heavy neutrino or something like that? Yeah, thank you. That's a very nice question. Basically here we are interested only in the light, the neutrinos, because if we add another massive state, we have to deal with the suppressed mixing angle that I have here. So basically we are trying to have only diagrams that are not suppressed by any other sources, that are only the Fermi constant, and that's it. But it's true. We can add another massive state, but it will be suppressed by the current experimental bounds for the mixings of these states. Yeah, the thing I was wondering is that if there you can get more information. Yeah, but after the decay of this, yeah, probably, but it will not be a four-body decay, it will be a five-body or, well, yeah. But thank you, it's a nice. So I don't know if there's any other question from the audience? I have a question for Diego. Diego, maybe you mentioned that I didn't get it. Is there any role for the CP violation phases here? Well, I didn't mention it, but essentially, let me go to this. When we zoom over all the massive states, basically we have the PMNS matrix square, and we use the unitary relations to, in order to only have this expression mentioned here. But yes, we use the unitary relation for the PMNS matrix in order to have these results. So it is considered, but once again, I will only take into account that this. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Okay. I don't know if there's any other questions. There's none from the YouTube transmission so far. So I guess that would be because I don't have any more questions. It was pretty clear. Well, if you have any other, later in the day, you can send me an email and we can discuss it. Excellent. So I guess that would be it. So thanks everybody watching for being here. And I'd like to remind everyone that this is our last webinar of the year. We're going to take a break. And we start next year probably mid January. We still haven't announced our list of speakers, but please stay tuned as we'll probably announce it soon. Okay. And well, yeah, hope you have a good holiday. I think I can, I can put a little emoticon here. Yeah. I think I hope you're seeing this. All right. And enjoy your, your holidays and we'll, we'll see you next year. See you and thank you again. Thank you again for the invitation.


Welcome to the Home Lab Show, episode 44, Dev Random. We had so many ideas that we were flinging all over the place and I was out of the office last week. So was Jay, we both had some things. I was building a new studio. Jay had some personal things going on. So we didn't quite have a show, but then we had too many ideas almost like. Yeah. It was hard to land on. So you know, let's do a Dev Random and run through some of these. And yeah, it was a lot of fun. We have a good list. We're going to cap the show at an hour because I think the list is exceeding what we may talk about an hour. We're not sure in any of these topics could be something we dive into deeper later. So it's, this is a new experiment with us, Dev Random. This is kind of like the Q&A episodes. Me and Jay want to do a few of them. Yeah. It's just basically things that each individual item wouldn't probably make an episode of them by itself. So there's some things we want to talk about, but it's like, do we want to have a five minute episode for this one topic that is just super quick? No. Let's just kind of just go through all these different things. Yeah. And like I said, a lot of this leads to further discussion. We do listen greatly to the audience so we can make sure we're covering topics that are always relevant to them. So, hey, feel free to throw some things in the chat. I'll hit us up on a feedback form if you listen to this, not during the live. And I should turn down things that make noise. So. Yeah. So I should probably do the same. Yeah. I just realized I have a couple of things on. So we're going to do that.  So, yeah. That's a good problem to have, I think. Good problem to have. And this is the first time we're doing this show from my new studio. So bear with us if there's any technical difficulties. But I think I'm all sorted out. Now, where there has not been any technical difficulties is with our sponsor. We've been working with Linode since the beginning and they want to continue sponsoring this show. They've been a great host and they were a great sponsor. And yeah, they are just a great place to host all the different magic that they have in their system. If you're looking for places, and someone actually posted in my forums and I thought this was a clever and maybe we should do an episode breaking this down. And it's a way to run a proxy in Linode that proxies in front of your servers in your home lab and ways to get connectivity to it. I think this might be a fun Linode and Linode was talking about, hey, is there any other, you know, includes you could do. And that might be a fun episode. This is something you can absolutely run in Linode. This would keep your public IP from being exposed but still allow you to run services, learn about how things work and never worry about someone, you know, attacking your public IP or revealing who you are through it. I think this might be kind of clever. They're gonna know your Linode IP but that is something you can always, you know, build, stand up the server in Linode, tear it back down and move it over to another location if you want. It creates some interesting scenarios. And this is pretty easily facilitated with some of the, you know, auto ways to build it in Linode but of course in this show we dive into the manual way to build it because I wanna do a whole site to site video and I'm thinking that might be a fun one as well where you for especially people stuck behind CGNAT. I think these are some fun ideas and absolutely all these can be run with our sponsor Linode. We have an offer code to get you started. You'll find that in the show notes there and absolutely great sponsor. We thank them for continued support of the show and that's what keeps us going on this stuff. You know, gotta pay the bills. Someone said we have a different sponsor because we keep having the same one.  A lot of you people probably already used Linode for some of these projects but now we gotta dive into the dev random of things. So that, what was the first thing on our list? That was it. Oh, Jeep hearted. Yep, Jeep hearted live. Yep, and a couple of these are tools that I think should be in everyone's toolkit, so to speak. Jeep hearted live is just one of those. It's not something that I need every day, every week or even every month. Sometimes I can go several months without needing it but it's always good to have it on hand whenever I do. And it could be something as simple as, you know, some hard drives that were previously used with LVM or ZFS and I want to just, you know, purge everything. There's many different tools that allow you to do that. Jeep hearted live is not the only way. It's not even the primary reason I would use it but it is one, I just want to nuke everything. I could do that. Another use case for it is sometimes Linux installation utilities, they don't really give you the option to partition the way that you want to. So sometimes it makes sense to use Jeep hearted live before you install Linux because they'll let you tell it where the mount points are that you want for your installation but they might not facilitate creating the partitions. So you could use Jeep hearted live to create the partitions the way you want them. And then launch a Linux installer and get that installed. So that's actually one way I can use LVM with Ubuntu because I still don't know why this is the case. You use LVM with Ubuntu through the official installer and it uses up 100% of the available space. And I do understand most people want that but then that eliminates LVM snapshots. They don't give you an option like Debian does to say like, I want 80% of that, not 100% of it. I want some wiggle room here. And with Jeep hearted live, you can create the LVM config beforehand just the way you want it and then install your distro. So it's one of those things I just always love to have around. It's also really claim. I'm trying to remember the Linux command. Maybe you can help me out with this. Windows has a tool called Estelit that you can do online but there's an offline tool you use in Linux to basically shrink a virtual machine that's taken up to a space when you have it then provisioned. It's built into Jeep hearted. What's that? I can't remember the name of the tool. Resized 2FS. Resized 2FS I think is what it is. Yeah, and what it does, it's also does writes out a bunch of zeros to the drive as well. It's like a, yeah, it's a way you can shrink your VM. The resize 2FS is allowed to increase the VM but Jeep hearted it's got all the utilities you need for doing things like that when you've run into some of those problems. Some of the VM can get kind of over time a little bit bigger than it should be on a thin provision and you can shut it down. Windows, I know it's Estelit. There's an equivalent command in there. Estelit's not part of Windows. It's something though that's from Microsoft part of the tool set, but Jeep hearted becomes very handy for that, very handy for fixing when Tom goofs up a logical volume or maybe a couple of broken times. You know how I learned about Grubb by breaking it. You know, and there's some other things too that are that kind of annoy me sometimes. Like it's like these problems that happen every once in a while.  And some installers will give you the option to delete partitions, but they'll air out when it tries to do so because they don't like they try to automatically mount and activate LVM, but that might not be what you want. So now the kernel sees your disk as LVM. It's a previous installation and is trying to safeguard you but you're just trying to like delete everything. And then it could become a pain. So yeah, it's just a great tool to have. Pretty much, I consider it the Swiss Army knife of partitioning basically. Yeah, and it's for recovery and things like that one. Things have broken. It just, it works well. We'll just say that it's one of those handy dandy keep that in there and yes. Yep. Yep. Oh, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I would say let's go to the next one. No, memtest. Yes, there's a really big reason why I mentioned this because I don't know what this is. And I think it's because, and this is a valid reason that homelabbers and Linux enthusiasts are more likely, in my opinion, to be using older hardware, nothing wrong with that because that server that served a huge company like 15 years ago, that server was great for them back then, but now it's kind of too slow and we can't really get as much use out of it. But for a homelab, it's great because you're just, one person or a handful of people, but it's hand-me-down hardware, which is usually a good idea, you save a lot of money. Same with desktops, laptops, why buy something new? You could, and I'll talk about this later, you could buy something that's not quite new but still better than what's available for new, for cheap. But the problem is often that your memory will be bad. And this happens a lot more than people think. And I can't count how many times I've seen people try to install Linux and it doesn't work well or at all and it doesn't make sense, but Windows worked fine, for example, and then I'll mention, you should try to check your memory. Then the rebuttal is usually well, but it was fine with Windows. So I don't think that's the problem. Well, the truth is each operating system handles or doesn't handle memory issues completely differently. So one operating system might be more tolerant to a specific type of hardware failure than another one. So the argument it worked on my previous OS doesn't work on this one, isn't really a valid argument. I would say memtest86, you should test your memory once a year on everything, your servers, the physical servers obviously don't run it in your VMs, there's no reason to do that. Run it in your physical machines and your desktop laptop servers just run it. Usually I just run it for 15 minutes. I haven't seen a case personally, I'm not saying this doesn't happen where you let it run longer than 15 minutes and it finds errors. Usually if it's gonna find errors, it's going to run, I mean, it's gonna show those errors like pretty much within the first five to 10 minutes. So for the last 15 minutes, you're probably in good shape. And you'll know when it finds errors, like the screen turns red, it looks hideous. It's pretty in your face the last time I used this. So it's so common memory issues and things like that. And I think sometimes people will get upset at Linux for not working on their hardware when all along they had bad memory. And sometimes memory issues are, they're kind of weird to be honest. Like I would love to say this is the symptom, but it's always something different, something strange. I remember one time, and I still don't really understand why this happened, but I used to be in game development. I was never good at it. Just something I was doing for fun with friends. I would just design a game and send it to a friend that's like one level or something, maybe as many as 10. And one game I developed had a save feature so you could continue where you left off, which is cool. Worked fine for me. So I send it off to a friend and they save and resume their game and they end up in a random level. I'm like, what the heck? So then I compile it, I look at the code and I can't find an error. And it turns out my memory was bad. It's on the desktop I was using to develop the game on. And the resulting executable was corrupt, even though on my system it was working just fine. I still can't understand that, but there's just all these weird things from Linux installations failing to development errors, file errors, all these different things. So just test your memory and just make it a point to do that as regularly as you can. It's not the most fun thing in the world to do, but it's pretty important. Now I have seen it take longer and we've had to have some machines, the real mystery ones that just don't do it very frequently. You'll have to run numerous iterations of mem tests to get the result. And it kind of goes to the randomness of a memory problem, especially when it's a very infrequent one.  It's the best way to describe it. You end up with a problem that is like, yeah, it almost is a repeatable because we know it happens, we see the result, but making it consistently happen under certain conditions becomes very, very difficult. And sometimes you just have to take parts of memory out. I will warn, there's occasionally, and mem tests has been updated over the years to fix some of this, but occasionally you run into some configurations that mem tests just fails on immediately. Not because there's a problem, it's because of an incompatibility in it. So you have to look at what the error messages are, throw them into a Google search, and really, it's challenging at times, but it's definitely very handy tool, especially with, I find it very compatible with laptops and sometimes have helped us solve some of those laptop troubleshooting issues specifically running mem test code. Oh yeah, it looks like some of the memory is not well in this. Swap it out and away you go. Saves you so much, especially when Linux can be memory efficient, it's only when you run the bigger applications that it hits the section of memory where those bits are a little bit less stable and it does not hold the memory. And then flipping a bit, if it's not important bit, you didn't notice it. If it's an important bit to a running process, well, and that process wasn't set to auto restart or loses or ends up in an unknown state, you have random problems and a lot of head scratching to do. So. Yep, and yeah, I totally agree. And similar to that, I'm going to go kind of off away from the order that we were going to go over the topics in because I think one kind of leads into the other, but I'm going to throw in one that wasn't on the list. And this is super simple. Have a flashlight available. What, why do you need a flashlight? Okay, hear me out on this because this just reminded me talking about mem test. I've had people bring me computers before and this happened like two or three times because it takes me that long to learn a lesson, apparently, where I couldn't get the operating system to install it all. And I could have ran mem test, but in this situation, after a few hours of cursing and fighting with it, I just opened the chassis, get a flashlight, shine on the capacitors and notice that they're leaking. Oh, there's the problem. That's why I can't, you know, you don't really think of that because it's not very common. I think I've seen it maybe five times in my entire career. So it's not like super common, but when you're buying a server from somebody like secondhand, absolutely look at the capacitors before you take it home. You'll save yourself a lot of trouble because if you didn't know to look for that, you might be, you know, troubleshooting that server for hours, trying to figure out why it won't work. Just to find out physical layer, there's some leaky or bulging capacitors, there's your problem. So that's another thing. And the other thing I'll throw in there too, because I'm about to talk about buying workstations or laptops or whatever, because we need a good workstation or laptop to modify our home lab, right? We want a decent machine to do all that config and all that. One of the things that I recommend people do, like if you're going at a, going to a used computer store, let's say, and they have a desktop on display or a laptop and you're thinking about buying it, it's good price and it's a solid machine. Usually it's gonna run Windows at first, go to the event viewer and filter for system errors or critical errors and look at that before you buy it. I don't care if it's like a server, if they have a monitor plugged into a server, I don't know if they will, or a desktop's laptops especially, look at the event viewer because if you have like a failing hard drive, it's just gonna flood the Windows event log with errors and other things are gonna flood the Windows event log with errors and you'll know right then and there that, okay, there's something going on with this machine so I really shouldn't take this one home. And it's so easy to do once you learn how to do it to go into the event viewer and that's not gonna be like a foolproof test. This is definitely a great machine because there's no errors. There's going to be errors because Windows always has errors so don't be alarmed that there's a few but you'll know the critical ones when you see them and that'll just give you an idea of what not to buy which is kind of like one of my tricks that I go through. But getting into buying laptops and desktops, my tip is to consider used more often than most do like I love System 76, I love Tuxedo computers and Lenovo and all those, they're great. Buying a new computer is awesome. If you have the money, I mean, what's better than that? I have a brand new rig, that's just so cool. But in reality, we can't afford a machine that's over a grand often. So sometimes you only have two or $300 extra. So what do you do? So that's why I wanted to bring this up because business class laptops and desktops are absolutely the way to go. I personally, I know this is an extreme opinion, I hate consumer level laptops because yeah, you can go to Walmart, yeah, you can go to Walmart or Mayer or whatever your local store is, you could get a brand new computer, not even a Chromebook, an actual PC laptop for $200 or $300, you absolutely can. And it's going to be fast. It's going to be efficient because hardware is cheaper now. You're going to think, man, this is a great machine but I've repaired these things. And I've literally told people, like if they cracked their screen because I'd replace it, I need you to buy a bezel too because I know how this is going to go. It's all going to crack. It's all going to fall apart. The minute I take it apart because the chassis is just bogus. There's a reason why it's $200 or $300, trust me on this but the $200 or $300 that you might have to buy a brand new machine, you could use that same $200 or $300 to go on eBay and buy a business class laptop, for example, or a business class workstation. That's a few generations old which is why it's $200 or $300. It's not the newest one. However, I would argue that the build quality is going to be better than anything you'll buy new at that same price. Plus, you know, business class laptops just last forever and they're often really fast. Like the processes are decent because processors are not changing in my opinion as often as they used to. So throw a solid state drive in an older, you know two generation old computer that thing will fly and you'll definitely have a better machine and absolutely research Linux compatibility first if that's what you want to run. But I would highly recommend people go that direction instead of buying new if their budget is really low because I think they'll get a better machine for their money. They last a lot longer. They have, I'm assuming everyone here is going to reload them right away. So the bloatware problem is less of an issue but they generally ship with less bloatware on them with the business class ones. The other thing too, and I've done a video on this before if you dig around on my channel I probably five or six years ago I had a couple of taken apart laptops and I was discussing that exact thing the difference between the higher quality ones and that hasn't changed in five or six years. You know, I haven't really readdressed that video but it also doesn't really need to be readdressed. If you look at the build quality on them it's substantially different. The kind of flimsy floppy nature of these how thin can we get it and everything else is just not as good because they're trying to produce it for the consumers in the mass market so they cut every corner possible to make them, you know, not as high quality. You take something like one of the Lenovo ThinkPad series which I've been a fan of for a while they're just a pretty solid build and a pretty solid feel. But if you can go new, don't get me wrong especially if you're going I want an absolute Linux compatible one look at something like the system 76. Now, and I have not got my hands on one I have not ordered one because I just don't have a need for a new laptop but I definitely, I know there's been a lot of positive feedback from several friends I've had and other YouTube reviewers on the framework laptops. I think that's a great idea. I like where they're going with it. I don't personally have any review experience with it but my overall feeling from the people who have reviewed it that they're being honest and it's a pretty quality product. So I would say yes, a lot of good stuff there if you are looking at some of the alternatives but we know it's a home lab show that's why we mentioned the budget conscious stuff first. All right, right. Not everyone's got the budget just to run out and buying stuff or get stuff sent to them because they do reviews sometimes. Yeah, it's just the best job perk ever but what we understand it's not a perk that very many people have where the few, right? We're the 1% I guess. But specifically I would say look for Dell Latitude for the Lenovo T-Series, Pinkpads because just because it's Lenovo doesn't mean they're all good because their consumer level machines are every bit as bad in my opinion as anyone else is like. They're business class Lenovo's or business class Dell's not the stuff that Dell sells that the retail stores is often so. Yep, T-Series. Although I think the model naming changed in Lenovo's Thinkpads series now I can't remember what it is now but I did it because I'm not I think it is it still a T-Series because that's what I've always known it as and then there's the latitudes have pretty much been latitudes forever. Those are some to look at. Absolutely. All right, what's on the next? So system rescue CD is really quick because it's just a quick mention system rescue CD downloaded put it on your flash drive have it ready. You can use it for cloning hard drives like clonezilla for example it actually supports that but there's other things that could do too it has a graphical user interface you can use it for file recovery or things of that nature. So just throwing a quick mention out there if you've ever used one of those what I call a multi rescue tool CD or whatever it is they have all these everything with the kitchen sink in there there's several of these out there I like system rescue CD it's treated me very well so I think it's just one of those things to have available if you need to recover files or do some hardware testing clone hard drive another quick mention and I'm gonna make this very quick because we had I think we had an episode about this about clonezilla. Yes. Now if you've seen that episode you know that it's gonna help you clone a hard drive but what you might not know is that if you have a failed hard drive or I should say a failing hard drive this doesn't always work but if you really wanna get that machine going again you could try keyword try to take an image of it with clonezilla but activate the advanced options and tell it to continue if it reaches a bad sector which means it'll still take an image of the hard drive but it won't be the best image because there's gonna be a couple of errors unfortunately this is for people that are really desperate obviously reloading is better if you have it scripted or automated do that instead but if you just couldn't get to backing it up or automating anything and you put weeks of work into this thing and you really don't wanna lose it you could just clone the hard drive activate that option to continue when it encounters bad sectors and then restore that image onto a good hard drive it might work because I have seen this happen several times where people were thinking oh man it's the end I've lost everything like I can't get this thing to boot and then I do that and then you'll still probably need to do like a file system check no matter what because there's errors but after you do that it might fix it but it's just something to try something to keep in mind if nothing else it might let you pull files off the hard drive too so I just wanted to throw a mention out there for that Yep List the next one on here CrowdSec and Fail2Ban Yep, yep We list those together because they're very similar in fact Fail2Ban inspired CrowdSec and the way they handle this is kind of similar because what they aim to do is offer a layer of protection I don't wanna say it's gonna protect your server but it's gonna obviously increase your security nothing's 100% but if configured properly Fail2Ban for example will look for certain things in the log for example it could be watching the SSH log and then seeing that there's someone just trying and trying and trying to get into your server it can block them by adding a firewall rule you set it for how many attempts you're willing to let it have because I don't know maybe you mess up the password four or five times because you're like me and you're a klutz but you never mess it up seven times so if someone has just set it to seven if it goes beyond seven it can basically create a firewall rule to block them you could put a white list to add your own IP in there so you don't block yourself ever and it's not just SSH you could configure it for Apache and GenX there's just a huge list of different things and you could also create your own jail that's what they're called jails for something else just tell it what to look for in the log file that constitutes a concerned view and if it sees it it can go ahead and block it excuse me and CrowdSec is basically very similar to fail to ban I don't know if you could do custom I think you could do custom jails so to speak they're not quite called jails on the CrowdSec side but CrowdSec also creates firewall rules when it sees some activity that it is not appropriate like a brute force attempt or some other kind of security thing that it notices it'll block the IP but another thing that it can do is it downloads a block list from CrowdSec which is paying attention to this and seeing these attacks happen so if one IP is getting attacked by another that it knows well that IP is doing some shady stuff so we need to keep an eye on that and it could let all the other clients know that IP is bad so that way it helps increase security by leveraging the crowd or their users and helps enhance it that way that's the trade off though because if you use CrowdSec it's going to send activity it sees negative activity like intrusion attempts up to the mothership so that way it could let all the other ones know so you have to be okay with that I don't see why it wouldn't be it's just trying to grab IPs but that's a trade off and I do believe if you don't like that you could pay for it it's free otherwise you could install it on 10,000 machines and it's fine for free but if you want to opt out out of that information sharing then that's I believe when there's a cost associated with it but it's so easy to install fail to ban I would say is a bit harder but it's not hard it's just CrowdSec is more of a turnkey it's not completely turnkey but it's closer to that fail to ban if I remember correctly bans or excuse me it watches SSH by default but it won't watch anything else unless you go in and enable the other different things that it has in the config file that you want it to watch for I just think it's really good to at least use fail to ban consider using CrowdSec if you want to have a global knowledge power at your disposal there for that but one or the other is fine you should definitely run one or the other especially on machines that are forward facing to the internet Yeah, and the thing I like about CrowdSec and fail to ban is great for the individual and I see actually someone through in the comment and you can get tricky with it taking the ban list that fail to ban creates unless say you're running a cluster of servers create a list and automatically do it but now you're getting into building a lot of engineering one the reality is you are not the only one with something open on the internet that's just going to be the way the internet works so the concept of CrowdSec I really like how they're doing it because this really opens up an opportunity and there are places like greynoise.io where you can get IP list from and there's a lot of threat intelligence data out there here's alien data has a free app feed where you can go through and look for bad reputation IPs this is kind of a cat and mouse game but CrowdSec really takes it to the next level of not only building the lists in real time having you help to contribute to those building of the list then combine that with you know you can end up with these IPs blocks so it doesn't even fill up your logs with noise so if right away in log4j was an easy example of this they were sorting out and greynoise was listing them and so were other places like these are the known threat actors attacking these type of devices that are you know maybe unpatched and already having that list and CrowdSec protects you in case you didn't patch but I know all of us and everyone listen that's already patches their system right away as soon as something comes up but on that off the hats that you know a person and they're not doing it and that's for a friend that's for a friend here it's nice to have an automated system that can roll out those block lists and it can buy you a little bit of time it's not a replacement for security at all but everything especially when there's a zero day out there someone gets hit that's how we learn about zero days that's how we learn about these active attacks sometimes it's only through the attack that we learn what was broken and this is an example that happened in some of the WordPress sites if in CrowdSec does integrate right into WordPress and the web applications this is really cool because as soon as someone started dropping all these attacks on these WordPress sites right away they're like whoa and it's not like there's a thousand IPs even doing the attack it's like here's a couple IPs that were initiating these attacks and exploiting this once that gets into a block list at CrowdSec cool and then the people that wrote the different plugins for WordPress that were at fault well now we gotta get those updated and we've now bought a little bit of time because we didn't even know about the problem so it's another layer on your security I think I really like what they're doing with it me and Jay talked about maybe we'll have them on to dive a little bit more in depth on their whole platform how their business model works because it's really a cool open source intelligence tool I just really like where they've gone with it and it's something I'm diving into more and Jay's got a video on and I plan to dive in a little bit more I've set up some demo servers I've been poking out with it so and I'm hoping they work on a they have a PF sense integration but I think it's pretty manual right now I'm hoping at some point they'll get a more in depth PF sense integration too because I think it'd be an awesome addition to PF sense because it sits at the perimeter of your network it can listen to the noise it can report back and then automatically add block list so it's gonna be something that I think we're gonna see a whole lot more of in the future field demands a cool independent tool but I like the full extensibility because it's putting security as a community effort just makes a lot of sense to me that they hit the right nail on the head with it and their background is also in managing hosting servers at scale the developers had a hosting company that's where they came up with the idea for all this and then their idea was well why not do it for everyone not just us and that's where they've been really pushing and expanding on it so I'm excited I'm gonna talk to them about that Yeah, for sure Yeah, maybe that'll be something we can set up Yep, someone mentioned earlier I just wanna give a shout out to Ventoy it is a way to set up the multiple boot USBs I've never used it, but my staff has it's a way to take some of those things like system rescue CD, memtest 86 and combine a few different ISOs I believe into one I believe that's the right tool name I've seen someone mention in there so Yeah, something like a Ventool, Ventoy, something like that Yeah, it's a great one I haven't used it myself but I've heard a lot of people talking about it I've read about it I've seen, you know or I've read how to documents about it I probably should be using it because I have like 50 USB keys in the little bucket that I kind of sort through every time I'm looking for something it probably makes that a lot better for me maybe I should give that a shot Yep, all right now related directly to the tools that was offered by CrowdSecond failed to ban or you can even kind of throw in PF Blocker those are all tools that identify things and then have block list different but can completely coexist at the same time is Saracota and Snort those are traffic analysis tools and the rule sets based that they use are looking for specific sequence of events or attacks that can come through now the efficacy of these products can be hampered by encryption so it kind of depends on whether or not they have the ability to see into the traffic that's passing through them typically you're going to run Saracota or Snort on an edge device and it is built into PF Sense and one of the things I like about the way PF Sense does it they call it Saracota they call it Snort they don't call it just IDS a lot of other companies are using Saracota in the back end they just call it Intrusion Detection System or Intrusion Prevention System you know that's but they don't tell you what it is and what the rules are around it so it's kind of interesting that PF Sense is kind of a you know not the only one but one of the companies that really exposes you to it and gives you everything to tune with it now what these actually do is they're looking for things like they can even look at the way DNS queries go out and you can say you know hey here's a rule set if these DNS queries go out or they look like something bad or looks like it's resolving something go ahead and have a block I managed to block myself the other day on accident I actually thought my VPN went down from my home to my office and it turned out Saracota see me doing something with SSH and I wasn't thinking about it but Saracota cause that's not the way that should have been done because I was hammering something on SSH as a test and then it blocked me and once you get on a block list I couldn't even log back into my own firewall cause I was banned so yeah that happens to all of us at some point cause let's be honest at some time you're like oh that's right I shouldn't have done that but nonetheless I was doing some testing and those are really good tools to use though and there's a cat and mouse game though those rule sets that are being constantly updated so it's another layer of security so that's why I refer each one of these they're not an end all solution they do coexist and they're best actually to coexist with our solutions now do you need Saracota and Snort on your home user system if you have no ports open I would put it only in detection mode so you can just kind of see things that might be interesting to you they do take and I have a video about tuning the rules and it is a constant effort so sometimes there's a new rule that comes up that it misidentifies something or the rule identifies a specific attack pattern but also by the way this other tool looks like that attack pattern I think in the early days syncing the transport layer of syncing triggered something unrelated all together so at first you're like wait why is this thing attacking oh looks like syncing triggers this this is where you get the false positives and because it's a pattern based system and sometimes it's looking at traffic that it may not have full insight into it can be really difficult to absolutely nail down that so it's not a hands off type of thing and a lot of times when you see it in like the Unified Dream Machine has Saracota running under the hood they don't give you as many tuning options for it and you're kind of just relying upstream on whatever the vendor pushes out for the tuning rules they give you such a good, better best or something I think they have a really generic way you turn up how secure do you want it and you crank it up to best so everything starts breaking and then you slide it down a little bit I don't know how much more tuning options they've added in Unified Dream Machine but when you do something in PF Sense it's absolutely showing you the raw data so you can get a better understanding of what rules flagged and what rules you want to tune and maybe why you're tuning it which usually, hey, highlight the phrase that it found in there or the rules that it found in there of what it told you it blocked copy, paste into your favorite search engine and you'll probably find a result in a discussion form about the rule why it exists and what it may be a false positive of so it actually helps you a lot with the research of why something's not working and yes, even people who work in high levels at security and sim places that's actually what they do they'll sit there and look at a rule that's weird to them and they're like, I don't know this one even with all my experience and yes, they use Google search that's for any of you that's thinking about getting into the enterprise market people are still on stack exchange right to the enterprise market don't work They really are I'm kind of surprised at the highest security level just doesn't disable every network interface in every device That makes the most sense right? Just break them all break them all Just disable everything related just kill the entire TCP IP stack 100% just to annihilate the whole thing and then yeah you'll be way more secure at that point Yep probably useless but secured nonetheless All right we got get for security Yeah, this is a fun trick but there's gonna have to be some asterisks here because I don't want to oversell this as like a really good idea in every use case but it does help sometimes if your server gets owned but it's not owned by something like full system level for example let's say you have a website and you have some HTML files that you're serving just something simple and someone just gets in there and they just corrupt the files they put the base 64 encoding in there and your PHP files and next thing you know there's a crypto miner if you have if you make your HTML directory a Git repository and I'm not telling you to upload that to GitHub because you can have a local Git repository that doesn't go anywhere there's no Git server you could just have a local Git repository that doesn't even leave that particular server anywhere and you can get the website or whatever the web app working the way you want it and then just commit right then and there and if someone does break in and they do some bad things there you could just do like a Git status you see all the files that they've modified and then you could do Git checkout and everything and it's like they never did anything now the asterisk is that obviously that's not always going to work because what I do is I make the Git repository owned by root so you can't commit unless you root so even if someone breaks in as the web server user they can't get into the Git directory and lock that up unless there's a privilege escalation trick that they use to get up to root or there's vulnerability chaining yes they absolutely can corrupt the Git database so I don't want this to seem like a end all be all security trick but if it's a lower tier intrusion that does not go beyond that it can help and it's so easy to do because it's a local Git repository just do Git init inside the directory and then Git commit everything there and then from that point on you at least have that starting point it doesn't take the place of backups doesn't take the place of automation this is just a I only have five minutes to fix this problem and I got to get to work kind of thing right I don't want to oversell it but I have seen this happen where someone just does Git checkout and everything and then it just makes everything like nothing ever happened as long as they didn't get outside that directory and infects the rest of the system somehow then that might actually help you out yeah and I want to make sure there's that clarification because there gets to be gets to be a lot of confusion in this Git Hub is a service which is currently owned by Microsoft and Git is a tool and a lot of people think of Git and GitHub is one and the same but they're just an opportunistic company that said hey we can throw a hub at the end of this we have this domain and we're going to offer it as a Git repository hosting now it's probably good that a lot of people use it it's been a really popular place even since Microsoft purchased it for hosting a lot of open source projects and allows you to easily get cloned throw the name in there and pull down information on there but they are separate things I just want to make sure that's always very clear there's, because you can also because you're using GitLab is it Jay? Yep, GitLab they're an absolute competitor that also uses Git of GitHub you know I use GitHub, Jay uses GitLab I was going to switch because we were all going to protest everyone said they were going to protest Jay actually protested because I think you moved from GitHub over to GitLab right? Yeah, but I ended up opening up GitHub for the YouTube channel it's not where I keep my configs for the business but GitHub is now where I want things to be like internet facing if I go over something in a video GitHub is a good thing to learn so I put some of my stuff out there so people can fork it or maybe put in a pull request or whatever but yeah, I did switch to GitLab for all of my production stuff on my end and I like it, it's really cool if I take Microsoft out of the equation I like GitHub and GitLab both I also like GitT which is something that I want to cover soon I don't have a video about it right now but that's a roll your own Git server that you could use instead of either GitLab or GitHub and just have your own you could put it on a note instance for example run GitT over there and you have your own Git server that's your own in your control so there's definitely options you can get the code out there if you want to but I think one of the beauties of having Git as a local tool that's not connected to a service is you can have local repositories for version control even if you have like, I don't know another family member that's also into IT and stuff and they're also learning with you and then something breaks you can just do a Git diff what did you do? Yeah, you modified this file why did you do that? Right You have some traceability there especially if you work in an IT department you can even have people committing changes there it just becomes a really awesome way to modify or excuse me to maintain server configs and in this case you probably shouldn't upload that to any of those Git services just keep it local this isn't like your pet Python project this is your app you want to keep that local but it could give you some additional options that may help as long as that intrusion wasn't like a higher level that broke out of the jail, so to speak and infected your entire system Absolutely Jay, you have a weird run on the list Yes, I do, don't I? You're probably surprised to see that one, weren't you? I was surprised to see this next one and I think you're talking about ripping CDs, right? I am Yes because I was thinking about I'm not going to get into the drama and the politics about Spotify and streaming services and all that but there's one universal criticism that I have which is these services these cloud music services are good because I don't have to have like a two terabyte hard drive with me everywhere I go I could just stream as needed but the problem is when they what happens when your favorite artist loses a license or they can't negotiate a license or something like that for the longest time tool wasn't even on Spotify and that really made me mad because I want to listen to tool so what do I do? And I feel like with Google music going away it's now YouTube music used to be able to buy MP3s and things and I used to have this Python script I would use to actually purge the hidden comment that Google put in MP3 files that would have traceability I just purged that and I had my own I own this content I can I know the music industry would disagree with me when I say I own it but I do feel like I bought it I own it, it's mine I'm going to listen to this until the end of time but now that's gone so what do we do? So I do kind of feel like ripping CDs is an important thing because you could set up like Plex Amp or one of the other hosted music players or Volumeo for example on a Raspberry Pi and create a jukebox and because I know this isn't initially like a homelab topic but it becomes a homelab topic because it's not much different than running a Plex server and watching the Avengers, right? Sometimes you don't want to watch a movie just want to jam out to some Metallica or something and it's good to have something to do that with and when it comes to ripping CDs what would you use nowadays because most people don't rip CDs anymore and for all I know CDs can go away all together but there's something about having a physical copy of something that if I Fubar the MP3s or whatever I'd actually rip an org format personally but I can recreate that content infinitely and it doesn't depend on a record company's negotiations to whether I can do that and the tool that I'm going to recommend because I'm sure this is not something that people are thinking about right now but I'm just putting the idea back in everyone's head about ripping CDs is called Asunder A-S-U-N-D-E-R has been my tool of choice for so many years, I can't even remember now. So I've been using that to rip CDs and have that digital copy and then I put it into Volumio. I also have Plex pointed to my music share as well so I can use Plex amp when I'm on the go to listen to my music collection. I think I have over like 150 artists in my collection right now and probably over 10,000 songs. So it's definitely a lot to keep track of but it's really awesome to have that control and until they discontinue audio CDs all together which let's be honest, you know they will. We have this ability now to just go to a flea market and buy a stack of CDs for a dollar and throw it in our music collection. Yeah, it's such an interesting concept and having some younger kids they some think about it a little bit but it's not as prevalent to them that we used to own all of our media. It wasn't the inconvenience of CDs. I mean granted, yeah, there's inconveniences swapping out audio disc or anything like that and CDs, obviously I've never been the biggest fan because they have delicate nature of them. And I remember forever ago, you know, yes scratch one, you're like, ah, I lost the music I could buy another one of those and there was places I used to, you know especially go to places to buy all the used audio but right now so many people in the controversies around media rights when you subscribe to some service and that service can't negotiate with the artist you like but they were able to before. This is a really interesting thing that is bringing back the rights talk and I'm really happy about that because I don't like the concept like that I pay an artist on a subscription. No, no, no, I pay that's not, that's a concept a lot of people seem to be confused by. No, the artist gets paid and has the ability to sell their same work when it comes to music in a digital form multiple times. That's a really cool thing. Now the artist has an opportunity to make a lot of money by having a popular song and each one of us pay for the right to use that song. I don't think that's an unreasonable request but I can play that at my leisure because I paid for it. Whenever I decide I want to play that and I think it's a lot, it's really annoying when you think about it because I wanted to watch something that I knew used to be on Netflix and now it's not. And I'm like, oh man, I wanted to watch it again or share it with someone and they're like, no, you can't. I'm like, wow, I can't even have friends over to rewatch this movie we wanted to talk about from a number of years ago, but it used to be and a licensing deal moved it to another platform. And yeah, it bothers me that we're getting away from it. I think hopefully some of these big controversies that come up bring people back to it because you pay for the media and I don't mind. And obviously it's different when you're paying for it as a service. When I pay for one of those music services, I don't get the rights. I get temporary rights as a service is the way I would describe that via streaming but I'm fine to go back to the days of purchasing them. I don't mind and I do this already and unfortunately, and I get lazy and out of convenience, I'll buy something through like the Google store and buy a movie so I can watch it whenever I want but there's still a concern that if something were to change with that movie I bought some licensing deal, if I bought it through Google or any service changes, could I lose access to it? That bothers me. And even worse, I mean, they could have an alternate version where Han Solo didn't shoot first and then you wouldn't have any control because it changed on you, right? Exactly, I need to know. Yeah, I need the version where Han Solo shot first not the other one that other people have out there. I mean, this could get bootlegged and changed and you know, I think it's such a huge conversation that may not really be the best fit for this but I podcast completely, but it kind of is where we really need to have a conversation about rights and digital media because it seems to me that people are in general, no, I'm not judging anyone in particular here but in general, the public is okay with losing things and it'd be one thing where I have a music CD and I accidentally step on it, okay, that's my fault, right? I shouldn't have done that, I broke it, I'll go replace it but if that CD that's on my desk was just disappeared because the record company didn't think I needed it anymore, what? I paid for that, are you gonna give me a refund? So if I went into a music service and I'll use this one example, it's the first time I've ever noticed this, Walmart, this is so long ago, used to actually sell MP3s a long time ago, so long ago in fact, I bet most people don't even remember that and I bought maybe one or two albums from them, I don't even know why and I got an email some time after saying, yeah, we're discontinuing that service so download your stuff while you still have a chance well, at least they allowed you to download it again but still it's like if you have your right to access media in someone else's data center they will shut that down, Nintendo is a good example of this, you buy games on the Wii, guess what? If that Wii breaks, you're done, all of your investment is completely gone, they're not going to keep that data for you to re-download because they don't feel like they need to and people should be fighting this because if you're going to gain control and hold the keys to my content then you need to keep it available to me or give me my money back but that's unfortunately not how it works at least with CDs and ripping DVDs and blueberries and things like that, you have a physical copy that if you did accidentally delete them or your hard drive died you could actually recreate the media infinitely you have control and I think that's something that I feel like a lot of people should really consider again in 2022 that yeah, it's nice to have everything in these media company servers available to us until it's not available anymore, that's not really fun. And I think it probably goes to even when you do the downloaded games on the Switch and things like that you're talking about, yeah, the same concept where you don't actually own the game anymore and it's not like Jay has a lot of the physical cartridges from the old-school games and things like that and yeah, you can play the Final Fantasy II anytime you want. Exactly, but the thing is, I hope I'm wrong but someday, like the Nintendo Switch is great, guess what, at some point Nintendo Switch is going to be considered retro, it's gonna be several Nintendo systems beyond that and you won't be able to download those games if that SD card fails that you downloaded those games to worse the system failed because it's locked to the system you will not be able to play those games again you cannot get those games back on the system again because they are some kind of serialization to the system that you're playing it on which is fine, now you call customer service my switch broke, I bought a new one and to transfer everything they'll absolutely help you out with that and I've had them do that for me but what happens when the Switch isn't really a thing that's being sold anymore, guess what, they don't care and there goes your investment so I think there needs to be like a bill of rights so to speak for if you're gonna sell me digital content then these are the expectations that you need to make it available to me if I need it again in the future or I think that's the least we could ask Yeah, absolutely, I think this one will stop with the list we have we have actually a few more and we'll save them for the next show and I'll throw out a couple answers in here because I've seen people asking about this and this is great directly related to the media topic and it's always a point of confusion someone says, hey, Tom, how's your phone talked to you and I use MB, I was using Plex I moved over to MB, I liked the interface and MB a little better and MB just worked better for movies I don't know why I was having weird stuttering issues and stopping issues with Plex it just would stop sending data, I don't know why I loaded MB, it works on the same server, no problem it's not a resource issue because neither one's using up that many resources on that system, but I did a video and me and Jay talked about this with VLANs the phone is an IoT device and so the Chromecast by which it will broadcast to I have the MB player loaded on my phone I have MB on the IoT network with my phone on the IoT network with my Chromecast and the IoT network those are all on the same network so they can easily talk to each other because the number of forum posts I have of, oh, I'm trying to get these things to bridge across multiple networks and keep the security is a headache and it doesn't always work well the portion where how do you get data over to MB or Plex is the question someone asked and it's really easy the NAS has multiple legs on it, so to speak we have a network interface that has a windows share and SMB share, if you will CIFS and the Samba share is on the secure network I drop the data over to the Samba share the Samba share is not available because it doesn't need to be on the IoT network because you're not sharing these over Samba you're sharing them through the program MB so MB is attached to the IoT network but the backend of where the data is stored within MB which is on my NAS is attached via a Samba share that's successful on a secure network it's as simple as that there's not, it's a nice secure way to do it and it makes your life a lot easier because you're not trying to figure out how to get all the devices to talk there and it makes MB stream perfectly fine there I can use the app on my phone the apps all look for local discovery on the same subnet so as long as you're all in the same subnet they all play happy together so hopefully that makes sense yeah there's all kinds of clever hacks and we'll definitely get to them I'm sure another DevRandom episode will have like quality of life tips for how to get your data to one place to the other sync this to that or whatever clever combination I think that's kind of the most fun thing about HomeLab it's like we have all these different things how can we combine them to have the most badass configuration we could possibly get in combination of services so yeah yeah so hopefully that makes sense and the last question I'll mention because it's just a really quick one and it rolls back to the very first thing we talked about our sponsor Linode someone says hey how can I look at my network externally I mean you can use things like Steve Gibson's shields up and look for open ports but if you wanted to dive into doing it yourself you can go ahead and sign up with Linode get an account going and use a tool like Nmap on a Linode instance to scan backwards towards your IP address because it's your IP address assigned to you from your ISP because someone asked well how do I know if I have any ports open and things like that yeah run a full port scan with Nmap externally is a way you can kind of test for your security internally testing for your security is a little different if you want to test application security Kali Linux is pretty much the go-to for having a complete set of tools on there runner up is going to be Parrot Linux as well that's for internal testing I mean you could run that in a cloud instance as well but it's a little bit harder to pull it back and you may as well if you're testing something locally a local application you may as well run it local for speed and things like that but just you know spin up a Linode instance to do an Nmap back to you easy way to tell if your ports are open so Yeah the way I see it there's a lot of people running Nmap against your IP why not join them why not join them why not do it yourself I mean everyone else is doing that right you might as well see what they're seeing Yeah absolutely so thank you very much for everyone who joined us today this was definitely a fun episode and we should listen Nmap is one of the tools in there because it's definitely you know what ports are open on this server what can I see from this it did my firewall rules actually work Nmap there's a easy way to do the testing in it so even built into PF Sense you can actually test from PF Sense and look at different sections of your network with it so Yeah you can do OS fingerprinting too if you don't know what the heck is this device that's connected to my DCP server Yeah try to do an OS fingerprint oh that's a that's a game system that's that's what that is or hopefully you know what it is after you run it Yeah and you can go I mean boy there's a lot of you know I haven't messed with as much but there's a lot of Nmap scripting out there that allows for some testing it's not as it's not a full vulnerability scanner but it will go a little further than parts open there's different Nmap scripts that can be added to it for some further insight so I don't know I don't know if we that's another tool that I don't know if there's enough to talk about it for a full episode but definitely a great tool overall to have in your toolkit That's right All right well thanks everyone and send us over some more feedback we always look forward to that we love doing Q&A episodes and right now everything's on schedule for next week we only had one skip so conversions of happenings sometimes happens with life Good news is both me and Jay had something on the same thing that caused it so we both had our day off at the same one Yeah some dev random caused us to take a week off and now we're doing an episode called dev random Yep exactly it's a full circle here All right thanks everyone, take care


And we had something we haven't had for a while and that is that the option market makers and some others had decided to go delta-neutral a day early. If you haven't listened to my show, I talk about it regularly, but for monthly options the decay of the option is so little in the last seven, eight days of the actually seven trading days after the Wednesday before the major monthly options expiration that there's a huge amount of risk for those option writers. So what they'll do is they'll either put on or take off or add a short or long position on the other side to make sure that the delta, i.e. the change in their account doesn't move very much. It's not going to move not at all, but for the most part they can get it down to where it's maybe a half a percent. Usually, well that was going to be tomorrow, I was kind of looking for it. I didn't think that Powell would have actually a lot to say today, but I think they use that as an excuse for what he said because I didn't see anything in there that really changed the trajectory of the market. He may have been just a tad softer than maybe even last Wednesday at the Fed meeting, but I didn't think that there was much there. So what do we have? Well we have markets that were severely down or down, well not severely down. We were down a little bit, then we went and went whole hog higher, and then we totally reversed back to being about flat on the market. I think the S&P is down two points today. So you just have to watch and learn, but this is a bear market, and you get these kind of massive pops higher and they instantly fizzle, and that kind of tells you that you are in that bear market. You don't really get that kind of stuff to the downside because there's always people wanting to buy in a bull market. Anyway, we'll be back in a few minutes, we'll discuss this and a whole lot more.


So, let me draw the traditional curves again. We have the energy. We know that the energy goes down right. When we fold, we have the entropy. I'm going to skip the details. The entropy also goes down. And then we want to think about what happens to the free energy. Well, if we have this nucleation condensation model, there is going to be some sort of region here that has formed the core. But that's going to be small. That's going to be very small. And then we have to think about what is how many native contacts do we have in here and how much valuable energy have we fold. So if we look at, say, delta E, that is going to go roughly, first as the volume here. I'm going to need to, I don't care what the proportionality is, but let's say to the very first approximation, it's going to be proportional to the volume in there. So I'll say that it's a constant one multiplied by the volume. But maybe that is too easy an approximation, because it's only the residues inside this volume that have all the beautiful interactions. The volume would be proportional to the number of residues. And for all these plots, I'm thinking of the number of residues that I've folded or density or something. But all the ones on the surface here, they don't have the beautiful contacts yet. So shit, I'm going to need to compensate for that. So I have to subtract some sort of other constant multiplied by the area, the surface of the small folding core. And if the volume is roughly proportional to the number of residues, that means that I'm going to have C1 multiplied by the number of residues minus C2. Well, the area is proportional to the volume raised to powers of two thirds. So this is going to be the number of residues raised to two thirds. Then we do the same for the entropy. In the entropy two, I have, there's going to be another con that let's call it C1 prime. The change here is going to be negative because this is the I'm losing freedom, right? The first approximation, that's proportional to the volume, the residues that are really stuck inside C1 multiplied by volume. But the entropy, well, if I have a small loop sticking out, the part sticking out here, they have also started losing their freedom, not quite as much. But with a bit of hand waving, hopefully you're accepting what I'm saying that with entropy, it's actually worse. Here I also lose from the part on the surface. It's not going to be good to be on the surface. So here I have C2 prime multiplied by area. So what that means is again C1 prime multiplied by N, sorry, minus C1 prime multiplied minus C2 prime multiplied by N raised to the power of two thirds. What that means is that if we look at energy first, first we had something that was proportional to N, but it's not quite that good. Particularly in the beginning, I'm not going to go down quite that quickly. So there will be a deviation here that is proportional to N to two thirds. Entropy, on the other hand, that's going to go down quicker initially. So here there will also be an extra term that is N to the power of two thirds. If we take those and say E minus S or TS, well, you know, these dashed lines, the first approximation, they will cancel, right? So that the remaining parts here, F sharp, is going to be roughly proportional to the number of residues in the folding core raised to the power of two thirds. This looks like a very minor difference. Remember when we talked, we talked about kinetics before, but now I want to say that the time it takes to get across this barrier, the time it took to get across the barrier, do you remember that that was roughly time zero multiplied by the exponent raised to plus delta F plus delta F divided by, let's say, RT. And I don't care about all the constants here. So that's some sort of T zero multiplied by an exponent. Let's call it A multiplied by N raised to two thirds. I don't care what units are in frame. This is what we should compare to Leventhal's paradox. So remember before we said that the folding time would be two raised to the power of N, if N was 100, but it was a very large number. And here I just say the folding time is E, well E is almost two first approximation, raised to something that is proportional to N raised to the power of two thirds. Am I completely crazy? I spent all these hours, you spent a few weeks just to get up with N raised to the power of two thirds instead of N. That's horrible. It's not. You have no idea how fast the exponential function grows with the argument, and that's the trick here. Two raised to the power of 100 is roughly 10 to the power of 30. Two raised to the power of 100 raised to the powers of two thirds itself, that's roughly 3 million. Do you see the difference? 3 million versus 10 to the power of 30. This is orders of orders of orders of orders of orders of magnitude faster that we would have predicted from Leventhal's paradox. And if you actually work out the exact personalities here, we can show that for normal small domains in the ballpark of up to 50 or 100 residues, we would predict folding times ranging from a few seconds up to maybe a minute or a few minutes. It fits perfectly. And that pretty much solves protein folding, or it solves Leventhal's paradox at least. And to sum that up, the proteins we have and the folds we have, the reasons for the size of the folds you observe is that they are that size because they can't be much larger to fold quickly and stably into beautiful stable functional proteins. That's what kind of what Leventhal proposed, right? Second, there will be many proteins that don't fulfill this, and they will not be stable proteins. Evolution will select against it. Sure, there are exceptions, but those exceptions are so rare that first we can ignore them, and the second part to think about is that it could lead to prions if you have two stable states. Why do we talk so much about folding? Well, folding was the problem where we introduced this, but this is equally true for say an ion channel moving between an open and closed state, or say a voltage sensor moving up or down in a membrane. If it's moving slowly in one direction, that means that it's an entropic process where we need to get across the barrier and find the right solution, and in the other direction it might move really fast. Then it's an entropic barrier that we also understand. So any type we're looking at, conformational transitions, all these things that we've learned are equally true, and in many cases we can use similar methods to study them. And that's of course the take-home message for you, that the field today is gradually, I wouldn't say moving away from protein folding, we're still interested in it, but suddenly computer simulations and experiments have become so good at studying, for instance, membrane protein transitions, is that there is an amazing ocean of fascinating problems there that we're working on. So get in touch with me if you want to do a PhD on it.