Good afternoon, welcome everybody to USIP as well as welcome to everybody watching online. My name is Nancy Lindborg and I'm the new president here at the U.S. Institute of Peace. We are honored today to host His Excellency Mohammed Ashraf Ghani. You have had an amazing visit thus far here in the United States. I don't know how you've slept. You've been absolutely tireless since you've arrived. So thank you very much. We're especially pleased that you were able to make it a priority to join us here today to speak to the American public and to take some questions. USIP is very pleased to host today's event with the Atlantic Council. It's President Ghani used to be on their board. And after the president makes his opening remarks, Fred Kemp, who is here, the president of Atlantic Council, will moderate a Q&A as well as those watching online. So please tweet with the hashtag Ask Ghani. Since his election last fall, President Ghani has repeatedly stated that peace is a key priority. That's the primary goal. And so it's therefore fitting that you are here with us today in this building which symbolizes America's commitment to peace and that this should be the venue of your conversation with the American public. I just returned from Afghanistan, where our USIP cobble team introduced me to a wide range of Afghan civil society, government, religious leaders, all of whom are working with great energy and great dedication toward the vision of reform and peace that President Ghani has outlined. And without question, this will not be easy. This will take concerted effort. But as one young civil society leader said to me, we have got to make this government work. There is no plan B. USIP has worked in Afghanistan since 2002, and Mr. President, I can assure you that USIP plans to remain fully engaged in helping to build peace in Afghanistan, both from the community up and from the top down, and especially with the new spirit of reform, of partnership, and of hope that you have brought. I want to give a special shout out to the extraordinary USIP team working on Afghanistan, many of whom are here today and led by the remarkable Andrew Wilder. And now I'm especially delighted to ask Steve Hadley to introduce President Ghani. Steve is our extraordinary chair of the USIP board. He's also the vice chair of the Atlantic Council, a former national security advisor, and an old friend of President Ghani's. Please help me welcome Steve and Hadley. Mr. President, and it is a real joy to be able to call you that. On behalf of both USIP and the Atlantic Council, it is a sincere pleasure for me to welcome you here. Our two countries reacquainted themselves with each other under the most tragic circumstances nearly 14 years ago. And who in those days of confusion and uncertainty would have imagined what Afghanistan would achieve in the intervening years? Who would have thought that Afghanistan could achieve in that relatively short period of time? What it takes many countries decades to achieve, a peaceful and democratic handover of power from one government to another. In welcoming you here as president, I don't want to overlook the significant role that you played throughout those 14 years in rebuilding Afghanistan. President Ghani was appointed in 2009 to oversee the security transition. In fulfilling those responsibilities, he visited every military command of the Afghan army, traveling to every province in the country. Between 2004 and 2008, President Ghani was chancellor of Kabul University, looking to prepare the next generation of Afghanistan's leaders. And before that, for two years, he was minister of finance. And what struck those of us who had the privilege of working with him in that period was not only his encyclopedic knowledge of Afghanistan, but his creative approach when it came to the difficult task of state building. I'm going to give you one example, reform of Afghanistan's currency in 2002. President Ghani, then minister of finance, implemented a massive nationwide currency exchange where every banknote of Afghanistan's various currencies, then in circulation, was traded in for a note of the new currency. Few people thought it could be done. Few people understood how important it was to creating a solid economic foundation for Afghanistan. And for those who understood it's important and thought it was impossible, President Ghani, then his finance minister, did it. And he did it with his trademark determination and tireless effort. He made it happen, providing the basis of years of economic growth that followed. Mr. President, your country is lucky to have you as president. On behalf of the Atlantic Council and the United States Institute of Peace, we feel very lucky indeed to have you with us here today, President Ghani. Ms. Landburg, Mr. Hadley, Steve, ladies and gentlemen, I'm humbled by the introduction. It's not the country that is lucky, it is I who am lucky to be born in Afghanistan at this moment in time. We are a country of great suffering and simultaneously of great opportunity. Our suffering is indicated by the fate of Farhunda, a woman totally innocent who went to a shrine to argue with a fortune teller, probably, as one version says, that the fortune that was written for her, the charm was without effect. She was murdered in cold blood by a mob. We have arrested 32 people in relationship to this heinous crime. We have put over 10 police officers under investigation for standing silent and doing nothing. This incident speaks for our collective trauma. 36 years of conflict have deeply traumatized us. We suffer from the post-distress order syndrome, but we don't have analysts. We must engage in collective therapy in order to deal with this unprecedented level of violence. It had no place in our culture. It had no place in our religion. Events of those type must be taken seriously because their rarity in itself is not an excuse. They speak of a tragedy and we must have the determination to overcome those kinds of tragedies. That's why I'm lucky because the people of Afghanistan, in their wisdom, accepted to place the burden of responsibility on myself in a team, Dr. Abdullah and our other colleagues, to bring fundamental change in sustainable transformation. We are a country of hope because we never give up. We are resilient people. Anyone else in our position today would have surrendered. They would have given up hope. They would have not had the determination to participate. You know, when others participate in an election, it's a picnic. For us participating in an election was to risk cutting off your fingers. And then, after the first round of the election, in Ghazni was trying to wipe off the marks, the ink marks, with a knife, so that people would not cut the fingers. That massive turnout, particularly participation of 38% of our women, speaks of our determination. Peace, I'll be extremely brief so I can allow a conversation rather than a lecture format. Lecture formats don't work. Peace is our priority, but peace is extremely difficult because peace in Afghanistan cannot be framed in terms of a classic political conflict. The drivers of conflict must be specified so that peace can be framed properly. Most of the literature in peace, with all due respect to the institute itself, is from classic perspective. Where is the discussion of criminality as a driver of conflict? We are people who have made tens of billions of dollars from conflict in order to have ungoverned spaces. We need to understand this deep criminality as a driver. The ecology of terror has changed. Terror morally is still an aberration, but sociologically it's become a system. Terror is acquired as a system characteristics that are very similar to corruption as a system. Corruption in a lot of countries is not an aberration. It is the system. The reason I highlight this is when you deal with a system, it takes very different type of efforts than when you deal with symptoms. The other, at the former life, cold nights when I was chancellor of Kabul University allowed me to read through over 100 peace agreements and classify them and write about them. I wrote a long article in 2007. So I want to highlight a couple of trends from that. In my paper on Syria that was published a couple of years back on foreign policy again, I drew some of them. 50% of peace agreements globally break down within five years. It's a very sobering fact because it means that when you begin or even when you conclude, it's not the outcome. And because of this, the agreement really needs to have been worked out and the implementation arrangements have to have been figured. A lot of peace agreements are very idealistic on paper but have very little attention to implementation arrangements. And that's when the real work begins. Second, for success of peace, regional consensus is essential. Almost all conflicts that have been enduring have involved sanctuary in a neighbor or several neighboring countries. The need of sanctuaries, determination of neighbors to be able to be willing to work together for peace is extremely important. And Central and Latin America peace broke out when the neighboring countries reached consensus that peace was essential from a regional perspective and not just from a national perspective. And then there's the very process of managing the process of peacemaking. You need national consensus, which means that in today's environment, you cannot have covert discussions. You must make peace into an overt process to build the consensus that is necessary because working in secret involves back clashes and it's extremely important. And the other, when there are major issues such as gender rights, fundamental human rights, rights to inclusion, all the more that the debate be framed properly, that the discussion be prepared thoroughly, and that the focus be maintained. One other observations and then I'd invite my very good friend and colleague, Fred Kemp, to engage in a conversation. Peace in a lot of countries does not result in security. Peace agreements bring an end to the political justification of violence, but absorption of ex-competence is a fundamental problem, reabsorption of refugees, displaced people is a phenomenon that requires enormous attention. The section of the peace agreements that are most ambitious and least paid attention to are the socioeconomic issues. And this, in our case, I just want to highlight one. When peace comes, I say when, not if, because we are determined to bring it. We will be facing absorption of two to five billion refugees back within our fabric. And we need to be very clear what this type of scale of reabsorption entails, what type of economic focus we must have, what type of governance, but particularly what kind of social policy that would ensure that people have a place, that they become stakeholders in this phenomenon. I invite you, the Institute of Peace, with your leadership, with Mr. Hadley's enormous experience and guidance, to be partners with us in this process, and I'm very much looking forward to an intense discussion over the days and months to come. Thank you. Well, Mr. President. You can call me a chef, I think it's a... Well, you know something, I like Steve, I think it just gives me so much pleasure to say Mr. President. Thank you. And I think those of us who have known you longest and have seen the integrity vision with the leadership you've shown in many aspects of your life. Sitting at the joint session of Congress today and seeing you walk down that aisle to a standing ovation of Congress was really a moment, a significant moment, a historic moment. So thank you, you've thanked us so much while you've been here, I want to thank you. For making the sacrifices you've made to do the job that you're doing, you said last night at the State Department, leadership is about sacrifice, leadership isn't about privilege, you're the epitome of that, and that's the last I'm going to say because we can talk later, but I did want to express those personal remarks, and now I'm going to grill you. Of course. I wonder if you can, I'm going to ask a couple of questions and then I'll go to the audience. Sure. Talk about peace a little bit more to the extent that you can, I realize that there may be much you can't talk about right now, but where do you think one is in a reconciliation and potential peace process with the Taliban, and what will it take, what unlocks this? Well, first we have to define the problem. The problem fundamentally is not about peace with Taliban, the problem is fundamentally about peace between Pakistan and Afghanistan. For 13 years we've been in an undeclared state of hostilities, and this is the definition that we offered to our Pakistani counterparts, they've accepted this definition of the problem. That's the breakthrough. First in the state of Pakistan and the state of Afghanistan as two states, sovereign, equal, independent, must reach acceptance of each other, and the necessity that we need each other to prevent the region from sinking into chaos. And the conditions have changed. In previous years we talked about the spring fighting season, and it was always Afghanistan. This year, unfortunately, the spring fighting season is going to be intensely in Pakistan. 165,000 approximately of Pakistan forces are now stationed along the Duran line. They've carried huge counterinsurgency operations resulting in displacement of approximately two and a half million people. We've had over 200,000 refugees from Pakistan come to Afghanistan. So it's a new context. The heinous attack on the Peshawar children came within days of the heinous attack on our children in Yahihil when they were playing volleyball. Terrorism is a ping-pong. It does not know innocent people or where they live. So this, if I'm correct in this, that now the new ecology of terrorism poses a threat to the entire state system of South Asia, and West Asia, and threatens China and Central Asia, then we must come together to understand that state cooperation on a regional compact on stability in prosperity is essential. In this regard, our conversations with our Pakistani counterparts, both civilian military leadership have been productive. I'm cautiously optimistic in waiting for results. The second phenomenon, of course, is Taliban, and as I remarked this morning in my address to Congress, the Taliban must be differentiated from the ecology of terror. They've been connected to it, but I hope that, as I've won patriots, they will choose to separate themselves from them. And there, it's premature to talk in public. Again, I'm cautiously optimistic. Thank you very much for that answer. Perhaps you could talk a little bit more also about the ecology of terror. When I spoke with you in Munich, you talked about Daesh and the evolution of Daesh in Afghanistan and also other groups. How are you seeing, this is a constantly moving picture, how have you seen this evolve? And will you need more outside help than you have right now to take this on? Well, first thing to realize with the ecology is that the ecology is a system, symbiotic relationships get to be established, also competitive relationships. Daesh is key characteristic. One, it focuses on its competitors and it swallows them whole. Look at its relationship with the Syrian Free Army. Like Cobra, it absorbed and the key officer corps that was the backbone of it from Syria in Iraq, the former Bates, are now working with Daesh. And if Al Qaeda was, we told you respect to Microsoft, Windows 1, Daesh is Windows 5. It's fast. It is brutal, but it's extraordinary quick. It took Al Qaeda years of planning, it took Daesh months. Three, mutation is very rapid. And we need to take account of this mutation because the other analogy is it's like a cancer. It jumps. Fourth, it's extremely well financed. The financing of the psychology of terror is unprecedented and unfortunately we've focused very little on relationship between the psychology and criminality as an inherent component of the psychology. Without the criminal networks that were available, money and people will not travel. In terms of ideas, the new technology is enabled recruitment. The first Afran to be recruited by Daesh was a woman recruited via Australia and deployed in Syria. So it gives you both speed and appeal. And then there's the narrative. The narrative is simple, straightforward, is cathological, deals with end of time. But it's appealing to certain very basic things. Now the contrast of this ecology is that states are either collapsing or they're extremely slow to respond. The governments of the region have not acknowledged the problem of exclusion. Like Afghanistan, we have 36% of our population living below poverty. For five years the poverty line hasn't moved one inch. In some places it's gotten worse. Northeastern Afghanistan is 50% poverty. Landlessness in some places is reaching 90%. Where are the egalitarian policies to make people stakeholders?  Maybe you'll be a government without a compact with your citizens. In the speed is slow. The international bureaucratic response is very slow. Our understanding analytically is slow. This combination makes the threat formidable. And a couple of other observations. One, our framework of analysis is country bound. While the ecology of terror calls the very borders into question. And we need to respond to this. We need to go prior to the age of nation state, as I was trained in medieval history or ancient history, to understand networks. Because that's, you know, while the technology is new, the techniques are not. Sufi orders, much more peaceful phenomena, spread very rapidly throughout Terworld. The levels of commerce for three millennia expanded. And related to the second point, we need regional coordination. We need coordination at the level of the government, at the level of region, at the level of the Arab Islamic world, and then global. In here is a fundamental requirement of courage. We have to be willing to speak truth to terror. Who speaks for Islam? Why are the majority of the Muslims silent? This is not your fight. It is our fight, and we must assume it and win it. How many Daesh fighters, if you can estimate it all, are there in Afghanistan and where? Well, again, I would reformulate the question. Because that's to frame it in the classic way of insurgency, counterinsurgency ratios. The Galula heritage. But Galula never commanded even a province. We were caught in a romance of the French, the way we were caught with structural reading, or deconstruction. Counterinsurgency must be viewed much more from perspective of Malaysia, the work of Thompson, or somebody else in that regard, than just this. It is who they can recruit, who do they target? So Afghanistan has no shortage of a reserve army available to be recruited. We have 1 million unemployed youth. 600,000 more are going to be added this year. There are academies that are training suicide bombers, money and ideas to recruit these and reorganize them, I think, are more important in terms of lethal impact. Daesh is four stages. Organize, orient, decide, act. This has been very well documented by a series of open source studies done for sitcom. And if you apply this phase, we saw three, we moved on the fourth to prevent them. And the action is spectacular. It is oriented towards TV, the burning of the Jordanian, the destruction of ancient cities. If you understand the pattern, then the nature of activities that must be directed against it would not be just in relationship to the numbers, but in relationship to the impact. Because the media's focus in media defines our comprehension is on dramatic action. After that, you can take the district or reorganize the city, but people will not report on this. So it's really important, I think, to understand that the threat is posed now in epistemological level, not words that I should use. It shows you my former profession as a professor. But one other story, why is Afghanistan so important for Daesh? It is because they have a narrative, a story of the end of the world. In that story, the past is important. Our ancient name of Khurasan is Khurshah. A lot of Daesh adherents have assumed the name Khurasan. Why? Because twice the caliphate was started from Afghanistan. The Abbasid caliphate was a product of the Khurasan revolt and reordering and overthrow of the Amid. And then Mamun, the one who started the golden age of science in Islam, reconquered Baghdad from the current city of Maruf in Turkmenistan and Herat was his major soon. Second, the story of the end of the world, the force that would defeat them, starts from Khurasan. And the battle that they expect will take place in Dabiq in Syria. That's the name of their magazine. It's a very small city, but they've spent unbelievable energy to consolidate this space. So hence, the problem has to be seen from their perspective. And then they expect Jesus Christ to come back, be reborn as a Muslim and bring the end of the world and defeat the Khurasan force. I think it's very important to get into that thinking. Thank you so much. Questions, please. Let me go straight to the audience. Please identify yourself, please, and ask your questions. Hi, President Ghani. And congratulations. You look much younger while I've aged. I'm Paula Bryan with Oxfam, and I'm very proud to be calling you President Ghani. I wondered if you could share some views on what you think is the role of organized civil society in Afghanistan and whether you think there's still a role for international organizations in your country. And speaking not only to your country, but you've been a voice for what we should be doing more generally. We're in a big year. We're declaring big goals about many of the things that you care about, not just MDGs, but industrialization, economic growth and so on. We don't have the financing for it, and many in organized civil society don't know what to do in the next generation of work that's coming. Do you have views on that? Yes, thank you. It's a pleasure to see you. It was my advisor when I was Minister of Finance, and it shows you I could trust a member of the civil society to be my advisor. Yes, you still need it. First thing, construction of the space of civil society in a country like Afghanistan that is witnessed the trauma and the type of tragedy of Farhunda and hundreds of other excluded persons is essential. Second, the oppositional role between government, business and civil society must end and come to a framework of creative tension rather than stalemate. Third, the local roots of civil society must be really rethought. We have over 200,000 mosques. The space of mosques as a civil space is extraordinary crucial. So, you know, there are two traditions. The English tradition of civil society that is focused on legal rights because political rights were very slow in England. You know, franchise developed very late investment in education or the Germanic tradition, which is emphasized social rights, but slowed down political rights. We must now bring this tension together organically, not to impose. Part of the external issue has been a discourse that alienates a lot of people locally, women's rights, human rights. The Constitution of Afghanistan includes everything that the Human Rights Declaration engages. Why do we need to continuously invoke the Human Rights Declaration instead of the Constitution? So, fundamental framing notions are really a display. And transparency was not invented by my former colleagues at the World Bank. Omar, the second caliph of Islam, or the fourth caliph Ali, are embodiments of this. What I'm bringing to you is that civil society must seek historical roots in the culture within which it operates. Politics is not a technical discipline. It is simultaneously a cultural arena in a field of interaction. And within this cultural arena, we have agreements and disagreements. If you just embrace what are called external notions, quote-unquote because we are engaged in a universal conversation, you surrender the space of Islam to the likes of Daesh. So the internal process of discussion, I think, is extraordinarily important. So objective in language must come to articulation. The new agenda is justification in the old agenda with the fundamental parts of it, or empowerment of the poor in their participation. And in there, I think you just need a new age of relevance, NGOs, or called non-governmental organization, which means they are confused about what they are. Another name would be Necessary to Governance. And I hope you adopt that. Trudy Rubin. This is such a pleasure, President Ghani. Trudy Rubin from the Philadelphia Inquirer. You spoke of the necessity of regional consensus for peace and the end of sanctuaries. Could you tell us a bit more about how far you feel you've progressed with Pakistan, moving towards that consensus and towards the end of sanctuaries? And for a broader consensus that includes all the countries in the region, including difficult actors such as Iran, including China, Russia, who is going to pull that consensus together? Can it be done just by the neighbors? Does the U.S. have a role? How can you envision that beginning to come together? Thank you. And let me just say one thing on top of Trudy's excellent question, which is the China piece of this. I was just in India last week, and they're somewhat suspicious of this move towards China. How does this fit in and how do you solve the... You have a great regional ambition, but you have some pretty significant regional problems? Well, thank you. I'll answer the second part of the question. The first one will reveal itself by results. In terms of the region, the initiative in the first place must come from the region, and I hope our practice in the last six months can show how much can be done regional. We've created the first... We've been critical in creating the first tripartite format of discussion between China, United States, and Afghanistan. China is a serious stakeholder in this. I'm fortunate that we've received more commitment of assistance from China in the economic area and security area than the last 13 years combined, because the psychology of terror and the nature of the threats allow us to form common understanding. Each one of the neighbors that you mentioned, we've engaged in deep conversation. Today, there's a broad consensus among our neighbors from India to Azerbaijan and beyond, Russia included, that a stable Afghanistan is essential to stability in the region. This is an important consensus that is being formed now from the expression of the consensus we have to go to the mechanisms. Mechanisms are going to require doing certain things bilaterally, certain things trilaterally, certain things multilaterally. The United States still remains the indispensable interlocutor within this, but managing the process and supporting the process must be differentiated. What we would like for the peace process or a mechanism such as Friends of the Peace where all parties are informed, they're engaged, but they do not mediate or manage. Afghan ownership in management of the peace process is the indispensable precondition. And I hope that we've shown that we have both the imagination and the capacity to do this, because without managing the internal dynamic, for instance, we've put and I thank Minister Stanekzai for facilitating this, we've put all key questions regarding peace to key constituencies in Afghanistan, women's groups, human rights community, the ulama, business community, the peace council, et cetera. That is given us, and he's just summed up the results of the deliberations and all the questions we'll put in writing, all the answers have been provided in writing. Writing is a very good discipline. Orally, you can change your mind and say, well, I didn't, but paper is cold. I like cold paper. That's because I'm a bookworm, I know you. I wasn't born a bookworm, I climb mountains. We have reached 90% consensus. The areas that are innovative constitute 5% that we really need to re-engage stakeholders, the areas that are different are 5%. But there are boundaries are clearly emerging from this. And mechanisms of support need to be differentiated. Question of voice need is important in this process. A lot of work on this, but there's the price. The price, peace, as it is significant and vital, next to this is economic integration. Don't forget, Asia is in the process of becoming the largest continental economy in the world. It's recapturing its position of 250 years ago. But Asia cannot be integrated without a stable Afghanistan. We are not just metaphorically the heart of Asia. Without us being stable, there would be not a single pipeline taking gas from Central Asia to Pakistan or India. Without us being stable, there cannot be a single transmission line going through. Et cetera. So our location that was a key disadvantage in the next 50 years is going to become solid gold. And I hope that I can utilize that location rather than our mineral wealth. Mineral wealth, his curse is attached to it. We need to preempt it. But location, if it's utilized for maximum purpose, can bring enormous goods to everybody. Just one illustration. Our discussions with Turkmenistan, with Azerbaijan, with Georgia and Turkey are resulting, I think very rapidly in the realization of the Lapis Lazuli corridor. I'm very confident that within a couple of years, our goods to and from Europe, from Europe to Afghanistan and then from Afghanistan, will only require five days. This will have transformational impact. But the advantage of this road again is that it's not a substitute for our relationship with South Asia. It increases South Asia's possibilities for global integration. So we are pursuing the strategy of becoming a regional platform for cooperation and an Asian roundabout. Peace on the other dimensions. I don't want to jinx our luck. And so you'll see the results. I'm going to take two questions. One, a Twitter question that we got in and the Twitter is hashtag ask Ghani. And then Harlan Olin. So it's from Jason Castillo or Castillo, associate professor at the Bush School of Government Texas A&M University. The question that he's posed is when can American soldiers come home? But let me phrase that also in a different way, which is the agreement that you've reached here, 9,500? Is this the unoptimal result for you? And what role do you see the U.S. playing going forward? Is this a satisfied result? And let me turn to Harlan for his question as well. Hi.  Pleasure's entirely mine. I'm Harlan Olin and Steve and Fred got it absolutely right. To say President Karzai is just really inspiring. My question. You said President Karzai. You did what President Karzai? You said you did say Karzai. Not to say President Karzai. Even academics has distinguished my apologies. Wow. My question is this. You paint a brilliant picture of opportunity in the future. But how do we get there? You've spoken with President Obama and Secretaries Kerry and Carter and other allies. What exactly do you think Afghanistan is going to need in the short term? In terms of military support, security support, financing, ideological and other sorts of support to make sure that Afghanistan is a real success. Thank you. The first part for Professor Costello. We've safely returned 100,000 of your troops. What more do you ask? No, literally. In 2013, when I was still in charge of the security transition, weren't the majority of you commentators saying Afghanistan was going to collapse as a result of the withdrawal? Ambassador Cunningham was one of the few believers. 120,000 troops who have been withdrawn, there have been no security gap to date. I think this is a tribute to our mutual plan. And to our belief. And I must say thank Mr. Hadley and a lot of other people in this room for their emphasis on training of Afghan security forces. Afghan security forces, I think, have exonerated the trust in them and the investment that has taken place. General Karimi is here. I'd like to acknowledge him for his leadership. Our chief of army staff. I am proud to be the commander in chief of a very proud force. No Americans are engaged in combat roles. On 31st of December, we met our goal that American forces are not engaged in combat. The role of the forces is advised, trained and assessed. And then we have a counter-terrorism cooperation framework. The forces will come back when your leaders decide that they come back. It's not our decision. It is the decision of your leadership. And we respect that. That's the old man's question. The first thing is it's our responsibility to get our house in order. It's not your responsibility. As proud as I am of being commander in chief, I've retired 62 generals in the last six months. Renewing of leadership. General Karimi was demanding this for three years. His request was not being complied with. I complied very quickly. We need to renew the leadership, contracting. There are allegations that there are $211 million difference in a $1 billion fuel contract. I canceled it. We've centralized the contracting process for a period that both the CEO, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, my good friend, and I would participate in a personally chair it. We are looking at forced readiness. We are looking at the nature of conflict. We are looking at the levels. This examination must be driven by us. What we need in that regard is support. Advice and assist. On enablers, we have had agreements. I hope that the delivery of those enablers will be speeded up. I'm very gratified by the decision by President Obama on providing flexibility. Instability for 2015, and the reason is that we have lost about minimally eight months of planning during 2014 because the bilateral security agreement was not signed. What we need more than anything else is a common analysis of threats and opportunities. We must create a shared universe of understanding as partners that can rely on each other that each can do his or her part as part of that division of labor. We must have clarity on this and then clarity regarding the functions that must be performed. In light of that, then the resource question can really be handled. From another perspective, we must answer the question of self-sustainability. We cannot be dependent on our security forces forever being paid or for decades being paid by your taxpayers. I've been thanking your taxpayers and I mean it from the bottom of my heart because it's your heart that earned dollars. So transparency and accountability in use of resources, leadership that is responsible, and ownership of peace. Putting an end to this conflict is necessary. I want to say this very clearly. I've run on a peace platform and so has Dr. Abdul. Our goal is very clear. The war is imposed on us. We are not seeking war but God helped the person who brings war to my children. Let them not underestimate our resolve. We've defended this country for 5,000 years. We are going to defend it if we are engaged for another 5,000 years. You help us with that. Thank you for that answer. We have four or five minutes left. I think we'll take... Let me take this question. Let's take these two questions and I think we'll make these two final questions. Thank you, Mr. President. My name is John Arga Iqbal. I'm a former Afghan diplomat. Now that the Daesh forces are gaining ground and making inroads in Afghanistan and their reality and some fear that Taliban forces are either clandestinely or openly expressed their allegiance to Daesh forces. How do you see the future of any peace deal with Taliban or for this purpose with Pakistan in the presence of such a threat to peace and security in Afghanistan? And also, do you see this as a unifying factor between Pakistan and Afghanistan since Daesh threats both countries alive? Thank you. And final question. Hi, my name is Yelda Kazimian with the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. Thank you, Mr. President, for giving us this opportunity for dialogue today. As an Afghan-American who has grown up hearing stories from my parents about the war, I am encouraged by your philosophy about peace and the importance of transparency in the process. I wanted to mention an issue today that almost seems forgotten and that's transitional justice. And get your thoughts as to how transitional justice will play a role in the peace process going forward. I think we can all agree that softening people's memories about the past and addressing their grievances and allowing them to have a sense of shared grievances and solidarity is key to that process of success. So just want to get your ideas on where transitional justice will be. Thank you. Sure. Thank you. To Mr. Janogha, the diplomat. First, peace with the Taliban is essential not because of the military force they present, but because of the justification of conflict. Maulay Baluch, one of our leading religious scholars, put the issue very simply. Daesh will be criminal activity in Islamic theory of governance. They can be suppressed like mice. Taliban are a different ideological factor. They provide a level of political legitimacy that we must acknowledge that exists. And because of that, I've called them political opponents. The other is that they have legitimate, some of them have legitimate grievances. People were falsely imprisoned. People were falsely tortured. People were tortured in private homes or private prisons. The geography of injustice in Afghanistan varies a great deal and we must take account of this. Ranging from the south to the east, there's a lot of variation and it must be addressed. Without addressing the failures of our system of justice, without inhumanity that has been carried, the report that was released, the very courageous report by Senator Feinstein, that night I didn't sleep a wink. I read it cover to cover. It's shocking. It's a tribute to American democracy that can acknowledge this. But how do you tell these people that you're sorry? How is it that people that specialize in psychology devise torture devices, torturing innocent people? This is part of the syndrome that we've inherited and we must address. And that connects to your question. Transitional justice involves all of us and we must figure ways because in the methods, I think South Africa and Rwanda have been most effective in devising collective forms of therapy because peace agreements, peace means, forgiving blood. Our culture, the culture of local mediation versus both sharia that is very strict in disregard and modern justice. Modern justice kills and returned for killing. It's still based on an eye for an eye. The local customs devise ways particularly in all of our named groups but in various traditions of Jirga, in part of the Jirga is what is called putting a stone on conflict. You bring about amnesia. 20 years, 30 years or others so that society can function. From the government's perspective, dealing with the past is one dimension, dealing with today is another. I will not tolerate torture of prisoners or abuse of innocent people. That practice must stand. I will fire anybody from India's or police or the army that engages in this. And if that has destabilizing effect, let it be, we will re-stabilize in terms of legitimacy. The past is a much more complex tapestry and I do not want. Again, it's my humbleness and my limits as the leader of this beautiful but much tortured country. We cannot sacrifice the future for the sake of the past. We must bring about a balance because if we go, just looking at the past we will be destroying the future and it's really important to understand that countries, a lot of countries produce historical amnesia. Europe after World War II was not an example of transitional justice. It was an example of historical amnesia. Indonesia. Malaysia. Singapore. So, while the quest for justice is essential, the circle of justice is the critical foundational notion of Islamic theory of governance, how we balance transformation and continuity is really important. Again, I've been very transparent with Afghan electorate saying I do not want the repetition of story of a manlachan or daoutan. They did not get the balance right. They pushed too far in one direction and resulted in decades of loss. Had our urbanization program of 1920s continued or our women's rights program or education program, we would have been in a completely different world. Continuity of governance is a critical condition of being able to achieve realistically what we are seeking. And this is where we must engage in a societal dialogue and I'm very privileged and pleased to have a counterpart like Dr. Seema Samar that can hold me both honest. She can scream much louder than I can, you know that. But simultaneously is the ultimate realist in terms of the goals and it's privileged to be able to work with the human rights community and a civil rights community in Afghanistan that is goal oriented and understands how we balance opportunities and move forward without losing momentum. President Ghani, I think everyone here would probably stay for another two hours, but we know you have to move on. I'll ask people in the audience to stay in their seats while President Ghani leaves. Let me just close by saying that I think, I speak for everyone in the audience and it's been an honor working with you on this and for the Atlantic Council in saying that we're impressed by your wisdom, your clarity, the way you're looking at this series of questions. We know the obstacles you face are great. We not only wish you well, as you know there are many people in this audience that will help wherever we can to achieve success in Afghanistan. Thank you very much President Ghani. Well thank you all. We need your help. Every Afghan child you can help is a great help. Every Afghan girl you can help particularly is even a greater help. But more than anything else your advice, your engagement with Afghanistan as American citizens, as American policy makers is crucial for us. Contrary to my previous reputation I've learned to be patient and I hope that you'd help me become even more person. Thank you very much.


Welcome to the Home Lab Show, episode 21, Synology. Are you talking about Synology, Jay? I am ready to talk about Synology. We thought this would be a good topic to dive into because the question has come up a few times and it's people looking for an easier solution, a turnkey solution, something that still let you maintain control of all your data but does not require the complexities of setting up some of the more advanced tools out there. And we have a previous episode where we talk about NextCloud, so you can go back to that and some of the things you'll talk about, you could say, can you do this with NextCloud? And I would say, yeah, but with the complexities that come with setting up NextCloud. I'm not to discourage people from setting up NextCloud. I'm here to talk to the people who may be discouraged about setting up NextCloud, looking for an easier solution. And ultimately, I think Synology fits that bill pretty good. So it's something me and Jay have both used. I've extensively used it in business. We actually have some Synology applications we use for my business, but we actively consult on these. So there's something I'm very familiar with and it's gonna be a fun topic. Lots to talk about there, but we should probably talk about our sponsor first because, you know, gotta keep the lights on and keep buying Synologies. And we gotta keep it hosted too because that's where- Yeah, gotta keep the hosting up. Yeah, absolutely. So the node has been a sponsor of LearnLinux TV for a long time. It's now sponsoring this particular podcast and the code that we'll have in the description will get you $100 in free credit towards your new account. That's good for 60 days. Definitely check that. That's if I remember correctly. But anyway, you can use that $100 credit to set up NextCloud if you wanna go ahead and do that. Or just roll out WN11 or, you know, that just came out recently too. So there's definitely all kinds of things you could do. There's a marketplace, one-click apps. It's a great service. Yeah, great service. And if you're listening to this podcast, it was literally downloaded from Linode servers. Well, maybe not by time list too because it could have been downloaded and then cashed by another server. But originally, we posted it on Linode. So this is literally bought to you by Linode. And of course, that's where we host both the podcast and the homelab.show website. They're one and the same for us because we do offer this in standard downloadable format. So if you don't wanna use some third-party apps or things like that. So me and Jay got a net discussion the other day. And we may do some more videos on that topic because we care a lot about you owning your data and being in control of it. And that makes a lot of sense. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to bring up Synology. Now let's get a qualifier out right away because now we are called the homelab show, not the open source homelab show. Although we talk a lot about open source, this is a product that is a mixed blend. Not all these applications are 100% free. Some of them are developed by the folks at Synology. And Synology, although it does run on Linux and well, a very customized version of Linux that they use, but that being said, it's not 100% open source. For those of you wondering, we just wanna make sure if that's a deal breaker for you, well, then the deal has been broken. And if you don't need to listen any further, but at least we've covered that topic and got that out of the way. I still think it's a very trustworthy product. Synology has been a good platform. Their updates and security and attention to detail has been good. There are competing products in the market that I would say I'm not gonna get too often on a tangent, but I'll throw QNAP under the bus for this one. QNAP is kind of a competitor and people asking about it, but QNAP's history of hard-coded credentials, bad security policies and lack of willingness to fix some of their product or at least very slow to roll out fixes has not made me really want to endorse their product. So I'll get that out of the way as well because there's at least gonna be somewhere someone commenting going, but what about, and I get it. Yep. And the thing about Synology not being open source, I mean, that doesn't bother me personally. I always prefer open source, but sometimes you just wanna get stuff done. And then in the Home Lab, I think it's a mix of different things. I mean, primarily, yeah, you're running servers in your home, but our sponsor for this podcast is Linode. They're a cloud sponsor. This isn't a cloud podcast, but these services help benefit and boost Home Lab because you can have a Synology backing up your ProxBox or you could have a VPN service in the cloud that has access or that you have a link to your Home Lab in some way. So having a mix of the components that matter to you and each and every listener makes his or her own decision as far as what components to include. So I would say just like Tom said, it's a turnkey solution. I've used it, I have one here in the studio. So there's a lot to say about Synology and we will be saying a lot about Synology. Yeah, so we're saying a lot about it. One of the first things is which Synology should you choose? The Synology NAS selector is really slick. You can kind of go through it and this is available on your website. Just type in Synology NAS selector and Google it. We can put a link in the show notes. I think it's hard to find. But we have a RAID calculator, NVR selector, we'll get to that later. And a NAS selector, it kind of lets you go through and pick what you're going to use it for. And once you start diving into it, you'll go, okay, I need this or I need that. I need this many drives. I need this many speed. I need to run some virtual servers. I need to use it as a storage target. And then you can start going into, all right, this is what will work for me. And I like the fact that they kind of help you guide you along the way because they do have a large, broad product offering. And all their product, with a minimal exception, almost all of their products run the DSM software. And we're at a time of transition from DSM 6 to 7. DSM 7 is available on quite a few models, but there's still a few models. That's not available on it. But generally speaking, the Synology says it'll be rolled out later. I think it's third quarter of this year, 2021, that they'll have it for all their models. So we'll just say by 2022, DSM 7 should be available for all Synologies. Functionally though, the base operating system versus the components that run on it are still separate things. The components are still being updated for people running the older DSM. But Synology is very upfront about their entire life cycle process. It's well documented so you can figure out, like, hey, will this Synology be supported for and how long will it be supported? They have a pretty good life cycle on that. And I am going to be updating to DSM 7 right now because I just pulled up my Synology and it said it's available. So I clicked the button so let's see what happens. Yeah, and now one of the cool things, the Synology, and when he says click the button, it is very friendly web interface. The web interface is not like other web interfaces. It is not just a series of web menus. This is something I think that attracted me right away to Synology, but I've seen that. It works like you're, it looks like a remote desktop application is how I describe it.  So being able to see all that, it's kind of a nice feature because it doesn't make it harder where you're digging through menus. It's very searchable where you can look for context for the different things that are loaded on there. So from first experience with Synology is the UI and it's relatively easy to use. This is one of the first big reasons people like it because they feel at home. They're going, hey, look, it's not just a web interface. It's kind of like running a little desktop interface with Windows that can be resized and maximized and minimized and dragged around. And so you can see what's running. And it's fast. I mean, it's not slow. Like I remember, you know, what was it? 10 or 15 years ago, people were trying and experimenting with putting like, almost like OS UIs in a browser and they took, you'd click the start button. It just takes so long for the start button to open up. But Synology is fast and it's like some kind of kung fu. I don't know what it is. It's like, it's almost like having XFCE inside your browser. Yeah, that would be great way to describe it. If you, for those of you that are already running Linux stuff, it is very XFCE like there. Simple, yeah. Now, let's start talking about the applications themselves because the hardware's nice. And I will fully disclose, because I've commented a few times that I've done review the hardware, if you search because of the popularity of another YouTube channel that he ranted properly about a problem he had with a 2014 version or 2015 model Synology where they were known, they had a run of models that had some power supply failures. And I can't remember the name of the channel off the top of my head. He does all the gaming reviews, gamers nexus. Anyways, he did that. And it's funny because it almost is like when he complained about it because this channel was so big with like a million subscribers, a lot of people kept saying that. That was an issue with a model of Synology but it has not been my history and Synology has since not built their power supplies in the same way. Actually, a lot of them have an external brick now until you get to larger ones. So it's been less of an issue for the power supply problems but at least I'll address it because I know people will bring that up. Now let's jump into the applications right away because that's where once you've gotten through what NAS you want that it's got a cool look in UI, but what can it do? And the first one on that list is gonna be active backup and that active backup and then Google active backup Office 365 active backup for your computers. This is a really cool feature that Synology has the ability to and this is something we use it for. We actually backup all of our, we were a G Suite company so we backup our G Suite for some of our clients they are using Office 365. We make local copies on their Synology of their Office 365 system. Now let's get it back down to the home lab people that probably don't have a G Suite or Office 365 account. Yes, you can backup all the computers on your network and it works really well. Matter of fact, we use it for some of our clients that need really simplistic on-prem backups that want just to have it available in a very simple way that has a complete self-service portal that you can set up for your users. Yes, that's just a feature you load on Synology. And this came up in some of the questions that people had sent in our contact form which by the way we do have a contact form on a website if you have some Q&A we're working up to a Q&A episode but the question was, you know how do we do solid backups to help protect me from ransomware and provided the ransomware operator didn't get the same password to login to your Synology then if your computer gets encrypted, Synology does and I've done videos on this full backups of your machine and incremental backups of your machine and full bare metal restores. So if your machine for reasons of external threat actors or reasons of hardware breaks sometimes whatever that reason is that your computer is no longer functioning because the data was gone on it having the Synology backup at a backup strategy is great and also it's next in yes your way to happiness. It does not have, if you watch my video I did on it you'll find that, oh, that's it. Yeah, it's not like some of the other backup utilities where, all right, here's about 70 steps, lots of instructions, server tools to load and this is big feather and a half personality of making it easy. It was one of the reasons we recommended to some of the smaller businesses that kind of want to self manage things or home users that go, I really want something to back up but I don't really want to put my data and some recurring amount of service fees that come with putting it in a cloud somewhere. And we do recommend still backing up offsite whatever offsite means to you but yeah, the Synology active backups are pretty slick system for that. Have you tested it all Jay? I have not actually because I have my own backup system but I was just thinking like I should probably do a video unlike backing up Linux to Synology anyway because a lot of Linux distributions come with something like Beja dupe or a number of other backup clients. I think it'd be kind of fun just to point one of those backup clients at Synology and kind of see how it operates. Yeah, it's like I said, it's one of the really killer apps I would say is on there that makes me pretty happy. Now, once you've put all this data on there that's where the next step is hyper backup. NAS is not a backup, RAID is not a backup. Just because you have a bunch of drives in there does not mean that catastrophic failure cannot occur. And that's where Synology has another tool called hyper backup. And this is something that some of the other NAS systems people have asked me like how do I just create like a copy? I need all this data backed up to another one. And Synology makes that relatively easy with hyper backup because they let you choose targets. That target can be another Synology. So if you have two Synologies and you can set VPNs and put these Synologies at two different locations and back them up to each other. Matter of fact, this is my cousin does this because she's not someone who likes the cloud a lot. So she says, you know what? I care about where all my data is. I like understanding it. And I happen to have two locations I can use. So setting up those backups not to land somewhere. But for those of you that only have one location they do offer, they call it Synology. I believe it's called C2 cloud. I've done a review on it. And they do have their own backup service but please note for those of you that don't trust the cloud, you're right not to trust it. And Synology offers encryption before send. That's an important aspect of any backup service should offer that and Synology's included in that. So if you do want to back it up offsite it does have encrypt before send, which is great. That's, you should do that no matter what service you're talking about. So me and Jay talked about that in some of the other videos throughout this thing.  The hyper backup is a great service to back up your Synology with a lot of target options. Then you can even target non-Synology NASs. I gotta do probably a video on that because me and there's one little hang up that we'll comment on is the Synology R-Sync was not as simple. It's there, it exists. But it does have, you have to do a little Googling if you want to use R-Sync as a transport method to synchronize it with other NAS devices that do speak or Linux general Linux servers or anything that speaks R-Sync. Synology's a little unusual in that they didn't have the simplest R-Sync setup. Not that they tried to make it difficult. I just think they didn't put a lot of effort at making it easy. But it does support all your usual suspects of just a file server, which you know, it's funny I looked down my list here. I never mentioned it's, by the way, it's a file server if you, if you didn't know. Yeah. And I was looking through. Well, actually, first of all, the upgrade was successful. It finished, it took like, it said it was going to take 10 minutes. I think it was probably closer to five and the UI changed quite a bit. It's still the same for the most part. It's more polished. It's more polished. It looks more OS-like if that was even possible, slightly more OS-like at least. And it was pretty smooth. And then I'm looking through the backup client and I mentioned DejaDuke, but the active backup for business plugin actually supports Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Red Hat and CentOS as well. So that's pretty cool. It's pretty slick there. But a couple of the basics that we did mention to you like I said, it is a standard Samba file server that does tie to, it has its own directory management, but you can also tie it to, for those of you that are using Active Directory, it will tie into that. It'll also act as an Active Directory server. So if you're looking at a Windows replacement that is in our feature, I don't know why I didn't have that on the list here. I guess it's because we don't often set it up that way. Usually from a business standpoint, we're usually tying it to someone's Active Directory more so than we are setting it up as an Active Directory server. But it does have kind of both options in our which I think is really slick. Yeah, there's so many options. I don't think it's possible to cover everything, honestly. Like we're just gonna cover the things we use the most, but there's gonna be so many things because there's a bunch of features in here. Yeah, so definitely that is on there. Though next is Synology Photos. And this is a topic that is coming out from the world of Android and the world of iPhone for any of you who file the news. First, Google has decided to up prices on Google Photos. And of course, there's always the privacy concerns do you want Google to have all your photos that your phone takes. And our phones are pretty much our cameras. We'll just leave it at that. That is primarily with most people, not everyone of course, there's always enthusiasts who have real camera still, but the phones become the camera. That being said, we now have iPhone and all their announcements that we won't get off topic on. But yes, that iPhone now on device offers photo scanning and people of course wondering what's next, where will that go from there? It feels kind of privacy invading. But then where do you store all that? Do you store it in the iCloud system? Or if you're on Google, do you use a Google Photos system? Which of course does work on iPhone as well. But then that's where Synology. And if there's something I'm gonna say I see persisting through the way Synology attacks things or projects they go after and develop is gonna be ones that make people happy to switch away from very popular cloud services. And that's where the Synology Photos system is. And this is where there's a split. There's the older Synology Photos and then there's the newer version that comes with DSM7. They used to have two different softwares that are on DSM6. Once you go to DSM7, it's just one piece of software but your data can migrate between there. But it's kind of cool. This does have a phone app and does have the ability for you to upload from your computer. So if you don't have to use the phone app but it allows you to have your own photo storage automatically synced and backed up very much in the way that you get it with other commercial cloud providers. And for a lot of people just wanna maintain control or not have the risk of putting all their information in cloud or all the privacy concerns that may come with it. This is a cool option and Synology's done a nice job. I'm not gonna say it's as full-featured as you're gonna get with Google Photos because Google Photos, Google's got the resources to build a really extensive product but I think they cover the major features of photo organization along with done on the system AI recognition. What I mean by that and it's just basically some machine learning that recognizes faces, cats and dogs. So you can look for some of your pet photos. You can look for some of the things in it. I think this is a great feature because this is something I actually do. I'm still full admitted for anyone who's watching my live stream. Yes, I do still use Google Photos for things. And I'm always amazed that I can type in different objects in Google Photos ability to index it. Synology is starting to add that and it's all going to be done on device for that indexing. Downside is the ability to index massive indexes of their photos, which actually, yes, someone said it's in DSM7, I believe it's called Synology Moments. They've changed your name a little bit but the application is essentially the same. The ability to do that does stay on device so any of the recognition is doing at least is done on there. With that being detrimental to people like me who have 75,000 photos we're loading on it. So that's, yeah. It's quite a few photos. Yeah, I've been taking digital photos forever. So this goes back all the way to the 90s when I had a floppy disk camera. I still have all those photos. So I have quite the library. I think this is probably good for Linux switchers too that are just starting out because one of the biggest questions is how do I get photos off my Android or iOS device to my Linux computer? So if it's automatically syncing to Synology that just makes it easy. Pretty much they're all there just download them from Synology if you wanna see them. Yeah, it's like I said for a lot of people especially the home users this is an important aspect that I think because you're looking for a solution that's easy and I know with some of the other NASs is there are several open source projects that are a little bit more complicated. Some of them have made it easier by building Docker images that you can just pull down but it's not as really, it's not going to be as, hey, click the app. It loads an app that's from an app store on the phone. So from a base user who's not is really deep into the technical it's an easy way to get started and it's better to do it this way than from a privacy standpoint that it is to just surrender all your data to cloud if that's what you're uncomfortable with. So something to think about there. And speaking of Docker, this is not a part I'm super familiar with. I think Jay's looked at it maybe a little bit more than me. They actually have Docker support in here and it pulls right from Docker Hub. Yeah, it's great. I love the UI integration is just so on point because I actually kind of feel like it makes Docker like the concept of Docker easier for people that aren't already familiar with it. Like they just have a container they want to run and they don't understand the internals of it. It's basically as easy as just adding an image. So you just download the image and then I'm actually looking at it right now. I was playing with it some time ago and I'm looking at it again. I mean, just download a container from the registry and then you run it and you could choose to have it automatically installed or excuse me, automatically start. And you could also create a file store for it. So that way, as people know in our listening audience that Docker isn't stateful by default but you just attach a volume to it or some kind of storage to it. And since, you know, Synology is a storage device, you know, it's a NAS, that's what it does. So you could just point a folder right to your Docker container and that's where it's stateful data goes. And I think it makes Docker like extremely easy especially for those of you out there that you wanna take advantage of Docker but you're not necessarily trying to get a Docker certification. You just wanna use it. You don't wanna know how the underpinnings work too much. It's like a turnkey Docker solution. I have heard complaints that it's older or too old or not too old, but it's not as up to date as if you would download it from Docker. I think that's kind of like true of a lot of things. So you weigh the pros and the cons if there's any features that newer versions of Docker has that this one doesn't, there could be an issue there but then again, I'm running DSM7 now. So maybe that's no longer an issue anymore. I'll have to dive back into it. Yeah. Now I'll also throw in there. It does have, and I have used this, the virtual machine manager provided you get a Synology fast enough to handle that with an up memory in it. In a lot of the Synology models, and this varies a bit, do you have a slot in them to add either more memory or also an additional slot for adding a network interface card or they also offer, and it, Synology has a cool, one of the ones I reviewed, I thought I complained about it only having one slot because it didn't have any caching options. And I didn't realize that Synology now has another offering. It's not cheap, but you can buy a card that has a combo cache and network interface on it. So if you need an extra interface on it for like 10 gig and you need caching, they have a dual card to solve the one slot problem. That was kind of novel. There are, when you're, I didn't mention too much, when you dive in Synology, they do have caching strategies that you can use for when you're setting them up. Like you can put M2 drives in along with the spinning drives. So there's a few different options on there for that function. It's also important to note, if you're going to do something like virtual machines, obviously putting that on faster storage that you may have in the machine matters quite a bit. So that's, the virtual machine manager is not bad. It's not as robust as some of your larger products that we've talked about, like XCPNG or Proxbox. But hey, if you just need something to run a couple of VMs, it's, I'm going to say it's solid. It's not something you would want to or we would really use for running a business and let's stick all of our servers on there. But I think for home users, that's kind of my feeling on it and we have a couple of businesses that run some small VM because it was a convenient place to run it without having to load hypervisor anywhere else. So it's another tool in a toolbox, maybe not the strongest one, but hey, it's cool. It doesn't cost you anything exactly, but it is, I say exactly because once you scale up and you want some of the higher end features where you tie virtual machines to several computers, that does have a license fee. Most everything on Synology, with the exception of the virtual machine manager and the next thing I'm going to talk about don't have license fees. The other fee that is in Synology that does have license, but it's also really, in my opinion, probably worth the license fee is the Surveillance Station. Now I've done a few videos on Surveillance Station and we've definitely deployed a lot of these as Surveillance Stations. Surveillance Station is Synology's tool for managing camera systems. And it's kind of novel that they have such a, I think at one time they told me it's like over 2,000 camera models supported. It's a long list. They have a camera selector and if for some reason you found some obscure camera that wasn't in their 2,000 list of cameras, you can also go in and say, all right, I just want to set up with a standard protocol at OMVIF and talk to that camera. Now Surveillance Station, you always get a minimum of two licenses but some certain dedicated models, I think standard come with four licenses. So you can always try out Surveillance Station yourself without having to pay any license fees. And the licenses aren't that expensive. They're also perpetual. They do not have renewals on them. You buy them. They're also transferable. If you get a different Synology, you can transfer those licenses to another. But for people that want to have an all in one box that say, does all the things we talked about, manages your photos, manages your backups, manages your Docker and virtual machine things you're messing with. It also, provided you have enough resources can be your surveillance for your home. And it's kind of a nice home surveillance system and it's nice and included in the box. Another thing I think we probably should mention real quick is ButterFS. Oh, yes. Because that is one of my favorite features of Synology. And what reminded me of that is someone in our live stream asked about BitRot protection, which is what TrueNAS has at the CFS. Synology has that too. You just have to choose ButterFS as the file system when you set it up. But as long as you do that and you enable the scrubbing, then yeah, it'll do that for you. And that's another benefit. And ButterFS has a few flaws. And this is where I've actually talked directly with the Synology engineers and I thought this was kind of cool. So when we talk about CFS, so like we have when we talk about other products, CFS is a combination of directly talking to the hard drives and hardware and being a file system. It's kind of very unique in that way. And ButterFS can do similar to that. The challenge with ButterFS, as I understand it and as the engineers explained to me, that the ButterFS has a little bit more of a rough time dealing with the hardware directly. So Synology is actually using Linux RAID on the RAID side of it for the covering the hardware, but then using ButterFS for the file system to provide the features like Jay said with the BitRot and things like that. So you still get, it's kind of a good best of both worlds scenario. So they have the different Linux RAID. They actually also have a flash RAID strategy. So if you're using all SSDs, I actually have a demo unit that we're gonna be setting up and I'll be doing a video on that they do have their flash storage type of RAID formatting too, but that's all handled at a hardware level by the Synology app. And then ButterFS sits on top of that to provide file integrity checking. So I think they did a good job of blending the best of both worlds together to make a platform that I still feels reliable. But see the very first thing we talked about in this video, which was NASA's not a backup. So you still need things to back everything up. So it's still important to have a duplicate of all of your data. Just don't the same, there's a lot we've talked about so far and there's a few more things to cover, but that all has to be duplicated in another box. So. Yep, that's an important point. Yeah. All right, a couple more things that are really worth talking about. And I like that they unapologetically called it Synology Drive. So Google Drive is a popular synchronization tool and Synology Drive is a very similar popular synchronization tool. Synology Office and Synology Notes. And I guess they call it Google Keep, but it's the note-keeping application. Synology's done a good job once again for people that wanna maintain all their data. Their Office application does allow you to collab with people, does allow you through a webinar face to share a document and work on it. Now I have not extensively used this, but I've had a lot of people tell me they like it. It's not something we run as much in business, but a few people have said this is just a great tool. I've toyed with it and set it up. I just haven't used it at scale and said, this is pretty nice. And you can of course import your DocX files and your Excel files and store them on the NASR. And then the Drive is just a synchronization tool. And once again, you're looking at ways you want to synchronize and share files. This is a cool feature that Synology has. And all of this is facilitated on the backend by the ability for Synology to, without opening any ports in your firewall using their Quick Connect feature. The Quick Connect will create an SSL connection and via Synology offer a bridging so you can share things outside of your house without having to set up HAProxy without having to set up certificates. They'll do the certificate management. They'll do the security management and then allow you to have remote access to your Synology, which also means when I say collaborate or share documents or share files, I mean, not just inside your network, but the opportunity is there. Good news for those of you who go and wait a minute, Synology has a bridging option. It's off by default. You have to enable it by default. Synology does not allow sharing of the data outside the network. So the defaults are always the scary thing in many things, because few people change defaults.  They create a special URL for your device so you can access it, so you can log into it. So you can put it into applications when you are outside your network and don't want to use VPN. So they do have all these options that kind of tie off getting all this tied together on there. So I think that's a pretty cool feature that they have on there. Have you looked at that one, AJ? Yes, I have, but I've used it. It works great. Like it's just I created a name and it asked me when I first set it up. So like you said, it let me know that it could do that. It wasn't just going to turn that on for me. It asked me if I wanted it. And then I said yes, because I wanted to try it out. So I gave it a name to create the URL. Then from that point forward, I think I have tried it a few times outside my office. I mean, honestly, in the age of the pandemic currently, we don't get out of the house as often as we would like to. So I don't have as many opportunities to check it outside of the house, but I did get an opportunity to try it a couple of times and it was just easy. It was just like a turnkey solution for that, which is pretty cool. Yeah. In kind of, only because a couple of people have mentioned it in here is the the tail scale, which I just recently did a video on. That is a plugin that's available in Synology. It is a app that allows you to have remote connectivity while you're outside of your network. And it is an option in Synology to load that. Synology has two splits in their apps. So far, most everything we've talked to, I think actually everything we talked about are Synology apps. There are a couple of third-party options. And Synology, basically companies approach them and it's kind of like a built-in app store. They list them out, there's like a split and it says, these are third-party apps. And Synology, I do know this from people that have asked me questions about it. Synology doesn't support third-party apps in terms of if you need technical support on here because they do offer support. They support their apps specifically that we've had help with, but if you have trouble with third-party, you have to kind of tell you contact a third-party developer on there. And we've ran into that once or twice before. And it turned out that a third-party developer just didn't have it updated. They had updated a backend but on a front-end version for something we were using a long time ago. But, tail scale is an option on there. And another really popular one is a Plex, of course. So we've all heard of Plex and Plex is a third-party option. Someone told me there was some issues when it first was released with DSM7. I did not experience those, but I also had it installed prior to my upgrade from six to seven. But to my knowledge, those issues have been resolved. I am using it very fine with another update that came with it. Plex is just Plex. I mean, we all know we gotta, if you have all your media somewhere, you gotta have an easy way to view it. Plex is definitely one of the popular projects out there. And yes, it is supported in Synology. So the same system that can back everything up, that can share your office documents, that can also be your surveillance for your house, can also play your movies on your TV. Do you know that transcoding works? Like how good that works on Plex? I'm really not sure, because most of the ones I have don't need it to be. So they're natively going their native resolution to my TV while I watch those movies. So... It's probably the best way to do it because if you don't have the transcode, then why do it? But yeah, I'm kinda curious. I guess it probably depends on which model you go with because they all have different CPUs and different- I don't think there's any particular passthrough for it on there for high-speak. Because I know, if I'm not mistaken, isn't there a way to do GPU transcoding with Plex? That's a good question. I've never had to do it. But then again, I also have it on a higher end hypervisor. So there's that. But I know some people are able to run it on a Raspberry Pi if they can minimize the transcoding. So I'm sure it probably works fine here too. But that's... I guess as long as you have your media in the proper format, it shouldn't be a problem. And I guess I could argue that people should be doing that anyway, if they're setting up Plex for their media, is making sure their media is in the proper format or the best format. But I think that's a good fit for people that, they could afford a Synology, but they can't afford a Plex server and then another server and setting up an entire rack. We have this one thing that can, at least until you save up money for other things, be all the things all in one box. Yeah. And that's kind of the point. As I said in the beginning, if you're looking for something very turnkey, Synology fits that turnkey and also fits that put it all in one box. And if you get some of their higher end rack station ones, it sounds like a lot to buy one of those. And by the way, they're not cheap, but they do have models that have redundant power supplies and everything else. But now you kind of have a singular box that does a lot of services on there. And that may be just a better fit for someone. And for some of our small business customers, they've really found it a fix. Some of them have the desktop models. And one of the neat things about the intercompatibility of Synology is the fact that when you have a mixed environment of Synology, some are the RS models, which stands for rack stations, that were gonna be your large models. That hyper backup target can be the smallest DS-218, which is a little tiny two drive system that I think is like under $200. The same software is running on them. So there's a lot of interconnectivity that will work between these for functional backups and things like that. Because if your storage target, as long as the storage target has enough storage, you can run a low-powered Synology to back up your high-powered Synology that runs the actual services. It's obviously not as good as having a whole redundant system, but at least all your data's backed up. It's usually the more critical part. And then when you replace or have a problem with the main one and you repair it, if that repair requires you to restore, you can just pull from that smaller Synology and put all the data back on the bigger Synology that handles all the processing. So it gives you some opportunities there. Now, one of the other things I'll talk about, I think it's probably the last one on my list here, is gonna be storage target. Storage target, as in virtualization. This is something I've been testing a lot with Synology and I have been pleasantly surprised by this. If you're using VMware, if you're using, I've not tried it with Hyper-V, so I don't really do Hyper-V, but I use a lot of X, C, P and G. You can choose Synology to be a storage target and I've actually been shocked with just how fast it is. It does support iSCSI, it supports NFS, and it supports it at speed. I'm pleasantly surprised with all the testing we've been doing with even the smaller Synologies, the fact that they're able to do this. Now, I've done a video, for example, and this is something to toss out there and Jay, being a gamer, understands this challenge that comes with it. My son has a five terabyte iSCSI, a five or eight, maybe eight terabyte. Eight terabyte iSCSI attached to his Windows computer because games, and he doesn't wanna remove any games because, I don't know, he plays every game for five minutes and that would be a challenge because it takes so long to download them. One of the things that's cool about iSCSI is you can attach it to a Windows machine and that can be your Steam library. And now you have this huge drive attached. Now the reason you don't do this as a share and you do it as an iSCSI, you can do it as a share, except some games go, no, I won't install on a share. When you do it as an iSCSI because it's a block device presented to Windows, it's a block device just like SATA drives or NVMEA drives attached. Therefore, you're able to get really fast connections for small files because of the way it's presented as block over network transport, which is how iSCSI works. And if you're lucky enough to have, or have the time to invest into a 10 gig network, which Jay's recently upgraded to, you can really get some high speed connections from your computer to the Synology, provided it has the backend to handle it and have a really fast, huge, huge Steam libraries attached to your computer. That sounds amazing to me. Just thinking about the possibilities there because I mean, every time there's a Steam sales, like my library gets bigger and bigger and bigger. I'm already at the point, I think a lot of other people are too, that there's not enough time in a lifetime to finish your entire Steam library. So I just, like I said, play five minutes of everything. Yeah. Now the last topic, because I know a few questions came up on this, will be the network connectivity. Most of the Synologies have a minimum of two, but sometimes four and five network interfaces on them. I say five, which sounds odd, but it's what they are, is you'll have four one gig connections and then you'll have a 10 gig connection next to it. So this varies by models. They're slowly rolling out and getting into the 10 gig game. This is where the expansion cards come in. And I've not had trouble and I haven't extensively tested this of third-party card support to my knowledge. Synology supports common, it's a short list, but common third-party cards. And it's far as I know, I don't think they plan to discontinue that, but I can't really say. Most of the time we, for compatibility, if we're selling something to the customer, we'll order it to spec with the Synology parts because we need ultimate compatibility. But my understanding is the Synology will support non-Synology cards. You know, I should probably check. I'm almost positive. Kane has a 10 gig card in it. I'm on DSM7. I just have an Intel card in mind. So there is some availability options on there. I should try that on mine too.  He did some videos on tail scale and a few other tech things. So we have another fellow content creator in here. I can't, I don't wanna click on it right now to confirm that it's the same person I think it is. But I've seen people giving a shout out. So, hey, awesome. I've watched a few of the videos. I think he did a video on tail scale as well. So nice to see some of that. Yay. A few people mentioned here in the comments and this is true. And I do have, and I'll leave a link to actually, I have a whole lot of Synology tutorials already done on my YouTube channel. For those of you just wanna look at how things work, Synology does have network bonding options that are relatively simple for bonding all the interfaces together. So it supports VLANs. It has all the advanced level support that you need if you have a more complex network. So you can bond things to certain cards, certain interfaces or bond them together and they have different strategies for that. So, oh, when someone said the digital life also has some good videos on Linux security. So cool. Me and Jay are saying hi to you. Feel free to reach out to us. Yeah, feel free to collaborate with us too. Just saying. We're always looking for, we always like people in our space. It's always welcome to see more people that are diving into some of these topics. Absolutely. Yep. I think I covered as much as we can. I mean, cause I could go more into the business topics Synology and I think it goes outside the topics channel but is there a central management system? Yes. There's ways you can centrally manage your clients. They have some of those options. Once again, they're opt in, not opt out. So if you wanted to have a central dashboard where we can look at all of our client Synologies or at least get data feature on not login data but like data for uptime data for how much storage is left alerts. They do have some central management features that Synology's rolling out. So there are some cool business application usage as well. And maybe you are a home user and you'd like to see a, you want your data into some type of cloud management system but as I stated, this is opt in implicit, not we put your data in there and unless you tell us not to we're gonna keep collecting it. Synology seems to so far be a good steward of privacy and not opting everybody into everything. But that's right now in August of 2021. Don't hold my words against me if some nefarious people take over and decide, you know what we need? Data. We need QR codes, QR codes, all the things. If you start seeing QR codes in a project. Yeah, that's when you know it's going downhill, man. You know some corporate meeting when a ride, when that happens. All right, any further notes on the Synology? I think we got it all. I think that's it. There's so many more things to talk about but I think as far as our target audience is concerned we pretty much covered that and you're gonna have some videos, some additional ones on there. I have one, I'll have more. I have a few Synology related videos on my backlog but I'll get to those as soon as I'm done editing the 16 episode Proxmox series which wrapped filming by the way. Filming's done. Maybe as soon as I get those edited out the door I could start doing some videos on Synology again. I'm looking forward to that. Yeah, I mean I'd love because I have confused myself and broke Docker when I was playing with Synology. That's kind of why I was like leaning towards, hey Jay have you used it? Cause honestly I don't, it's not something I use. I had something working and I had something very broken the next time. So there's definitely more learning to do on it cause it's a pretty extensive platform. I'll also mention, someone said it in here if you go over to level one text Wendell's covered Synology as well. So if you look, he's talked about it and feels much the same way as we do about it. He likes it as a solution. And he's talked about some projects that they've done with it over at the level one tech area. So you'll find plenty of good information on Synology. It is a good platform. For those of you looking at it, the turnkey ease of use are all good selling points. But as we said in the very beginning if you're looking for the pure open storage open source everything, Synology does have some close course components. So make sure you have that in your thought process and figure out where you set on that. But easy use, thumbs up overall. Still, I think it's a good product and I still would recommend it to anyone just like we said at the beginning. That's why we're doing a video on it. This was also not paid for or endorsed by Synology. If we were smarter business people we would have reached out and been paid shills by them, but we're not. So Linode, thank you for endorsing this. Yeah, I appreciate it. You know, that's such a good way to do it. Every time someone sends me a laptop for review I make sure it's being sponsored by somebody else. Yes.  But thankfully that hasn't happened yet. I haven't been put in that situation. It's coming, but Synology sent one to me. That's why I'm able to look at it, but they didn't tell me I needed to create content on it. Literally, they didn't. They're like, hey, just play around with it and that's it. They never contacted me ever again. Like never again in this been months. They have an interesting way of working with vendors. They're a little bit different because sometimes it's almost in some things that me and Jay both experienced as creators, we turn down when they are like implicitly like, here's the thing, here's a script. Like there's people that say, well, you read the script if you do our product to me and Jay are like, no, no. And yeah, some of the companies will ask for editorial review prior to publish. We won't work with me and Jay have policies that we've talked about like how to publicly, we have our own statements on how we do our ethics, but I always like to make this clear because people always want to know if this was, was this paid for or endorsed because some people don't disclose that very well. It was an incredibly impulsive last minute idea that we thought was a good idea. Yeah, we were coming up with some show ideas and this is how this came to be. So throw this little errata at the end of the show here for those of you just behind the scenes curious when me and Jay sit down and scratch out ideas and things like that. It's like through Synology on there. So all right. Thank you for joining us. Looking forward to hearing from you. So hit our website for the feedback form and let us, we've been collecting all the questions. Don't worry, we're not ignoring you for those of you we haven't replied to. We are working up to a Q&A episode which we'll announce at some point and we want to, we'll do Q&A for live stream and of course people who can't make the live stream to have listened to this and post and send us some of the questions we're working on when that episode will be but there's plenty of more future things coming. And also thank you for those of you that suggested or had some of these questions about things like Synology and did ask us in the feedback. So if you do have some product or something you want us to dive into review please reach out to us. And we love hearing some of the ideas that the community wants to know about. All right. Absolutely. This is Tom Lawrence and- Jay LaCroy. All right, thanks to you guys next time. See ya.


So I'm here today with stylist Rachel Farrell and she's going to be taking us through some of the vintage fashion looks you can create over the Christmas season. So tell us about the first look you've created today. So the first look we've created is this beautiful dress that was found in a vintage shop in New York but it's very kind of stand around inspired. It's a navy really like light material with some gold sheen on it and it's really easy to create on the high street. I know Asas and Zara both have really similar dresses at the moment and it's a really nice fit too. And tell us about the accessories you've kind of put with it. So we've gone for, I know a lot of people don't want to mix navy and black but what we've done today is we've gone for a black sparkly clutch to add some more sparkle and we've gone for some simple black heels because the dress is a little bit shorter so you want to be able to see footwear. Okay so for the second look you've created today you have this beautiful green jacket. Do you want to tell us a little bit about this look? It's more of a kind of formal or where would you wear this kind of look? This is the kind of look that you'd wear if you were going to work and you just want to throw on a bit of bling in the evening because the jacket is really the statement piece. There are so many at the moment. They have got the same jacket and it's a full suit and they have it in a purple and pink colour so it's definitely something you could throw on. We've got a little vintage leather skirt with this and we've just thrown on the jacket on top and then we've gone for some gold heels to pick up the gold and the jacket. So Rachel the last look you've created here are the sparkly trousers and the vintage kind of top. Could you tell us a bit about that and where you might wear this look? So I could definitely see someone wearing this if they're going to party with their friends in a nice bar over Christmas. We've got the sequin trousers which are such a statement piece and they're so comfortable as well with the pockets and the wide leg trousers and then we've also got a nice vintage shirt. This one's from Shubha Ella and they have loads of different brown skin colours available and what we've done is just to add a bit of skin and some edginess. We've worn it open with a craft shovel underneath which you could definitely wear it closed up if you want or you could leave it open and there's just so many different ways you can style it.