0:03

I have finally upgraded

0:06

my home network. And what

0:08

prompted this upgrade? I'm glad

0:10

you ask. What prompted my upgrade

0:12

of the network was my daughter

0:15

having a terrible network in her rented

0:17

university accommodation. What?

0:20

Hang on. What? Yes. So,

0:22

uh, Sophie's away at university and

0:25

she's just started a new year because the new academic

0:28

year and she's moved into new

0:30

accommodation with three of her friends and

0:32

it has all the usual amenities and services,

0:35

including wireless networking. Right.

0:37

Now, Sophie's room is

0:39

the furthest geographically

0:42

from the wireless access point.

0:44

And she called me

0:46

up a couple of weeks ago and said,

0:48

there's a bit of a problem because

0:51

I'm so far away from the wireless. I

0:53

don't get a good signal at my phone

0:56

keeps dropping off the wifi and I'm burning through

0:58

my data on my phone.

1:01

And if I want to work on my laptop, I have to tether

1:03

to my phone because the laptop can't reach. I

1:06

thought, ah, okay, I'm going

1:08

to have to help her solve this problem

1:10

remotely. So I got her to

1:13

go and take a photograph of the wireless access

1:15

point, because that was the easiest thing to do is

1:17

just like, just take a photo of it. I'll figure

1:19

out what it is. I said, take a picture of all

1:21

four sides or six sides of this thing.

1:24

So she did.

1:25

And it was like El Cheapo

1:27

sky internet thing

1:30

sat underneath the TV. So you can't really move it

1:32

because it's like near the telly and

1:35

where the phone line comes in and all that kind of stuff. So

1:38

I asked on my favorite location

1:40

for asking for technical support, Mastodon,

1:43

if anyone knew of a way to, you know,

1:46

make network go further. And

1:50

a few people, you know, made the usual

1:53

suggestion of, oh, you need to upgrade to

1:56

what they call unify or something. This

1:59

this very. expensive equipment you can buy.

2:02

And I'm not going to do that for her rented house,

2:04

for her and her friends. Someone recommended

2:07

TP-Link Deco. And

2:09

I had never heard of this. Nope, nor have I.

2:12

Right. Well, I've got a couple of TP-Link

2:14

devices in the house and I've heard of TP-Link, but

2:17

I've never heard of this brand Deco.

2:19

Apparently it's been around for a while. I

2:21

went looking on my favourite online

2:23

store and I found some and

2:26

I thought, oh, that looks good. But what I

2:28

should do is make sure it works and

2:31

I'll make sure it works at my house. And

2:33

if it works at my house, I'll have better internet

2:36

and then I'll tell her she could buy the same one

2:39

and put them in at her place. So is

2:41

Deco just a good wireless access

2:43

point brand or is there more to it than

2:45

that? It's like a branding. Like there

2:48

are a number of different types of units. They

2:51

pretty much all look like white

2:54

lady cylinders and

2:57

some are indoor. Some are slightly ruggedized

2:59

for going outdoor. There are some poor ones,

3:01

short ones, some are as big as your head. And different

3:05

models are compatible with different wireless standards

3:08

and have different number of sockets on them and stuff like that.

3:11

Right. So I bought a set for myself

3:13

because my network is pretty ropey

3:15

here. I've got a decent wireless

3:17

access point in the bedroom where my cable internet comes

3:20

in and then everyone else could just suck it

3:22

because the rest of the internet around the house

3:24

is a mishmash of if they're over power

3:26

and a couple of random old access points

3:29

dotted about. Right. Because the one

3:31

in the downstairs bedroom doesn't reach

3:33

to the opposite corner of the house. So

3:36

I'll buy these Deco things. So I bought a pack

3:38

of three. It was 100 quid for

3:40

a pack of three access points. And

3:43

I want to tell you, this is just

3:45

fantastic. It's super easy. You

3:47

have three in a box, three power supplies

3:50

and one ethernet cable. And

3:52

you take the first one and you plug it into your

3:55

internet. However you get your internet. And

3:58

there's an app for your phone that goes. goes through the setup

4:00

process, much like you'd set up a lady cylinder,

4:02

you know, connects to it and then you tell

4:05

your what your wireless network is going to

4:07

be called and it creates a new wireless network.

4:09

Then you get the second one out and you put that somewhere

4:12

else in the house and you just plug it into the wall. It doesn't

4:14

have to be plugged into any networks or anything, it's just

4:16

plugged into the wall for power. You set that

4:18

one up, it connects to the first one

4:21

through the power of wireless and

4:24

then creates a wireless network where it is

4:26

and then you get the next one and the next one and you put as

4:29

many out as you like. I've got three and

4:31

they're kind of staggered around the house and

4:33

they all centrally connect to

4:36

the one that's physically connected to the internet,

4:38

although actually the one that's connected

4:41

to the internet is actually connected to an ethernet

4:43

overpower thing that then goes to another

4:45

room and connects to the... I've

4:47

got to fix that. It was just the first place I could plug

4:49

it in, in the lounge where there is

4:51

an ethernet overpower thing. But

4:54

it's great, it works. All the

4:57

clients seamlessly move from one deco

4:59

unit to another. If I wanted to add more,

5:01

I could buy more and put another one somewhere. If

5:03

I wanted to put one in the garden, for example, I could,

5:06

this ruggedized version, I could put one down the

5:08

end of the garden if it's a bit further away. But

5:10

it does gnat. I've actually got two

5:12

levels of gnat now because I've

5:15

got the gnat that the deco is doing and then the gnat

5:17

that my domestic ritual

5:19

is doing. I might replace them, but I'm

5:22

not sure yet. In terms of moving

5:24

between points, are they each a separately

5:27

named network and your phone moves

5:29

between them? Or is it all that they all have

5:31

the same name and then your phone picks

5:34

the one which is giving the stringless signal? Because

5:36

in the past, when I've tried doing a sort of mesh

5:38

network thing, I found that sometimes

5:40

my device will hang on to

5:42

an access point with not such a

5:44

good signal as I move

5:47

around rather than dropping it and switching to

5:49

the nearest one. It's precisely the problem

5:51

that I had previously and

5:53

I do not have this problem with these deco

5:55

units. It has one network,

5:58

so they're all called Popi. and

6:01

wherever you are in the house it just connects

6:03

to the right one and figures

6:06

out which is the right one to connect to and connects to it. When

6:08

we recorded a Buntu podcast I did a

6:11

home network upgrade and I looked

6:13

at the Deco devices

6:15

and from what I remember they create a wireless

6:18

mesh network, right? So you

6:20

get this one SSID

6:23

and they do all sorts of clever things to figure

6:25

out like what's the fewest

6:28

number of hops to get to the

6:30

source point and they

6:32

prioritise the traffic. They

6:35

do all sorts of clever stuff and Deco

6:37

is the branding from TP

6:39

Link to describe their collection

6:42

of devices that have this mesh capability

6:44

I believe. The model

6:46

I've got is S4 which I think

6:48

are Amazon exclusive ones, they're quite cheap

6:51

and they have two Ethernet sockets on the back. The

6:55

one that's near the internet where the internet

6:57

comes in, that one's plugged in with

6:59

a cable, the other two have no cables

7:01

attached to them at all, just the power. But

7:04

you can attach them

7:07

to the network if you want to. You don't have

7:09

to because they've got this whole mesh capability but

7:11

you could plug them into the network. You can also plug

7:13

devices into them as well. So if you've got a desktop

7:16

computer you can plug a desktop

7:18

into one of them. They're quite versatile. Yeah

7:20

so I think the dual Ethernet ports

7:23

you could optionally have wired

7:25

Ethernet as the backhaul between the devices

7:28

rather than them use a wireless network

7:31

to provide that connectivity between

7:34

the nodes of your mesh. Yeah

7:36

if you have an especially very

7:38

bricky house with chunky

7:41

walls and the oldie

7:44

construction that's hard to get wireless

7:46

signals through then maybe you might need to do that.

7:49

I haven't had to do that and it's been pretty robust

7:51

and the kids haven't complained. So

7:54

ultimately it was successful. I

7:57

then told Sophie you should get them. So

7:59

Sunday. She phoned me up and said, is

8:01

now a good time for you to walk me through how

8:03

to do this? I'm like, I can walk you through it, but it's

8:05

actually pretty easy. And so she

8:08

put one in the lounge near the TV, she

8:10

put another one out in the hallway, and then she put

8:13

the third one right in her bedroom. And

8:16

she gets perfect signal. She was using like

8:18

fast.com on her phone and on her laptop,

8:21

and I told her, just forget the other wireless

8:23

network, just like delete it from your phone, and

8:25

just use this one, and you will have great

8:28

success. And she shared the credentials with

8:30

her housemates, so

8:32

they can all use it. They all benefit from having

8:34

a better spread of wireless.

8:37

But yeah, plus one. Would buy these again,

8:39

they're good. It gets a poppy cheap

8:42

wifi recommendation, five stars. Very

8:44

good. And I should just add in closing,

8:47

that if anyone's wondering what Lady

8:49

Cylinder is, Alan's referring to

8:51

Echo Dots and things of that

8:54

nature, the home assistant

8:56

speakers. As

9:00

I may have mentioned in the past, my gaming

9:02

opportunities these days are a bit more

9:05

limited than they used to be. I don't have a whole Saturday to myself

9:08

to sit there playing games anymore. But

9:12

more recently, I've noticed that my daughter

9:15

is getting interested in playing

9:17

games herself. So this has given

9:19

me the opportunity to play a bit more myself, the

9:22

bit more myself because I can

9:24

now play games with her and I'm parenting, right?

9:27

It counts, it's allowed. It

9:29

is valid parenting, yes. But there

9:31

are some challenges to gaming with a three-year-old. Is

9:33

she not very good at 360 no scope headshots? Is

9:38

that a problem? Well, yeah, suitable

9:40

games is certainly one of the challenges. What

9:42

games can a three-year-old get their head

9:44

around and play effectively and enjoy? They

9:49

don't have the longest attention spans. They tend to

9:51

wander off from the point or just say, I'm not gonna

9:53

play for a year. I'm

9:56

not gonna play for a bit, you play. And

9:58

they don't have very big hands. holding a

10:00

big controller is difficult.

10:02

Like I've, she's tried playing,

10:04

when I've been like holding a Steam Deck or like

10:07

a Switch Pro Controller, she's

10:09

tried using it and she actually

10:11

has to reach her other hand round

10:14

the back if she wants to press a trigger. She

10:16

can't like hold the front and reach the triggers

10:19

at the same time. That just doesn't work for her at the

10:21

moment. Do they do like kid size

10:23

full Xbox controllers with all the buttons?

10:26

There are. Ah. I mean,

10:28

I remember on the original Xbox, I think

10:30

when they released in Japan, they actually released

10:33

a smaller version of the controller because the original

10:35

controller was enormous. And they found

10:37

that, yeah, in some markets, just the average

10:40

hand size was smaller. They weren't specifically designed

10:42

for kids, but yeah. I've not actually looked

10:44

at sort of third party controllers designed

10:46

for kids. Yeah, so I have looked

10:49

at that. It was Xbox licensed

10:51

controllers that are smaller. And

10:54

I forget all of the brands, but if you

10:56

search for Xbox controller

10:59

small, you will find that there

11:01

are several manufacturers that cater

11:04

to that market. And several of them are actually

11:06

quite decent. I will look

11:09

through my notes and put a couple of links in the show

11:11

notes to a couple that I found in the past. Right.

11:14

So I have had some success. The

11:17

first point I thought I should try is some

11:19

sort of educational games. And

11:21

forever there's been a suite

11:24

of educational games and then it's called G Compre,

11:27

which is, you know, it's really

11:29

good for just sort of the really basic

11:32

computer skills, how to control

11:34

a pointer, how to type, things like that.

11:36

Because one of my daughter's favorite things

11:38

to do when she sees me use the computer is come along and say,

11:41

can I type? And, you

11:43

know, she starts mashing on my IDE

11:45

and shoving loads of stuff into my program.

11:48

So, you know, it's really handy just to be able to bring

11:50

up G Compre and say, there you go, just

11:53

mash the keyboard until you get bored. I

11:55

have discovered with all of my nieces

11:57

that that desire just to make characters

12:00

appear on the screen is very

12:02

strong with all of them at sort of preschool

12:05

age. Yes, and also just point and click

12:07

as well, just clicking on things and

12:09

making ducks go quack and things like that.

12:12

I've not tried it yet, but I found out that there

12:14

is actually a version for Android, which I assume

12:16

is sort of deep screen based, because

12:19

she does have a tablet

12:21

with some games on that she plays by herself.

12:23

And the instinct when she sees my laptop

12:25

is to start poking at things on the screen as well.

12:28

So I'm interested to try the Android

12:31

version.

12:31

When Sam was tiny for controllers,

12:34

when he was too young to really play, the

12:37

Wii controllers were pretty good because

12:39

they're like, you know, kid friendly. And we would

12:41

just not put batteries in and we would

12:43

play the game and he would be waving around like playing

12:46

bowling. Yeah, he would think he's bowling

12:48

and we would stand behind and just like flick the

12:50

ball. Yeah. And he thought he was playing a game because

12:53

he had the low attention span and he would wander off. Yeah, we

12:56

could carry on playing and he disappeared

12:58

with a controller that had their batteries in it.

13:01

I did try things like that a little

13:03

bit at first, but the illusion didn't

13:05

last long. Let's put it that way. She quickly figured

13:07

out that it wasn't working

13:09

when she was trying to do stuff. Yeah. Speaking

13:12

of illusions that don't last very long, the

13:14

period of time where G-Com pre

13:17

and sort of the very sort of

13:19

kindergarten type

13:22

preschool educational games,

13:25

they came and went very

13:28

quickly. They got accustomed

13:30

to them and bored with them very

13:32

quickly. And they were looking for a

13:34

more engaging and challenging experience

13:37

quite quickly.

13:38

So I have had some success with actual,

13:41

you know, fun games as opposed

13:43

to educational games. And what

13:45

I can't don't do is there was a thread on

13:47

Reddit a little while ago about this

13:49

idea called little buddy mode, which

13:52

is something that some games have. And I

13:54

think Sonic 2 was given as the archetypal

13:57

example, but it's getting a bit more common these

13:59

days. whereby the game

14:01

has a sort of co-op mode, but it's a

14:03

sort of asymmetrical co-op where you don't

14:06

both have to do the same thing. And in fact, player

14:08

two can just sit there

14:10

and do nothing and everything's

14:13

okay. You can still play the game perfectly

14:15

well by yourself, but when they want to chip

14:17

in, they can, they have something to do. And

14:20

the example I found was actually

14:23

on the Nintendo Switch because

14:25

the Switch controller, their

14:27

Joy-Cons are nice and

14:29

small and perfect for kids. I mean,

14:31

it's something that I think Nintendo really

14:34

thought of when they were designing that was, can

14:36

a child effectively use these controllers

14:38

and you can turn them on their sides and use them with both hands,

14:41

and they're really good for that. And

14:43

the game that I came across was Pikmin 4,

14:46

which came out recently, and Pikmin's

14:48

a sort of exploration,

14:52

sort of resource management kind of game, where

14:54

you're going around and collecting things and

14:57

exploring things and doing challenges.

14:59

But there's a co-op mode whereby the second

15:02

player has a controller

15:04

and they get a little target on the screen and they can throw rocks

15:06

at stuff. So you come across

15:08

a creature and you've got to fight it and

15:11

they can help, or they can not help,

15:14

and it's fine. And in

15:16

doing that, that's enough for her to get engaged, to

15:19

ask what's going on, to follow the story.

15:21

But if she doesn't actually feel like playing, then

15:23

that's fine as well. And she's got

15:26

used to what the controller buttons do,

15:28

that they've got letters on, and the ones with

15:30

different letters I can say, now you press

15:32

the one with A on, now you press the one with X

15:35

on, and she gets it. If she wants to

15:37

re-center the cursor, she presses X and there

15:39

it is, and then she's got motion controls to move

15:41

it around. And it's actually really good.

15:44

We're getting on really well. Nice. Yeah.

15:46

When I started with the games, like

15:49

proper games, I actually wound

15:51

the clock back and used

15:54

NES emulators and some

15:56

of the sort of early NES

15:58

games. I did try the

16:01

arcade games but that was complicated

16:03

by the fact that you have to understand

16:05

it's a virtual arcade machine and you're putting

16:07

coins in it. Yeah. Explaining that

16:10

concept, it was just too much. So

16:12

actually using emulators for consoles

16:14

where all of the buttons on the controller

16:17

are the thing that you need to do and it's just start

16:20

and play and moving around. And

16:22

I used recreated

16:24

NES style controllers

16:26

because they are quite small and they've

16:29

only got the two A, B buttons

16:31

and the directional pad. And

16:33

we started with some simple games there, things

16:37

like the Mario

16:39

games. Yeah. But what I discovered

16:41

was when my daughter was younger,

16:44

any games that had like a time

16:47

limit, she got quite a lot of anxiety

16:50

about being put under pressure by

16:52

the games. So we had to sort of find

16:54

games which didn't apply

16:57

pressure or concern or

16:59

jeopardy. And we quickly

17:01

moved on to Steam and there was a couple of games on

17:03

Steam that we really found to be great.

17:06

And one is Toki Tori, which is a puzzle

17:08

game, which is sort of very much turn

17:11

based and you can wind the clock back.

17:13

So if you make a mistake, you can just sort of rewind

17:16

back to a different point and make a different

17:18

vision. I think Pikmin has a similar

17:21

concept. You have a rewind time option. Yeah.

17:23

And then the other thing that was hugely popular was

17:26

when my daughter discovered Scratch and

17:28

then Grifpatch, I think their name

17:30

is, who is a prolific Scratch

17:32

developer. And they write loads of games

17:35

and re-implement popular games in Scratch.

17:38

And a lot of my daughter's early

17:40

gaming was actually on Scratch playing

17:43

games that people have published on Scratch. Oh,

17:46

nice. In terms of jeopardy, Sam's

17:49

most frightening occurrence was when his character

17:51

in Minecraft would go underwater and

17:53

Sam just couldn't get him to swim back up again and he'd

17:55

start drowning. And Sam would like scream

17:58

at me from the other room. He's

18:00

drowning! And I'd

18:03

have to come running in and hit the space bar to make him

18:05

swim upwards. Dude, just press

18:07

space. It's fine.

18:10

Yeah, some of those games that have a bit of jeopardy

18:12

are quite hard.

18:13

Yeah, I'd love to hear from

18:15

anyone else who's listening what sort

18:18

of games they like to play with, particularly with

18:20

young kids, particularly little buddy

18:22

mode style games. Really

18:24

interested to know what other ones I'd rather try out.

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the details are at linuxmatters.sh

19:00

slash contact. I

19:04

have built an entirely solid

19:06

state NAS. It's passively

19:09

called and it has no moving parts

19:12

whatsoever. And what are you storing on

19:14

this NAS? It's been a while since we've

19:16

had a home server and I'm

19:18

using it to re-serve

19:21

our archive of DVDs

19:24

and Blu-rays and CD

19:26

dumps that I made last

19:28

decade or whenever

19:30

it was. We cancelled

19:32

a bunch of streaming services earlier

19:35

in the year that we didn't feel we

19:37

were getting full value from. We've

19:40

reinstated Plex as one of

19:42

the things on this server and our back

19:44

catalogue of stuff to

19:47

fill in the gaps that you can't

19:49

get from the couple of streaming services

19:51

that we've kept around. So that was

19:53

the main crux of it. But

19:56

it was also an opportunity for me to experiment

19:58

with some spare parts. I had because

20:01

this is the most ridiculous way to build a

20:03

home server I'm sure but

20:05

also to experiment with using Nix

20:07

OS as a server. So is this

20:09

just a box with an SSD plugged

20:12

into an ethernet port? Oh no. Come

20:16

on Mark, of course it isn't. So

20:18

the first thing is there was a NUC

20:21

that was made around 2016 called

20:23

the Skull Canyon NUC and it was the first

20:25

gaming NUC. Now you can just

20:27

ignore the gaming bit but it was a decent performing NUC.

20:31

And I got an aftermarket case

20:33

for that NUC which is made by a CAFR

20:36

and it looks like a TIE fighter. And

20:38

you take the mainboard

20:41

out of the original case and

20:43

you put it in this large finned

20:45

aluminium case and

20:48

it's an entirely passively called case. So

20:50

there's no fans. It's got a whole

20:52

bunch of heat pipes that radiate

20:55

out to these TIE fighter-esque

20:57

blades at the edge and the whole

20:59

thing is passively called. And therefore

21:02

silent which is actually quite a

21:04

desirable property because the fan in

21:06

the original Skull Canyon NUC was massively

21:09

whiny. And Joe, our

21:12

producer, used to complain

21:14

endlessly about the noise coming from

21:16

my little NUC when I used to record podcasts.

21:19

So that bit's silent.

21:22

But then I had a Thunderbolt

21:25

enclosure that takes multiple

21:28

cards that was gifted to me. It's

21:30

a hand-me-down from an Apple

21:33

Mac music studio. And the

21:35

purpose of this multi-card

21:38

Thunderbolt enclosure is you put multiple

21:40

sound cards in it in order to create

21:43

a sophisticated mixing studio

21:46

using... Is it ProLogic or Logic

21:48

Pro? One of those. So when you say

21:50

cards, we're talking PCI cards.

21:53

Yes. PCI Express cards.

21:55

Yeah. And it takes three

21:57

of those. It's two that are eight times.

22:00

and one that is four times is what's in there.

22:02

So I was gifted this and

22:05

I also happen to have a couple

22:07

of interesting cards which are PCI

22:10

cards that you can put

22:12

four M.2 SATA

22:16

sticks on each card. So

22:20

these are not the 2.5 inch drives, these

22:23

are the drives that look like chewing

22:25

gum sticks, but these

22:27

are not PCI Express NVMe

22:30

drives. They use the SATA protocol

22:33

so they are slower, but you

22:35

can put four of these drives on each

22:37

card. So with two

22:39

of these cards I can have eight

22:41

drives inside this Thunderbolt

22:44

enclosure and then connect

22:46

that Thunderbolt enclosure to the back of

22:48

the NUC and now I have eight drives

22:50

available. Which obviously you've set

22:52

up as a giant pool of ZFS

22:55

right? Well you were close, you're

22:58

a couple of letters off there, a giant

23:00

pool of XFS is what I have.

23:03

Got it, got it. So each

23:05

of these cards has four 4

23:08

terabyte SSDs on it

23:11

so that exposes a total of

23:14

32 terabytes of storage and

23:16

then due to the RAID that I'm using

23:19

that's actually 24 terabytes of usable

23:22

storage which is a significant

23:24

upgrade from the six terabytes

23:26

that I had on the spinning rust

23:29

that we originally had connected

23:31

to this. You say they're slower,

23:34

they're slower than NVMe would

23:36

be but they're still significantly faster than

23:38

a spinning drive would be. Yes

23:41

indeed, so the theoretical

23:43

speeds is around 540 megabytes

23:46

per second sequential read

23:48

and write. For each drive

23:52

and when they're aggregated each

23:54

card of four I can

23:57

push data through a whole card at

23:59

the speed of... a single SATA

24:02

SSD so I get that sort of five approximately 500

24:05

megabytes of throughput. If you're

24:07

like streaming films from it unless you're

24:09

doing it in 8k and there's six people

24:11

in the house doing it surely it's not going to be

24:13

a problem. It's not. You didn't do this for the speed.

24:16

Well I don't know I don't know what else is on there

24:18

it can't just be playing there's you

24:22

know maybe more intensive. There is other stuff

24:24

on there I didn't do it for speed

24:27

I mean for example when I'm streaming stuff

24:29

off this I can saturate the gigabit

24:31

interface that the Ethernet has on this

24:33

device with overhead to spare

24:36

so I could be doing large backups

24:39

internally on the device and

24:41

streaming you know movies don't actually

24:44

compete with one another. So it's by

24:46

no means bleeding edge but

24:48

it's more than adequate for

24:50

a home server for streaming stuff

24:53

and because this Skull Canyon NUC was

24:55

a gaming NUC it's

24:57

got all the hardware on the CPU to

25:00

do hardware accelerated transcoding

25:03

so you can actually sort of you know take

25:05

your 4k stuff that

25:08

you ripped off your blu-rays

25:10

but stream that over like 1080p

25:12

down to the devices on the network.

25:15

So Plex was where this sort

25:17

of started but I was then interested

25:19

in well what else could I do with

25:21

it and the first thing I wanted to do

25:24

was because there are no fans

25:27

I wanted to make sure this thing wasn't

25:29

overheating so I installed

25:32

netdata which is

25:34

very nice if you've ever used anything like

25:36

um Grafana it's like

25:39

Grafana except it works

25:42

intelligently by default so what

25:44

do I mean by that it enumerates

25:46

your system and automatically

25:49

creates a whole bunch of time series

25:51

metrics based on everything that's

25:53

on your machine hardware and

25:56

software and you can then create

25:58

alerts from that so it was very very easy

26:00

to actually just make that go

26:03

and then actually check on all of the important

26:05

stuff. So I quite like NetData for

26:07

home users. It's a really

26:10

nice way to monitor

26:12

your server without spending ages getting

26:14

into proper, let's

26:17

call it, web scale solutions. I

26:20

set up a simple DNS server as well

26:22

because I wanted to do that. So

26:24

I have an ad block enabled

26:27

DNS server that which uses AdGuard

26:29

behind the scenes. And

26:31

then I mentioned Plex and we've also got

26:34

Tatooly installed as well.

26:36

What's that? It's sort of analytics

26:39

and monitoring for Plex. So

26:42

it keeps a track of what was

26:44

watched when, from what

26:46

devices, by who and it

26:48

starts to build profiles of habits

26:51

and it gives you an idea of like, well,

26:54

what's popular and what should we have more

26:56

of on the home server and stuff like that.

26:58

But it's just another bit of insight

27:00

into Plex and how it's used. Nice.

27:03

And then all the usual bits and pieces. So we've

27:06

got sync thing running. So it's another

27:08

full time running sync thing.

27:10

So the devices either

27:13

on the LAN or remotely are all

27:15

connected to this and Dropbox Headless

27:17

is running there as well to synchronize

27:20

the things to provide a backup point

27:23

for our Dropbox stuff at home. And

27:26

then Samba because I want to

27:28

be able to drop things into the server from

27:30

time to time without having to SSH in.

27:33

And it's all working really well. And I think

27:35

the thing that I've been really impressed with in terms

27:37

of the Nix OS side of things is

27:40

how quickly you can

27:42

add these services and get them

27:45

fully configured and up and running. It's usually

27:47

just a case of saying this service

27:50

dot name dot enabled equals true.

27:53

And it's rare that you have to do anything

27:55

more sophisticated than that to bring

27:57

these services up and in particular

28:00

configuring Samba was delightful

28:02

by comparison to how I've had to sort

28:05

of wrangle the smb.conf

28:08

file in the past, which is often

28:10

not overridable with, you

28:12

know, .d style

28:15

override files. So, you know, package

28:18

upgrades tend to clatter it. Yeah,

28:20

I've never found Samba config to be a fun

28:22

job. Yeah. So, now

28:24

you've got all this storage and it's

28:27

all silent. Is there anything left

28:29

you could do to improve it? I mean, is there room

28:31

for more storage? Is there room

28:33

to tweak it in any further ways? Yeah,

28:36

I think what I'm going to do is daisy

28:38

chain another one of these enclosures

28:41

and use that as a backup target and run

28:43

the backup to not spinning rust,

28:46

but to another solid state array.

28:48

So, this is Borg, which we talked about

28:50

in our big backup bonanza. And

28:53

the other thing I want to do is because

28:56

Nix OS, I want to experiment

28:58

with running my own binary cache.

29:01

So, this is effectively like my own

29:03

proxy and mirror of the

29:05

software archive or repository

29:08

that you would get in other distributions. And

29:11

that will then accelerate my build

29:13

times and deployment times for my devices.

29:16

So, that's something I want to learn about. There's

29:19

a really great bit of software called garage, which

29:21

when I figured it out, will also be featuring

29:25

in a future episode. So, it's

29:27

really building on this as a platform and

29:29

a base now. I'd be interested to hear

29:32

what people do about home servers

29:34

at home. I know some people still run like

29:36

microservers and some people use old laptops

29:38

and stuff. I'm keen to

29:41

hear from our listeners and maybe we'll

29:44

collate some of this stuff and put it in a later

29:46

feedback episode. Yeah, good idea. Thank

30:00

you.