Where to Begin

Welcome back to Linux Prepper, episode 2, titled where to begin. Just wanna start by saying happy 2025. Hope everyone had a great end of their year. I will recap a little bit of my year. I wanna start by saying thank you to everyone for providing so much excellent feedback on the show.

I really appreciate it. As an exciting announcement, I was able to get a little interview done with a buddy of mine on his blog, and you're welcome to check it out, a little backstory in regards to the Linux prepper, which I'm happy to at least have a written version of because I haven't had time to release the audio version yet. But just as good, feel free to read this little Medium article explaining more background on the show, and I will drop a link to the interview on Linux Prepper podcast into the show notes. So what have I been up to since October? Well, I have moved into a new place and made some other changes.

I also went to seagl. That's seagl. That's the Seattle, the new Linux free software event that happens in October. I was around Seattle for Family Function, got to attend, so I'll be talking about that. Also, we'll talk about LinuxFest Northwest, which is coming up.

I'll take a little time to get through some audience feedback from past episodes and kind of key things up for episodes to come. Well, thank you so much for joining me, and here we go. Our first piece of feedback is in regards to the Despecialized episode where I was talking about use of Ubuntu Studio, and I realize now I got a little confused because the release cycle of Ubuntu itself is 2 years per release. The current version will be supported for 2 years since its release, which means if I've been on a couple of versions, more or less 4 years total use time. Thanks for the feedback on that.

Another thing, I was asked about Matrix. The chat associated with this podcast is available on Matrix. That is an open source chat platform, which is available to use by anyone. There's clients available. You can use it on the web.

You can join a matrix chat. It's just like what you'd normally have on something like Discord or Facebook Messenger or whatever, but it is a fully open source solution, which are the kind of things we're trying to play with here. You're welcome to join that. Going in line with that, there is also now a discussion forum that has just been put up for the show at discuss.james.network. You're welcome to join that.

Think of it as a fun experiment to go more long form on the topics mentioned on the show. This is something I feel like is lacking in other podcasts, so I just want to address it directly and offer a way for people to be able to share their thoughts and notes and expound on the things discussed in the show at length. I feel like show notes on the podcast are one thing, but this can take you to the next step. So you can go discuss things. Hope that's fun and people enjoy it.

Let's talk about Seagull, the Seattle GNULinux 2024 event. I actually found this through a listener, Adam, who has steadfast self hosting, and I went and checked out that talk. It was fun about people who want to self host and self host their own services. There's also a book, I'll drop a link into the show notes. People can check it out.

I believe that Adam is also a founder of the event. I found out about that and what ended up being in town, and I could go to it. Let's talk about things I liked and things I didn't like. Thing I liked. Oh, the Seagull event was all available through Matrix.

They have their own Matrix chat and all of the different talks were also available through Matrix. I thought that was awesome. Something well, honestly, it's more things I like. Another thing that I really liked is when you get there at the University of Washington, you're in a main hall room, and the hall room has all of the tables for all of the different vendors. When you get into the space, you can meet all these different vendors and there are people like the FSF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Software Foundation, and then projects like Calyxt for phones and all these other really cool projects that you can learn about.

So that's where I spent the majority of my time, was in that room. It's just where you end up anyway, and that's where the, you know, discussions happen and the interactions from person to person. Now the negative, I would say, was I had difficulty keeping track of the time. I had a great time being at it. I just had a difficult time remembering when things are happening because there's that break between, you know, looking online or whatever and just talking to someone in real life.

So I think one thing that would help, since the talks are on a time schedule, I think it would be nice to just have a big digital clock, you know, like on each end of the table or on the wall or something that's just telling you what time because the talks are happening on different floors of the building and it's easy to totally miss them and forget about them. So, I think any sort of like clock or countdown timer or just someone yelling, you know, like, which they did for the main area, but they didn't do it for the other talks as far as I remember. But just saying, hey. There's a talk in 5 minutes, in 10 minutes. The other thing I didn't realize I totally missed was the fact that people were giving their own impromptu talks in between the scheduled sessions.

I thought that that was something that had a set time, so I totally missed all of that. So there were a ton of seagull that I missed, but I had a great time at what I did experience, which is those conversations in the main room and then those conversations I remembered to attend. I'll drop a link in the show notes for Seagull, both the, matrix space website and where you can watch the recordings. If there's any talks or things that you want to experience after the fact, they're all there to check out. And, it was cool, and I'm amazed that those kinds of events happen.

You know, it's seriously, it's it's really cool that specifically a new Linux event, because that's that's the kind of thing that I'm really interested in. So, yeah, I'll drop a link for that, but it was great. I recommend attending next October in Seattle. That brings me to another event, which is coming up in April, and that is Linux Fest Northwest. I last attended that in 2015, and I highly recommend LinuxFest Northwest in Bellingham, Washington.

It is fantastic. So strongly, strongly recommend it. Speaker slots are available until 10th. I will drop a link for that as well into the show notes, and if that's something you would like to attend, can't recommend it highly enough. I have been to the Texas Linux Fest, Seagull, and Linux Fest Northwest, and I would have to say that Linux Fest Northwest is my favorite of all conferences, followed by Seagull.

It's free to attend, and it's very high quality. So our main topic for the day is the title is where to begin. And I think it's an open question in terms of where to begin. Where to begin with hosting your own services and using fully open services, like where does that start? It's also worth mentioning that outside of the computer stuff, there's just life itself and enjoying that.

I just want to acknowledge that talking about technology too much can be a real downer. I want to be able to talk about things that aren't just computer related as part of this show. You know, we started with the first two episodes talking about self hosted services because things like this podcast are being self hosted. If I'm hosting, you know, my own discussion forum and my own podcast and things, it's like a good starting place, but it's just not the ending place. I'd like to be able to talk about other things as well that are available in the open, like building instruments, building props, hosting my own shows, hosting my own events, recipes.

There's other things that can be talked about besides just computers that are also part of this open process. We're beginning from talking about technology things, obviously, but it's not the only thing to discuss. I promise. And I'm I'm really excited to get there, but it's like a baby step situation, you know, this where to begin. I think in terms of where to begin before everything else, if you want to learn, you're going to need 2 basic instruments.

The first is you're going to need the ability to take notes, and the second is you're going to need to be able to recall those notes when you need them. So this is my expectation for my listenership. So I'm trying to make a show not only for enthusiasts, but it's people who want to learn more. So my expectation for you as an enthusiast who's joining me for this is you're someone this is why I like Siebel. You're someone who's into this, and you will like, no matter what you know, you you're ready to learn more, and you're sitting there thinking, okay.

Whatever you're talking about, I'm going to look through the notes, or I'm going to take my own notes. So my hope is that my audience will be less one who asks a question and more one that looks up the answer first and then asks a question. So someone who's like, hey. How do I do x, y, z is different from, I looked up x, y, z, and I got some information, but I have some questions about it. I that's who I'm making this show for.

If you're taking notes, my big suggestion would be to use or learn on the computer, markdown. Unless you're using something like Evernote where you can drag and drop, you'll want to be able to take notes, and markdown is the standard. It's an expectation that someone would have a basic understanding of markdown. Or if you do writing, I would suggest a process called bullet journaling, which is equally simple. And I will drop links for these things in the show notes.

Both have served me very well for years. In terms of recalling your notes, one way you can do that is you can take notes in an application and sync them around, but I would also recommend taking important notes and putting in putting them into something like a password manager, which has been discussed in every episode of the show so far. But nothing wrong with taking useful notes or related files and thoughts and putting them inside a password manager if it means you'll be able to find those notes again in 5 or 10 years. Just take care of yourself, and if you're willing to take down notes and to be diligent, I think we can have a lot of fun together within this show, and I hope that you are excited at that prospect of beginning together. Believe me, it's been so hard to get these ideas out of my brain.

So hard. But getting there. Where to begin in terms of the technology side of services, coming back to the self hosting and hosting idea? Well, 1, you can use some kind of hosted service, and that's where everyone starts. Right?

You don't just start life self hosting your own website and email. You sign up for a service and start from there, which is fine. But at what point do you actually want to self host? I think this is an interesting question. So let's explore this of, specifically, when do you want to self host in a local place, at your home, at someone else's home that you know on a device that you own?

For me, that would be when I I run into some limitation. For example, I would love to be able to host my own files for this podcast, but my hosted service only allows, say, 10 gigabytes of data, and I have a multi terabyte hard drive sitting at home that I want to use. In that case, I think it makes sense for me to self host that hard drive because, sure, I can have that content available on a drive plugged into a computer when I want it, but the truth is, is I kind of want it available 24 hours a day, and I already have this device locally at my house, and I just want to experiment. That's when I would start self hosting at home. And the good news of self hosting at home, this is also known as a home lab, is by making your own home lab or your own internal network, you have something that you can experiment with.

I also like to call this the intranet. Not intranet, but intranet. We could also call it the internal net. The internal net is one that you have available in your local network, and it's not dependent on the Internet. And this is one of the most exciting things for me that I discovered in self hosting, is running my own services locally, and only I have access.

It just feels cool. It feels like there's this underworld within the world, and I'm the only member, and I love it. I highly recommend trying this idea of a home lab and a place to experiment and have fun. It's it's a great starting place. If you're not sure of what to get started with, I recommend finding any old computer and using that to host your own services.

Works great, find any old machine, set it up, install basic Linux as a learning tool, and then you could run your own services. What service would I recommend? I would say to do this one of 2 ways. 1 is you use the old computer, or 2 is you use a router itself. Let's assume that you don't have control over your router.

Well, then let's go back to this idea of running the services on your local machine. I would try something like a DNS server. Right? DNS domain name resolution is what happens underneath a URL or a typed hyperlink, mywebsite.com. Well, using something like DNS, domain name services, you can make my domain name dot com redirect within your internal network to whatever you want.

To do this, how would you do this? The first thing you would do is once you've been set up this old machine, you could install something like Avahi. Avahi is known as mDNS, and it is a local DNS service that makes your host name available as a URL. Specifically, it would be hostname.local.dotlocal is very useful. It's actually specifically set aside as a local only service, which means no service on the Internet is served on a dot local domain.

It's very unique in this way. So if you wanna use Avahi, you can set up your hostname.local, whatever you named your machine, and you'll be able to access it. Very, very useful. So Avahi on its face supports printers and Samba file sharing. It's also known as Bonjour on Mac, and it is something that is universally supported on Linux, Mac, Windows, cell phones, whatever.

Avahi is amazing, it's a game changer. I will drop a link for Avahi and how to edit your Avahi config to set your own host name. That's why I would recommend starting with the tool Avahi. That's my choice. Taking it a step further, I would recommend setting up your own DNS server.

This is assuming you could configure 1 for use on your local network. Say you don't want to mess with your router, but you do want to add a DNS server, you can at least do that using something like Unbound. You could use Unbound with a basic block list. I'll drop a link in the show notes, or you could use a tool such as PyHole or AdGuard Home. Personally, I like AdGuard Home.

It is feature rich, it is insanely easy to install and to remove. I personally found that PyHole was more difficult to install and remove. It required me doing more intervention on my home lab than AdGuard. For that reason, I personally have been using AdGuard for a number of years as a DNS server, and then eventually as the DHCP server of my network. Why did I do that?

Well, I've spent so much time using AdGuard Home and getting comfortable with it that I realized I actually liked it more than my router for serving my DHCP reservations, which is taking a device and assigning it to have a specific IP range. It's one thing to set up my own DNS, but I also know what address reservations I want for my devices, for my own sanity. Example, if your IP address is 10.zero.zero.one, perhaps you want all of your say you're hosting a lot of services, you want your Raspberry Pi devices to be located at 10.0.10.1 up the scale. So your first device is 10.0.10.1, your second device is 10.0.10.2, etcetera, or you want your printers to start on a different range. So these are things, if you set up your own DHCP server, it really helps your own brain to stay organized.

For that reason, I would recommend, in order, setting up Avahi, setting up a DNS server, setting up a DHCP server. Beyond that, I would recommend buying your own domain, a domain that you own, or using a dynamic DNS service such as Duck DNS, because what you're going to notice when you run services is Avahi will make it possible for your service to be available as hostname.local. What if you want to make it available as mydomaindot com? Now you're going to need some kind of reverse proxy. So with that, we say set up Nginx or take your pick, and now you'll be able to use that service to rewrite an external domain, my domain dot com, back to hostname.localservice.

That is a useful tool that allows you to kind of build out that internal network and even influence how you engage with the Internet at large. Another reason that you'd want to set up something like a reverse proxy with, say, a dynamic DNS service or a domain is because you're gonna run into HTTPS errors. You'll notice it right away because of the Snowden revelations. Now browsers are very hard and fast about not wanting to use HTTP because it is totally insecure. That's why you need proper SSL, and your browser's gonna complain if it doesn't see it.

It's gonna say, this thing is not trusted. And even if you're cool with it and you don't have OCD, if you try to share a service with someone and the browser spits back this unknown error, trust me, the service is gonna fall on its face. So because of that, you can use, thankfully, a reverse proxy to connect to either a dynamic DNS service such as Duck DNS. It's going to look like my service dot duckdns.org, or to a domain that you own, and now you can do what is called a reverse proxy, which is you can redirect to any number of services as opposed to using IP addresses and port numbers. You can use actual domains and see proper SSL.

That topic goes way deeper than I want to discuss it right now, but these are good starting places for setting up your own local services. I want to know that I didn't actually say anything in regards to more explicit services. We just have basic Avahi, an ad blocking style DNS service, or a reverse proxy. There's way cooler projects to talk about, but these are the fundamental kind of projects that if you set them up properly, you will use them nonstop always, everyone who uses your services and network will use them, whether they know it or not, and these services work. So these are my first few services that I recommend for services your friends and family will actually use.

If you have other services, I would love to hear about them. Feel free to join our matrix chat or to join our discussion forum. Send your feedback to podcast at james.network. Lastly, I want to mention ways to support the show because I was asked about this. Right now, the show is put together by me.

I don't have any sponsors at the moment. I'm looking into getting a sponsor, possibly. There are certain projects that I would love to be sponsored by, because they fall in line with my own interests. I'll give you an update on that shortly. But in the meantime, I have a PayPal service.

It's what it is, man. If you want to use that, you can support me. It'll be linked in the show notes. It's also on the Linux Prepper website, the castabout page that serves up the podcast, so you can donate and support me that way. Also, I added podcasting 2.0 support for the show.

So if you wanna listen on a podcasting 2.0 client, you can do that. It's up to you. Some people are really into podcasting 2.0. I have set it up previously because of a podcast I was on called The Volunteer Technologist, but if you want to try that out, you can. I'm not gonna go into podcasting 2.0 at this moment, but I'll at least drop a basic link to it in the show notes, and you can dig into it more.

For the moment, we'll just say, if you know, you know. Outside of that, any support is much appreciated. I used the last couple of months to invest in some studio monitor speakers, which have a flat response, so I can actually hear what the recording sounds like. I also got my hands on some tooling to try to clean up my volume levels and sound, so hopefully that has made a difference. In this show, I will put more information into the discussion forum on the details of that if you're curious as we do this continued experiment known as the Linux Prepper.

I hope you liked this podcast, and feel free to share it. If you like the show, tell anyone you know about it, friends, family, whatever. Share it on social media. I'm just gonna focus more on releasing the show and making it available as openly as possible. From there, I leave it up to you, my audience, if you think others would like this show or be interested in hearing discussions about things like self hosted services, free and open hardware, which we haven't really gotten into yet, and also other kinds of free and open tools, like building musical instruments, running laser cutters, 3 d printers, and these other sorts of topics that we'll get into in the future.

Anyway, thank you so much for listening, and best to all of you in the new year. Take care. Bye.