1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:04,960 Welcome back to Linux Prepper Podcast, I'm the host James, show about self-hosting, 2 00:00:04,960 --> 00:00:11,040 false, curious, cis admins, home lab enthusiasts, people who want to DIY things themselves 3 00:00:11,040 --> 00:00:13,720 or just try self-hosting their own gear. 4 00:00:13,720 --> 00:00:17,400 You've ever tried this and failed, well, welcome to the club, we're going to deal with 5 00:00:17,400 --> 00:00:22,480 self-reliance, local first tooling, and today's episode is all going to be about repurposing 6 00:00:22,480 --> 00:00:23,480 old machines. 7 00:00:23,480 --> 00:00:29,440 We're also going to dig into basic file processes, file networking for a local or offline 8 00:00:29,440 --> 00:00:34,200 style setup in the home lab, and then we'll finish it off with trivia picks from the 9 00:00:34,200 --> 00:00:36,920 recent Linux Fest Northwest. 10 00:00:36,920 --> 00:00:38,960 So buckle up, here we go. 11 00:00:38,960 --> 00:00:44,320 Want to thank the sponsor of this podcast, which is a meradroid.com, a meradroid is 12 00:00:44,320 --> 00:00:49,600 the United States Northern California-based distributor of single-board computers, especially 13 00:00:49,600 --> 00:00:55,520 o-droids from hard kernel and official partner of Nabukasa and home assistant hardware. 14 00:00:55,520 --> 00:00:58,880 They offer global shipping, and they have friendly customer service you can call them 15 00:00:58,880 --> 00:00:59,880 on the phone. 16 00:00:59,880 --> 00:01:02,840 They're awesome people, super nice, they'll help you out. 17 00:01:02,840 --> 00:01:06,920 It's definitely an advantage to order from them versus ordering directly from overseas 18 00:01:06,920 --> 00:01:11,880 and hard kernel and such, and they're just an all-around great provider. 19 00:01:11,880 --> 00:01:14,240 Can't recommend them enough, thank you for sponsoring the show. 20 00:01:14,240 --> 00:01:18,840 You can use Linux proper a checkout or use the referral link. 21 00:01:18,840 --> 00:01:20,280 So what is a battle station? 22 00:01:20,280 --> 00:01:26,880 A battle station really is just a cool term people have put online for a gaming type 23 00:01:26,880 --> 00:01:32,400 setup in addition to an office, it's like you have some comfortable gaming setup with 24 00:01:32,400 --> 00:01:37,720 an ergonomic chair setup to kick butt in an online game. 25 00:01:37,720 --> 00:01:42,480 So we're going to take the same concept, but adapt it to the Linux prepper style user and 26 00:01:42,480 --> 00:01:47,280 administrator, which means instead of for going for something fancy, we're going to actually 27 00:01:47,280 --> 00:01:52,160 just re-appropriate the gear we already have to make sure that it's working in a foundational 28 00:01:52,160 --> 00:01:58,040 way that supports us in getting work done and assumes that we'll run into problems and 29 00:01:58,040 --> 00:01:59,520 snapfoos. 30 00:01:59,520 --> 00:02:05,040 So my focus with this has been all the hardware and all the software. 31 00:02:05,040 --> 00:02:08,160 We're going to break our battle station segment into four sections. 32 00:02:08,160 --> 00:02:14,720 First, we're going to talk about graphics and gaming performance, 32-bit specifically. 33 00:02:14,720 --> 00:02:20,440 Then we'll jump into pipe wire, we'll follow that up with managing memory between 16 34 00:02:20,440 --> 00:02:26,600 and 1 gigabytes on a machine, and we're going to end it off with local file networking 35 00:02:26,600 --> 00:02:32,280 between two machines as the basis of a minimalist home lab before trivia. 36 00:02:32,280 --> 00:02:37,080 I want to give a caveat that I got really deep in the weeds on this over the last six 37 00:02:37,080 --> 00:02:41,400 months, and there's so much material, so I'm going to try to keep this really focused, 38 00:02:41,400 --> 00:02:45,120 and that way we can break it into different chunks, different episodes. 39 00:02:45,120 --> 00:02:49,200 Do send me your thoughts because this is the longest deep dive I've ever had, and I hope 40 00:02:49,200 --> 00:02:54,100 you enjoy this condensed version of what was previously two hours. 41 00:02:54,100 --> 00:02:58,960 Battle station, gaming setup, usually with a computer, monitor, some gaming peripherals designed 42 00:02:58,960 --> 00:03:02,800 for optimal performance right and for your own comfort. 43 00:03:02,800 --> 00:03:06,920 So in this case, we're going to build out our own little Linux pepper battle station. 44 00:03:06,920 --> 00:03:11,120 Two of them in this case, with the assumption that at least one is going to break down, 45 00:03:11,120 --> 00:03:14,280 I've already lost two laptops, what's another one, you know? 46 00:03:14,280 --> 00:03:18,120 So one's not good enough, we're going for two. 47 00:03:18,120 --> 00:03:23,320 This means anything I'm running on one machine, I have to be able to run on the other, 48 00:03:23,320 --> 00:03:27,640 and that means the directories have to be managed equally across the machines. 49 00:03:27,640 --> 00:03:32,760 So if I work on machine A, and I work on something else on machine B, it's not going 50 00:03:32,760 --> 00:03:33,760 to mess me up. 51 00:03:33,760 --> 00:03:37,560 I've got a system I can understand, and that's what we're delving into today. 52 00:03:37,560 --> 00:03:41,440 We're going beyond the first steps, and now we're going into the next steps, which is 53 00:03:41,440 --> 00:03:44,880 making machines we can actually use. 54 00:03:44,880 --> 00:03:48,960 Take recap of what happened with that fancy laptop. 55 00:03:48,960 --> 00:03:51,640 It was the fact that I had a new laptop, but it had broken. 56 00:03:51,640 --> 00:03:55,640 I couldn't get access to the BIOS, the screen was damaged, so that inspired me to crack 57 00:03:55,640 --> 00:03:57,320 up in my discarded gear drawer. 58 00:03:57,320 --> 00:04:01,680 I call it my cabinet of shame, and I also have a steamer trunk of the same volt projects 59 00:04:01,680 --> 00:04:03,160 and all parts. 60 00:04:03,160 --> 00:04:07,800 So I dug into that, and you can see in the forum, I have a detailed technical breakdown 61 00:04:07,800 --> 00:04:09,320 of what I used. 62 00:04:09,320 --> 00:04:15,560 What the base suggests is two Intel Nook thin client computers, one has a solitary USB 63 00:04:15,560 --> 00:04:21,800 3 port, it's an i5 that I upgraded to 16 gigabytes of RAM, and the other one has a USB 64 00:04:21,800 --> 00:04:28,240 2.0 port, and I dug around and I was able to get it up to 12 gigabytes of RAM from the trunk. 65 00:04:28,240 --> 00:04:32,520 And I have two matching 24 inch monitors, so I put one on each. 66 00:04:32,520 --> 00:04:35,880 I have a keyboard, my Dell, which I've mentioned before, it's just an old Dell, you can 67 00:04:35,880 --> 00:04:41,120 see it for a few bucks, and then I got some mice, they sell for about $20, and they're 68 00:04:41,120 --> 00:04:46,240 absolutely amazing, I don't link to them in the forum, and I have two simple desks. 69 00:04:46,240 --> 00:04:52,840 I found some TP-Link Wi-Fi adapters, and Bluetooth adapters for USB 3, since USB falls 70 00:04:52,840 --> 00:04:56,440 back to 2 or 3, I figured that would work. 71 00:04:56,440 --> 00:05:01,840 You'll remember I only had one solitary USB 3 on one, and some USB 2 on the other. 72 00:05:01,840 --> 00:05:06,160 That means in order to use devices, I was going to need to start chaining together USB 73 00:05:06,160 --> 00:05:07,160 devices. 74 00:05:07,160 --> 00:05:08,400 That's what I need. 75 00:05:08,400 --> 00:05:13,040 What I ended up doing was I got powered hubs, and this is something that I've played with 76 00:05:13,040 --> 00:05:19,600 in the past, but I decided to buy quality powered hubs like 10 port USB individual on 77 00:05:19,600 --> 00:05:23,680 off high amperage, I think they're at 5 amp. 78 00:05:23,680 --> 00:05:28,680 Because of backwards compatibility, even USB 2 works totally fine with the USB 3 powered 79 00:05:28,680 --> 00:05:30,920 hub on an Intel Nook. 80 00:05:30,920 --> 00:05:34,840 You just want it to work, and the speed is less important. 81 00:05:34,840 --> 00:05:43,160 I've used it successfully to run the mouse, keyboard, Wi-Fi adapter, Bluetooth adapters, 82 00:05:43,160 --> 00:05:49,600 video capture devices, an external USB monitor, small projector, everything is run without 83 00:05:49,600 --> 00:05:50,600 issue. 84 00:05:50,600 --> 00:05:54,880 I haven't had a single device that didn't work, which is a great testament to how well-supported 85 00:05:54,880 --> 00:05:58,920 devices are these days, and honestly it's good enough scenario. 86 00:05:58,920 --> 00:06:03,160 So the main thing that I noticed to get those machines upright is to go to a wired. 87 00:06:03,160 --> 00:06:07,680 So running gigabit wired between them makes the biggest difference. 88 00:06:07,680 --> 00:06:10,480 But as you'll see, it's not a deal breaker. 89 00:06:10,480 --> 00:06:12,720 So what do I actually need for my battle station personally? 90 00:06:12,720 --> 00:06:15,680 I need a USB microphone, which means I got one on both. 91 00:06:15,680 --> 00:06:16,680 I need headphones. 92 00:06:16,680 --> 00:06:18,080 I got them on both. 93 00:06:18,080 --> 00:06:23,320 I need some pen and paper at both, and then I need some kind of chair and some tea. 94 00:06:23,320 --> 00:06:24,560 So I've got my desk together. 95 00:06:24,560 --> 00:06:27,040 I got my battle stations together. 96 00:06:27,040 --> 00:06:30,840 And it was just a matter of getting my systems up to date running Ubuntu. 97 00:06:30,840 --> 00:06:37,440 I took the Ubuntu LTSs, which were an LTS behind or two LTSs behind. 98 00:06:37,440 --> 00:06:39,480 I got those up to date. 99 00:06:39,480 --> 00:06:43,120 I'd already moved all of my data into cold storage in the past. 100 00:06:43,120 --> 00:06:48,800 So I updated those backup images and then updated my systems. 101 00:06:48,800 --> 00:06:51,840 And in general, it was a pretty seamless process. 102 00:06:51,840 --> 00:06:59,760 I'm now running KDE Plasma on both, and what I realized on these older pieces of hardware, 103 00:06:59,760 --> 00:07:07,560 they have I 915 Intel graphics stacks inside, which is not powerful and not good. 104 00:07:07,560 --> 00:07:09,480 I ran into a lot of issues related to that. 105 00:07:09,480 --> 00:07:14,320 So what I would actually recommend on older hardware like this, even though it's an I3 106 00:07:14,320 --> 00:07:21,760 or an I5, I would dump KDE and I would move to LXQT, which is open box based, or you 107 00:07:21,760 --> 00:07:28,560 could use XFCE, or you could use I3 if you were open to Tiling Windome Manager. 108 00:07:28,560 --> 00:07:30,640 All of those would work really well. 109 00:07:30,640 --> 00:07:35,360 So yes, in running these, you are literally going back to an X-based system. 110 00:07:35,360 --> 00:07:39,600 Hello, X, my old friend, but it's going to run better. 111 00:07:39,600 --> 00:07:45,120 So you will get better performance by moving back to X instead of staying on Wayland. 112 00:07:45,120 --> 00:07:48,520 It's worth considering on old hardware. 113 00:07:48,520 --> 00:07:55,240 And there's also those minimal like anti-X type projects and MX Linux that you can run as 114 00:07:55,240 --> 00:07:56,240 well. 115 00:07:56,240 --> 00:07:59,480 You still have some support in 32-bit land, but you do have to be careful. 116 00:07:59,480 --> 00:08:02,600 The underlying dependencies are breaking. 117 00:08:02,600 --> 00:08:06,720 Multi-architecture support for Debian is still available. 118 00:08:06,720 --> 00:08:12,080 Despite 32-bit dropping off overall, you can still make it happen as well as with arch 119 00:08:12,080 --> 00:08:15,680 and void Linux, but there are still 32-bit options out there. 120 00:08:15,680 --> 00:08:18,480 All of it is trying to be brought out to pasture. 121 00:08:18,480 --> 00:08:20,840 Good news is there is still support. 122 00:08:20,840 --> 00:08:27,040 I've been focusing on devices that I can run 64-bit on, but something that I want to 123 00:08:27,040 --> 00:08:32,920 mention in terms of 32-bit is I've been struggling a lot with running 32-bit software. 124 00:08:32,920 --> 00:08:38,400 The libraries and dependencies of 32-bit are problematic in their support, even in reinstalling 125 00:08:38,400 --> 00:08:42,640 X, reinstalling multi-architecture and 32-bit support. 126 00:08:42,640 --> 00:08:48,120 I find myself having to dig back through like, for example, the Debian repositories trying 127 00:08:48,120 --> 00:08:53,960 to find these dependencies that have changed, whereas I thought that I would just be able 128 00:08:53,960 --> 00:09:02,200 to run software 64 or 32-bit from 12-15 years ago that I personally own the Steer M3. 129 00:09:02,200 --> 00:09:07,920 I've found a lot of problems with it, and a lot of that comes back to gaming, right? 130 00:09:07,920 --> 00:09:14,200 Gaming type tools, but I'm really surprised to see that overall platform support for software 131 00:09:14,200 --> 00:09:16,560 you would imagine would work, does not. 132 00:09:16,560 --> 00:09:22,560 This is one place, Windows itself crushes Linux. 133 00:09:22,560 --> 00:09:27,520 Windows still offers that 32-bit support, just like Wine gives you that 32-bit support. 134 00:09:27,520 --> 00:09:34,000 If you want to run 32-bit software in Linux, it's painful on modern operating systems. 135 00:09:34,000 --> 00:09:39,800 Even tools like I was able to run without issue in the last, say, five years is performing 136 00:09:39,800 --> 00:09:43,120 worse in 2026 than it was at that time. 137 00:09:43,120 --> 00:09:48,800 That's frustrating, and obviously your repositories have changed and packages have changed, 138 00:09:48,800 --> 00:09:55,280 but I see this as a limitation of Linux itself in terms of its 32-bit support and support 139 00:09:55,280 --> 00:10:00,080 for legacy code, which is just not as good as you would imagine. 140 00:10:00,080 --> 00:10:05,920 So we keep chasing the shiny and new, but the truth is, is the old code you have, it doesn't 141 00:10:05,920 --> 00:10:10,560 mean that it's aging well, and you might be surprised when you try to run it and you run 142 00:10:10,560 --> 00:10:14,120 into difficulties with these old applications. 143 00:10:14,120 --> 00:10:19,720 I realize we're really focused on gaming right now, but it's important because if we step 144 00:10:19,720 --> 00:10:25,560 away from that 32-bit and old systems, and we come back to these Intel Nooks with these 145 00:10:25,560 --> 00:10:33,960 Intel I-915 stacks from 12 years ago, whatever, and you look at those in terms of, say, 146 00:10:33,960 --> 00:10:40,640 this use Steam, well, the problem is that Steam itself and Proton technology is not supporting 147 00:10:40,640 --> 00:10:42,520 these old titles either. 148 00:10:42,520 --> 00:10:47,120 That's what's recommended is like, oh, use Proton, we'll guess what, Proton drops support 149 00:10:47,120 --> 00:10:52,940 for the Intel graphics stack back around seven, so you have to install old versions and 150 00:10:52,940 --> 00:10:58,400 pray that they work, and all these things were working perfectly in the past, when the last 151 00:10:58,400 --> 00:11:03,640 couple years, you could run any of these titles and now all of it's totally broken. 152 00:11:03,640 --> 00:11:09,800 So, that's just not good, and this is not even about Windows games, we're talking about 153 00:11:09,800 --> 00:11:14,240 Linux native games that are broken, and then you're trying to run them through Proton, which 154 00:11:14,240 --> 00:11:18,000 is also not supporting the graphics stacks because they want to support the new graphics 155 00:11:18,000 --> 00:11:23,560 stacks of Vulkan, whatever, it's just broken all over the place, it's not good. 156 00:11:23,560 --> 00:11:28,320 So this is not good, if you bought a game in the past, you expect that you can use it, 157 00:11:28,320 --> 00:11:32,440 and apparently that is not the case, and it's very frustrating, and then you're back in 158 00:11:32,440 --> 00:11:36,960 the weeds, like it's 20 years ago, and you're trying to fix this dependency, and that 159 00:11:36,960 --> 00:11:41,640 dependency, and you're in deep package on the command line, it's like, dude, what happened? 160 00:11:41,640 --> 00:11:44,980 What happened to just being able to like, have stuff run, and you assumed it would still 161 00:11:44,980 --> 00:11:49,080 run back in the future? 162 00:11:49,080 --> 00:11:54,640 Maybe this incessant need to throw away the old for the new at all times, is holding 163 00:11:54,640 --> 00:12:00,880 us back, maybe that's holding us back, so let me think about. 164 00:12:00,880 --> 00:12:07,600 There is some good news, if you were like, man, I really want to run a modern game, well, 165 00:12:07,600 --> 00:12:10,920 I have an option for you that is really exciting. 166 00:12:10,920 --> 00:12:16,080 The love 2D engine is coated in C++ and uses Lua throughout. 167 00:12:16,080 --> 00:12:21,440 It's ultra light and can still be built for 32-bit, which means you can also rebuild 168 00:12:21,440 --> 00:12:29,600 games of packaged through Steam for app images, and run them on a 32-bit compiled engine 169 00:12:29,600 --> 00:12:35,400 known as love, so what you can do is you can purchase a game on Steam, like Bellatro, 170 00:12:35,400 --> 00:12:41,280 you unpack a jit, take that love file, and run it through your 32-bit compiled version 171 00:12:41,280 --> 00:12:45,920 of the game engine, and Bob's your uncle, you're able to run these games on a 32-bit system 172 00:12:45,920 --> 00:12:50,440 right now, and that is the power of a free and open engine. 173 00:12:50,440 --> 00:12:54,240 Specific notes for that will be included in the show notes, if you want to jump on the 174 00:12:54,240 --> 00:12:59,960 forum and try doing this yourself, as a quick shout out to these love 2D coated games 175 00:12:59,960 --> 00:13:05,440 that you can still run on 32-bit, not to mention the Intel graphics stack, be sure to 176 00:13:05,440 --> 00:13:10,000 check out one is Moon Ring created by the creator of Fable, it's an old-school ultimate 177 00:13:10,000 --> 00:13:14,360 style RPG, you can get it for free, so you should be able to get the app image directly 178 00:13:14,360 --> 00:13:19,120 off itch and build it for 32-bit or run it on your local system. 179 00:13:19,120 --> 00:13:23,960 There's also Bellatro, which is a super famous card game right now, it's a major seller 180 00:13:23,960 --> 00:13:28,880 where you basically create game-breaking hands of cards, and there's Arco, which is 181 00:13:28,880 --> 00:13:33,640 a Meso American turn-based fighting game, and I highly recommend checking out Arco, 182 00:13:33,640 --> 00:13:39,200 it's worth noting the developer's listly mentioned, most likely will never make another 183 00:13:39,200 --> 00:13:43,000 game of this kind of passion project, because it isn't sold well, even though it's been 184 00:13:43,000 --> 00:13:47,120 critically acclaimed, and you can play the demo of the game, I tried it on Steam, it's 185 00:13:47,120 --> 00:13:55,880 super fun, great pixel art highly recommend checking out Arco, and Bellatro, and Moon Ring. 186 00:13:55,880 --> 00:14:01,160 As we wrap up this section talking about the more visual side of older systems, do keep 187 00:14:01,160 --> 00:14:06,560 in mind that if you're running headless, the situation looks far, far better, especially 188 00:14:06,560 --> 00:14:12,680 because of Go and Rust, Go and Rust, all these applications I found over 100, great tools 189 00:14:12,680 --> 00:14:18,520 that we recommend all the time on all these different podcasts, right, like uptime, kuma, 190 00:14:18,520 --> 00:14:23,040 all these different tools, they're all written in Go and Rust, which means you can use 191 00:14:23,040 --> 00:14:28,040 them on 32-bit, awesome, they run on 32-bit, they run on 64-bit, and they're perfect 192 00:14:28,040 --> 00:14:35,160 for running at home on low systems, like on very low RAM, one gigabyte systems, you could 193 00:14:35,160 --> 00:14:41,680 run multiple of these applications, reverse proxy, DNS, DHCP, and there's a lot of options 194 00:14:41,680 --> 00:14:48,440 up there, so in that way 32-bit hardware is still extremely usable, but let's jump back 195 00:14:48,440 --> 00:14:54,200 into the desktop portion of things again, but this time, let's focus on audio. 196 00:14:54,200 --> 00:14:59,920 On the audio front of things, I've had a fantastic experience, back in February, I started 197 00:14:59,920 --> 00:15:05,600 looking into my options for pipe wire, for audio interfaces multiple of them managing them 198 00:15:05,600 --> 00:15:08,920 on this local machine, because that was one of my goals, right, with getting started in 199 00:15:08,920 --> 00:15:13,880 this whole project, and one of the things I found is that pipe wire support for audio 200 00:15:13,880 --> 00:15:20,480 on Linux is amazing, it's fantastic, and I've had it such a good experience. 201 00:15:20,480 --> 00:15:23,680 If you look at the forum post, you can see the crazy picture of all the stuff routed. 202 00:15:23,680 --> 00:15:29,040 What you get is all your different USB connections, your Bluetooth connections, plug them 203 00:15:29,040 --> 00:15:34,800 all in, like me, you might be wondering, well, how do I access an audio device, for example, 204 00:15:34,800 --> 00:15:40,760 an audacity, or in any audio recording tool reaper, how do I run this input to this output? 205 00:15:40,760 --> 00:15:43,680 I'm confused, and I was struggling with that. 206 00:15:43,680 --> 00:15:48,400 There's three different tools that are really important, and there's more, but this is a good 207 00:15:48,400 --> 00:15:49,400 start. 208 00:15:49,400 --> 00:15:51,600 Number one, wire plumber. 209 00:15:51,600 --> 00:15:56,480 Wire plumber is the session and policy manager for the pipe wire API. 210 00:15:56,480 --> 00:16:02,280 Wire plumber is the actual configuration files that are being managed for the audio interface, 211 00:16:02,280 --> 00:16:05,840 so you can create wire plumber configs, and that'll get you covered. 212 00:16:05,840 --> 00:16:06,840 It gets better. 213 00:16:06,840 --> 00:16:13,360 There is also the QPW Graph, which is a GUI tool that shows your audio assignments in 214 00:16:13,360 --> 00:16:16,800 video in real time and MIDI. 215 00:16:16,800 --> 00:16:21,000 So definitely save your existing configuration, because it's really easy to screw things 216 00:16:21,000 --> 00:16:24,720 up when you have all the patch points, like an old telephone operator, you can just 217 00:16:24,720 --> 00:16:28,600 wire anything into anything, it's so fun, and it's all visual. 218 00:16:28,600 --> 00:16:35,800 So QPW Graph, for some reason, for example, you don't hear something like in your headphones 219 00:16:35,800 --> 00:16:42,120 and say your playing music on your speakers while you're recording, you could at any time 220 00:16:42,120 --> 00:16:47,000 open up QPW Graph and say either, I want to take the speaker output, or let's say you're 221 00:16:47,000 --> 00:16:53,120 playing from Firefox, I want to take the Firefox output and route either to the headphones, 222 00:16:53,120 --> 00:16:54,120 and then it's done. 223 00:16:54,120 --> 00:16:55,120 It's works. 224 00:16:55,120 --> 00:16:59,440 You can do it on the left ear, the right ear, and stereo, you can split it up however you want. 225 00:16:59,440 --> 00:17:00,480 Very, very cool. 226 00:17:00,480 --> 00:17:05,280 I would say I was confused when I was trying to do things directly in different applications, 227 00:17:05,280 --> 00:17:10,600 as well as I was confused, because I'm so used to ALSA Mixer and Pulse Audio. 228 00:17:10,600 --> 00:17:16,480 Pipewire is a drop in replacement for these applications, but for configuring pipe wire, 229 00:17:16,480 --> 00:17:20,600 you'll want to do it directly in wire plumber, or with something like QPW Graph. 230 00:17:20,600 --> 00:17:25,400 For jack assignments, that's PW hyphen jack, that'll manage jack assignments, which is like 231 00:17:25,400 --> 00:17:26,400 pro audio stuff. 232 00:17:26,400 --> 00:17:28,240 Here's my note on jack. 233 00:17:28,240 --> 00:17:32,760 You don't actually start a jack server when you're using pipe wire, as pipe wire emulates 234 00:17:32,760 --> 00:17:33,760 jack. 235 00:17:33,760 --> 00:17:37,520 Instead, you will configure the application to use jack, which will then connect through 236 00:17:37,520 --> 00:17:41,240 pipe wire without needing the separate jack server. 237 00:17:41,240 --> 00:17:45,880 Even with the basic wiring in wire plumber, it gets you 95% of the way there. 238 00:17:45,880 --> 00:17:50,000 I am happy to say once I figured out this basic routing in pipe wire, everything has 239 00:17:50,000 --> 00:17:55,600 been awesome ever since, and I have been able to run 4, 5, 6, 8 devices, and everything 240 00:17:55,600 --> 00:17:56,920 has been cherry. 241 00:17:56,920 --> 00:18:01,800 So I highly recommend learning about pipe wire configuration, it rules. 242 00:18:01,800 --> 00:18:07,000 If you enjoy hearing about pro audio and all this kind of fun DIY approaches, I'm going 243 00:18:07,000 --> 00:18:12,640 to include a bonus episode with this one on Apex Twin, the Electronic Pioneer, who has 244 00:18:12,640 --> 00:18:18,200 made an entire 40-year career out of using any and every imaginable tool, be it the command 245 00:18:18,200 --> 00:18:23,960 line, hardware sense, whatever, to make crazy, amazing music for years, and it just every 246 00:18:23,960 --> 00:18:29,640 tool is pushed to the absolute limit, and if that interests you, you can check out my dedicated 247 00:18:29,640 --> 00:18:35,280 episode to Apex Twin, who would use the absolute ever-love and everything out of tools 248 00:18:35,280 --> 00:18:37,880 like pipe wire. 249 00:18:37,880 --> 00:18:41,000 Ways to support the show. 250 00:18:41,000 --> 00:18:45,920 The best thing you can do to support this show is to share it with somebody else. 251 00:18:45,920 --> 00:18:49,000 If you know anybody that likes this show, please share it with them. 252 00:18:49,000 --> 00:18:52,360 The second best thing you can do is let me know. 253 00:18:52,360 --> 00:19:00,280 You can send me an email, podcast@livingcartoon.org, you can drop in the matrix or send me 254 00:19:00,280 --> 00:19:01,680 a message if you like the show. 255 00:19:01,680 --> 00:19:07,800 Seriously, this show is so small, and it actually does inspire me to want to continue. 256 00:19:07,800 --> 00:19:14,120 And if this show interests you, let me know because I have over 15 pages of notes in regards 257 00:19:14,120 --> 00:19:15,120 to this show. 258 00:19:15,120 --> 00:19:16,120 Oh, hello, Carl. 259 00:19:16,120 --> 00:19:17,120 You can hear him. 260 00:19:17,120 --> 00:19:18,120 That's my cat. 261 00:19:18,120 --> 00:19:22,920 Back to the episode, I would be remiss not to mention the ram-shaped elephant in the room, 262 00:19:22,920 --> 00:19:25,680 which is, of course, memory. 263 00:19:25,680 --> 00:19:28,240 Memory is crazy, memory is limited. 264 00:19:28,240 --> 00:19:34,280 So let's take a moment to specifically address memory, no pun intended. 265 00:19:34,280 --> 00:19:36,520 Related to everything here, right, is memory. 266 00:19:36,520 --> 00:19:40,000 Memory prices, disc prices being insane. 267 00:19:40,000 --> 00:19:45,120 So what I'm saying is that having low memory on a computer inherently means you're going 268 00:19:45,120 --> 00:19:48,920 to hit the limits of that computer quickly. 269 00:19:48,920 --> 00:19:50,760 And I definitely found that, right? 270 00:19:50,760 --> 00:19:53,720 I'm not going to lie in any way. 271 00:19:53,720 --> 00:19:58,320 I hit the limits of memory immediately in terms of swap. 272 00:19:58,320 --> 00:20:02,040 And so what I dug into a lot is Z-RAM. 273 00:20:02,040 --> 00:20:05,960 And Z-RAM really helped with performance with some tuning. 274 00:20:05,960 --> 00:20:10,840 And I just want to read what this person posted to Reddit and I'll link it because it's useful. 275 00:20:10,840 --> 00:20:16,600 Z-RAM is a Linux kernel module that creates a swap space in RAM, as opposed to having it 276 00:20:16,600 --> 00:20:17,880 on your disk. 277 00:20:17,880 --> 00:20:21,640 Swap partitions on a hard drive or an SSD are slow. 278 00:20:21,640 --> 00:20:22,640 And I found this. 279 00:20:22,640 --> 00:20:23,720 I hit my limits in them because of browsers. 280 00:20:23,720 --> 00:20:26,720 The web browser is the problem right a lot of the time. 281 00:20:26,720 --> 00:20:32,040 But this results in stuttering where the machines decides to start using swap space. 282 00:20:32,040 --> 00:20:37,720 Z-RAM is an alternative to swap space that compresses memory before storing it in a designated 283 00:20:37,720 --> 00:20:38,720 space in RAM. 284 00:20:38,720 --> 00:20:43,360 This means you get more efficient use of the RAM as your system will not compress files 285 00:20:43,360 --> 00:20:45,160 in memory when needed. 286 00:20:45,160 --> 00:20:51,200 In using Z-RAM, I did find notable improvement in my daily browsing experience. 287 00:20:51,200 --> 00:20:56,080 And I'm not talking about any kind of browser level manipulation of things just in terms 288 00:20:56,080 --> 00:21:01,120 of the computer itself and allocating Z-RAM to performance. 289 00:21:01,120 --> 00:21:05,880 So Z-RAM is kernel supported on all the major Linux distributions but it doesn't mean it's 290 00:21:05,880 --> 00:21:07,680 enabled by default. 291 00:21:07,680 --> 00:21:11,760 For me, I had to install the Z-RAM hyphen tools package. 292 00:21:11,760 --> 00:21:15,240 And from there, I was able to set up a Z-RAM partition. 293 00:21:15,240 --> 00:21:18,200 That part was easy and it did work really well. 294 00:21:18,200 --> 00:21:21,560 I'm going to pull up my notes and say exactly what I did. 295 00:21:21,560 --> 00:21:22,560 Let me look. 296 00:21:22,560 --> 00:21:23,560 All right. 297 00:21:23,560 --> 00:21:28,520 Let's go back through my system de-configuration of Z-RAM swap. 298 00:21:28,520 --> 00:21:30,080 Systems with 12 gigabytes of RAM. 299 00:21:30,080 --> 00:21:31,080 How systems behave? 300 00:21:31,080 --> 00:21:34,760 12 gigabytes of RAM, enough for basic use. 301 00:21:34,760 --> 00:21:40,200 But once you're adding kd-plasma, gaming, web browsers, then I'm running out of memory 302 00:21:40,200 --> 00:21:41,840 which is exactly what's happening. 303 00:21:41,840 --> 00:21:46,560 So let's talk about the role of Z-RAM and 12 gigabytes of RAM system. 304 00:21:46,560 --> 00:21:47,920 It's absolutely critical. 305 00:21:47,920 --> 00:21:52,000 It acts as a buffer before I jump into that disk swap. 306 00:21:52,000 --> 00:21:56,040 And what it does is it prevents kd-e-plasma itself from freezing. 307 00:21:56,040 --> 00:21:58,720 Because that's what was happening to me with 12 gigabytes of RAM. 308 00:21:58,720 --> 00:22:03,320 It's like, you watch a YouTube video, browse the internet and be doing something. 309 00:22:03,320 --> 00:22:05,760 And the computer just seizes up. 310 00:22:05,760 --> 00:22:07,680 And I'm like, oh. 311 00:22:07,680 --> 00:22:12,080 So what it does is it's going to grant me an additional four or six gigabytes of compressed 312 00:22:12,080 --> 00:22:15,480 RAM that's going to help keep the system from being responsive. 313 00:22:15,480 --> 00:22:18,520 Instead of it just like locking up because once it locks up, there's like nothing I can 314 00:22:18,520 --> 00:22:19,520 do. 315 00:22:19,520 --> 00:22:20,680 It's like a frozen robot. 316 00:22:20,680 --> 00:22:22,600 And I'm just like, ah. 317 00:22:22,600 --> 00:22:23,600 So that's not good. 318 00:22:23,600 --> 00:22:27,760 It's giving me a little bit of a safety net, a little bit of a, you know, a little space 319 00:22:27,760 --> 00:22:30,840 to work with, take some of the pressure off. 320 00:22:30,840 --> 00:22:35,040 So it, it did help and it helped on both the computers. 321 00:22:35,040 --> 00:22:37,600 So let's talk about my 16 gigabyte RAM system. 322 00:22:37,600 --> 00:22:39,880 So 16 gigabytes obviously is a little bit more comfort. 323 00:22:39,880 --> 00:22:41,760 I can do more multitasking. 324 00:22:41,760 --> 00:22:47,440 But as you ram in this case, still important, it's giving me like extra six gigs compressed 325 00:22:47,440 --> 00:22:53,280 RAM, which is again preventing kd-plasma in this case from blocking up. 326 00:22:53,280 --> 00:22:57,920 In case browser spikes take up all my memory because, you know, browser tabs themselves 327 00:22:57,920 --> 00:23:03,800 are taking up so many hundreds of mags or 75 mags at minimum per tab and things just 328 00:23:03,800 --> 00:23:05,560 add up quickly. 329 00:23:05,560 --> 00:23:12,000 So swap still there, but it's just, it's just rarely used as the intention. 330 00:23:12,000 --> 00:23:19,160 So in this case, Z-RAM is about half the size of the available RAM. 331 00:23:19,160 --> 00:23:25,040 Shop file is a quarter of the size and then I'm taking my, it's called swapiness. 332 00:23:25,040 --> 00:23:31,560 I'm taking my swapiness down and I'm using a program called early out of memory. 333 00:23:31,560 --> 00:23:36,280 And I am running that let's talk a little bit about early out of memory. 334 00:23:36,280 --> 00:23:39,920 All right, this is from the project GitHub page. 335 00:23:39,920 --> 00:23:42,520 What is early out of memory? 336 00:23:42,520 --> 00:23:45,920 So early out of memory wants to be simple and solid is written in pure sea. 337 00:23:45,920 --> 00:23:50,120 It has no dependencies, it is an extensive test suite, unit and integration tests, which 338 00:23:50,120 --> 00:23:55,640 is written in, oh, who knew, go early out of memory checks the amount of available memory 339 00:23:55,640 --> 00:23:59,240 and free swap up to 10 times a second. 340 00:23:59,240 --> 00:24:04,400 By default, if both are below 10% it will kill the largest process, whatever has the highest 341 00:24:04,400 --> 00:24:06,760 out of memory score. 342 00:24:06,760 --> 00:24:10,920 Reason this matters is because if your computer's about to seize up, it's better to kill 343 00:24:10,920 --> 00:24:16,720 the process than to kill your entire computer, and I'm specifically talking about the web browser. 344 00:24:16,720 --> 00:24:22,160 So we're just giving ourselves multiple levels between ZRAM, swap, and the out of memory 345 00:24:22,160 --> 00:24:27,160 Damon to prevent losing everything. 346 00:24:27,160 --> 00:24:31,040 And okay, why not trigger the kernel out of memory killer instead? 347 00:24:31,040 --> 00:24:35,920 You can make early out of memory trigger the kernel out of memory killer by passing along 348 00:24:35,920 --> 00:24:36,920 the flag. 349 00:24:36,920 --> 00:24:42,240 However, in some Linux kernels, triggering the kernel out of memory killer does not work. 350 00:24:42,240 --> 00:24:46,480 That is, it may only free some graphic memory that will be allocated again and not actually 351 00:24:46,480 --> 00:24:49,080 killed that process. 352 00:24:49,080 --> 00:24:53,920 You can see how this looks on machines such as Intel integrated graphics, which is what 353 00:24:53,920 --> 00:24:55,720 I'm running. 354 00:24:55,720 --> 00:24:57,760 How much memory does early out of memory use? 355 00:24:57,760 --> 00:25:01,960 About two megabytes, the only 220 kilobits is private memory. 356 00:25:01,960 --> 00:25:05,600 The rest is a libc library that is shared with other processes. 357 00:25:05,600 --> 00:25:09,800 So I have had no problem running early out of memory on my computers. 358 00:25:09,800 --> 00:25:15,560 It hasn't caused me any kind of trouble, but it's really once I did that ZRAM in addition 359 00:25:15,560 --> 00:25:18,960 to this that I've had much better performance. 360 00:25:18,960 --> 00:25:28,000 And this is a good little setup, ZRAM, swap, reduced swapiness, and getting out of memory 361 00:25:28,000 --> 00:25:32,640 Damon or similar in case something just eats through all your RAM, which browsers are want 362 00:25:32,640 --> 00:25:36,560 to do, you just got to protect yourself from the whole system seizing up. 363 00:25:36,560 --> 00:25:39,200 And let's say while we're talking about this, that you're like, what is this whole 364 00:25:39,200 --> 00:25:45,200 swappingest thing and why does that matter before we jump to this out of memory Damon killing 365 00:25:45,200 --> 00:25:46,200 things? 366 00:25:46,200 --> 00:25:47,200 What's the deal with swapiness? 367 00:25:47,200 --> 00:25:52,720 So swapiness is controlling when the kernel starts moving the memory out of RAM. 368 00:25:52,720 --> 00:25:57,320 On a system where now I'm running ZRAM and swap, that means it's affecting me on two 369 00:25:57,320 --> 00:25:59,360 layers. 370 00:25:59,360 --> 00:26:03,280 First you have the fast compressed ZRAM, which is used before swap. 371 00:26:03,280 --> 00:26:05,280 So swapiness doesn't change that. 372 00:26:05,280 --> 00:26:10,560 Then you have the disk swap, which is slower, that's where swapping is matters, right? 373 00:26:10,560 --> 00:26:15,440 At a rating that I have around 20, it means I want you to avoid using the disk swap for as 374 00:26:15,440 --> 00:26:19,040 long as possible because it's slow and limited. 375 00:26:19,040 --> 00:26:23,640 That means on my 12 gigabit system and even on 16, I'm going to go through memory pressure 376 00:26:23,640 --> 00:26:30,040 and swapiness is going to determine how gracefully I'm working through my memory. 377 00:26:30,040 --> 00:26:33,240 My goal is just to keep the system responsive. 378 00:26:33,240 --> 00:26:38,280 And what I'm saying is if swapiness does not need to occur, I'm discouraging it. 379 00:26:38,280 --> 00:26:42,760 So how does early out of memory interact with the ZRAM, right? 380 00:26:42,760 --> 00:26:44,360 Early out of memory is this watchdog. 381 00:26:44,360 --> 00:26:49,000 It's preventing the system from freezing once the memory becomes exhausted. 382 00:26:49,000 --> 00:26:53,960 So it's monitoring the RAM, monitoring the swap, and once things fall below this threshold 383 00:26:53,960 --> 00:26:58,880 of like, you know, so many percentage points, single digit, 10%, then the largest memory 384 00:26:58,880 --> 00:27:00,760 hogs start getting killed off. 385 00:27:00,760 --> 00:27:05,800 This is to protect KDE plasma and the system itself from locking up. 386 00:27:05,800 --> 00:27:09,040 And this is before the kernel's out of memory killer like we already mentioned. 387 00:27:09,040 --> 00:27:10,200 So why does this matter? 388 00:27:10,200 --> 00:27:13,000 It's because KDE plasma does freeze on me. 389 00:27:13,000 --> 00:27:16,640 If I exhaust the RAM with the browser, my system walks up. 390 00:27:16,640 --> 00:27:20,960 At least I'm able to kill these runaway processes before the system locks up. 391 00:27:20,960 --> 00:27:28,520 And with ZRAM, I get a little more safety bandwidth time before I have to kill those processes. 392 00:27:28,520 --> 00:27:31,360 If you had a larger amount of RAM, then this doesn't really matter anymore. 393 00:27:31,360 --> 00:27:35,280 Once you have like 32 gigabytes, you've got a lot to work with. 394 00:27:35,280 --> 00:27:37,120 But in this case, I don't. 395 00:27:37,120 --> 00:27:41,520 And let's take a quick moment to talk about, does any of this matter when you have extremely 396 00:27:41,520 --> 00:27:42,960 limited RAM? 397 00:27:42,960 --> 00:27:49,480 Okay, so when dealing with 8 gigabytes of RAM, it seems like so far for me, things state 398 00:27:49,480 --> 00:27:50,920 pretty much the same. 399 00:27:50,920 --> 00:27:58,040 ZRAM, roughly half of the actual RAM, swap about a quarter of that 8 gigabytes. 400 00:27:58,040 --> 00:28:02,280 And really all we're trying to do is prevent freezes from when the browser spikes, the early 401 00:28:02,280 --> 00:28:04,080 out of memory still recommend it. 402 00:28:04,080 --> 00:28:06,680 8 gigabytes still obviously is enough that your system can work. 403 00:28:06,680 --> 00:28:10,560 You just don't want, you don't want it to die. 404 00:28:10,560 --> 00:28:13,080 Just drop down into the 4 gigabyte of RAM. 405 00:28:13,080 --> 00:28:16,320 Let's say that now we're using XFCE or something like that. 406 00:28:16,320 --> 00:28:20,120 So now it's just like, we got to keep the system responsive period. 407 00:28:20,120 --> 00:28:26,760 So we're still doing roughly the same ratios, 2 gigabytes of ZRAMs or half of it, roughly 408 00:28:26,760 --> 00:28:33,120 the same in swap, a higher degree of swapping S because it's just going to happen. 409 00:28:33,120 --> 00:28:35,080 And we're still using early out of memory. 410 00:28:35,080 --> 00:28:38,320 And then in this case, we just want to try to avoid these heavy services. 411 00:28:38,320 --> 00:28:41,960 So if you only have limited RAM, obviously, you don't want to be running, you know, snaps, 412 00:28:41,960 --> 00:28:48,200 containers, any kind of preloading thing or heavy workloads because it's not going to work. 413 00:28:48,200 --> 00:28:50,560 It's just total border line, right? 414 00:28:50,560 --> 00:28:57,800 Because even like say XFCE is going to use like several hundred megabytes just to run. 415 00:28:57,800 --> 00:29:02,760 So ZRAM will still give you some space swap will still help with crashes and early out 416 00:29:02,760 --> 00:29:05,520 of memory will still help with systems locking up. 417 00:29:05,520 --> 00:29:09,200 But you just have to keep things very, very limited, obviously. 418 00:29:09,200 --> 00:29:13,040 And now we're getting into the space where, you know, the distributions themselves don't 419 00:29:13,040 --> 00:29:16,280 recommend having this amount of memory or even close to it. 420 00:29:16,280 --> 00:29:19,040 But what about if we dropped two gigabytes of RAM? 421 00:29:19,040 --> 00:29:23,240 So if we get it down to two gigabytes of RAM, now we're just trying to minimize the actual 422 00:29:23,240 --> 00:29:27,280 amount of RAM that's being used to keep the system running. 423 00:29:27,280 --> 00:29:29,400 So you could still do ZRAM. 424 00:29:29,400 --> 00:29:35,080 Now you're basically doing half again, swap file, half high swapping S because you're going 425 00:29:35,080 --> 00:29:38,080 to use it all the time, still using out of memory. 426 00:29:38,080 --> 00:29:42,440 But all like notification background services, everything we don't need, we're disabling 427 00:29:42,440 --> 00:29:43,440 it, right? 428 00:29:43,440 --> 00:29:47,960 No more indexing, no more in extra anything, extremely tight. 429 00:29:47,960 --> 00:29:51,040 So it's like a VPS style system now. 430 00:29:51,040 --> 00:29:55,040 And if you're doing desktop, you're just keeping it light. 431 00:29:55,040 --> 00:29:59,040 So you could use like XFCE or something, it's just, it's going to be slow, it's not going 432 00:29:59,040 --> 00:30:00,280 to be good. 433 00:30:00,280 --> 00:30:03,840 And then your browser, obviously, you just got to be careful with Firefox, things like 434 00:30:03,840 --> 00:30:04,840 that. 435 00:30:04,840 --> 00:30:05,840 We're not going to go into that. 436 00:30:05,840 --> 00:30:10,760 But you can really tweak it, obviously, in order to not multitask so hard. 437 00:30:10,760 --> 00:30:16,000 Once we drop into the one gigabyte RAM territory, now we're talking obviously like headless 438 00:30:16,000 --> 00:30:17,000 server. 439 00:30:17,000 --> 00:30:18,000 We're just running a terminal. 440 00:30:18,000 --> 00:30:19,400 That's what I am anyway. 441 00:30:19,400 --> 00:30:21,960 At that point, you could still use ZRAM. 442 00:30:21,960 --> 00:30:28,240 You could still use swap of high swapping S, but you just want to disable all extra services 443 00:30:28,240 --> 00:30:30,200 like very aggressively. 444 00:30:30,200 --> 00:30:35,240 So I want gigabyte of RAM, you're just like anything you don't need, you're just taking 445 00:30:35,240 --> 00:30:39,800 off because you're just hitting the threshold all the time, right? 446 00:30:39,800 --> 00:30:43,960 And ZRAM and swap might just keep your system running period. 447 00:30:43,960 --> 00:30:47,560 But I think the main thing to me is like, you just don't run anything extra, at least 448 00:30:47,560 --> 00:30:48,720 I don't. 449 00:30:48,720 --> 00:30:54,160 So even compose for me on a one gigabyte system, I just don't use it. 450 00:30:54,160 --> 00:30:59,880 I mean, I'll just, you know, I'll do that on a fancier machine or whatever. 451 00:30:59,880 --> 00:31:03,440 But I just hold this, give some ideas of RAM usage and please write into the show if you 452 00:31:03,440 --> 00:31:06,400 have more ideas of how to maximize RAM. 453 00:31:06,400 --> 00:31:10,160 But I did find that this did really help with performance for myself. 454 00:31:10,160 --> 00:31:16,240 And once I get into a headless bare minimum one gigabyte, I more just worry about only 455 00:31:16,240 --> 00:31:20,200 running the literal thing that I want to run and I don't run anything else. 456 00:31:20,200 --> 00:31:21,880 That's the honest truth. 457 00:31:21,880 --> 00:31:23,200 All right. 458 00:31:23,200 --> 00:31:26,920 Now that we've jumped through all these concerns and all these whatever's, what actually 459 00:31:26,920 --> 00:31:30,120 are we going to run on these devices? 460 00:31:30,120 --> 00:31:31,120 Glad you asked. 461 00:31:31,120 --> 00:31:33,720 This is something I'm very excited about. 462 00:31:33,720 --> 00:31:38,560 Touching back from the last episode, having, you know, basic a recursive little DNS for 463 00:31:38,560 --> 00:31:45,400 faster lookups and having these devices with limited RAM, but basic performance. 464 00:31:45,400 --> 00:31:51,760 Well, obviously you're going to want, say, these two little computers to communicate together. 465 00:31:51,760 --> 00:31:55,520 No matter how much RAM or how much performance they have, you want to get basic tooling done. 466 00:31:55,520 --> 00:31:59,240 This is exciting because the tooling we're going to talk about is the same tooling that's 467 00:31:59,240 --> 00:32:03,320 been powering Linux and Unix machines for decades. 468 00:32:03,320 --> 00:32:04,280 Let's jump in on that. 469 00:32:04,280 --> 00:32:09,120 So one thing you can do obviously is you can take a device, an old pi three, which a listener 470 00:32:09,120 --> 00:32:11,840 did as part of the dirt. 471 00:32:11,840 --> 00:32:16,440 That's the DIY unfinished resurrection project challenge to work on something that you've 472 00:32:16,440 --> 00:32:17,440 been putting off. 473 00:32:17,440 --> 00:32:22,800 They took an old pi three and they installed a service called octopi octoprint onto 474 00:32:22,800 --> 00:32:30,240 it, just to manage a 3D printer in place of an SD card as a way to send files over Wi-Fi. 475 00:32:30,240 --> 00:32:34,160 And it previously had been used on a pi five, but the downgraded to the pi three, because 476 00:32:34,160 --> 00:32:39,120 it has full size USB ports, it has wired ethernet, and it gets the job done. 477 00:32:39,120 --> 00:32:40,880 So it worked well enough, right? 478 00:32:40,880 --> 00:32:46,760 So like that's an option is you have a sort of form fit application you can run. 479 00:32:46,760 --> 00:32:50,760 But let's go even before that and let's just say you're connected to this machine. 480 00:32:50,760 --> 00:32:54,440 Well, the first thing you're basically going to want to do with any machine is you're 481 00:32:54,440 --> 00:32:57,240 going to want to move a file or a folder around. 482 00:32:57,240 --> 00:32:59,080 Let's focus on the terminal. 483 00:32:59,080 --> 00:33:05,320 You're going to use the GNU core utils, something like the CP MV command, copy move, copy 484 00:33:05,320 --> 00:33:08,840 a directory from one location to the other, right? 485 00:33:08,840 --> 00:33:13,960 I want to copy because I still want to leave my original copy where it is in case anything's 486 00:33:13,960 --> 00:33:14,960 wrong. 487 00:33:14,960 --> 00:33:15,960 I have it in two places. 488 00:33:15,960 --> 00:33:18,600 Now let's extend that to these two machines. 489 00:33:18,600 --> 00:33:20,160 They're on the same network. 490 00:33:20,160 --> 00:33:23,400 So I connect them using good old SSH. 491 00:33:23,400 --> 00:33:27,000 I make an SSH connection between the machines to move files, but I'm like, well, that doesn't 492 00:33:27,000 --> 00:33:28,000 really make sense. 493 00:33:28,000 --> 00:33:30,520 I'll just use the scp command. 494 00:33:30,520 --> 00:33:34,720 In this case, scp literally means copy over SSH. 495 00:33:34,720 --> 00:33:35,720 Who are we? 496 00:33:35,720 --> 00:33:38,960 We are somebody that just needs to send something to a place. 497 00:33:38,960 --> 00:33:43,920 One way, we're going to use the scp command to send from where our directory is right 498 00:33:43,920 --> 00:33:49,760 now to user at remote directory and send the file or folder. 499 00:33:49,760 --> 00:33:52,760 scp is equally useful to pull in reverse. 500 00:33:52,760 --> 00:34:00,480 So you can scp to your local directory from remote user at host, from x directory that 501 00:34:00,480 --> 00:34:06,040 you remember, and battle pull from the remote machine to your local machine without having 502 00:34:06,040 --> 00:34:08,720 to do anything else is pretty amazing. 503 00:34:08,720 --> 00:34:13,320 So you can send or receive files using scp very, very useful. 504 00:34:13,320 --> 00:34:14,320 That works. 505 00:34:14,320 --> 00:34:19,520 I do that all the time to send myself something between machines, and it works. 506 00:34:19,520 --> 00:34:25,240 But it's also limited, because think about it, you're moving a file or a folder. 507 00:34:25,240 --> 00:34:29,600 And right away, you're like, even though I'm just sending this off somewhere, I want 508 00:34:29,600 --> 00:34:32,040 to maintain my time stamps. 509 00:34:32,040 --> 00:34:36,920 I want to do a little check summing to make sure that this process is working properly. 510 00:34:36,920 --> 00:34:41,240 I want to make sure that the ownership and all these things don't change. 511 00:34:41,240 --> 00:34:45,080 Maybe I'm making changes on your behalf as the administrator, and I don't want you to 512 00:34:45,080 --> 00:34:47,960 know about it, because it's a network drive or something. 513 00:34:47,960 --> 00:34:51,480 So in that case, I'm not going to use the scp command anymore. 514 00:34:51,480 --> 00:34:54,520 Now I'm going to use our sync. 515 00:34:54,520 --> 00:34:58,280 And our sync has been around for 29 years. 516 00:34:58,280 --> 00:34:59,760 It's an unbelievable tool. 517 00:34:59,760 --> 00:35:02,960 It is the basis of all modern backups, more or less. 518 00:35:02,960 --> 00:35:06,240 So what you're doing with our sync is you're doing the same concept. 519 00:35:06,240 --> 00:35:11,480 You're moving a file from one place to the other or a directory of files, but now you 520 00:35:11,480 --> 00:35:16,840 have really comprehensive control over what our sync does. 521 00:35:16,840 --> 00:35:23,520 So you can still use scp is all foundational, but with our sync, hmm, I want to move 522 00:35:23,520 --> 00:35:29,640 this series of directories to this new machine, but I'm worried I'm going to screw the 523 00:35:29,640 --> 00:35:30,640 command up. 524 00:35:30,640 --> 00:35:36,600 So I'm going to do a dry run, and you can literally hyphen, hyphen, dry run, or hyphen 525 00:35:36,600 --> 00:35:41,120 in, and you can actually see what will happen without taking action. 526 00:35:41,120 --> 00:35:44,840 So this makes just for the dry run capabilities alone in the analysis. 527 00:35:44,840 --> 00:35:50,040 Our sync is an amazing tool, and of course it can be run through SSH, or locally, or do 528 00:35:50,040 --> 00:35:53,240 an external disk or for backups. 529 00:35:53,240 --> 00:35:56,840 Our sync killer in a one-way fashion. 530 00:35:56,840 --> 00:36:01,760 So if you want to have a more bi-directional approach to our sync, because now it's like, 531 00:36:01,760 --> 00:36:03,760 okay, now I'm not doing the one way anymore. 532 00:36:03,760 --> 00:36:05,840 You might use a tool like Unison. 533 00:36:05,840 --> 00:36:08,400 Unison has been around for 25 years. 534 00:36:08,400 --> 00:36:10,200 It is built off of our sync. 535 00:36:10,200 --> 00:36:16,160 But our sync is designed to be run on two machines, which is perfect for me. 536 00:36:16,160 --> 00:36:19,200 I have Unison set up, why? 537 00:36:19,200 --> 00:36:22,440 Because I have these audio recordings that I'm moving back and forth. 538 00:36:22,440 --> 00:36:25,880 Obviously I could use some other tool, but it doesn't make sense because these files are 539 00:36:25,880 --> 00:36:26,880 pretty large. 540 00:36:26,880 --> 00:36:30,760 I'm working with 40 gigabytes worth of audio files. 541 00:36:30,760 --> 00:36:33,760 My next cloud is 5 gigabytes. 542 00:36:33,760 --> 00:36:34,760 Google Drive is what? 543 00:36:34,760 --> 00:36:35,760 15 gigs. 544 00:36:35,760 --> 00:36:37,160 I don't need any of that cloud stuff, though. 545 00:36:37,160 --> 00:36:39,240 I can do this machine to machine. 546 00:36:39,240 --> 00:36:44,240 So what Unison does is it does what I was doing before with SCP and our sync. 547 00:36:44,240 --> 00:36:47,320 It's actually being run on the two machines. 548 00:36:47,320 --> 00:36:50,920 When you call it only, it's not real time. 549 00:36:50,920 --> 00:36:58,280 Just on the state of the directory you've named, both machines are looking at that state 550 00:36:58,280 --> 00:37:05,640 and they're adjusting accordingly to keep perfect validation across both machines. 551 00:37:05,640 --> 00:37:11,000 So it's like this directory is what it's supposed to be on machine A and machine B. 552 00:37:11,000 --> 00:37:16,040 And even if one of those Unison links goes offline when they come back up, they'll sort 553 00:37:16,040 --> 00:37:17,040 it out. 554 00:37:17,040 --> 00:37:21,680 So you can be making changes and it'll get resolved. 555 00:37:21,680 --> 00:37:22,840 That's all Unison does. 556 00:37:22,840 --> 00:37:27,040 It doesn't like do any extra special anything. 557 00:37:27,040 --> 00:37:30,960 It just keeps this directory as perfect as possible. 558 00:37:30,960 --> 00:37:36,840 And you can do a hub and spoke approach and run multiple iterations of Unison. 559 00:37:36,840 --> 00:37:40,760 But Unison's not designed to be run on top of itself. 560 00:37:40,760 --> 00:37:44,440 So it's going to stay at that two machine limit. 561 00:37:44,440 --> 00:37:48,360 It's not designed to work it out between four machines or six machines or eight machines 562 00:37:48,360 --> 00:37:49,640 on the same directory. 563 00:37:49,640 --> 00:37:51,920 No, it's not designed for conflict management. 564 00:37:51,920 --> 00:37:57,000 It's just designed to keep this directory that you've defined perfect two machines. 565 00:37:57,000 --> 00:38:02,480 If you want something that scales up beyond Unison, keep in mind, the tools we're talking 566 00:38:02,480 --> 00:38:04,280 about, these will run on potatoes. 567 00:38:04,280 --> 00:38:08,520 I'm talking, I ran these on a 400 megahertz box that I have at my house. 568 00:38:08,520 --> 00:38:13,560 So all of these tools run great on anything that can run. 569 00:38:13,560 --> 00:38:18,120 So if you can't run SSH, you basically can't use the computer for networking. 570 00:38:18,120 --> 00:38:24,440 And SCP, R-Sync, and even Unison will get you there. 571 00:38:24,440 --> 00:38:28,240 But if you want to scale up, that means you're going to obviously be using more resources. 572 00:38:28,240 --> 00:38:32,680 But now we go to another excellent tool which runs in real time. 573 00:38:32,680 --> 00:38:37,360 And no, that tool is not next cloud, it's not any sort of cloud service. 574 00:38:37,360 --> 00:38:41,040 We could use cloud services, but that's not the point of this episode. 575 00:38:41,040 --> 00:38:45,600 And even if we did, there's a big caveat with next cloud, which is that it's screw stuff 576 00:38:45,600 --> 00:38:46,600 up. 577 00:38:46,600 --> 00:38:49,160 And I have been using next cloud for years. 578 00:38:49,160 --> 00:38:54,120 I use it offline, like I'll run, for example, it only on Wi-Fi. 579 00:38:54,120 --> 00:38:58,320 I have the next cloud desktop app on at this moment, but usually I just have it turned 580 00:38:58,320 --> 00:39:02,040 off on these machines because I don't want to use the RAM, right? 581 00:39:02,040 --> 00:39:08,680 And in this case, I don't need to move the data to an additional server. 582 00:39:08,680 --> 00:39:13,040 I don't need to use web dev and I don't fully trust web dev because I do have issues 583 00:39:13,040 --> 00:39:17,960 with like these kind of database files or these large, chunky directories. 584 00:39:17,960 --> 00:39:22,480 When all I'm trying to do is just migrate my changes from machine to machine. 585 00:39:22,480 --> 00:39:27,160 In that case, I personally don't want to use next cloud or I don't trust it as much 586 00:39:27,160 --> 00:39:31,760 as this next tool, which does not require a server. 587 00:39:31,760 --> 00:39:35,480 And that would be sync thing, right? 588 00:39:35,480 --> 00:39:39,160 We're going beyond Katie Connect because that doesn't scale in this case. 589 00:39:39,160 --> 00:39:45,360 So that's a way to send things between a folder on your phone and your computer or whatever, 590 00:39:45,360 --> 00:39:47,640 but yeah, we're moving beyond that. 591 00:39:47,640 --> 00:39:50,160 Sync thing can be used on as many devices as you want. 592 00:39:50,160 --> 00:39:58,240 What's cool is you actually have a global look at each node at each device on the system, 593 00:39:58,240 --> 00:39:59,240 right? 594 00:39:59,240 --> 00:40:00,320 And they're running in a peer to peer fashion. 595 00:40:00,320 --> 00:40:02,560 It can scale up as much as you want. 596 00:40:02,560 --> 00:40:07,240 And what happens is every single node or client is aware of each other, even if no changes 597 00:40:07,240 --> 00:40:08,640 are being made. 598 00:40:08,640 --> 00:40:13,560 So say you're running five sync things and they're all working together. 599 00:40:13,560 --> 00:40:15,160 They are aware of each other. 600 00:40:15,160 --> 00:40:19,280 So they know, for example, oh, node five is offline. 601 00:40:19,280 --> 00:40:22,520 Node three has gone offline in the last hour. 602 00:40:22,520 --> 00:40:26,640 And that means that changes can be propagated in a peer to peer fashion. 603 00:40:26,640 --> 00:40:28,760 There's not a central node. 604 00:40:28,760 --> 00:40:31,680 And the nodes will help each other make this sync possible. 605 00:40:31,680 --> 00:40:37,200 So sync thing is a super useful tool and I have found that it works well in a similar 606 00:40:37,200 --> 00:40:44,280 fashion to unison where I turn it on when I need it, I turn it off when I don't need it. 607 00:40:44,280 --> 00:40:48,120 And I think if the only goal is to keep that folder synchronized, obviously, you should go 608 00:40:48,120 --> 00:40:50,240 back to unison between two machines. 609 00:40:50,240 --> 00:40:54,200 But if you want to have more flexibility with phone clients and stuff, then sync thing 610 00:40:54,200 --> 00:40:59,960 is a solid bet, even with like two gigabytes of RAM or whatever on a box, I say minimum. 611 00:40:59,960 --> 00:41:00,960 Sync thing is good. 612 00:41:00,960 --> 00:41:03,040 Use it when you want it. 613 00:41:03,040 --> 00:41:08,880 And I would use sync thing over next cloud because you just don't need the server aspect. 614 00:41:08,880 --> 00:41:11,080 I just need to move the folders back and forth. 615 00:41:11,080 --> 00:41:16,880 I can do it over VPN, whatever, sync thing will make it happen. 616 00:41:16,880 --> 00:41:21,280 No tools perfect, but these are always tools you can fall back on. 617 00:41:21,280 --> 00:41:26,400 And because I'm a guy that comes especially from next cloud, even next cloud themselves 618 00:41:26,400 --> 00:41:31,200 I recommended sync thing for just moving large data sets and our sync as these tools work. 619 00:41:31,200 --> 00:41:36,280 And it's avoids having to do the whole sync up to the server, sync down from the server 620 00:41:36,280 --> 00:41:37,280 to your device. 621 00:41:37,280 --> 00:41:39,120 You're just moving device to device. 622 00:41:39,120 --> 00:41:45,480 And plus you have things like doing deltas, which is looking for what changed and you get 623 00:41:45,480 --> 00:41:49,720 functionality with compression, whether it's with sync thing or our sync. 624 00:41:49,720 --> 00:41:52,080 So this is good. 625 00:41:52,080 --> 00:41:58,280 And I think we'll leave it there for this episode as far as these tools. 626 00:41:58,280 --> 00:42:02,080 But these are like the foundational tools that you can use to build yourself a basic 627 00:42:02,080 --> 00:42:03,800 home lab. 628 00:42:03,800 --> 00:42:05,360 So you're moving folders. 629 00:42:05,360 --> 00:42:10,000 You know where they are and now we're starting to do backups, right? 630 00:42:10,000 --> 00:42:13,680 Using one way synchronization, really what you're doing is you're making a backup. 631 00:42:13,680 --> 00:42:16,480 You're moving your data to another location. 632 00:42:16,480 --> 00:42:19,240 Maybe you're doing some level of compression or encryption. 633 00:42:19,240 --> 00:42:22,400 And I'd like to get into that in a future episode. 634 00:42:22,400 --> 00:42:26,840 But I'll give you one more tool because you can run it on a low-end machine. 635 00:42:26,840 --> 00:42:29,120 And that is our clone. 636 00:42:29,120 --> 00:42:32,960 Once again, both of these tools are coded in go. 637 00:42:32,960 --> 00:42:38,200 So our clone is a command line tool that is inspired directly by our sync. 638 00:42:38,200 --> 00:42:40,200 But it's for cloud providers. 639 00:42:40,200 --> 00:42:46,280 You can use our clone as a way to access a remote cloud provider like Google Cloud, Google 640 00:42:46,280 --> 00:42:51,800 Drive, Dropbox, Next Cloud Web Dev, S3, whatever. 641 00:42:51,800 --> 00:42:56,000 You can connect to a service provider, a backup service, which people do all the time. 642 00:42:56,000 --> 00:43:01,560 Using our clone, you'll be able to have a mount like a fuse style mount of a remote 643 00:43:01,560 --> 00:43:07,520 location that otherwise does not support it in order to send our sync, like directories 644 00:43:07,520 --> 00:43:10,640 to that location or pull in either direction. 645 00:43:10,640 --> 00:43:19,320 So it's not designed for real-time usage, it's inherently a bit flaky to mount these providers 646 00:43:19,320 --> 00:43:21,440 that otherwise do not support this technology. 647 00:43:21,440 --> 00:43:23,400 It's, you know, I wouldn't fully trust it. 648 00:43:23,400 --> 00:43:25,760 I know people do, but I would be wary. 649 00:43:25,760 --> 00:43:29,480 But if you're goal is to get your data out of Dropbox or whatever, our clone will make 650 00:43:29,480 --> 00:43:30,480 it happen. 651 00:43:30,480 --> 00:43:34,400 And if you limit the threading and the amount of transfers and stuff, and you just really 652 00:43:34,400 --> 00:43:38,640 lock that down on the configuration level because it's command line tool, you can run it 653 00:43:38,640 --> 00:43:42,040 on an extremely minimal machine and our clone will work. 654 00:43:42,040 --> 00:43:45,240 Anyway, that's enough of these tools for this time. 655 00:43:45,240 --> 00:43:50,600 Something you'll notice from this sort of experimentation and local first tooling, like 656 00:43:50,600 --> 00:43:54,600 we're talking about, is really what you have is you just have a home lab. 657 00:43:54,600 --> 00:43:55,840 That's what this is, right? 658 00:43:55,840 --> 00:43:57,480 This is a home lab setup. 659 00:43:57,480 --> 00:44:02,640 Every one of these tools is a valid tool that can be used professionally that you can fall 660 00:44:02,640 --> 00:44:06,680 back to, even if you're using other things, you can always use this tooling in addition. 661 00:44:06,680 --> 00:44:08,000 And that's what people do. 662 00:44:08,000 --> 00:44:09,320 So congratulations. 663 00:44:09,320 --> 00:44:14,240 If you're running any of these tools at home, you're running a home lab, you know, try 664 00:44:14,240 --> 00:44:22,080 using SSH to make a connection, try using SCP to copy a file, try using R-Sync to verify 665 00:44:22,080 --> 00:44:23,320 that file. 666 00:44:23,320 --> 00:44:29,200 You could try using unison between multiple machines, keep a file in sync, or you can make 667 00:44:29,200 --> 00:44:31,040 backups with R-Sync. 668 00:44:31,040 --> 00:44:35,400 And these are all valid tools that you can use forever. 669 00:44:35,400 --> 00:44:39,560 And you have a basic kind of peer-to-peer connection between your machines, whether it's local 670 00:44:39,560 --> 00:44:41,680 or then through a VPN. 671 00:44:41,680 --> 00:44:48,480 And that's what I'm working towards is giving you the tooling to have a rock solid, awesome 672 00:44:48,480 --> 00:44:50,760 setup that you actually understand. 673 00:44:50,760 --> 00:44:52,520 And we're building up, right? 674 00:44:52,520 --> 00:44:56,640 We're building up towards playing with containers and playing with these other things. 675 00:44:56,640 --> 00:45:00,760 But either way, I think we're addressing the biggest thing these devices have locally in 676 00:45:00,760 --> 00:45:07,360 regards to how well do you actually understand a tool that you're using. 677 00:45:07,360 --> 00:45:09,960 And how well is it actually working for you? 678 00:45:09,960 --> 00:45:13,160 So that's where we're coming from is we're going to understand the tool. 679 00:45:13,160 --> 00:45:16,520 And that way, however you've set it up, we don't care. 680 00:45:16,520 --> 00:45:19,400 But the point is you at least know what it's doing. 681 00:45:19,400 --> 00:45:24,040 And it's worth taking the moment to figure out as we continue building up into more and 682 00:45:24,040 --> 00:45:30,960 more workflows beyond, say, now taking a machine and a device and growing that to a couple 683 00:45:30,960 --> 00:45:34,800 machines, couple devices, and beyond. 684 00:45:34,800 --> 00:45:39,360 I think we'll close this thing out by going over some of the trivia winners from the recent 685 00:45:39,360 --> 00:45:44,600 Linux Fest Northwest, which will be also dropped as a bonus to this, talking about that 686 00:45:44,600 --> 00:45:45,600 experience. 687 00:45:45,600 --> 00:45:46,600 It was a lot of fun. 688 00:45:46,600 --> 00:45:51,680 But let's go into the some of the named projects to end out this episode that people 689 00:45:51,680 --> 00:45:55,000 who played trivia named off, I told them they can name any project they want and I will 690 00:45:55,000 --> 00:45:59,040 share it on the show and let's talk about those. 691 00:45:59,040 --> 00:46:06,240 So trivia was a mix this time of questions, which people found quite challenging in regards 692 00:46:06,240 --> 00:46:14,000 to Linux open source trivia, followed by a practical bonus round of free and open tooling 693 00:46:14,000 --> 00:46:17,920 that people have actually done in their daily lives, whether or not they've done it 694 00:46:17,920 --> 00:46:19,080 as a point. 695 00:46:19,080 --> 00:46:26,000 The top score was Romeo with total of 30 points, 22 in the main route, eight in the bonus. 696 00:46:26,000 --> 00:46:27,000 Romeo named off Ubuntu. 697 00:46:27,000 --> 00:46:33,600 Romeo also gave a talk on Ubuntu, Linux Fest Northwest called Ubuntu without handlebars. 698 00:46:33,600 --> 00:46:37,800 We'll do a link to the room, you can check out that talk if you want, recording for it 699 00:46:37,800 --> 00:46:45,160 available on YouTube trailing immediately behind right on the shoulder of Romeo by a single 700 00:46:45,160 --> 00:46:50,680 point was Matthias of Victoria Metrix, Victoria Metrix being a drop-in replacement for 701 00:46:50,680 --> 00:46:53,000 Prometheus Grafana. 702 00:46:53,000 --> 00:46:59,280 That was 21 points plus eight in the bonus, so 29, it was very close. 703 00:46:59,280 --> 00:47:05,600 The other score, very interesting, which got 10 on the daily application of tooling in 704 00:47:05,600 --> 00:47:10,960 their life was Salt, who named Segal, Segal Conference at the University of Washington 705 00:47:10,960 --> 00:47:14,880 is currently accepting talks if you want to submit for that. 706 00:47:14,880 --> 00:47:16,040 Let's keep going. 707 00:47:16,040 --> 00:47:21,120 From there, we had the GNU boot project. 708 00:47:21,120 --> 00:47:27,320 We also had meshtastic, the communication decentralized network, Pi Club, which is based 709 00:47:27,320 --> 00:47:33,600 out of Washington, Slackware, the gentleman for that said he runs a Slackware mirror 710 00:47:33,600 --> 00:47:38,480 with his father, and they run all of their software through the mirror locally and even 711 00:47:38,480 --> 00:47:39,480 offline. 712 00:47:39,480 --> 00:47:41,040 That's interesting. 713 00:47:41,040 --> 00:47:47,080 We also have the Triton Data Center, WWU, that's Western Washington University, furry 714 00:47:47,080 --> 00:47:57,960 tail, noster, fusion PBX, next cloud, another Pi Cloud, clonezilla, take the stone.xyz, 715 00:47:57,960 --> 00:48:08,920 next book, Libra phone, open street maps, Boo Kitty, zipline recruiters, and yeah, if you 716 00:48:08,920 --> 00:48:11,480 want to check out any of those, feel free. 717 00:48:11,480 --> 00:48:17,000 A big thank you to everyone who participated in the trivia, and also thank you to Linux 718 00:48:17,000 --> 00:48:23,080 Fest Northwest for letting me be there at a table at a great time, and I recommend anyone 719 00:48:23,080 --> 00:48:28,920 interested, consider being a part of Segal this fall, and check out the link if you want 720 00:48:28,920 --> 00:48:35,240 to submit as a speaker to participate in Segal all about GNU and FOSS. 721 00:48:35,240 --> 00:48:38,880 Coming up in the next episode, we'll be talking about monitoring of services, making 722 00:48:38,880 --> 00:48:42,740 sure things are running, making sure that the networking is running smoothly, because once 723 00:48:42,740 --> 00:48:46,360 it's actually something's online, how do we know? 724 00:48:46,360 --> 00:48:51,960 So we'll dig into that next episode, we'll also touch base on a little more on the Linux 725 00:48:51,960 --> 00:48:57,240 Fest Northwest conference, what happened there, what you can expect at Segal, and it'll 726 00:48:57,240 --> 00:48:58,480 be a good time. 727 00:48:58,480 --> 00:49:01,120 If you have any thoughts or comments, do send them in to the show. 728 00:49:01,120 --> 00:49:05,640 Otherwise, thank you so much for tuning in to Linux Prepper and have a wonderful day. 729 00:49:05,640 --> 00:49:05,920 Bye.