The state of homelab tech (2026) (Friends)

(upbeat music) - Well friends, it is Change Login Friends, the weekly talk show about, well, you know what? What everyone to talk about in this week, it is the State of Homelab, 2026. A massive thank you to our friends and partners at fly.io, lunch or sprites, lunch or apps, lunch or fly machines, lunch or everything at fly.io. Like us, okay, let's talk. (upbeat music) Well friends, I'm here again with a good friend of mine, Cal Goldbreath, co-founder and CEO of depo.dev. Slow builds, suck, depo knows it. Tell me, how do you go about making builds faster? What's the secret? - When it comes to optimizing build times, to drive build times to zero, you really have to take a step back and think about the core components that make up a build. You have your CPUs, you have your networks, you have your disks, all of that comes into play when you're talking about reducing build time. And so some of the things that we do with depo, we're always running on the latest generation for ARM CPUs and AMD CPUs from Amazon, those in general are anywhere between 30 and 40% faster than GitHub's own hosted runners. And then we do a lot of cache tricks both for way back in the early days, way for a third depo. We focus on container image builds, but now we're doing the same types of cache tricks inside of GitHub actions, where we essentially multiplex uploads and downloads of GitHub actions cache inside of our runners, so that we're going directly to blob storage with as high of throughput as humanly possible. We do other things inside of a GitHub actions runner, like we coordinate off portions of memory to act as disk, so that any kind of integration tests that you're doing inside of CI, that's doing a lot of operations to disk, think like you're testing database migrations in CI. By using RAM disks instead inside of the runner, it's not going to a physical drive, it's going to memory, and that's orders of magnitude faster. The other part of build performance is the stuff that's not the tech side of it. It's the observability side of it. Is you can't actually make a build faster if you don't know where it should be faster. And we look for patterns and commonalities across customers, and that's what drives our product roadmap. This is the next thing we'll start optimizing for. - Okay, so when you build with Depot, you're getting this, you're getting the essential goodness of relentless pursuit of very, very fast builds, near zero speed builds. And that's cool. Colonist team are relentless on this pursuit. You should use them, depot.dev. Free to start, check it out. One line of change in your GitHub actions, depot.dev. - Well friends, we're back. It is a new year. Not a new team, same team. Got your hat on, Tim. - That's right. - I heard you got some strife on the internet recently. - Yeah. - Bob made your back. He took your hat off, and he started to be like, just have your non hat Tim going, you know? A slight uproar, what happened there? - Yeah, people freak out when I don't have my hat on. In my last video, no glasses, no hat. I broke my glasses and I didn't have a backup pair. And I thought, yeah, I'll go no hat too. And so like, you got this crazy person on Tim's channel that kind of looks like him and sounds like him, but it doesn't really look like him. So yeah, people get really confused. Every now and then I do it on purpose though, to try to like throw off the algorithm for YouTube. 'Cause I don't know, they're like, maybe we target people who like glasses and now we'll target people who don't like glasses, you know? So the backward hat, you know, I've done that forever, but I've noticed some people are like, take your hat off. You're inside, you know, and so sometimes I switch it up 'cause maybe the algorithm will now target those people that think that. - Right. - So you never know, you know, those games you play with the algorithm. - Well, of course, man. You got an A/B test, an A/B test. - Your A/B test, right? - You know? - Yeah, I don't have that much. - Yeah, me too. - Yeah, A/B test, yeah. And then a C, then you take your C as your B and your next. - You know, it's a constant game, you know this. - It is. - It is. Yeah, fighting for ears and eyeballs, you know how it goes. - Ear and eyeballs, well, we love these people out here listening to our pods and our content. We just go on this journey because we're just nerds. We can't help it, right? We just have to pursue the, you know, the inevitable, I suppose, and somehow put ourselves to that pain, slash pleasure and share it. - That's right. - And that is what you call what we do. - Man, did you think we would be where we're at right now last year, Tim? - No, no, not at all. A lot's changed. Even I feel like for a home lab, it's changed even more. But yeah, a lot has changed. - What do you think has changed? I mean, it's obvious, but I want to hear your own words. What do you think has changed for a home lab in particular? - If I could sum everything up in one word, it'd be availability, just availability. And that goes a few ways. You know, availability in parts. You know, it's very difficult right now to get your hands on server parts. - Oh my God. - Whether that be used, server gear, motherboards, CPUs, it's very hard to get your hands on those because, you know, I suspect that, you know, most of these companies have contracts with really big companies. And so your onesy twosies, orders, or even your mass orders from stuff like Nueg aren't as big as say, you know, Microsoft or something like that. It's really hard to get your hands on, you know, server grade hardware. And also, that also has been true for the second hand market, too, when it comes to CPUs, motherboards, and everything like that. I mean, home labbers have always been used to paying the home lab tax. Well, let me take this back. We used to not pay the home lab tax. We used to get the used server gear free, take it away, really cheap, you know, type of hardware. Then people started realizing, hey, there's home labbers out there and I can make money off this. All right, it still has some value. I guess I should put it that way. It has a lot more value than it used to because, you know, people are using this stuff in their home for home labs, which was awesome. Second hand market, you know, it was great. And now we're at a point where, not only do we have the home lab tax, 'cause people realize that they could start, you know, making money off their second hand gear, now you can't even find it. (laughs) And so that's one big change I see is just availability of server parts, you know. And the same goes for RAM. RAM, as you know, prices are through the roof. If you can even find it, you know, prices are through the roof. You're paying, I don't know, double triple. I'm scared to even look anymore. Oh, yeah, how much RAM costs? Hard drives too. Hard drives up. I was looking earlier today and I paid 159 a year ago for a 14 terabyte hard drive refurbished. That same one now on eBay, if you could even find it, you know, is almost $100 more. Really? Yeah, anywhere from $70 to $100 more. And, you know, storage is just gone through the roof too. It's easy to find storage, but you're paying a lot more than you were before. What about CPUs? CPUs the same? It is the same if you can find them. Yeah, second hand CPUs, they're expensive. I mean, most people aren't, I mean, let me take this back. If you're building, you know, server with server-grade hardware, a lot of people are buying them used. We can't afford new ones. Or don't want to afford, I should say, in some of the cases. But even though second hand ones are through the roof, because people are still getting a lot more life out of them, or they can't buy the ones that they want to upgrade to, you know, the latest, whatever, Epic CPU, you know, most of those are allocated to some big customer. So even the mid-sized customers can't upgrade because they can't get those. So they're not releasing that gear to then trickle down to the rest of us. So it's, it's tough for CPUs, CPUs too. Yeah, DDR5, CPUs, hard drives, motherboards. I feel like the only thing that's really cheap right now are cases and closures, because no one can buy them. I'm sorry, no one can build them. No one can build them. So I think like, you know, and closures are really cheap right now, because they're like, please build something, but we can't. So. So, who is it, gamer Nexus was talking about cases recently. It was about four months back saying the cases were actually up because of tariffs. Yeah, yeah. So then there's that. Then there's tariffs on everything, which is, you know, whatever percentage increase across the board for everything. There's that for sure. But a lot of this has to do with, you know, just the AI race that's going on and, you know, build, build, build, and DRAM prices are through the roof, because there's a shortage of hard drives. There's a shortage of everything because I, you know, everyone building data centers right now. So yeah, there's definitely, you know, tariffs across the board on everything, but this is like beyond that. This is like beyond, you know, hard drive prices, RAM prices, GPU prices, I mean, through the roof. GPU's another one. Like you can't even like get your hands on them. So, you know, if you, if you bought one four years ago, you're, you're pretty lucky. You know, if you bought a 30, whatever, I still have my 3090. It's actually back there as someone I'm testing with. Yeah, right in the beginning of COVID. Right at the beginning of COVID. And I thought, how am I, I don't want to pay $1,300 or $1,100 for a GPU. Like I thought, you know, am I really going to pay this price? I'm so glad I did. Oh, wow. You know, I've had, I've had it for four years, you know, I paid retail for it. And so, you know, if you think, you know, the 4090s, 5090s, they are more expensive than that too. So I bought my 3090 last year for $300 less than your retail price. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because that's when the, probably the 5090s were. Just coming. Yeah. 5090s were being announced and everyone was dumping them. But now it's like, you can't even get your hands on them. Yeah. That's a good deal. That's a good deal. Yeah. It's a good GPU. I may have some fun things happening on that GPU as we speak right now. Training, training a rag system, just doing some cost of a rag right now. Cool. Cool. And I was just looking up that stuff too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I thought you would say that, you know, I'm glad you mentioned the hardware shortage, because that's key. But I thought you would say this, your availability remark would have been not unavailability, but abundance of availability in terms of capability. Oh, yeah. These new augmented home labber that can now tend their homegrown vegetables, aka software. Yeah. I mean, I thought they were the same lab garden, so to speak. Oh, yeah. So that's my second piece. It's the explosion. So then my second piece to availability, that was the other side of the coin. And I'm not just saying that. It's in the notes right here is the explosion of self-hosted software that we can now run at home. Like it's incredible. And so that's my prediction for this year. This year is year of the self-hosted software. We can't get hardware. Yeah. We've got to make do with what we have. And so this is the year for software, and it's the year for software for many reasons. First of all, we have way more capabilities at home. Like I've been running Ola at home, OpenWebUI, you know, to play with models and do chat. I've even done, you know, some coding assistance with some agents. You know, that stuff's fun. Models aren't as good as the open ones. All right. I'm sorry. Models. The open models aren't as good as the closed models the ones you pay for, obviously, or you wouldn't be paying for them. But they're good enough to do a lot of tasks, especially just, you know, like you were mentioning rag and stuff like that. Like I've been playing with paperless, paperless NGX, paperless, paperless NGX is a self-hosted document scanning solution. So if you think about, you know, if you think about, you have lots of documents that you want to store, you want to store on your own hardware, you know, they might be private documents whether they're, I don't know, financial statements or subpoenas or marriage license. You name it. Yeah. Whatever you have that, you know, it's private that you keep, you just think of what you keep in mind your documents, you know. Think about keeping that on your own servers and then being able to scan those documents and then getting metadata and data about those documents. That's kind of what that's what paperless does in a nutshell. Well, now all of these, not really side-car, but these kind of side-car solutions are starting to pop up where you can feed them to a model and get better data out of those. So right now, paperless NGX, it's super cool. That's actually my next video. So you're getting a sneak peek. That's why I'm so like, yeah, that's why I'm so like, gun hole about it right now. So paperless use is traditional OCR, so optical character recognition. And for the most part, it's okay, right? It's okay. It's way better. It's faster than humans, but it is nowhere near the accuracy of a model that's been trained for vision. And so this is kind of the next evolution in OCR. It's not use optical character recognition. Use a model that's been vision trained or multimodal is what they're saying now, where you can feed it text or feed it image and you get text out. And so I've been playing with this thing called paperless GPT and paperless AI, which hooks into paperless. And now I can scan documents, scan images, and get high fidelity data out of those images. So for example, I scanned serial number on one of my devices. I took a picture, scanned a serial number, OCR did terrible. It got like made in Japan, right? It's about it. Serial number wrong. Everything was wrong. You feed it to an LLM that has been trained with vision, like super small one from Olamah. And everything works perfectly. And even it was able to figure out that the FCC trademark, their little FCC logo actually said FCC, even though it was F with circular seas inside of it. So it's really cool. Really cool solution, self-hosted solution. And so that's where I'm thinking that this year is the year for software. Not only because people are making all of these awesome solutions to self-host, it's that people have a lot of assistance now to get those ideas, to make them come to fruition. They had agents to help them. I was just talking to a guy the other day who just built the piece of software he always dreamed of, but never had the ability to do it because he's not, you know, he's not a developer. He's not a developer. And say what you want about, you know, that code and whatever I'm a developer to. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Because I think that's, that's. Does it work? Does it solve a problem? That's good code. Does it solve my problem that it exists before this moment? That's good code. That's right. So people who are driven by results or who want, you know, code is just means to an end for a lot of people. You talk to product developers. You talk to people who are in IT, but don't do code, but have these ideas. Those are the people right now who are creating these awesome solutions and finally being able to get those ideas out of their head. So anyways, long story short, I just talked to a guy who built this whole solution on top of like Unified's API. It's actually Chris from CrossTalk Solutions. He built this whole solution on top of Unified's API and it's like the solution he's wanted for years, but never took the time to do it or paid a developer to do it. So anyways, we're seeing lots of that now and I'm hopeful and it's super exhilarating to see these ideas coming out because, you know, when developers, when you have people who are generally software developers, you know, they're, they're, I don't mean to buck a people up, but, you know, a lot of times there's su, you know, deep focused on some super technical solution, looks perfect, runs perfect, you know, structured in a certain way. But now I'm seeing these solutions by people who, you know, think way outside of the box and they're just trying to solve a problem and, you know, I get to see how they solve that problem. And it's really cool to see because, like, you know, I might not have approached the problem the same way that they did. And so I get to see like a new perspective on, on, on coding. So I, I don't know, that's the other piece is availability. So I, I think this year is the year for a self-hosting software, for open-source software or for solutions in general to be able to run on your home map because a lot of people are just going to be okay with the hardware that they had for a couple of years. And, you know, people like me who love to self-host stuff are always looking for like the next container app to run on your server. Yeah, I feel you on that front there, man, I've been scratching little liches is how I'd say it. Question on papalus is, can it handle books? I suppose this is does the OCR and or the vision version of that. Books are cool too because one thing I'm doing is I'm trying to figure out how to get knowledge out of certain books I only own in paper that I can't even get in digital point. There's a lot of books that are just not like that. And I think in great, I have this book of, it's on my bookshelf over there. I've had it for years. I've paid the, you know, I've paid the author, I've paid the publisher. It's my copy. But I'm not going to go pick it up because that's the old way. You know, that's not that I don't read books, I still, I still read, okay, I still read. But you can read good, I can be good, you know. I was trying to build a little center for people who can read good, but, you know, I'm just not there yet. I'm not as you like me yet. That's cool for ants. That's right. That was a good clip, that was a good clip. So can you do books with this paperless world? Yeah. So you can, you can because you can have multi-page documents. So you could. I mean, you would have just basically had this, you know, this, whatever, 300 page, you know, document. Right. And then you could feed that to the LLM, which has vision. And yeah, it should be able to parse it all out. Like paperless by itself should do pretty good on books as long as you get a good scan on it. But I'd still feed it to the LLM anyways for it to use its vision because it's going to be, you're going to go from whatever 80% accuracy, probably a lot lower to like 90, high 90s accuracy, OCR in general. You don't realize how bad it is until like you actually try to scan something in the real world. And you're like, oh, yeah, this, this used to be amazing, but it's not amazing anymore because we have vision-based LLMs that are amazing. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, you absolutely could. So I'm thinking, okay, you would scan it, you would get it in paperless. It would put it in PDF form. And that's the thing that's cool about paperless too. It tries to get everything in a PDF form. So you would basically get it in a PDF. I assume the reader that you're using uses PDFs too or maybe uses pub M or whatever the weird extension is that I can't think of. But I think if you got into PDF that would probably be good enough, I think. Yeah. Yeah. My preference is to mark down. I'm going to get things to mark down, you know? And I got some solutions I'm working on around transcription and just really pure good stuff was just saying. And that's my next goal is like, is to be able to transcribe something with, you know, really good accuracy because there's a lot of jargon out there and whatnot. And I'm close. I'm like 98%. What's the same 99% there? So I got some curioses in that front. It's so funny. You mentioned that too because I've been going down this rabbit hole on document scanning. This is kind of how it goes when I start researching the video or something that I'm doing. Like this is like the third rabbit hole within this whole paperless thing. You know, I learned that there are solutions and people probably know this. I don't because this isn't the world that I live in. But for document scanning, there are solutions out there that prepare your documents for AI. And so it will take, say, you know, a document and identify and break it up into its parts. So that you can feed it to like what you're trying to do a system for rag. So it will understand a title, a footer and all of these pieces of the document and not just the text itself. So there's two solutions out there, one's called Dockling, which is from IBM and it's open source. And it takes any document you want, whether it be MP3, PDF, Excel, and we'll break that up into its parts and then feed it to your LLM so that you can do rag against it. The other one is paddle. And so paddle is another one, paddle OCR that I don't want to say does the same thing because people who know this stuff are going to be like, it doesn't do the same thing. But for me, from the outside looking in, it's a solution trying to save this, solve the same problem where it's trying to, you know, not only get the data out of the document, but lots of metadata about it too. So those are two solutions that might help you. And I say that because you're saying you want everything in Markdown, that's going to help you big time because, you know, if you scan a document that has a table and you do OCR against it, the text you get out isn't a table, right? And so same with, same with even an LLM. So what you want to do is, you know, use dockling or paddle to feed, to do the transformation or the recognition of the individual parts. So if you took a picture of a table, you know, a workbook table, Excel table, then you, your output could still be a table, but in Markdown. And so this is like the next, I don't know, I feel like this is like on the frontier of document scanning. And anyone who's doing document scanning in the industry, they're probably like, this has been around for four years, this is coming from like a web developer who does infrastructure at home. And so this stuff is new to me. So those are two things I would look into and I, I'm, I'm going to mention them in my next video because they're pretty cool. But I think that these two solutions, paperless AI and paperless GPT are trying to solve that thing. And the funny thing is, paperless GPT can hook into dockling to do that for you too. So it's getting wild, man. I was just thinking about architecture there. So if I, maybe you'll go here with me Tim, I've been thinking about ETL pipelines. I feel like the world is an API, the world is a CLI and the world is an ETL. And that means extract, transform, load, and I feel like that's exactly what you're doing there. So if I were building that pipeline and I were using paperless and I was, you know, behind the scenes, you're a little nerd research lab there, whatever, you know, I would want to keep the original images. And the reason I would want to keep the original images, I would want to extract whatever the purest original copy of it would be, which would be an image, right? Just not take the transform version of it, let's extract literally what we get from it. The raw data. So let's have a raw layer. That's, if you went with the, I think it's the medallion process, I believe it was called. You got silver, you got gold, you got bronze, you got silver, you got gold. And so the bronze layer would be this original raw layer. And so that would be simply images of every page you have. It could be the simple image of your serial placard, you know, or it could be all the pages of the book. Store those in the raw copy as an image, boom, you got that, that's your, that's your bronze layer. Then the, the teat comes into play, the transform comes into play. And you say, okay, let's now take all those images. And this is great as technology or models change or vision models get better is you can go back to that original raw source is almost like how they do mastering for films. They go back to an original film that was shot on film, remastered for 4K, but they're going back to those original slides, you know, and so that's kind of the same process. I would want the original image though. Oh, I agree. I agree. I like it. This is similar to like meta fields, you know, in, in developers and APIs, when you, when you scrape stuff, you know, it's like, let's, let's pull out the stuff that we can use and put it in our API. But oh, by the way, we're going to have this meta field that has everything we found to begin with, just in case we need to come back and process it a little bit later, a little bit better. Yeah. We leave it on the table. If you don't do that, you put on the floor. You know, you're not, you're not capturing it. So you, you, it's in the throw away in that process to get to the pristine. You throw away what was not really that good to you, but in the ETL world, you want to keep that original raw source now in so far as that it does hold value, you know, but if you go back to that original raw, if you need to ever, as your technology changes in the transform layer, well, then you've got lots of things you could do that goes back and gets more accuracy. If you can't get full accuracy, now if your score is 50 out of 50, you're 100 of 100 in your quality score and your raw is not really in the 80 more, well, throw it in reference pile, you know, but I want the images. I want the images so that, so that when it comes down to that table, I can actually have the LM examine the image of the table and then the mark down we get from it and we're like, that's good. Let's go. You know? Yeah. I like it. Man, ETL is taking on such a different, I guess, a different perspective, you know, last time I was talking about ETL was, you know, it was SQL, like trying to, you know, pull data out of, you know, one database and put it in another, you know, in the perspective of this, yeah, it really makes a lot of sense because you know, well, LM's in general are like best effort, best guest every time, you know, and so that best effort, best guest is going to be different every time and it could be better in the future or it could be worse, who knows? But yeah, saving the source image, yeah, it's awesome. It sounds like a fantastic way to treat, you know, analyzing images like this. Yeah. The pipeline is medallion and like I said, it's bronze is the, you know, the base layer, which is your raw. Your silver, which is like a, you know, maybe an augmented version of that that's been kind of cleaned up a little bit, then you finally transform it in the final layer in your gold layer, which could be your production database, for example, or your production layer. So you've got, you know, that first layer raw, that sort of middle layer, where you're sort of evaluating things, maybe you're doing some joins, maybe you got multiple databases and the final transform is in, is in the gold layer, where you're taking maybe two or three different databases or two different data sources and you're merging them in production. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. It's cool stuff. So let's go back to Chris from crosstalk and unleashing, let's just say Claude, Claude, Opus 45 on your UDN Pro or whatever, if you're Tim, techno Tim, maybe you've got the latest greatest, I don't, you know, Tim, I'm, I'm a trouble that over here. I got to buy my own things, and I know you probably buy your own things, but you get gift a lot of stuff. I don't mean it negatively. No, I mean, you get to put up the fun stuff and I'm envious. So here I am with my UDN Pro that's not even the special edition, it's just the, the one that's not special. And so that's what I'm using. Yeah, yeah. It's, yeah, I wouldn't worry about it. Like at the end of the day, like their software continues to evolve. And so you're getting the latest and greatest, everything, even though your hardware might not be up to stuff. That's the cool thing about Unified Channel. Your does like light dances and stuff. You got all your RGB stuff, bro. I mean, like, I, I want mine when I put on my beats and I take my dance break. I want it to dance and, you know, do a light show for me. I just don't have that capability like you do. Oh, yeah, no, no, or you could play snake. Do you see that video? Someone playing snake on there? Yeah, on there. Yeah, it's pretty wild. On their display. That's right. So this world, something that happened recently with me, one of our neighbor friends came by one of my son's friends came by and he brought a switch, his switch to as a matter of fact after Christmas. It was one of his presents. And like anybody who's inviting somebody with a device into their home, where do you think I said, I said, you know, you got to be on my guest network. Well, for some reason, they just couldn't get on like the authentication happened to the Wi-Fi network, you know, all things checked out as good, couldn't get DNS. And so I thought it was my newly homegrown Rust project, which is called DNS hole. So I rebuilt pi-hole in Rust, if you didn't know this, and it's not available yet, dnshole.dev in the future very soon. I'm waiting for one or two more things to happen before I can do that. But right now, even as we speak, my DNS is being resolved by my own DNS server that has fully replaced what pi-hole is. I think you'll love it when I can release it. As a matter of fact, I'll share it with you as soon as we can. All that to say is that he couldn't get on via DNS and I'm like, gosh, DNS hole. Maybe you messed up here. It was not DNS hole, okay. It was, DNS hole was perfect. You know what it was? What's that? It was VLANs, man. It was my VLAN roles, okay. So of course, I popped out cloud and I'm like, what's going on here? Because I couldn't figure it out on my own. And I'm like, gosh, why didn't you just pull out cloud and let it just log into your unifying, just check out some things. And so through investigation, it turns out I had some jacked up VLAN roles. And while I was in there, I was like, you've done this all wrong. You know, this is great work. You're out in a bit like, you got old rules. You got these rules that can flip. You got this one rule that does nothing. You got this whole set of rules that doesn't make any sense. Can I fix this for you, please? Sure, cloud. Please, please help me out. Five, 10 minutes later. Beautiful VLAN scenario again. All the rules great. He's on the internet. They're playing and having fun. They're playing Mario Kart and life is good. So I mean, like, that's the world we live in to. You know, I can't even get my VLANs right, but cloud can. That is awesome. So I haven't used cloud in that way. Like, to be honest, I haven't used cloud all that much. I, you know, I use co-pilot, you know, with, with models, you name the models. But no, that's interesting. So did it do it through the CLI? Yes. Any API. That's it. Yeah. Gotcha. Well, that's the like address. It has my auth. I've got an SSH key. So I've SSH into my, into my UDM Pro. Gotcha. So it's me. So it's me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So logged in. Dude, listen. I'm okay. Hold your seat. It reads the Mongo database directly, you know, update the Mongo database directly. You know, it's, it's not cool in production. Don't read and record the database. Yeah. But I've done it before and saw it was confident. And then it will trigger whatever it does to, like, let the UI catch up, essentially, like the cache layer that's in the UDM Pro, whatever, like, just because you change the database doesn't mean that the reads come back quickly. You got to sort of re-cache the cache kind of stuff. And oh, yeah, man, it's so cool. It will log in to the UDM Pro via SSH as if it's you, or in the case of Chris, which I'm sure he did, or was thinking about doing, is you can use your own, you can use the API, the UI API, or you can just log right into it and just SSH around, just CD directory and, you know, like you're on a system, like you're an assistant admin, no different. I think that's such a wild world. I think that's what's, that's what's making home lab more special to me. Proxmox is got a little more fun to him. If you, I'm off to show you some things. Okay. I have a CLI, I have a CLI built called PXM, stands for Proxmox. And at one liner, in a one liner, Tim, I can have a brand new Ubuntu machine running. I can specify the IP address. I can specify the CPU, the RAM, and the disk. It already has my SSH key. And literally in less than 10 seconds, it's reporting the IP address back to me via the CLI. Yeah, yeah. And one less later, that same, I can do PXM info, and then whatever the VM ID is. So PXM info 104, for example, and it reports back to me, SSH user is Ubuntu at whatever IP address, all that good stuff, whatever the details are of that machine. And moments later, my agents can be building on brand new infrastructure. Yeah. Isn't that good? Yeah, that is awesome. Yeah, no, it is awesome. This is exactly what I'm talking about. This is exactly what I'm talking about, it's like AI and agents in general are just letting people get these ideas out of their head and tinker way more and go way deeper than they used to before. And this reminds me of when I went from IT to a software developer, I went from using other people's tools to using my own tools. And for me, that was like a light bulb. I was like, I don't need the UI anymore, give me an API or even a CLI, and I can figure it out. And for me, that was just like a light bulb went off and it was just like this moment where I was like, I felt like so much freedom to be able to build software that I wanted. And so now it's just so awesome to see like other people being able to do that, take that step from using other people's stuff to using my own stuff. And so now I feel like like you, you know, I mean, would you have ever written that thing out in Proxmox, you know, five years ago, maybe, but it would have made it a long time. It'd take you way too long. I wouldn't have the time. I probably would have, it's just too daunting of a task to do, because it's really time. It's not necessarily ability, and I suppose it's probably both time and ability, but yeah, I would have just never tackled it because it had just been too hard of a mountain of climb, really, because I mean, even even with the augmented AI tools, it was still hard. I mean, it didn't get easier. It got easier to move faster and to get past the hurdles, but gosh, I had to solve so many problems. I forgot so many ways to deal with how do you store the image on Proxmox? Well, that's kind of obvious to most people, but like getting through the whole life cycle, and that was one of the first things I built with Claude. So I've learned a ton since then. So I want to rebuild it. Now I know what the tool should do, and before I was trying to make this, I don't want to try to make it. I was just trying to explore, really, and now I know exactly what I wanted to do and what I don't really care that it does that I just don't need, and so I wouldn't waste my time on that part of it, because I was trying to make this, I guess, I didn't want to have to log into my Proxmox machine every single time and navigate the web UI and click all the things, and it's not that it's a bad UI, it's just that that's not the way anymore. This is the year we almost break the database. Let me explain. Where do agents actually store their stuff? They've got vectors, relational data, conversational history, embeddings, and they're hammering the database at speeds that humans just never have done before. And most teams are duct taping together a Postgres instance, a vector database, maybe Elasticsearch research, it's a mess. Our friends at Tiger Data looked at this and said, what if the database just understood agents? That's agent at Postgres. It's Postgres built specifically for AI agents, and it combines three things that usually require three separate systems, native model context protocol servers, MCP, hybrid search, and zero copy forks. The MCP integration is the clever bit your agents can actually talk directly to the database, you can query data, introspect schemas, execute SQL, without you writing fragile glue code. The database essentially becomes a tool your agent can wield safely. Then there's hybrid search, Tiger Data merges vector similarity search with good old keyword search into a SQL query. No separate vector database, no Elasticsearch cluster, semantic and keyword search in one transaction. One engine. Okay. My favorite feature. The forks. You can spawn sub-second, zero copy database clones for isolated testing. This is not a database they can destroy. It's a fork. It's a copy off of your main production database if you so choose. We're talking a one terabyte database, fort, and under one second, your agent can run destructive experiments in a sandbox without touching production and you only pay for the data that actually changes. That's how copy on right works. All your agent data, vectors, relational tables, time series metrics, conversational history, lives in one queryable engine is the elegant simplification that makes you wonder why we've been doing it the hallway for so long. So if you're building with AI agents in your tired of managing a zoo of data systems, check out our friends at Tiger Data at TigerData.com. They've got a free trial and a CLI with an MCP server. You can download the story experimenting right now, again, TigerData.com. I wanted to be able to do a CLI version of it. I wanted to get JSON back and feed it to my agent and now that's all possible, really. So have you played with or heard of this latest thing which is called Ralph Wiggum? No, that name sounds familiar, though. From the Simpsons. Okay. Yeah. Gosh. Why is it called Ralph Wiggum? I forget. I think it's because they just keep trying despite setbacks is how I, if I compare, phrase Ralph Wiggum is keeping, keeping the leap going despite setbacks. And so I believe it was, you know, I don't have it here. I was going to try to figure out who actually created this name as, I don't know, I can't remember, but somebody who discovered this loop essentially. So you essentially keep feeding back the loop of the input output that you would normally do with your own typical cloud scenario, which is, you know, you entering the prompt, it doing something and returning some sort of response back to you and doing work in between. Well, they have found this way to create this Ralph Wiggum loop so that you can essentially define a pretty clear instruction set. You might call it a spec or a spec, but they actually just call it prompt dot md. And so in this prompt dot md, which would, you would feed into Ralph can do a loop. It could be a small loop like, you know, build this one part of the feature end to end and you just go until it's done. Well, the reason why I'm telling you this is because I feel like now if I, now that I know what it could do and what it should do, I would want to, and if hardware was more available, I would be more inclined to do this, but I would build a test subject, hardware machine. That is proxmox. And then I would just set loose this, now that I have a, a pretty clear vision, I would set loose this thing on that machine, just have it build this proxmox redo, I suppose, potentially, you know, because I'm just trying to get the value out of it, not so much the pristine code, but sometimes that's the value part, too, and you enjoy the process, but just for an exercise because I want to automate proxmox, why not do it via this Ralph, like a loop, which is to just do it until it's done and you can kind of give it repetitions. You can say, okay, do, you know, one, you know, one version of it, what, not a version, but I think like tries, I think what the terminology is for it. Let me see if I can find real quick. Just like one iteration, two iterations, and you can specify, because you have, you know, only so many dollars to spend, I don't want to spend more than 20 bucks on this feature, 10 bucks on this feature. So either spend 20 bucks on the feature, or, you know, 10 or 15 iterations until you get to some result, and then I'll come back and examine it. And to run it again, all you do is just run it again, it's like I'm putting it that way. It'll just go back and do it again, like that's such a cool world to be in, man. Yeah, building a little home lab, a little home lab gardens with, with that kind of loop. So cool. Yeah. Yeah, no, that is for sure, because yeah, a lot, a lot of times, you know, agents will stop. And I know exactly what you mean now, because, you know, you, you, you could tell it to do something to completion, but it's either going to stop or check in or do something, you know, and I know, I know the prompts that I give. I have a lot of my prompts saved because they're, you know, annoying to keep explaining to AI, you know, like, you know, fix all unit tests and run all inting and do all this, you know, do these things, don't do these things, go, you know, and, uh, to be able to, to, to not be a human in the loop anymore until the very end is, is pretty cool to think about is like, no, you loop, you figure it out, you do so many iterations of this piece of software or you do one really good iteration. And let me see the final result at that point, you're, you're just like a director, you know what I mean? You're just like, you know, right, that's right. Yeah, give me, give me something that's right, a parent, go, go clean your room. Don't come back until it's all the way clean. And you know what? I'm going to check under the bed. I'm going to check in the closet. So, you know, make sure you don't put stuff under the bed and in the closet. And when I come back in, you know, an hour, better be done. Right. I'm not a parent, but, you know, I remember those days, you know, thinking, thinking I, thinking I can outsmart my parents, putting in everything that they're doing. You get your pops, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, they, they, they, they're, they're pretty clean, though, you know, and they don't clean up after themselves. I mean, not yet. Well, generally, unless, you know, something, yeah, I won't go there, but, but yeah. What is the centerpiece of your home lab right now? Like what are the centerpieces? I imagine Prox Mox and Truna has a still there in the center, Unify hardware is obviously probably part of the center. What's, what's around that center? What's you building on? It is. So, so this kind of goes into, you know, another one of my predictions for this year too is, if we could ever build anything is, is one big box. I think people are going to return to this one big box idea where they're, yeah, only because things are hard to get a hold of. And, you know, while, while you, you might be able to get hold of lots of little older machines, you know, the, the, the one leader machines, you know, to do, you know, clustering, I feel like now that things are so scarce, people might be going back to, to one big box that your stores, that's your AI, that's your compute, that's your, you know, virtualization, that's your NAS, that's your everything. And, it's kind of the way I've been going to. So, I do have my Truna's box. It's, it's one big box, you know, has a video card, has RAM, has 10 hard drives, you know, GPU, all that stuff. And so, that's, you know, not only my NAS running ZFS, but it's also where I'm running my applications now, too. So I've moved a lot of my applications onto my NAS. Yeah. So I've been doing this. I watched them live yours where you were doing stuff with containers and you had to do that sort of sidecar load, which I did follow, but I didn't, I didn't get the same results you did. Maybe is that the way you're doing it with that whole, you have to create the EML file and let it knows about it in the app container world? Yep. Well, if you're talking about Truna's, yeah, yeah, so I, I, so you don't have to use the EML and do it that way. I do it because I want EML, because I'm a developer, but also it's a lot. I, I'd much rather edit EML than fill out a form any day, even if you could give me, you know, saying you could, yeah. And so I also, because then you get CLI's and you get help from me, you get all the stuff you get with EML and I can do it in VS Code. So there's that too. So yes, so I'm now running my applications on top of my NAS. So I've, I've always gone back and forth like, you know, do I want my NAS to just be an as and just be storage or do I want my NAS to be an application server, too? And then run those applications on top of my NAS. And so I've done both and I'm still kind of doing both, but for the most part, what I'm calling now my home production is on my NAS. And so my home production, I, you know, I've, I've gotten a little bit wiser over the years and a little bit crazier, but, you know, I have a home production now. And my home production is where the services are that need to be up. They need to work or I'm going to hear about it. You know, that's, that's Plex, that's my NAS. That's, you know, whatever else I have running, which is a lot of stuff. And when I say, I'll hear about it, I don't just mean my wife because she will say something if it places down because we record a lot of stuff. And if it doesn't record survivor on whatever night, I hear about it. So that needs to be up. But also, you know, alerts and stuff I have set up and running, too. So, you know, my home production, that is right. Yeah. Oh, I've been getting so deep in there. Oh, yeah. I've been getting so deep in Graffana and Prometheus now. And it goes back to what you're saying. Like, you know, you know, I, I do a ton of, well, I've done a ton of Graffana and Prometheus in the past. A lot of observability stuff, you know, in the enterprise world, the corporate world. But at home, I was always kind of like, man, that's, that's a lot of work. That's a lot of work to get that going. You know, now that I have help from, you know, LLMs, it's, it's work I want to do because while I could model through it and spend a week getting, you know, scraping, working on one machine, you know, the trade-off just wasn't there. And so now that I can scrape metrics on one machine in about 10 minutes, the trade-off is there. And so it's worth it to me. And so, yeah, tons of, tons of, I'm, I'm monitoring everything now. I have metrics on everything now. You name it. You name it. And I'm going to show off some of this pretty soon in my home lab tour. I do every year. It's coming soon, both the hardware and software, everything I, I host and run. Excited. Yeah. So that's coming soon. But I, you know, I need to make it really good for you to, you know, see, you know, people have certain expectations and some reason it's always got to be a little bit better or people be like, oh, that's what you did last year. So, yeah. So I've, I'm running my applications on my NAS now. And there is a reason for that not just because I want one box, but ZFS is a really, really good file system. And when you layer on stuff, like, you know, caching, uh, and then metadata, special v devs and separating out your metadata and putting that on ultra fast storage and then putting, you know, your app data on fast storage too, you get this really good bulk storage that can perform like MVME storage. And so that's been my idea, this kind of crazy idea they have. I'm putting 10, 10, 14 terabyte hard drives in an array, you know, I'm doing strike v devs kind of boring. But, and then on top of that, I'm, you know, augmenting the things that need to run fast, like metadata lookups and app data and putting that on super fast storage. But anything in that ZFS pool can, can also use it. So it's kind of a tiered approach to storage, yeah, which is RAM. RAM is going to be the fastest than I have this, you know, special v dev where I can put files on there too that are below a certain file size. And then I have bulk storage. So my idea is run hybrid, hybrid ZFS, you know, all of my video editing goes on there. But also all of my databases still go on that pool too. And I still get, you know, MVME like performance for most of the things that I'm running. So it's pretty cool. And so it's been a challenge for me to get that working. So that's why I'm doing it. And mainly because, you know, I always look at it like this. You know, if Plex is running on one machine, which it used to, and my media collection is on another machine, now I have two chances for it to be down. If I reboot my NAS or I reboot my application server, right? And so now I've doubled the chances of that service being down in my home. And so I co-located everything on the one box. So now it's like, well, you know, if the NAS is down, that means the apps are down too. But my NAS should never be down. And if it's down, we have big problems. So yeah, that's kind of what I've done. I still have a Kubernetes cluster at home. You know, I still have three proxmox in a cluster running Kubernetes and I still have that on mini machines. That's kind of my home lab test, kind of lab where I test stuff before I actually run it in production, which I have a co-location to where I'm self-hosting proxmox and another Kubernetes cluster there that's running techno-tim.com, plug for my website. Like that's all self-hosted in a co-location on hardware I own running on proxmox in a cluster, running on Kubernetes that I maintain myself. So, you know, my home kind of cluster is kind of a testbed for that too. So yeah, I actually run and manage three Kubernetes clusters. I have a lot going on, but it's fun. That's a lot of stuff to run. I was going to ask you about your clusters because I went the route you did a while back when you built that cluster from the NUX. I don't need about one because I can only have four of one, but you bought three, and I thought that was cool. I think that's where you ran your Kubernetes, or you ran proxmox on high-vailability there, one of the two. That's right. Yeah. So I don't have proxmox in high-vailability. I have them in a cluster. I'm like, I get it while people run proxmox in need to do that. Yeah. I don't need HAVMs. I push that further down to the right to the left. I don't know which way it is. I push it further down to the services, and then run HA services, right? I don't need an HA Kubernetes node. Right. I just build more nodes. It's a whole cattle approach where I'm like, it's great for if you have a single VM, something super important. That's old legacy app that you need to run and needs to auto-migrate somewhere. But with Kubernetes, as you know, you don't worry about that. You just worry about the services you run three replicas, and if one node goes down, one node goes down. So that's the approach I take. I don't have proxmox in HA. It's just clustered, so I have one UI and I can migrate stuff easily. You got your true NAS, which is running your home production services. That's right. You got your Kolo, which is in a data center. That's right. And that's all of my public-facing stuff, yeah. Which makes sense, because you want bandwidth there, and maybe no firewall poking, stuff like that, although you could probably use tail scale or something else to do that. Yeah, yeah. No, I used to host it out of here. No problem. Update DNS dynamically. It was all fine, and I could today. I just wanted to kind of expand it, and I had an opportunity from a local person here in Minneapolis to join their Kolo, and I thought, hey, why not? Why not? Let me do some super fun site-to-site networking stuff and backups back and forth, so pretty cool stuff. What do you run your Kubernetes clusters then? These applications? What do you run on there? So Kubernetes clusters, so I have, yeah, they're applications. Anything from Discord bots, websites, so I host my own documentation site that's multiple replicas. I have my own link site. I have some APIs that I run, two or three APIs, because I have this mobile app that I used that I built. Many years ago, that's still running, and this mobile app then has APIs, which then needs databases. Databases are in there. Other people's websites, like my brother has a website, I built a forum. My other brother has a website, I built a forum, so those are hosted in there. A whole bunch of, I'd have to look, but random stuff. But it's basically web dev stuff, a lot of web dev stuff. And is proxmox mainly just skunk or stuff, like lab stuff then? Well, those are, so proxmox is actually the host. My Kubernetes nodes are VMs in proxmox, right? So I'm not running Kubernetes bare metal. I'm running Kubernetes as virtual machines, so I have nodes that are Kubernetes nodes running on proxmox. And the proxmox is also running some Alexese, like DNS, Postgres. So I have Postgres in a cluster running on an Alexese, because, you know, kind of mixing that into Kubernetes while it does work, depending on your IO, can go bad really quick. And I don't have a ton of IO. And then, yeah, Alex, you know, I'd have to look at the list, but I use Alexese too. I was always kind of against them. I know they're doing containers now too, which aren't really great. It's kind of like a hack of how they're doing containers now. But I am using Alexese for small things. And when I say small, I mean, like, I don't need a full OS for them, which mostly the time I don't. That's interesting. The way you're using Trunas, because I was always in the camp of let my NAS box just be a NAS box. But I'm kind of bummed because it's a Z on CPU, it's a ton of RAM. And so I look at it and I'm like, well, you're not doing really much. I mean, like a fire server is not taxing as an enterprise, maybe with like thousands of users, that's the box you want. And so I've never really been happy about that scenario, but then I'm like, you know what, one problem, one issue, it's a NAS. I don't want to conflate what's on there, because if I start putting applications on there, different things on there, within the uptime may go down, or I may have an issue that is not NAS-related. So that may have been like thinking like NFS mounts. So why, what made you want to put applications there versus just NFS mounts? Yeah. So NFS mounts are great. You can get into some trouble with NFS mounts, like, single-vacals. Yeah. It's terrible. But not with other apps. You just need to have a storage, you know, for like a database application, you want to be closer to the actual storage for sure. Yeah. It's not even just the latency piece, it's the locks and everything like that. Like NFS just doesn't handle it so well. Like the latency I can kind of get over, but like SQLite in general, you'll have these locks that are like locked that you can't unlock and you'll get corruption and stuff like that. But NFS mounts were great. Yeah. I mean, you got to figure out permissions and stuff like that. You know, and I went down that route, you know, two for a while. But then it's like, I have to back up, I have to like, you know, take care of applications over here, you know, set up all those mounts and do all that stuff. And then also still, you know, care and feeding for that NFS mounts and snapshots and keep that connection up. And again, you're back to, you know, you've just, you know, doubled your chances of downtime, you know, too. You know, it takes two, right? Takes two to make one. So, you know, and again, like, I've gone back and forth with this, like, so many times, you know, it's like this whole generalized versus specialized, you know, that you see all over IT and, you know, enterprise in general, I've generalized and specialized my server so many times that like, I think I'm ahead of like corporate corporate entities that do this with their, with their, with their employees. And so I've specialized and generalized my NAS so many times with so many different things. But right now I'm landing on this. And I think a lot of it has to do with two things, well, actually three. One true NAS ditch Kubernetes who went back to plain old Docker, which was awesome, because I never would have done it if they were still running the whole Kubernetes bit. But they went back to just standard containers, quote, unquote, standard containers, you know, Docker images, Docker containers, like I should say, two that I'm able to do it with the amel because I'm not going to fill out their forms. Like if they ever take that away, I'm bailing, I'm going to find something else to do. Because, yeah, just not me, like, I don't want to like fill out a form, you know, to be able to, you know, put in my environment variables, like with the.emv file, I copy and paste them and they're there. Like, why should I have to do that in a form? I get why they exist because people aren't developers, but that's not how I want to manage my containers, a lot of that has to do with Kubernetes too. And then, you know, the other piece is this whole like hybrid, well, it has a lot to do with what you just said is like, hey, you have this beast of a machine just sitting there doing nothing. You know, I feel like it's that meme where that guy is like poking that thing with the stick and he's like, do something, you know, that's how I feel if my NAS is like, it's kind of boring to watch the metric. Yeah. Yeah. Dude, tell me about it. It's funny. You know, much over there. Beastie. Oh, it's funny to say that because now you should see my metrics, because now I post all my app metrics on the screen, like you can put little widgets, you know, my, my traffic reverse proxy, you know, five or six megabytes per second, you know, which is, you know, not a lot, but you think like that's more than every day, yeah. You know, and then like, you know, I look at my, I can see my MariaDB database, you know, going, it's doing, you know, three, four, a hundred megs per second of queries and stuff like that. I'm like, yeah, this thing is like, it's humming right now. You know, and if I look at the CPU differences, you know, you know, it's only a couple percent, you know, more than it was before. And so I probably have 50, 60 containers running on there. And again, like the reason why I ended up doing this is because I figured out a way with ZFS to create this hybrid pool. I mean, people in production probably won't do this. I, I think it's cool. But, you know, to make my hard drives, normal hard drives, you know, be as performant and as responsive as NVMe. So not only the speed that you get, but as responsive. And that's again, like I've layered in NVMe to handle all of the quick rights, quick files, quick access. And for anything else that's going into RAM, which is another huge case of like, yeah, I want to store my applications on something that has tons of RAM. And if it's storing, you know, bits and blocks in ARC, which is, you know, ZFS is RAM cache. If it's storing that stuff in RAM, yeah, do it. I want it to. So I'm like getting like the super performant, you know, apps that are mostly reading out of RAM. If they aren't, then they'll read out of NVMe storage. And then worst case scenario, they read from a slow disk, which is worst case scenario because I have all those tears. Can you tease with your, with your RAM, your VDEV is, which is NVMe and then your, your disks? I think you're probably a person, some of your future videos bubble, but, oh, no, this is, no, I've done videos on this too. So, so my, so I have striped VDEVs, all right, let's back up. So for bulk storage, I have 10, 14 terabyte hard drives. And of those 10, 14 terabyte hard drives, I'm doing striped VDEVs, or kind of mirrored pairs, where I have two that are in a pair that are mirrored. And so, which means I have 50% loss of my data. So you got seven terabytes essentially? Yes. Per pair is seven terabytes. Yep. That's exactly right. And so, but I, I do that for two reasons. One is because you can, in mirrored pairs, you can stripe them across. So you're basically kind of getting like a rate 10, I don't want to say a rate 10. Think of it like a rate 10 where, you know, you have these pairs, but the data is striped across. So you get the performance on reads and you get performance on right, which is good for me when I add a videos because, you know, I have a bunch of sequential reason rights and I don't know where they're going to be. But on top of that, you can also expand by pairs. And so, traditional ZFS is super complicated and I know that they've been adding features to be able to expand VDEVs and do all this stuff. But, you know, when I started my array years ago, I realized that, you know, buying two drives at a time is a lot cheaper than replacing all four drives with four different size drives just so I can get a bigger pool. And so, in the traditional sense with ZFS, it's kind of what you have to do, but you got to plan up front and buy it front, but doing pairs, let me build incrementally and buy incrementally. So anyways, that's my, that's my slow disc array. Then I've done this thing called special VDEVs, which is basically, you say, hey, all of the metadata about that data, instead of storing it on the pool itself, move it off onto super fast NVMe drives. So if you end up in a folder, like I have some folders that have thousands of files, you know, that can take a really long time for it to parse that metadata and retrieve that metadata because it lives on slow spinning disks. What do you have a special VDEV? You move it off of there so I can look it up on NVMe. Then on top of that, another thing you can do with special VDEVs is you can say, oh, by the way, don't just store my metadata there. If you find any files that are, I don't know, below 64k, just put them on there too. That's pretty cool. So if you think about it, like, now I'm, now any small file, which usually takes a little while to find on spinning disks, is now stored on there too. And so it's like, I've just given my, my whole entire array a huge boost because now most of the stuff is handling happening on NVMe. There's one huge caveat to that whole thing. If you lose that special VDEV, you lose all the data. But I'm listening. Yeah. Yeah. So you lose all your data. You're definitely cowboy in this. I mean, yeah. But you know what you're doing. Yeah. But I've done the same thing, mere VDEVs. So I have four NVMe drives, you know, and so two would have to die for me to lose all of my data. Right. But then on top of that, you should have a backup. Right. And so, you know, I am definitely going cowboy because I want the performance. But I think that's, that's a, I'm being a careful cowboy. I don't know if that's possible. But you got spurs on, man. You get your gun on your, you get your slinger, but my slinger is on safety. How about that? You know, where, you know, I'm still, you know, taking precaution. I'm still building in redundant, you know, redundancies. Yeah. If you're on rocket one NVMe, I was in a call, call foul team, but you've got four, of course. That's right. Truth in fashion. So not only four, but you got them in pairs. So you can lose two of the NVMe. Now that you also go with different brands, buy them from different places, things like that too, or just buy a batch. So I, on top of that, there's these old Intel Optane drives. So Intel used to make these Optane drives. They're ridiculously fast. And they have like the lowest latency ever. Intel stopped making them. Yeah. This will like outlive earth, you know, like these things, like the read and write performance you get on them and the longevity and how many times it can read and write is like ridiculously long, that I ended up buying four of them because of how fast and because of how responsive and because of how long they're supposed to live. So no, I bought, I bought, I bought two from, I think new egg. And then two more from Amazon like later on, they're hard to find, but they're still the best drive for that, that specific use case. And so when those die, what I'm going to do is just replace them with Samsung, you know, consumer grade. Yeah. I hope they never die only because they're, they're the fastest thing out there. They blow away any NVMe that's, that's on the market. How did you get to get four NVMes in this world? Cause that's, that's a, that's different. It is different. So I use an adapter, you know, a PCI Express card. So, you know, traditional NVMes, this is going to get a little complicated too, but NVMes want to use four lanes of PCI Express where they can talk directly, you know, to the CPU or talk directly to something. I can't remember. I'm, I'm not a true infrastructure person. I just play one on YouTube. So, but anyways, the mask is off. That is right. That is right. Hey, I, I, I coined the term infrastructure as a hobby. That's, that's kind of my thing. I, I age or something. That's what I call home lab because, you know, my, my actual career is, you know, I'm software developer, you know, infrastructure is my hobby, but I love it. But anyways, NVMes can use four PCI Express lanes and in, in, in your motherboard, typically you'll have one big slot that's 16X, you know, PCI Express lanes. You have to buy a card that can actually split that out into four individual lanes and then you can address all four individually. Right. There's also this thing called bifurcation. And so you need to make sure that your motherboard can do bifurcation and what bifurcation is is exactly what I just talked about. It's able to split that 16X card up into four individual, you know, lanes four, four X lanes. And your motherboard has to support it and the card has to support it. Server motherboard's generally speaking, like super micro ones, a lot of them do. Desktop consumer boards generally don't. Yeah. And so if you're going to do it on a board that doesn't support bifurcation, then you can buy a card which is really expensive that can do it for you on the card. And those cards are, I don't know, four, five hundred bucks, maybe even more. But if you get lucky and you have a server grade motherboard that does it, that's where you want to do it. So anyways, that's how I get four NVMEs and one PCI Express is 16X slot and they're all getting four X bandwidth for each. So that's what lanes for your GPU. That's right. Yeah. So I have a lane for my GPU. And the primary probably, right? Yep. And maybe one of your second areas which are bifurcating, you probably have a workstation or a server grade motherboard. I'm assuming you got that ability. Workstations are great. Workstation motherboard is a great hack to not have to go server grade and not go consumer grade. You kind of get that middle ground. You're still in the 600 to 800 bucks, maybe a thousand dollars for the motherboard. But you know, that's because that's the world we're in right now. But you do get the capability and you usually get ECC RAM availability as well versus non-ECC RAM, which you don't really need in an ass world, but you should have if you want peace of mind. I guess. Yeah, a lot of people will go back and forth whether you need it or not. People will say, oh, if you care about your data, you do because you don't, you know, if the memory gets corrupt. Well, that's where it writes first. That's the source of truth. Yeah. So in ZFS, it's less important. I'll say that because of how it checks and how it does its CRC checks on the memory and can verify the data. Some people still swear by it. Like they'll say, like, if you don't use ECC, you might as well not even do stuff. You know, people go to the extreme. Right. I'm not there. But I'm glad I have it. How about that? It's an interesting world. I mean, so when you think about a problem like this, so let's zoom out to, you know, not scare the home ladders away those, those curious folks. Yeah. When you think about this problem, do you get at your big old whiteboard when you're speaking this world out? How do you think about it? Because you're a YouTuber too. So you think about it, probably in the story arc, and you also think about it as a technologist. How do you map this and plan this and test this world? How do you do that? You know, first and foremost, like I've been doing this for a long time, even before YouTube, I've had a server in my basement since, I don't even know, I'll probably date myself, probably like 2004 or five, you know, going back to like this old piece of junk that when I was in tech support, I asked my manager if I could take it home, so I could learn about Linux and learn about Active Directory. And he looked at me like I was crazy because the thing was, you know, 10 years old already, and he, you know, told me, yeah, you can take it, just take the hard drives out because, you know, I had data on it. So I've been doing this for a long time, I've had a server in my basement for a long time. So I, I generally think about, you know, what do I want to do? What capabilities do I want to have? You know, generally speaking, you know, I want to, I want to provide file services. So I want a NAS, you know, to be able to do shares and store my files on. I don't want to store my files. Obviously on, on my system, I want to store them on my NAS because then that gets back to, I want to have some compute, you know, and it takes very little compute. To do most of the things you want to do, a lot of people will say get server grade, you know, but I could spin up this I3 right over here that's, I don't know, from five years ago. And this will like destroy any, you know, self-hosted container I throw at it and like laugh at it. Like, so you don't need much compute at all. Ram is great, but again, like you don't need tons of ram. And so I just try to think of, you know, what services do I want to provide? For me, it's storage, for me, we record a lot of TV and, you know, stream stuff at home. So I think about Plex, Plex then brings in a video card. If I want to trans code, most of the stuff I can direct stream here, but, you know, when we travel or whatever, iPads, you know, phones, they want to trans code. So having a video card in there that can do that trans coding for me on the fly is good. You know, that's a decision point too. You could, you could get by and intel stuff. But then I start thinking, well, I want to run models at home too. So I kind of want to, you know, have shared infrastructure. So I want my video card to be shared too. So that's what I do now share my video card with Plex with Olamah with the stuff we just talked about, you know, with paper lists, AI and stuff like that, technically that's going through Olamah. But even some of my, you know, I do some trans coding for some of my, you know, video cameras too. So yeah, I try to find a video card that'll work in all those scenarios. And so, you know, I never want people to think like, oh, I need to go and buy this big thing before I can start home mapping. It's never like that. Like if you have an old PC in your basement, use that first, figure out what you want to do with it. You know, use it as is. If it had Windows on it from 10 years ago, wipe it, put Linux on it, and if you're scared to Linux, that's fine. You can put Windows on it. I would say just try Linux, because you're going to find things are a lot more compatible. Yeah, for sure. And just, just try it. I mean, you might find it sucks to be a siss ad bin at home, you know, I enjoy it. I enjoy it. When things go wrong, my wife says something doesn't work. That's when I'm like, all right, you know, it's developing something broke. I have a job. That's right. That's right. That's right. This is why I try to backwards from 10. Oh, that's right. That's right. But, you know, I enjoy doing it. You know, a lot of people joke on a lot of my comments, you know, on my YouTube video, are "Bro has a full-time job at home." And it kind of is right, you know, to an extent, but if you built things right, you got things working and you know how they work and you document it in case things go wrong, and a little help for me, I like a lot of things are hands off. So you're focusing on the next thing you want to do. Yeah. So, you know, again, like, I don't have like, you know, a recipe of how I do things. I just try to think of, you know, what are my base services I want to have? It's always going to be storage streaming and some compute and some kind of transco capability. And from there, I just try out a whole bunch of containers. You know, I treat containers now. Just think of like apps on your phone, you know? I mean, I can't spin them, but that, that quick, I can spin them up, you know, probably about five, 10 minutes, all said and done working with a proper certificate. But I, they're like apps on my phone. If I want to try an app, I try the app, does it do what I want? Yes, it does what I want to know it doesn't. There's this other app that I should try and so I'll go try that and, you know, that's kind of the world I live in now is, you know, my self-hosted services are basically apps at home for my home to use. I want to say at home, I mean, pretty much me, but you know, there are some that my wife uses. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, and it's as long as I have a platform to do all of that, it really doesn't, you know, matter what parts I used because you can get by with so very little nowadays. I really can. Yeah, I don't think you have to go so big to, I mean, like this is where it leads, okay? It's like, I don't know if you're a golfer, Tim, but that's what golf folks say as well. It's like, hey, you get invited to play golf, you're like, no, I don't want to go. And then somewhere during that first round, you're like, oh my gosh, this is the best game ever. I'm going to go buy all the clubs I could possibly buy. And golf tech, like any tech is just limitless, really, what they, what they can like fine tune and dial in. And so if you've, if you've ever become a golfer, you start with like this small itch and the next thing you know, you've spent $10,000 your first year in some way, shape or I'm being facetious, but you know, golf rounds aren't cheap, golf trips with friends aren't cheap. Golf clubs are not cheap. And then you have to have special clothes or you want to have special clothes because hey, why not dress the part? I kind of feel like that's the same thing with home labs, like you can begin with, like I did. I can remember the day when I got my Raspberry Pi. I can remember the day when I spun up the Trunas, or actually it wasn't Trunas was just like whatever 45 drives sent me because like way, way, way back to the day. I want to say probably six or seven years ago, I mean, eight years ago, they sent me an AV-15 to try out and they said, hey, no, you know, you can just keep it. It's just yours just just to have them play with and this is when they were first launching that line to home labors or what would become home labors. And I was like, really? I'm like, yeah, we don't want to back it. We cost way too much to ship it back to us. And at that time, I guess horror was just cheap enough that we're like, yeah, we don't even want to back, just use it and enjoy it and tell people about, you know, your experience about it. I'm like, okay, cool. That today is my Trunas box, you know, and it's got the Xeon silver, I think 4012, I believe, the CPU in there if I recall correctly, or 4212 maybe. But I began, that was, that was gifted to me. I didn't know what I was doing with it at first. But then I began on a Raspberry Pi and sort of the experiment. And so that's where I began with everything ran on my Raspberry Pi. Now, I wouldn't because my, my, not my needs, like what I actually need for computer is grown, but my desire to play with bigger things has grown. You know, the, the playground, I can't just have the carousel on it. I got to have the slides, I got to have the swing, I got to have the rope climb, I've got to have the, you know, all the things, you know, so my playground for home, I've just grown a little bit. I'm curious though, when we look at maybe this potential dichotomy between Trunas and your desire to put all things there, which maybe somebody out there's having similar feelings. And then this word of prox box, I feel like I'm with you, I kind of want my Trunas box to do everything, but Trunas, the software is not quite there yet. Where do you see, do you have this vision or purview into that world where you can see Trunas being this all one big box software, because it traditionally has been great, you know, great for what it is, you know, ZFS, storage poles, a little bit of applications you need of it, not a tremendous amount. I kind of want my prox box and my Trunas in one box, is that how you feel? Yeah, I do, and you kind of can. So you, you could virtualize Trunas. So let's take, let's take your, your thing for, I've done it for years and it's totally fine. Totally fine. It's totally fine. It's totally fine. But don't you have to like map them to like weird, like drive IDs and stuff, isn't it? Like weird, within the, the uptime, I suppose, if you had some major issues with your drives? No, so it's, it's, it's easier than you think. And so let's take, for instance, you have that Trunas box, it's running Trunas. Just pretend you want to run prox box on it now, but then you create a Trunas virtual machine. And you give that Trunas virtual machine, you pass through the hardware of that HBA controller. To give it the whole piece of hardware, you say, nope, this hardware controller, hard drive controller, HBA, is now assigned to this virtual machine. And what that does is now the virtual machine has direct access to all of those disks. There's no IDs to pass through because it thinks it's the true owner of the disks and then you do that, then your life is good and then whatever, that's one way to do it. No, that is one way to do it, but I, I agree. So I, let me, let me put it this way, like, and this is not a dig to either product. They're better at some things. And so, you know, Trunas is leading as an ass, they're, they're, they're, they're leading with I'm an ass, but I could also do apps and I can also do virtualization, not that great. And that's, that's my own opinion. But it can do virtualization. It's just not that great at all because it's, it's not a hypervisor first, it's leading with NAS. And when you think about Proxmox, Proxmox is like, Hey, you know, I'm a hypervisor first. Like, that's what we do. We do virtualization. You could install apps like LXCs, although I'll get into that, but you could install a whole bunch of apps and run them on the machine itself. But, you know, and that does work. But like if you think about it as a NAS, not, not great NAS experience, sure. You can install a Samba server, assign it some, you know, pool and then do all of the Samba config and a CLI and all that stuff like that, figure out permissions. You can do all that. Like, they're, they're both capable of doing each other's job. I'm kind of like, I want something in the middle. And there is HexOS, which is kind of coming, but that's, that's kind of like, you know, joint venture between some people and Linus and, and, you know, Trunas are Ix systems creating this more, I guess, consumer-friendly version of Trunas. There's that coming, but, you know, I played with the beta. Looks pretty cool. It's, it's kind of going to be, you know, a facade on top of Trunas because, you know, they're going to use Trunas APIs and it's really Trunas in the hood, but that's something different. I want the best of both worlds. I, I wish they would, I mean, they're not going to do this, but if I, if I get designed, I guess the perfect nas at home for me, it would be, you know, it would be like a Trunas like experience for the NAS piece and maybe even for the application fees, but give me, you know, give me the virtualization capabilities that Proxmox have, you know, and the networking capabilities that Proxmox have, or, you know, if, if, if I couldn't do that, I would love for Proxmox just to run Docker containers. They are so, I don't know what's going on there. They're so against like running Docker on the host and I know you could shim it in and do it yourself, but they've even got to the point where now they're like converting, you know, OCI containers, which, you know, Docker containers, quote unquote, to Alex C's, to then run as an Alex C, because they don't want to run true OCI containers like Docker. Like I don't get it. Like, maybe I, I mean, I would have applied this thing. I, I don't know. Docker C, does it, does it cost money to, I mean, I don't know. I know that there's been a lot of change in the Docker world in the last, you know, six years. I mean, they were almost a dead company and then yeah, then they were revived. It was Docker 2.0. I talked to their CEO on a podcast here on the same podcast. You're on a few years back as a fun conversation about Docker 2.0 where they went from zero revenue to revenue. And I mean, at some point you have to protect your moat, really, you do as a company. And yeah, I imagine it's probably a licensing. It's probably something there, but you know, as a user like you are, I want that world to marry. So figure it out. Yeah, yeah, like and Docker's done like now that they're, you know, they have model runner. They're doing all this scout stuff and scanning containers and like really building up their Docker desktop. And I'm just focusing on the Docker CE part and maybe there is licensing around, you know, maybe you can't ship this with your own product. But let's take that all the way out and just go down to like container D, like just get, you know, OCI images, pod man. I mean, something like at the end of the day, I don't want true problems available more like more license friendly. Yeah. And so at the end of the day, like, I wish I could run OCI containers as first class citizens on proxmox. And I, again, like I don't know the reasoning behind it. I honestly feel like it has something to do with more of their strategy, you know, and how they're, you know, trying to be highly available and Alex sees highly available. Though that, I don't think is there yet in VMs highly available. I just don't think they want container spinning up on the host itself. And I get it, you can get around that. Friends, you know this, you're smart. Most AI tools out there are just fancy onto completes with a chat interface. They help you start the work, but they never do the fun thing that you need to do, which is finish the work. That's what you're trying to do. The follow ups, the post meeting admin, the, I'll get to that later tasks that pile up into your notion workspace looks like a crime scene. I don't mind it. I've been used to notion agent and it's changed how I think about delegation, not delegation to another team member, but delegation to something that already knows how I work my workflows, my preferences, how I organize things. And here's what got me. As you may know, we produce a podcast, it takes prep, it's a lot of details. There's emails. There's calendars. There's notes here and there. And it's kind of hard to get all that together. Well now my notion agent helps me do all that. It organizes it for me. It's got a template that's based on my preferences and it's easy. Notion brings all your notes, all your docs, all your projects into one connected space that just works. It's seamless. It's flexible. It's powerful. And it's kind of fun to use. With AI built right in, you spend less time switching between tools and more time creating that great work you do. The art, the fun stuff. And now with notion agent, your AI doesn't just help you with your work. It finishes it for you based on your preferences. And since everything you're doing is inside notion, you're always in control. Everything agent does is editable. It's transparent. And you can always undo changes. You can trust it with your most precious work. And as you know, notion is used by us. I use it every day. It's used by over 50% of fortune-fathered companies. And some of the most fastest-growing companies on their like open AI, ramp, and versatile. They all use notion agent to help their team send less emails, cancel more meetings and stay ahead. Doing the fun work. So try notion now with notion agent at notion.com/changelog. That's all our case letters notion.com/changelog to try a new eit mate notion agent today. And we use our link. As you know, you're supporting your favorite show, The Change Log. Once again, notion.com/changelog. Can you miss with Fly Dio, by any chance, that we're all done in like prod, Fly Dio? No, I have. I mean, if you love containers, then you'll love Fly. I mean, Fly is what we host on Change Log.com. They're a partner of ours. We love them, obviously. This is not technically paid. I'm not paid to love them. We just love them anyways. Fly is like that. You're running containers. Right? You're running a container in production. It's firecracker VMs. I'm not familiar with everything behind it, but fly machines, essentially. They spin up very fast. They run down really fast. Now, I want, I would love to have a version of Fly in my own lab, and it sounds like that's what you're describing there, which is, I want an OCI container. I want, you know, as close to bare metal as I can. I don't have to spin up a Ubuntu VM to then throw Docker on, to then launch my Docker container. I would like to just have the entire system be container friendly. It sounds like you're saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, similar to Cloud Run and Google or any of these things, you give it a manifest, you spin it up, and it's running container only. And I mean, that's kind of what I'm getting with TrueNAS right now. I feed it to me, Emma. I got to create a data set for it, but I got to tell it where to put the data it's going to use. Then I use a Docker compose file, and I'm done. So that's kind of what I'm getting with TrueNAS now. I just wish, you know, Proxmox would just build that into their CLI or UI or whatever, so that people just don't have to do this. Well, I'm going to run an LXC and I'm going to run it as root, so then I can install Docker to then run an OCI container inside of this LXC container or pay the virtualization tax and run it inside of a VM. I just want as bare metal as possible. And I don't know. I'm sure Proxmox has a lot of reasons why they don't do it. Probably has something to do again with their strategy. It doesn't fit in there. But I just don't see how you could ignore OCI containers in general. Like, yeah. Yeah, I agree with that. I do agree with that. Well, the closest I've been able to come is the CLI built, which in this case, it's got the cloud image and a boom to or even a fedora cloud image on the server already, which it uses that as its base like you would. And so rather than going that whole route of creating the template and including the template to create a new machine, the CLI does a version of that through automation. And you're able to, through cloud and knit, you're able to define the network, right? You've got all that there. They use the network, the SHK, and then everything else is the Proxmox API, which I really wish Proxmox and Trunas did a better job of documenting their API. It's just not, it's not super. I mean, it's a good documentation, but I just feel like they don't treat it like a first-class citizen. And that me, the kind of developer I am, is I want to play with your API. I want to build my tools on top of your system, not be forced to go to your web, I even web you out. Like, even with Trunas, like, you're the same. I don't want to fill out a form to spin up a new thing. Why would much rather automate through whatever layer it is, whether it's me or an agent, some sort of CLI? And then if the agent's using it, then it can just easily use the CLI built, but I want to be able to automate those things on those kinds of systems. And the closest I've come is that exactly. It's like PMX, VM, new, and then specify all these things, send it a template, which is super easy. And those are YAML files. Those are YAML files, like two or three YAML files to define a couple of things. Then you're off to the races, you can define a minimal Ubuntu brand new machine. You could define it to be bigger, but I just have found that it's just more easy to layer on a post-installed bass script than try to script it all. Like you got into Ansible Land, it was just really nasty and you got really error prone. So I was like, you know what? Forget all that. I just want to define a base VM. A base VM that is blessed with an IP address, with the RAM I want, with the CPU I want, the disk I want, and protect it. It's got to dash P on it, which means if I try to delete it accidentally or my agent tries to, it's got to go through this whole entire dance and send across documentation and social security numbers to fight that to delete a VM. You can't just accidentally delete a VM, you got to do some things. But it's pretty, literally within, so you're 15-minute scenario that you defined earlier with a new container, less than 60 seconds to him, maybe even 30, maybe a minute to get the IP address back. It's got to like launch the VM, get all the updates from a boom to whatever, which takes time, and then actually launch the actual machine itself and then get an SHQ. That's the thing that takes time. The boot, the update, and then the finally, you know, QEMU giving you that IP address back. But like that's all like instant. And so when I said 10-15 minutes, that's me figuring out, okay, data mounts, environment variables, like that's me, that's like research I had to do anyways. If I knew it, yeah, it's still take me five minutes, but that's not 60 seconds. I should look at doing that with Trunez too. It's just automated. We should call out. I'll show what I'm doing behind the scenes because it's not ready. It's ready to be used if you don't mind warts. It's not open-source ready yet because I think people have a different expectation of what that might be. I want to do one more re-rate because I now have a more clarity on what it is, but I think we could layer on what I'm already doing with the idea of already saying, okay, there's Trunez on the system here, and there's a separate layer that you can spin up that second, that same VM, but then also say there's mounts elsewhere. There's NFS mounts elsewhere, whatever you want to do to do your world, which you're talking about there. Yeah, I'm curious why you don't use Ansible though, because I have my post-Ansible, like I have-- Bash. It's not Asian. It's not Asian. It's Asians like Bash. Yeah. I didn't fight the system. I just mean like, no, I know I get it, but like I have my Ansible Playbook for New VM, you know, and it has 50/60 tasks that are all there, and it does it intelligently. Like, hey, if I say, you know, stop the firewall service, well, if it's not running, it's not going to stop it, you know? Yeah. Hey, if I tell it to install this one package, it knows that doesn't run on this type of machine, so it's not going to-- You know what I mean? Like, I have my Ansible Playbook where it's, I just click go. Like any time I create a brand new machine, I have a standard Playbook I run, and it's going to apply updates, update, reboot, install ZShell. Configure ZShell with Robbie Russell, because that's what I like, you know, it goes through the whole shabang of like, this is my standard VM, and I just don't even pay attention to it, you know, a couple of second-- you know, it probably takes, you know, minute or two throughout all the reboots and applying and installing packages, but after that, then it's like, it's ready, you know, ready for production. Yeah. So, I think the-- I'll defend that by saying, I have never been not for any reason an Ansible Guy. I really got into it. I didn't understand the world. I know what it does, and how people use it. I get all that. Client server. I get the recipes. I'm not foolish, but I never got into it to need infrastructure automation, and the link me Franca of agents is Markdown Files and Bash, Bash is everywhere. You have to add on Ansible in your client or on your server somewhere, and it's baggage to-- For sure. Right? So it may work for you because that's been your history, right? But in that world, when you're trying to automate that kind of thing, I just tell the LLM, hey, I'm launching a new instance of DNS hole, and here's the specifications for it. It will write a script. That script can be item potent, and it will rerun it, and it's just as good, if not probably better and faster than Ansible. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm not-- I'm just thinking about, like, if you're building, you know, if you're building a CLI, like, at some point, like, you know, it has to be able to scale to different things, and so like, are you recompiling the CLI every time it needs to install one more thing, or just writing a new script, or how does that work, you know what I mean? Well, it has versions. It's written and go, so it's got versions. And so if there's new features or a patch release, I'll patch release it and, you know, throw a new version out there, which you can then, you know, run PXM update, and it will get the new version of it. Should I just mean like the source of truth for your list of things, you know, say, like, one day you want to install Z-Shell? Like, here's the beautiful thing, Tim. Those aren't in there. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Those things are in user land. Those templates are in user land. You can define them. And so that's why I won't rewrite it because I sort of like, you know, I haven't been doing this as a day job. This is my little scratch, my little itch, and I really haven't-- I probably haven't changed the code in three months, honestly. Like it does what I needed to do. This Adam wants to change it to release it and make it better. But the word I wanted to build was this really interesting CLI, but most of those things live in user land. And so have a separate repository that the world can define their own minimal Ubuntu, minimal Fedora, minimal, you know, Debian. You name it, whatever you want to do. And all the patterns are there, and all you got to do is clone the repository, put it in a certain place, update your config, and when you run pxm, you know, new vm or whatever it is, and you can do dash, dash template or dash, dash package, and you point and you say the name, well, it knows that because config says all of your templates are over here. So you won't have to recompile the go binary, the go see a lot of do that. All that will live in user land. Originally, they did. Okay. I was a fool. Okay. I put those things in there. And I was going to make it to extract out. So I wanted to give people a good bootstrap. Well, then I learned, well, that's just probably not the best way. And so it's better to have a user land repository that people can commit to, an update, and it can be appointed to people, ensure it's one more step to clone that repo down and put it in a config. But I feel like the trade off is better long term. So that's where I'm at. I haven't gotten to the point where now I can put a lot of those minimal templates or even more expressive ones that use Ansible, which is totally possible. I just didn't want to do it. I just wanted to get a base image and at least my agent on that image and be like, make the world and it goes and it makes the world, you know? Yeah. No, that sounds awesome. No, it sounds awesome. I'd love to check it out. Because yeah, again, it was like, you know, I did Ansible only because that was way better than running CLI commands over and over and over or even writing one big bash script. Now that's changed because LLM's love bash, so now it's now things have changed. But yeah, I should definitely revisit it. Yeah, I'd love an agent. Yeah. At some point, I'd love to hook up my open web UI, so my internal chat that I use with O Lama and build, you know, use open agent or something is that new open agent that's out. Open code. Yeah, open code. Sorry. Yeah. Open code. Run that agent and tell that agent to do stuff in Proxmox for me. All the chat. Yes. Like, I just don't even want to run a CLI. That's what I'm saying. I don't even want to run the CLI sure I could do that and expand the variables and figure out what it can. It can't do. Well, the problem with it is that Proxmox has some challenges, like, it would have to navigate. The reason why I went to CLI route was one, I thought I wanted it for me. Now the whole world shifted to be agent first. Now I want to build an MCP. I want to build an MCP for Proxmox that the MCP understands the Proxmox API. So, hey, MCP talk, you speak Proxmox API, LLM, you speak human, but you also speak to the MCP. You know what I mean? So now it's like, I speak human to an LLM that speaks MCP to that LLM kind of API to Proxmox and just do the stuff. You'll get to a limitation at some point, though, so the CLI is the blue layer in the middle there. First, the CLI is kind of the important piece, and then you layer on the MCP server on top of your CLI. So the MCP can speak native Proxmox as necessary, like if there's an API using native API, or the things that it doesn't do that you've taken from 15 steps to one command. Yeah. And you've got tests against it, well, your CLI, in addition to the Proxmox API with your MCP server and your agent in Opencode or in Cloud, well, that's, well, that's the beautiful world. Yeah, man. Yeah, that sounds awesome. That sounds awesome for sure, because, yeah, the Proxmox binary, whatever it is, PXM, that can do so much. I mean, that's how people are doing even their Ansible scripts right now. They're like, you know, shelling into it, running a PCM command. So yeah, that's, it sounds awesome for an MCP to be able to say that, like, but then that's a lot of words for me to type, you know, I'm getting lazy developer. Like, it'd rather like you have a CLI and run a command. Like, do I want to sit here and describe, you know, what, what to build? No, just build a standard VM. Let me know when it's done. Call it this. All right. Well, the determinism there's the challenge. You can do that, but you, you know, the reason why MCP came into play was because LLMs are non-deterministic. And you can say that, but every time you might get a different version of it, or if you're using Sonnet versus Opus now, and like Opus 45 is the default, you know, per anthropic and cloud, they want you to use Opus 45 is non-deterministic. It may know that and you get great results every time it's, it's not the same path to Rome. The MCP server is what helps you to, you determine and create determinism or even skills. So you layer on skills, MCP and CLI with a decent API, which is why we love Bronx Monks to just bolster that, make it, make it more expressive, give me more in there, better documented. Because if you give us those tools, we'll use your thing more. And I got to imagine if I'm an enterprise buying a support license, you know, I'll, that's how they make their money, right? Isn't that how proximal things are money on, on Bronx Monks is, oh yeah, support licenses. Yeah, that's, that's how most open source, you know, are making it. Now they're starting to do premium features. It seems like that's like a huge trend now is like, oh, you can, you can self-host the normal version, but then premium features, you know, it's a combination of, I'm either going to be your SaaS, I'm going to give you extra features or, and, or, I'm going to be your support. Yeah. That seems how most open sources projects are monetizing now. In large installations, I can see that for me, I would buy a support license as a means to sustain. And just to get rid of that thing that pops up every single time, really, I would just be like, I would honestly give Bronx Monks 100 bucks a year just to get rid of that, you know, realistically, yeah, there's a, yeah, I agree. I asked them one time, hey, do you have a home lab license, you know, do you have a cheaper version of the home lab license, you know, that I could use so I could get, you know, legit updates versus bleeding edge updates because their price per core or whatever it was was, you know, kind of cost prohibitive for a home lab person, it's like five, six hundred bucks. It might be more now per year, and I'm like, yeah, that's a lot, not a lot for enterprise, a lot for a Tim or prize, you know, so, and they were like, I don't worry about it. You know, they were like, don't worry about it. Just, you know, use our latest updates. Anyways, I say that because you can get rid of that nag screen really easy. You can't. I don't know. Yeah. Oh man. So since we're talking so much about proxmox, have you heard about proxmox helper scripts? No. I did a video on it. It doesn't matter. Check out proxmox helper scripts. That's all right. No, that's out of the going back to algorithm, you know, it's, it's fighting for ears and eyeballs and, you know, and Google says like, hey, this does not deserve ears of eyeballs. And plus like, dude, there's no way you can keep up. Anyways, that is a collection of tons of scripts, single liners. You can run to do anything you want to do on proxmox and I'll written in bash. There's one that's like, get rid of nag screen that you can run, but there's also like the default script you run is so good. It'll like get rid of nag screens, set it to, you know, remove the enterprise repositories. You know, it'll do everything you want to do as a home library, which is give me bleeding edge updates because that's all I can get. Turn off nag screens because I can't really afford a license and, you know, disable some other things because I'm never going to use it. So really cool, really cool repository. I was actually made by someone who passed away and he passed it on to the community. So really cool website and a really awesome group of people. What does it call it again? One more time. Proxmox helperscripts. Okay. Might be proxmoxhelperscripts.com, I'm not sure, but if you check it out, it's, it's, it's so awesome. I mean, it's worth looking at. Proxmoxhelperscripts, it looks like a GitHub.io website, it is search that on the web. We'll link up in the shows, of course, I know we're getting close to our time, Tim. I'm happy to be talking to you, but yeah, go to view scripts. I mean, anything so, so they basically built almost like an app store for Alexee containers, which is pretty cool. Like, hey, do you want to install, do you want to install home assistant as an Alexee container on your proxmox? Yes. Click one shell script you're done. Do you want to install, no, yeah, do you want, do you want Olamah with GPU enabled? Yes. Okay. Run the shell script. Yeah. Go to proxmoxvehelperscripts. It's community-scripts.github.io and that's what they've done is they basically built almost like an app store for proxmox because they're able to either create an Alexee for it or create a VM for you. Like databases like, hey, do you want to run Postgres? Yes. Do you, do you click this button, run the shell script, you know, and it's cool, man. Yeah. It's really awesome. I did a video on it. I had no idea this existed. Yeah, man. It deserves so much attention. And it's not building VMs. It's building Alexee's for the most part because that's what you want, right? You don't need a full fat VM to run, you know, MariaDB. You just need MariaDB running, you know, with a little bit of storage and a little bit of RAM. Yeah. Like, like, like, think about setting up, you know, bit warden. How hard that is, you know, or athalia, you know, this does it for you and, you know, very simple shell script. Well, all right, then I'm glad to talk to you, Tim. Yeah, man. Like, home assistant, like, you want to run home assistant and Alexee container. You just want to try it out. Click this script two seconds later. It's running. Like, home assistant, delete it, you know, are you using this for those, you're probably not using this for those things that you're using it just for the simple things though. Sounds like I am using it for some stuff. I, I used it for pi-hole, set up pi-hole as an Alexee container because I'm like, yeah, why not? Like, do I want to run, you know, pseudo-apt install and do all this stuff? No. No. Do I want to run it as a VM? No. So yeah, so I've done it for, for certain things, for certain things in my lab. Yep. Rhett. Did I do it for redis? I might not have done it for redis because I run redis in a cluster. I do run redis as an Alexee, I do run it in a cluster, but I don't think I use their scripts. But anytime, you know, anytime you want to test something out, I mean, this is almost faster than trying it with a Docker container only because, you know, they fill out all the defaults for you. So you go from, you know, you go from running the script to it actually running. So the challenge here and the one thing, the big takeaway is here is you don't run this script in a shell prompt. It's kind of weird. You have to run it from the proxmox terminal web, that makes sense. You got to log into your web UI, yeah, and open terminal. Things might have changed since then, but if you run it in your shell, you know, you're not executing it, I think is the right person. And that might have changed. They might have made changes, but I know for sure, if you run it in the terminal from the web, it works. So yeah, set up, set up, Grafana set up, Prometheus, it's all right there. Wow. Yeah. It's pretty awesome. That is pretty cool. I didn't even know this existed. I've been using proxmox forever and learned something new every single day. Just left. What's left on your, on your thought list? I know you made a list. I did make a list. Anything else on your list is like, man, we can't end the show without talking about this. No, it is my. A lot of it was just, you know, I don't want to say complaints, but, you know, just the state we're in with how expensive things are, nothing's available. But software is getting better. So that's a huge upside and, you know, people are making awesome things, using a lot of tools and getting ideas outside their heads. A lot of, a lot of awesome cell phones and stuff in, in the open source world. And it's, I love it. I love it. I went from this, I feel like I went from this drought of software, I don't know, a couple years ago where I'm like, yeah, you know, I've seen all the Docker containers, people run at home. So now I'm like, oh my gosh, there's this whole like new world of people building these new containers of things I can run that I've never even heard of before, you know, based on AI or maybe, maybe not, that, that like, I feel like sober fresh because now I can try all these apps again. So, yeah. Now these are like, for me, it's like server apps, think of it like that. So I think this year's gonna be a wild year. I would definitely encourage you to unleash cloud on your UDM, whatever you might have. And just say, like, help me just examine my VLAN snare, examine my rules and my profiles. And it might be like, you know what Tim, you're pretty good or might be like, you know what Tim, I can help you here. You know, it's probably going to say like, well, why do you have these duplicate rules? Like I, I, I, there are probably rules in there that I either never deleted. Like, I am not a firewall rule expert. I'll be the first to say is like, I try it until it works. And like, it's, it's, it's always guess for me. Well, let me just say that I set up my VLANs based on your video and it was upset with me. Just saying. It's operator. Just saying. Just saying. And I really didn't know much about them. So I was like, you know, I've been told, hey, if you run a network, you should have VLANs because you want your kids to be on one thing, which I totally agree, you know, you want your guest to be on another and I totally agree with that too. And then everything else is on this trusted network, which I totally agree with. But then all this intermingling, I'm like, well, just because, just because it's an Nvidia shield, should I put it on my IoT thing? And then the answer is no, the answer should be, it should be entrusted. It just needs access to too much, you know? And there's other things to like, it's the dumb things that you definitely don't want on your trusted network on the IoT VLAN. So the three VLANs, I'm for sure I want is trusted kids and IoT and guests. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's kind of where I settled too. But then I have all of my networking equipment, you know, on a separate one. Like it's, you know, it's, it's on the default one. My trusted is its own VLAN. I do have one more and then cameras, all my cameras going one VLAN. But yes, I agree. You, you got to think about like, it's not necessarily what the device is. It's kind of the role that it plays and how much do you trust it? Yeah. Yeah. And so some people might say, yeah, put, put my home pod on IoT, I don't, I don't want my home pod. You know, that's IoT. Well, if you're, ask, if you give it access to your schedule and you're telling it to turn on your lights in your home, I think you kind of trust that thing, you know, enough to put it on your trusted network. And so that's the way I kind of think of it now is like, what does it need access to? And how hard is it to go to, to, you know, cross the chasm, you know, like home assistant? Like I do trust that thing, but I don't want to write a thousand firewall rules for it to go talk to everything in IoT. So I put it on the IoT because I don't want to do the opposite. So yeah, it's, even my Xbox for a while, I was like, die hard like, no, you are IoT, but I'm just like, you know, I put my password into the thing and I play games, it's, it's going to go on my trusted network because I don't want to cross the network just to do other things, you know? At least you got to worry about if that thing ever gets circumvented. That's the main thing is like if it gets, yeah, yeah, it's, it's all about limiting your blast radius, limiting your blast radius and how comfortable you are with that. You know? Yeah. I think this year though is the year of AI in the home lab. I know it has been already for me and I do lots of stuff across machines with cloud. I don't just do it on the single machine I'm on. I'm not only using it to build software or to build little itches and scratches and stuff like that. It really is like the moment, for example, when PXM gives me that IP address back, I take that info report, it gives me which I've designed to be agent friendly. In that case, I'm the CLI or I'm the API. I copy and paste it into the age and I say, here you go, here's your machine. And then it logs in because it's got my SH key and it's like, okay, sweet. It's a brand new brand new, you know, base image of Ubuntu. Let me build your world here for you. Here's the manuscript. Right here, it stores it in Git in the repository and maybe a deploy file or deploy directory. We always make it idipodent and that way if we want to rerun or something like that or if it needs a different one, maybe a post or a pre-install. Who knows what? But that thing has just been so cool to just unleash like that. So I think this year will probably be your year too of AI in your home lab and that's kind of fun. New worlds, new capabilities to him. Yeah, I definitely need to unleash some agents here and try some of that too. I've been, you know, I do run a ton of AI stuff and I've been, you know, doing a lot of LLM stuff, especially, but agents, yeah, would be cool to turn some stuff loose in my Proxmox cluster and just say, go build some stuff rather than using an Ansible Playbook. Just go for it. Rather than one year later, Tim, we should talk in three months. Here, my prescription, if I'm your doctor, Dr. Stacovic here, okay, is your prescription is go unleash, clawed on your home lab network and do some cool stuff and come back in three months and tell me some tales, okay, because I guarantee you, I guarantee you, come back a whole different Tim. I bet, you know, it's just like, again, like a lot of people probably going through this, like, you know, I've had the tools that I've used and I've designed the tools and I know they work and I'm comfortable with them and I write CI/CD pipelines, but maybe I should just kind of just give that to AI and tell it the outcome I want and not worry so much about how it gets there. Especially on the low stake stuff, you know, if you just got, at least this little thing you want to do, what's the harm? You wouldn't have read it anyways. Who cares about the code? Why do you need a good, dude? Co-Review. All you need is a Co-Viewer. Your VS code is now, that stands for Co-Viewer now. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. It stands for continue, continue, continue, right? Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, you can also automate a lot of that stuff too to be in yellow mode. So a lot of people will say yellow mode for some things and that's kind of Ralph Wiggum, that loop there. The Ralph loop is, if you, if this is your first time here about Tim, you're going to hear a lot more about it soon because it's the, it's the, the beginning of what's going to come when it comes to a well engineered, like it doesn't remove you as an engineer. You start to be an engineer. So be a good engineer with a good to do list or a good spec and unleash Ralph, that Ralph, Ralph loop on it. And you know, if the code works and it past tests and these different things around security, well then who cares really in the end is it the best idiomatic go. I mean, I kind of do if I'm, if I'm like maintaining this thing, but if the agent's maintaining it and I didn't have the software yesterday, I need it today and now it's here and it solves my problem. And I don't have the time to maintain it anyways, it's like did the tree fall in the woods and you hear it anyway? Like it's, it's that whole thing, you know, it's really better. Well, it kind of related to that. One thing I did learn too is, you know, after having AI write some code is having a right test too is super important. I've noticed. Yes. So I've noticed like anything I want to keep, have it right test because not only does it prove that it works, it's a good hint for it to understand. And how the code works, just like humans, you know, any time out, like when I review someone's code, I'm like, where are the tests? Not because I'm asking where your test are because in your test, I can kind of figure out like what you were thinking when you wrote this and what you're trying to do. So I've noticed that too. It's like anything you care about, you know, that you have AI writing, have it write some tests too. It's, you know, it costs you what's some tokens, not really any brain power, but you told them to do it too because it's a, it's good, good, it just helps, you know, your agent understand in the future what it was doing before. YouTube.com. What is your, what is your, do you, do you, do you say what your YouTube is out loud? In that techno Tim, I used to just, yeah, just people, Google techno Tim, uh, it's techno Tim.com now huge, huge change. No more techno Tim. Live. It was that, you know, I, I paid the squatter. No, I'm big time. I have a.com now. I had to put tons of redirects in place. I was like redirects everywhere. Actually I did them on the edge on Cloudflare, most of them, but then I had to like find my old links. Then I have link shortners, then my email, uh, and then I set up aliases and cut that over and a lot of DNS stuff. I actually did it in about a day, you know, I had help from AI. I did about a day, uh, so it wasn't, it wasn't that difficult. It was just a lot of things to remember, um, a lot of things to remember, uh, to do. And still I, I think I still broke something, but, uh, least I didn't, uh, at least I didn't lock myself out of my own email. So if you ever changed domains, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a lot. Yes. As early as possible or never. Yes. My gosh. It's like renaming something. Yeah. It's the worst, especially if yeah, it's just the worst. Pick a good name from the beginning. Do what you can to never have to change your domain, ever, ever, ever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Never name your business after a street or a product, unless it's like main street. You know, I said, I noticed that with so many, you know, local businesses, it's like, you know, we're, I don't know, we're whatever Boulevard, but they're not on whatever Boulevard anymore. It's like, oh, wait. It's maintenance. Yeah. We actually have here in dripping spring. We have a Mercer dance hall and it used to be a Mercer. And it's not anymore because Mercer's real estate got more expensive. Now they're on like root 12. Yeah. See? Exactly. You're not Mercer dance hall anymore. It's like, where do you go to Mercer dance hall? Root 12. Everybody knows Mercer Street here, you know, it's like, it's like, well, I'm here at Mercer. Where's the dance hall? I didn't there anymore. It's somewhere else. Yeah. Yeah. That in a product like, you know, yeah, or like a price, you know, dollar store. They're not even dollar store anymore. It's like dollar 25 store, you know, but they're still dollar store. That one's kind of generic. But, you know, if it was like, everything's a dollar or everything's five dollars and it goes up to 10, then you're you're in big trouble. Well, there was another story called something five, oh, a five below. Five below. Yeah. You can go in there and buy things about five bucks. That is right. What do you want? Yeah. Now, I get it. The color is blue and they make it like it's cold, but that's right. Like it's not your double entendre is no is a single entendre now, you know? Come on. You know? That is right. I get, yeah, you better keep a five below in there, you know, temperature wise because, you know, not everything's below five dollars. That's right. That's right. Well, everyone, techno Tim.com, check that out. That's right. Thank you Tim for just exploring this fun world of home lab with me every year. But my prescription is go away and instead of coming back a year later, come back in three months and tell me about your new world. I want to see Tim's new world in three months when you just unleash AI even more so these agents on your home lab. I'm here for it, man. I love talking to you, too. It's always a pleasure. You give me so many ideas, and now I think I have a lot of ideas. I want to do something right after this next video, but yeah, I'm excited. I'm glad to be here and it's always nice talking to you, man. Yeah. Same, Tim, same, Tim. Good seeing you. Glad you're well. Bye, y'all. Bye, friends. Woof. A new year, fun time with techno Tim, always fun digging in and talking about the future of home lab with Tim every single year. Hope you enjoyed the show. This is the year of software. More software getting built, more software developers coming in, more people building more software, more, more, more. I don't know about you, but my home lab is super active. My prox mox is basically on fire over there. It's warm in my office because my stuff is always going so hot. It's kind of fun. I want to hear from you, though. What's your home lab like hanging out at my new fun hangout how it works dot club. That's a fun place to be. If you're not there, you're wrong. You should check it out how it works dot club. And of course, hangout in zoolup. Change law.com/community. It's free to join. I'm there. You're there. Well, you're going to be there. I mean, go to that URL and sign up. It's totally free. And hangout in our home lab channel and talk home lab tech with us because that's fun. We have some awesome sponsors depot dot dev, our friends over at tiger data and our friends over at notion depot dot dev tiger data dot com and notion dot com slash change log. Those are funny roles to go to. Check them out. They love us. They support us. And of course, to our friends, our partners, our host where we host our sprites, our machines, our apps are everything fly dot IO. If you're not using fly, well, that's just sad man, again fly dot IO into the beat freak in residence break master cylinder, the bang and beats keep flowing. Love those beats and a lot of break master. All right, friends, it's just done, we'll see you next week.