1053: What’s in Our Home Lab

Scott and CJ tour their homelabs, from a fully 3D printed server rack to a custom OPNsense firewall load balancing two ISPs. They dig into Proxmox, Tailscale, Caddy, Synology vs. DIY ZFS storage, Home Assistant, Jellyfin, Immich, Kiwix, and coding over the network with T3 Code and OpenCode. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 00:56 What’s in Our Homelabs? Servers, Pis and Workhorse Machines TEROW 4 Port 2.5G PoE Switch Proxmox 03:54 Proxmox Explained: A Hypervisor OS for Your Home Lab 05:49 Scott’s Fully 3D Printed Server Rack and Mac Studio Synology DS918+ 11:19 Keeping It Quiet: Server Fans and Noisy NAS Drives 12:58 Networking: Building a Custom OPNsense Firewall oaknode Firewall Appliance 15:08 Load Balancing Two ISPs With SFP+ Fiber AUMOX 10 Port 2.5G Switch 20:07 Wi-Fi Access Points and VLAN Network Segmentation Omada AX5400 WiFi Access Point 21:40 Scott’s Switch and Eero Wi-Fi 7 Mesh Setup UGREEN USB to 2.5G Ethernet Adapter Eero Max 7 25:55 Ditching the ISP Router: PPPoE and Bridge Mode 27:51 Accessing Your Services Remotely With Tailscale 31:08 Local Domains and TLS Certificates With Caddy and Cloudflare 34:37 NAS and Storage: Synology vs. a DIY Setup 38:59 Hot and Cold Storage: Hardware RAID, ZFS and Cockpit Cockpit 45:20 Container Management With OrbStack, Proxmox and Portainer Portainer 47:52 Termix: SSH Into Your Servers From the Browser 48:50 Home Automation With Home Assistant and Apollo Automation Apollo AIR-1 51:02 Flashing Wyze Cams With Thingino for Frigate 52:30 Cloud-Free Smart Devices: ESPHome, Tasmota and Bluetooth Proxies 57:07 Self-Hosted Media: Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf and Immich Seerr 01:02:37 RSS, Read Later and YouTube Archiving With Tube Archivist Miniflux Wallabag 01:04:01 Offline Internet: Wikipedia and Stack Overflow With Kiwix Zim Library Manager 01:05:46 Paperless-ngx for Device Manuals and Documents Paperless NGX 01:07:44 AI Coding Agents: Scott’s Pi Durable Personal Agent 01:09:46 Coding Over the Network With T3 Code and Zed Remote 01:15:39 CJ’s OpenCode, Open WebUI and code-server Setup 01:20:02 What’s in Your Homelab? Roast Our Setups Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Scott Tolinski?

  Welcome to Syntax Today. We're talking all about home labs and all of the stuff we are running on our personal networks and how we do it. My name is Scott Tolinski and with me today is the perfect person for the job, CJ Reynolds. What's up CJ?

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Not much. I'm excited to talk about this. I haven't, like, I have so much to share and I've never been able to, or haven't had the chance to share it. So, yeah, I'm excited.

• 0:23Scott Tolinski?

  I'm excited specifically because I know you're probably on to some stuff that I should be on to. In fact, when I was browsing the show notes, I was really interested in some of the things you have listed here. So I'm pretty, I'm pretty curious about some of your thoughts. So, we're gonna get into everything from hardware to the software to the network stuff, NAS, home automation, media, anything that we're running. I got a big ol' rack down here that I'm running all kinds of stuff in and it's about to get even crazier for me once my new computer arrives. So, let's get into it. First and foremost, what are we running in our home labs? Let's talk about hardware first CJ. What do you got? What are you working with?

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is my server rack that has my firewall, which we'll talk about in a bit, as well as a few machines. In terms of hardware, like, I have a dedicated firewall box, which I'll talk about, a couple of switches, PoE switches. I've got my AI machine, which I've done a video on. I have a NAS that takes four hard disk drives, and this is not like a network RAID array. This is just like a hardware that holds on to those disks and then I plug it into a machine. And then I've got this little B-Link machine here, which takes six M.2 SSDs, and that's also, that's my NAS. And then, so I kind of think of it as like my B-Link is my cold, my hot storage, like, that's

• 1:46Speaker 01

  where all my stuff I access that I need all the time. And then, the RAID array is kind of like cold storage. I plug it in when I need it.

• 1:53Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  And then, in terms of where I run most of my stuff, I have this Dell Precision workstation. So, this thing has two Xeon processors, both 24 cores, so it's 48 cores, and it has 128 GB of DDR3 RAM. So, I bought this about four years ago with plans to like, do awesome stuff in my home lab, and then it sat on the shelf for like, two years, or like, a year and a half. And then, just this past Christmas, I started setting everything up. But, this, this machine is the, the workhorse behind everything. So, it's running Proxmox. I've got five different virtual machines on it, and then each of those virtual machines have containers on them, but most of my services

• 2:35Speaker 01

  are running on this machine. I have this little Raspberry Pi 3, and that is running one service. That's running my Vault Warden. So, that has all of my passwords. It's my password lock. But, my, my thought was like, when you're setting all this stuff up, if I were to put the password lock, like, on, or like, the, the drive, you know, on this machine, and let's say this machine shuts down or something, how do I get access to my passwords?

• 3:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  So, that's why I'm like, okay, I need something tiny and dedicated. And I have so many Raspberry Pis that I have like, nothing to do with. So, this little Pi 3, its sole job is to run Vault Warden, which is like the open source version of Bitwarden, holds all my passwords. And then I've got one more Pi 3 that I'm setting up now, that will be my proxy for everything. Cause, we'll talk about in a second how we access all of our servers, services. But, right now, there's actually a virtual machine with a container inside of it, and that container is running Caddy, and that is how I get access to all of my services in an easy way. But, I want to make, put that on a dedicated machine as well, because if this one goes down, then I can't access my services.

• 3:43Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I've got the server, and then various other network stuff that we'll get into when we talk about network. But, I would say this Dell workstation is kind of the, the workhorse of my, my whole hardware setup.

• 3:54Scott Tolinski?

  Sick. Yeah. I love to see this. And what, what OS are you running on that bad boy?

• 4:00Speaker 01

  Proxmox. So-

• 4:01Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, Proxmox as an OS. Is it always an OS? Cause I, we'll, we'll talk about that stuff later. But I, I'm so woefully undereducated on Proxmox.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Definitely. And I mean, for, for the listener as well, if you're not familiar with it, Proxmox is a hypervisor operating system. So, the idea is, you install Proxmox just like you would a DBN or Ubuntu. It's your base operating system. And then, they have a dashboard where you can manage all of your virtual machines. So, um, once you have it installed, it's just a web dashboard where you can see all of your VMs. You can go in, you can set their hardware and everything else.

• 4:35Scott Tolinski?

  Cool.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, this is like the, if you were doing it directly on a laptop, you might use like, VirtualBox or UTM. But, Proxmox is the OS that basically lets you have lots of VMs. And they have several different things they provide. They also have Proxmox backup server. So, you can have, and you can have like, a cluster of Proxmox servers. So, you technically could have multiple machines, each one running Proxmox, and then have a main dashboard where you can control virtual machines from, from that spot. Yeah.

• 5:03Scott Tolinski?

  Cool.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  To talk about the hardware as well, like, if you're getting into this, like, look for old server hardware, like, look on GovDeals. So, this thing when I bought it, was about 500 bucks. I think now, since everything's getting so expensive, like, even this machine might run for like, a thousand. But, depending on how many cores you want, and what else you're trying to do, like, you can find some cheaper ones. Like, if you just search for Dell Precision T5610 on Amazon, they have some for like, 300. It doesn't have 48 cores or 120 GB of RAM like mine does, but it is DDR3, so you could find some cheaper RAM and kind of like, fill it out.

• 5:43Scott Tolinski?

  Cool. Man, you, I knew your setup would be interesting. Mine is different. I will say that.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Let's hear about it. Yeah.

• 5:50Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. So, I'll just share a photo of my, my rack here, guys. Don't demonetize us. I'm showing off my rack. Um, here we go. And, and if you're watching on audio, don't worry, or listening on audio, I'll describe everything in here. So, I have at the bottom, I have my Synology NAS. It's the DS18 Plus or 19 Plus. It's kind of the classic four-drive Synology NAS, which has, we'll talk about our network area storage in more depth later, but it has 40 TB total across four drives. A lot of storage there. I store a lot of media. I like, I'm a hoarder in the sense that like, I, I don't feel comfortable deleting any of my footage, for some stupid reason. Yeah.

• 6:35Scott Tolinski?

  I, I take an enormous amount. Every single video I record with this camera is an outrageous size. So, I, I gotta have all that space for my backups. Um, and then, in this next row, which you see these little dots in here, this is actually a Mac Mini. Uh, it's an M.2 Mac Mini, sadly with only eight gigs of RAM, and therefore, it is constantly struggling. I, we'll talk about what I run on it, but I like, manage a Minecraft server for my kids on there. It's running, it's running a lot of internal services. This big space right here is going to be my Mac Studio, which is a significant machine, and will be arriving, um, hopefully at some point here. You know, it's funny, it says it's shipping November 12th, and a lot of people have been getting theirs early, but sadly, mine

• 7:20Scott Tolinski?

  has not budged. That machine will be significant. So, let me even pull up the specs on this thing while I'm looking here. So, this is a future network stuff. This will be my future workhorse, and all kind of local inference machine and stuff. The version of the Mac Studio I got has 256 unified memory, um, it has four TB of storage, and I maxed out on the processor. It's a 36-core M5 Ultra, 80-core GPU, and a 32-core neural engine. It's going to be an absolute hoss. It's gonna do all kinds of crazy stuff. This photo doesn't show this, but this section right here is

• 7:59Scott Tolinski?

  for Raspberry Pi, and just in general clusters. And so, you can print these little like, slide-in things, uh, just to cluster your Raspberry Pis. And like you, CJ, I have a handful of Raspberry Pis. I have a 3 I'm not doing anything with. I have a 4 that's running Home Assistant. And I have a 5 that I'm still trying to figure out what to do with it. So, the, the 5 is going to be doing something here soon. And then, I also currently have another slot taken up via a, a 4, 4 TB SSD, just like a little 4 TB SSD that's hooked into the, the Mac Mini here. Um, and then I have my,

• 8:38Scott Tolinski?

  my network switch here, and that's pretty much what I'm running, uh, for compute on this bad boy.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Dope. This rack, I'll say, is, it, it looks amazing. Um, and it's fully 3D printed, right? It's like, so- It's cool to see how it's all assembled because you have spots, I'm guessing for like screws or Allen keys, but it's all like PLU, right?

• 9:01Scott Tolinski?

  So the everything that is sturdy is PETG. So the yellow bits that are just kind of decorative, even though they're handles, those are PLA and then the rest of it is PETG. And I've heat sunk little brass nuts in there to then screw in the M screws or whatever. I don't know if they're M5 or what, M6 screws into there. And let me tell you, one, this thing is sturdy as hell. So if you're thinking like a 3D printed rack, no, this thing is crazy sturdy. Man, it's heavy as hell. There's so much metal in here that are just hardware stuff. But in the same time, I probably spent more money printing this thing than I would have

• 9:43Scott Tolinski?

  just buying one off the rack, given the amount of PLA and PETG I had to use to. But the thing about it that makes it better than just buying one off the rack is that I can print it to be the exact dimensions that I want. And this thing fits perfectly under my desk. Every single component in my system fits perfectly in here. This Mac Studio shelf that I have for it was designed by me to take up the exact space and the exact everything and look that I wanted it to have. So you can customize this thing to your heart's content. I even have a half a, was it a, is it you, just a half you?

• 10:20Speaker 01

  I haven't even, I would say half you, but I haven't even heard that term before. But yeah.

• 10:24Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it is a half you here. And the reason why I have a half you that does nothing up here is because this really great Ethernet pass through is only a half you tall for some reason. Even, I mean, yeah, take up as little space as you need, but like so little things are half you that is like, okay, I guess I gotta print a half you spacer in here just so there's not a giant gap in my rack. I am going to print some mounts for the back. I have a bunch of fans and then I will be printing sides to this thing. But I wanted to get it all set up before I just locked it down. It was a, it was a cool print. KSW2, KWS2.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  I think it's worth, like regardless of it being more expensive, like it is worth it. Like if you compare Scott's photo to mine, like mine's haphazardly stacked on top of each other and like, it's not the perfect like width of everything, but like.

• 11:14Scott Tolinski?

  That's how mine was. Yeah.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  So this looks good. Yeah, this is goals for sure.

• 11:19Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Can we talk a bit about just like our hardware choices? Like, so when I was deciding and building out my home lab a while back, I looked into like actual server racks, right? Because you can find old servers for fairly cheap. But one thing you should really check out before you do that is watch a video on how loud the fans are. So my, my home lab is essentially silent, even with the workstation. Like sometimes the fans are spinning, but like you can't hear it unless you're like two or three feet away. But if you were to get like actual enterprise server software, the fans are so loud. I don't know if you've, you've, you've thought about that or?

• 11:55Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, well, I thought about that. I mean, one, all my, all my computers, mostly Apple, and then I have some Raspberry Pi. So the Mac Mini is silent. The Mac Studio is going to be mostly silent, although I've heard that when you're really hammering it, the, these ones are, get decently loud. The biggest, the biggest noise that I have here is the NAS drive, which is noisy. And it's not even the fans. It's like the drives are noisy. The, the thing that is not pictured here is my audio interface, which seems stupid because it's a little computer and not, not like a little whatever. It's a Neumann MT48. It does onboard DSP and stuff. So it's, it has a loud fan, believe it or not.

• 12:39Scott Tolinski?

  So I'm like looking to move that somewhere to get it away. Cause yeah. But that's the only noise I have really is the Synology, which has been surprisingly not bothersome. I have all of my automations in terms of like data scrubbing and stuff on there. I have all of that running only overnight, so it won't, it won't run during the day.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Gotcha. Cool. Should we talk about network?

• 13:01Scott Tolinski?

  Let's talk about network.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Okay. So I built a completely custom, not built, I didn't build it, but I bought a bare bones machine that's built for being a dedicated hardware firewall. But this machine has four 2.5 gigabit Ethernet ports and then two SFP plus ports, plus like USB and everything else. But the idea is you can run a dedicated firewall operating system on it. And this acts as your router and firewall. So most people, I would say that haven't looked into this, probably just use the router that's given to them by their ISP or the modem and then use, maybe they plug a router into that. I started looking into this a lot and one of the issues with the, like even the routers

• 13:46Speaker 01

  that you buy from Asus or TP-Link or some of these other companies, they only upgrade the firmware every now and then, right? Like they, and then after a couple of years, that hardware like isn't, doesn't stay up to date at all. And so as we move into this world where everything is getting hacked and vulnerabilities are being found everywhere. Like you, the, the hardware at the front of your network, I think you would want to be up to date and patched. And so that's why I, I put this machine together. And this thing was about 275 bucks bare bones. So I had to add RAM and a hard drive to it. But the operating system I'm running is called OpenSense. And this is an open, well, it's a fork of PFSense.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  I believe PFSense was also open source, but OpenSense is, there's some drama around when it forked, but at this point.

• 14:39Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, classic drama.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, but a lot of people use OpenSense and this is based on FreeBSD. But it basically gives you a web dashboard where you can manage all of your firewall rules. You can set up and explicitly say for each one of those Ethernet ports, what do they do? Should they be receiving internet or sending internet? And then you can also set up VLANs so you can create guest networks and all the things you would expect to be able to do on a router. You can do it with OpenSense and I'm running it on, on this hardware. And one of the reasons also that I set this up is actually load balance my network. So I have internet, a 2 gigabit internet from Xfinity and then 2 gigabit internet from Quantum Fiber, mainly because there's been a couple of times where either one of

• 15:24Speaker 01

  them dropped and then I didn't have internet for days and I don't want to experience that again.

• 15:30Scott Tolinski?

  You gotta be connected. Yes.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's my job, it's my job to be connected. So essentially what I do is I load balance the connection. So two of the Ethernet ports are used as incoming connection for both Quantum and Xfinity. And then within OpenSense, I configure it to be a shared gateway. So all of the devices on my network will round robin, use either of the connections. So that way, like two people could be watching Netflix and they could be on totally separate 2 gig connections. You're not interfering with each other. So that's one of the main reasons I did it. And then I actually use the, a third port every now and then, like I actually have had a scenario where both of them went down for whatever reason. Like there was a fire in my alley. So the cables and the fire, the wires burned and then all my internet was down.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  But I do also have a 5G modem and that's like worst case. But if, but if I want to keep all my devices in my house connected, I can just plug that into the third port and that becomes like the, the last piece of internet I could use if everything else goes down.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  So yeah, that, that load balances it. And then the other thing that I learned when setting this up is about SFP plus. So these are these little square ports below the Ethernet ports and these are actual fiber optic connections. And so essentially I have, let's do the maths. I have two 2 gigabit connections. So that's four gigabits of bandwidth total. And if I were to plug a 2 gigabit cable from that to the router, that means even though I have four gigabits of connection, all the devices on my network could really only ever saturate about two gigabits. But with SFP plus, this is a 10 gigabit fiber port. So I have a fiber cable plugged from SFP into my switch.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  And that means that one fiber can have 10 gigabits of connection across it. So all the devices on my network can use and fully saturate both of those 2 gigabit internet connections. And then I, so I have a switch that has the SFP port and then it's just like a super cheap 10 port switch that all my other devices are connected into.

• 17:37Scott Tolinski?

  Wow, that's crazy.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Again, I think the main thing is I keep this thing updated on a schedule and OpenSense is very active, like they push security updates all the time. And so I can be sure that the thing guarding the internet for everything else on my lab is up to date and I don't have to worry about a manufacturer like pushing a firmware update or something like that. Cause it also receives all of the updates that FreeBSD get and all of those security updates.

• 18:06Scott Tolinski?

  Wow, that's wild. Does having a hardware firewall, I get that that is.

• 18:14Scott Tolinski?

  Firewall for your entire network. Does having a hardware firewall that's separate from everything offer like any benefits outside of like the the ones that you might have like in terms of security? Do you know? Like, is it better?

• 18:29Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, I mean, not better in the sense that it's more up to date and I am more configurable. Because I've configured both of the modems for my internet connections to be a what's called a bridged connection. So a lot of times, if you're setting something like this up and your internet service provider doesn't support it, you basically have almost have two firewalls. Because the router and the modem that your ISP ships technically has a firewall on it as well.

• 18:54Scott Tolinski?

  Right.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  It's just not as great. And so then, traffic would be coming through there and then through yours. But I'm able to set up my modem so that I have a direct connection to the internet. And then this basically looks at all the traffic coming in and going out of the network. I mean, the other aspect of this is you can set up the firewall as a VPN server. So if you use Tailscale or anything else like that, you're probably running that like on one node inside of your network. But with this, you can actually set that machine up to be the firewall, to be the VPN server, and then connect directly into it. Yeah.

• 19:26Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Man, that rules. That sounds like a lot of work. But I'm very, very interested in it.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  I mean, the other thing I'll mention in terms of like, security is you also have full control of DNS rules. So a lot of people set up like a Raspberry Pi with a Pi-hole, which is like a custom DNS server that blocks ads.

• 19:46Scott Tolinski?

  I'm considering doing this. Yes.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Right. And you can do that inside of OpenSense. So there are, you can set up in your DNS block lists, and it uses the exact same format of block lists. And so now, you're blocking DNS at the firewall level instead of like routing all of your DNS traffic to a separate device.

• 20:02Scott Tolinski?

  Wow. Okay. Ben, you're dialed here. What else you running?

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll also just mention like, the Wi-Fi portion of this. So like, that that holds all of my internet. And then for Wi-Fi, I use an access point. So I'm using a TP-Link access point. I think I got a Wi-Fi 6.1. They recently came out with a Wi-Fi 7. It's about 200 bucks. But the Wi-Fi 6.1, I can't even, even with my two 2 gigabit connections, I can't even saturate it on the access point. But the other aspect of learning about this network stuff is, an access point is kind of just like, it's a bit dumb in the sense that it's not a router itself. So it plugs into the network, and then broadcasts the network and the DHCP server and everything that that firewall has, but without having any services

• 20:49Speaker 01

  itself. So it literally just basically turns a wired switch into a wireless network. And so I have two of these in my house that devices can connect to. And then this also has the ability to set up like guest networks. And so I have a guest network that, that's the Wi-Fi password I give to people when they come over, and it's isolated from my home lab. And then I also have a home security network where all of my cameras and IoT devices are plugged into. And that's separate from that network. So basically have three separate networks, and that works via VLAN. So in the config of TP-Link, I say this network is on this VLAN, this network's on this VLAN. And then in pfSense, I set up firewall rules

• 21:30Speaker 01

  that say this VLAN can only access devices within this IP range. And so that allows me to segment my network as well.

• 21:37Scott Tolinski?

  Man, cool. Sick. Yeah, I love that.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Can you talk a bit about your switch that you have? Is it anything crazy? Or is it just like a 2.5 gigabit or 10 gigabit switch?

• 21:47Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, so I have the 10 gigabit for like, some things. But I don't have any devices currently using 10 gigabit. A lot of it is is kind of future proof for me, where when I'm buying things, I want to make sure. But like, what I will be doing is connecting the Mac Studio to 10 gigabit. I will be getting a better Cal-digit or a dock that has 10 gigabit as well. But one thing that I did upgrade on my NAS was I got a Ugreen Ethernet to give me at least 2.5 on my NAS, because the 5 is just 1 gigabit. So if you do this Ugreen

• 22:26Scott Tolinski?

  adapter, and then flash a firmware on it, you can get 2.5 on the Synology. So at least get a little bit better speeds there. Do you want me to talk about my router and stuff in general, but or just like my network switch?

• 22:40Speaker 01

  I mean, if that's something you want to share, sure. I mean...

• 22:42Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. So router, I am running a mesh network that's a Wi-Fi 7, and it is the Arrow Wi-Fi 7 Max. This is a really super good router, although it is, it's Amazon. And there's a subscription service that they have for like, oh, a VPN and ad blocking and stuff, which you know, it's, it is what it is. But it is Amazon. And the beef there is that, well, they're upselling you on a lot of stuff. Because it's Amazon, it's not like, open, you know. I don't like that. I would prefer if it was not that. But this is a really good router.

• 23:26Scott Tolinski?

  And it has 10 gigabit ports on it and stuff. And man, the Wi-Fi 7 speeds are crazy. So it's a really fast. And Wi-Fi 7 is crazy fast. And I do have a lot of Wi-Fi 7 devices in my house. And I have three mesh routers. So I have like, full blanket coverage. It's important because like, my office is detached from our house. It's, you know, a ways away. I am connected wireless or wired underground, though. So I do have Ethernet run underground in my office. So I do have, a lot of our network stuff lives in the house. And then some of the home lab stuff all lives in my office. So I do have that connected, wired.

• 24:11Scott Tolinski?

  But man, yeah, the Amazon router thing rubs me the wrong way in general. But because it's such a good, fast router, I decided, you know what, I'll go the low management side of thing. And honestly, the software side of it is very good in terms of like, I've had other routers in the past, that you get into the software side of things, and you can't manage. I can do anything I would want to do in this app and system. So it feels good to me. You know, as far as like, creating guest networks, or creating, you know, this specific type of network, maybe I want like, an IoT network or something like that. I can do all of that inside of here, no problem. And it auto updates itself overnight and

• 24:53Scott Tolinski?

  everything like that. So it is very nice. It's a nice system. Yeah.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  It makes total sense. I think if you're comparing and contrasting our two approaches, like, my approach took me months to figure out, and decide, and configure, and plug all together. And so if you're at home and wondering what you should do, it really comes down to like, being a home network admin is a part-time job, basically. Like, I need to, I need to make sure that like, my, I mean, my wife depends on the network as well. So like, I gotta make sure the network's up, and things are working, and things are fast. And if you're using off-the-shelf stuff, most of the time, you don't have to do too much to make sure that it just, it just works.

• 25:32Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Ideally, I would like to just throw a Pi-hole in here as well. But I haven't done that yet. So.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  I will say, at this point, I think I have six months of uptime. So like, no downtime. Internet hasn't gone down.

• 25:44Scott Tolinski?

  Better than railway. Yeah.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Exactly. So at this point, I've got it dialed. But it was a process to get there. There were a couple of weeks where things were up and down. And my wife was pretty mad at me. But, you know.

• 25:55Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah, I would, I would personally, I would not use the ISP's router, man. The Sentrylink with fiber, they were like, really trying to make you use their router. And but you can just call it. What key is that? Do you know what it's called? When you get the, you get a key from them?

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Well, as I remember it, it was, it's the PPOE username and password.

• 26:18Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, that's what it is. PPOE username and password.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Like, so I was on Sentrylink as well. They got bought by Quantum. So that's what I'm using now. And then the Quantum modem like, supports it out of the box. You don't need the PPOE username and password anymore. Yeah, you basically can just plug right in, and it'll work. But like I mentioned earlier, you can also go into the settings and set it up as bridged mode. And that will give you basically direct, direct access. Yeah.

• 26:43Scott Tolinski?

  So Quantum, I looked into Quantum, because I only have 2 gigabit, or 1 gigabit, from Sentrylink. And Quantum is the same price for 2, like, right? But when I talked to them, they wanted to install, permanently install a box onto my wall. And my, my entry point is in my living room. Like, like TV and that, like, you're gonna install something right there, sitting on the side of my TV, totally ruining the aesthetics of my living room? I'm not, I'm not gonna do that.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  I will say, it probably depends on the tech who's installing. But the guy I got was super cool. Because I was like, I was like, here's my whole setup. You can see my server rack. I have my whole setup. Where do we put this thing? And he was, and my server rack has holes on the side. So I was like, can you just zip tie it to that? And he was like, sure. And then when he was on the way out, he was like, yeah, at this point, you can actually do whatever you want with it. Technically, you're supposed to leave it. But he was like, we don't care, as long as it's plugged in. So. I guess it might, yeah, it might depend on the tech. I don't know.

• 27:39Scott Tolinski?

  I know. I like to call, I called them. I even had somebody scheduled to come over and I was like, "So you really gotta install this thing on my wall?" They're like, "Yep." I'm like, "There's no way around that? Nope." I'm like, "Oh, okay. I'll pull the plug then and say no."

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:51Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  So we talked about hardware and network. So like, how does the internet get into our house? Where's everything running? Let's talk about how we get access to all of our services. So things like domain names, tail scale, that different kind of stuff.

• 28:07Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Do you want to kick it off?

• 28:09Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, yeah. So I've been using TailScale for a while. What tail, people will be like, "Oh, just use WireGuard," which is like the protocol for devices, like a VPN protocol. I'm not an expert. But TailScale just allows you to set it up easily. You can have multiple users. You can have all kinds of access rules. Like, if I want to add something to my TailScale, I have to go through several approval processes and give it exact access to which machines it has access to, and it gives me that control over it. So I put everything on TailScale. I even put my Steam machine and Steam Deck on TailScale. I literally put everything on there so that way I can connect to anything outside of my, my normal network. When I'm away, it makes it really easily.

• 28:53Scott Tolinski?

  If I'm away from my own personal network, I still have TailScale to connect anything to anything to anything, at least which I have set up and configured. So I love, I love, a huge fan of that, that project, huge fan of that product. And I do pay for the, I think it's like even like five bucks a month, Molevad VPN exit for TailScale, which means that if I'm connected to TailScale and the VPN or the Molevad is turned on, then I just get a Molevad VPN sitting in front of all my network traffic on any device. And that's nice. It's cheap, works easily. And then for accessing things on my own local network, I use Caddy for domains and SSL.

• 29:37Scott Tolinski?

  So all of my home services, regardless of what device they're running on, they have a domain that I have specifically set. And because I have CloudFlare pointing the DNS to my TailScale network, I don't have to mess with hosts files on anything, right? Like especially like my wife is on TailScale, my kids are on TailScale. I want them to be able to visit my Jellyfin server at a domain instead of typing in an IP address with a port.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:11Scott Tolinski?

  I want to, I want them to be able to do that easily enough. Or share services like our agent, which we'll talk about. But like, I just want them to be able to access all of that. But then obviously if anyone else were to try to visit those, it would not allow them to visit. Because they're not on my TailScale network. Yes.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so I have a similar setup. But I think the, this is the key piece of figuring out the home lab here is because like, let's, you're hosting everything in your house, but sometimes you're on vacation and you want to access some of your services.

• 30:41Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Before something like TailScale is pretty tricky. Like you would have to set up like a VPN on your home network and.

• 30:47Scott Tolinski?

  Or I was tunneling everything. I was using CloudFlare tunnels for everything. Yes.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  And, and then when you're doing that, you're potentially exposing it to the internet. So like anybody that knows the tunnel address could get to it.

• 30:58Scott Tolinski?

  Then you put, you put, whatever the CloudFlare access control is, and then you gotta do like three logins to get into any of your services. Yes.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. So this is, this is the way for sure. And so I have a similar setup where basically every service in my house, so we'll talk about all the apps that we're running, but every single one has a subdomain for a domain that I bought. But those domains point to local IP addresses. I do this with Caddy and CloudFlare because with a CloudFlare, if your domain is hosted there, they actually let you create SSL certificates for domains that are pointed to local IP addresses. So normally, when you're getting an SSL certificate or TLS certificate, with something like Let's Encrypt, they need to ping that IP to make sure that this is the same server and the server that you're allocating this TLS certificate for is the same server.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  But if you try to point it at a local IP address, like 10 dot 0 dot 0 dot whatever, or 192 dot 168 dot 1 dot whatever, Let's Encrypt is not going to let you do that out of the box. So you can use the CloudFlare plugin for Let's Encrypt, put your domain on CloudFlare, and now you actually can create TLS certificates for local addresses, like 10 dot or 192 dot.

• 32:16Scott Tolinski?

  And so, like, so I have my SSL stuff being done through Caddy. Is, is that approach different? You're, you're.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  No, it's, it's the same. Yes. But Caddy is using Let's Encrypt. Like that's their default.

• 32:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Right. But why do it in CloudFlare instead of in, in Caddy? Just.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  The CloudFlare allows me to use local IP addresses.

• 32:36Scott Tolinski?

  Gotcha. Yeah.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  So, so, yeah, to clarify, in CloudFlare, I have one setting that says, star dot mydomain.com

• 32:44Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  points to my network. That's, that's the only thing that I have set up inside of CloudFlare. But then for each service, when a certificate needs to be provisioned, it actually has to ping CloudFlare to say, "Yes, you own this domain." And yes, I'll point it at a local IP address. That's the only connection there.

• 33:03Scott Tolinski?

  Okay. So maybe I have that set up and I don't even know it because an agent did it for me.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  I think you might also be pointing yours at TailScale IP addresses, not local IP addresses.

• 33:10Scott Tolinski?

  Okay. So that's, yes, correct. Okay. That is one.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  And like technically, I mean, I don't know the intricate details of TailScale, but I do believe that those IP addresses, they're not exactly private. Like you still, you can only access them when you're on the TailScale network, but it doesn't fall into the same private IP address range, like 10 dot whatever or 192 dot whatever.

• 33:32Scott Tolinski?

  Gotcha.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  And I'm guessing there's some kind of TailScale plugin for Caddy so that it can know that you have access to that specific tail net, that specific IP address range, I'm guessing.

• 33:43Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Okay. Sick. People who don't know this, the, the local domain thing is just so clutch. Even for my, all my dev services, every, every single dev service, every dev server that I have running when I'm working on projects, everything has a domain and an SSL. So that way you can get a secure context in dev on Safari, which you need for auth and all kinds of stuff. So, yes, it's nice. And then you don't have to worry about weird IPs and stuff. I can just load it up on my phone and it works like a normal website. So.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. And the other piece here is like having Caddy as kind of like the, the load balancer or the entry point. Like I have one Caddy server with like 20 different entries that all point to different things that are on my home lab. But that one server is in charge of provisioning the SSL certificates and then routing traffic to all of the various services.

• 34:36Scott Tolinski?

  Mm-hmm. Yep. Cool. All right. Let's get into network, area of storage, NAS, and storage in general. I mentioned that I have a Synology. It is like the kind of classic DS1 918 plus. My God. 918 plus. This is like, kind of like the classic starter NAS in terms of it's expensive, but it is like four drives. When it came out, it was powerful enough to do video encoding on, although they've since like changed that in the OS, I believe. And I threw, over time, I've had this for a long time now. I've just kind of upgraded drives here and there.

• 35:21Scott Tolinski?

  And I'm now at 40 terabytes. And I, it's, it's pretty sick. I have offline backups with BackBlaze, using the Glacier storage. And I, I really like my Synology. I used to run a lot of software on it. CJ, like I used to run like Plex or, or MB. I used to run a ton of stuff on it. But I've since moved most of that software to the Mac Mini and then just letting the Synology handle storage and then a couple of software pieces that I don't feel like moving.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I think for anybody getting into this, that's actually one of the one-stop solutions. Or there's similar products out there like that where, yes, it's your NAS, but it also runs Docker containers and can run all of those services directly. So like, I think if you're just getting started in the home lab space, a device like that is really good to get up and going because there's not a lot of configuring that needs to be done. You just plug in some drives, you've got network storage, and then you can host services. But yeah, similar to you, I separate my stuff out.

• 36:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. And I, I have mine pretty locked down in terms of there's all kinds of like access software built into the Synology, like QuickConnect or any of that stuff. And I really went through the process of like making sure I, one, don't have any of that stuff turned on. You can only access this thing through keys or via my, my home network and the, and the UI. But again, like.

• 36:56Scott Tolinski?

  I don't want my NAS exposed to the internet in any regard.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 37:00Scott Tolinski?

  So, yeah, yeah.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's one of the things you like, if you turn that service on, it basically allows you to access your NAS from anywhere in the world, which can be convenient, but if you're anywhere in the world, anybody else in the world could try to hack into your NAS.

• 37:13Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, yeah, so like really, and also like having individual users per file store, whether that's my syntax folder or level up folder or whatever, like really scoping access to what individual services cannot, you know, access what, turning off admin, those types of things.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  And I guess, how do you access that storage on your various devices? Do you mount like a drive on your Mac that has direct access to it? Or how are you connecting them up?

• 37:38Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I do that and I have each, I have several drives broken out, whether that's the media and anything like that, each with its own access. And yes, I do mount those. I have them set up to auto mount on my MacBook Pro. And then so, which was all, that was a pain, man. I was running into so many situations where like the auto mounting wouldn't work and then stuff wouldn't be available or my Mac mini restarts. And now suddenly I gotta go log in there and manually reconnect all my drives. So, yeah.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Nice, so my setup is again pieced together. I mean, I think the theme of my setup is like I spend way too much time and then

• 38:21Speaker 01

  ultimately I'm paying, I'm not, I'm not using any hosted services or paying anything, but I, all my time got sunk into actually setting it all up.

• 38:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is funny because like, yeah, I went with a lot of off the shelf products, but a lot of it is because I just didn't want to manage it at the time. Like I said, I've had this, I've had this Synology for a long time. So like when I made that decision, I might make that decision differently today with better controls and tools and AI to help me like understand what connects to what or whatever, because I'm not a networking expert and I never have been. But at the time, this just seemed like the best option.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Definitely, and so my NAS, my storage setup is two different devices. So I talked about it at the beginning, but I have this RAID array and this is not network attached. So it literally is just a box that you put up to four hard drives inside of. And then it's called, it's what's called hardware, hardware RAID. So there's actually like a switch on the back where you say what RAID should be. It configures all of that. And then when you plug it in, it just shows up as a single device. I guess we haven't really talked about like what RAID is. Basically RAID is a redundant array of independent disks and it allows you to take multiple disks and turn them into like a single disk

• 39:41Speaker 01

  with various forms of redundancy or mirroring. And we won't get into it here, but basically you decide how do you want to mirror? How do you want to be redundant? Or how do you want to have parity data? So like if one drive fails, you don't lose all of your data. That's the kind of thing that RAID gives you. So I have four 10 terabyte drives in here and I'm using RAID 1.0, which means I only have 20 terabytes of actual storage. But that means I can lose a drive, like a drive can fail and I don't lose any of my data. I can swap the drive in, it'll rebuild and I'm, and I'm good to go. But this is just a USB C. So any device that I want to do what I call cold storage on,

• 40:26Speaker 01

  I'll plug this in, drop all the like media files or whatever else I'm trying to back up, unplug it and then it just sits on my rack unplugged. That to me is going to make the hard drives last a whole lot longer and it's not just like spinning all the time. So that's my cold storage. And then my hot storage where all of my media is, is this little B-Link device. It's pretty slick. It has six M.2 ports inside of it.

• 40:51Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Basically, it's like a vertical machine. And then on both sides, there are three spots for M.2 drives to plug into. And then the center stack is the cooling stack. So that's where it has like a fan. But I have three, four terabyte drives on one side and then three, two terabyte drives on the other side. And those are set up as two different storages that I can connect to and save stuff onto. I will say I got in right before the increase in price on everything. Like if you were to try to build this same thing right now.

• 41:18Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, man, I did too on my, on my M.2 caching layer, which maybe I should talk about.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the four terabyte drives now are like almost a thousand in some places or more. I think I paid about three, 400 for each of the four terabyte drives. That machine, this little B-Link that has all six of those SSDs in it, is running Proxmox. So even though I don't have, I'm not actually running any virtual machines on this or anything like that, Proxmox has one of the best ways of setting up a ZFS pool, which is a software way of taking multiple disks and turning, turning them into a single drive. And so I have Proxmox running on here, ZFS pools, and then those are available on my network via Samba. So Samba is like an old, older Windows technology, but basically every machine speaks it.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  And so any machine on my network that wants to store stuff on this driver or read data from it mounts it as a Samba drive. The other piece of this is I'm also running a piece of software called Cockpit, which is from the Fedora team, but you can run it on pretty much any Linux operating system. And it essentially is like a web dashboard for managing that Linux system. But one of the main reasons I use it is they have a really nice way of configuring your ZFS pools, like deciding which disks go into a specific pool and then also deciding which SMB stores you want to make available. And you can also manage all of your users from there. So it's a bit of a wonky setup because like technically I probably could just be using

• 42:53Speaker 01

  something like Fedora with Cockpit instead of like Proxmox with Cockpit. But, you know, I, I've tried all these various things.

• 43:01Scott Tolinski?

  And when you build this stuff, it's like you're getting one thing at a time. And then, you know, if you were building out the system from scratch at the very start or whatever, choices that you make might be different along the way, right? Like, yeah.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  But it gives you pages to manage your firewall. You can see, you can actually access your terminal directly. You can manage your ZFS pools, that kind of stuff. That one device holds all of my movies, music, books, all of the media that I consume from the apps that we'll, we'll talk about in a second. All of that lives on that drive. And then any machine on my network can mount it and read and write from it.

• 43:37Scott Tolinski?

  Sick, I'll show my RAID setup real quick if you don't mind.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:41Scott Tolinski?

  Because I didn't describe this very well, folks, sorry. So I'm running four drives, two 14.6 terabyte drives, two 12.7 terabyte drives. It's just the order in which I acquired them is when it is. So I have via the Synology has like their proprietary RAID, which is the Synology Hybrid RAID. Because of that, that's how I have the 40 terabytes available. So I obviously have more storage in my drives than that. But the way that the Synology Hybrid one works is so that you can pull one drive out, put another one in and it just automatically repairs itself. But again, I have fault tolerance for one drive. So if one drive fails, if two drives fail, I might be in trouble.

• 44:26Scott Tolinski?

  But if I get a message, because I got alerts for all that, if I get a message that one of my drives is having problems, I'm on it. So, you know, obviously something could catastrophe, but I do have offsite backup as well. And then I have this SSD cache storage as well for two terabytes. Well, two terabytes raided to one terabyte. And so, yeah, same thing, just M.2 plugged into the bottom of the Synology or whatever, cache drives in there just for a fast caching. Because man, these NAS drives are slow.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:01Scott Tolinski?

  And we're used to SSDs, so I couldn't have that. But yeah, that's what I'm running.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  And so like the nature of spinning disks, they're going to be slower. And so this cache layer makes it so that like when you access a file, puts it onto the cache, keeps it hot. And then if you're not accessing it anymore, like it removes it from the SSD, so.

• 45:19Scott Tolinski?

  Yep, cool. All right, let's talk about container management. We got a little bit into CJ's Proxmox. I'm, I'm running a couple of things for containers. The Synology itself has software for, it's called a container manager and it just allows you to manage your containers. That's how I manage all the containers on my Synology. And then I also have on my Mac mini, I run OrbStack to manage my containers, which is basically just like easy, modern kind of container management, just replacing Docker desktop for me. But I don't have an advanced system. I just put everything into OrbStack and yeah, that's what I've been doing for a little bit here.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, makes sense. I wouldn't call mine advanced. It's just I want to be able to access and manage my stuff from the web browser. So that's what both Proxmox and another tool I use, Portainer, give me access to. So with Proxmox, like I mentioned earlier, you can create virtual machines from the web browser. You create machines, configure them, decide how much hardware they get or whatever else. But Proxmox also supports containers. So in the same way that you would create a new virtual machine, you can create a new container, choose what image it should be and then that thing will boot up. I actually don't use the containerization part of Proxmox. I just use it for virtual machines. And then on each of those virtual machines, they each have like eight CPUs between 16 and 24 gigs of RAM. And so each of those virtual machines is a very beefy machine itself.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  And then I actually run Docker on each one of those. And so then I have containers running on each one of those virtual machines. When you have lots of containers, you want to manage it in some way, right? Docker PS will only get you so far. And so one of the tools I use is called Portainer and you install this on any machine that has Docker running. You could even install it on your desktop if you want to. But this gives you a web dashboard where you can see all of your running containers and it just gives you a web GUI of being able to launch new containers. You can add what's called a registry where people post like all of their. Docker compose examples of various types of setups. So like later on, we're about to talk about all of our various services.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  So things like Jellyfin or Audio Bookshelf, like these types of services that you would want to set up. People have created Docker compose files that are kind of just ready to go. And then you drop them onto Portainer. It spins up those containers and then they're, they're starting and running. And so Portainer is really nice to have that web way of managing everything. And then very similar to Proxmox, Portainer allows you to have multiple instances on multiple servers. And then you can have a single dashboard to manage all of them.

• 47:53Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  And then the last piece is I use a tool called Thermix for SSHing into all of my, my servers.

• 48:02Scott Tolinski?

  Cool.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  And I've heard, I've heard you talk about a similar thing before, Scott, but this, this kind of gives you that. But basically I have Thermix running in one of those containers on one of those virtual machines. But this is also a central management point for any server that I very often SSH into. And so basically, again, this gives you a web dashboard, but you can run any sort of command from the web dashboard and directly access any of those servers that you want to directly manage. And they also have a mobile app. So if you want to SSH into your servers from there as well, that's another, another way to do it.

• 48:33Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Sick. Man, that rips very, it is so funny. I love, this is why I'm so excited to do this episode. I'm learning so much from you right now, stuff I didn't even know. Like I know Portainer existed and stuff, but a lot of this, like I said, I'm not like a network pro. So for me, it's like, where does this fit into? How does this fit in, you know? Let's talk about home automation. I, we did a whole episode, Wes and I did on this stuff before, so we can go through pretty quickly on this. I do run Home Assistant. It runs on a Raspberry Pi via Home Assistant OS. It's just kind of always there and I connect everything to it in my, my, my house. I have personally replaced just about all of my switches with Lutron Casada switches, both dimmers and otherwise. They're awesome. They work great.

• 49:18Scott Tolinski?

  Everything is, is very automatable and Home Assistant. And because of that, it's really nice. And my wife hates it when the lights in the kitchen turn off at seven o'clock when she has friends over or whatever. But what I need to get is a millimeter wave present sensor in there and stuff like that. But I do run quite a bit of that and I do love my Home Assistant setup. I'm tweaking it all the time. I do have a number of different temperature sensors. I have an EcoB thermostat, those types of things. But the one thing I've really been liking is getting these devices that are made like out of ESP devices and stuff. So a company that does this is Apollo Automation.

• 50:03Scott Tolinski?

  They make these 3D printed little, like little shell devices that are, I don't know. I think they're maybe hand-built, but either way, these things are great because they don't come with any software. They don't make you install some shitty app from China. And you, they're pretty much made to just connect automatically to Home Assistant. And they have things like, oh, they have an audio casting unit now? That's interesting. I haven't seen that. But I have their air quality sensor and it's so good because what I really wanted out of an air quality sensor wasn't just like, wasn't just CO2 and stuff like that, of which is important to have. This thing does like particulate.

• 50:43Scott Tolinski?

  It can, you know, look for mold in the air and it's really, really super good for the price. And because they are not coming with software, not coming with subscriptions or, you know, all of that, you can get much better prices on the devices. So I really like this little Apollo Automation. And that's pretty much what I run there. I recently, as of like this week, got my Wyze cams flashing. And this is even the Wyze Cam V4, which they just added support to. I've been flashing the thing, thingo?

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Thingo?

• 51:20Scott Tolinski?

  Thingano, Thingano. I've been flashing the Thingano firmware to them all. So that way I can use them outside of the Wyze stuff. And then I did set up my Frigate software, which allows you to connect these cameras and then have recording going to my own stuff rather than somebody else's servers or even the SD card. So it is running kind of 24/7 on my system and then saving it to my NAS, of which I have a ton of space on. So now I can run automations to that through Home Assistant, present sensing and that type of stuff directly from the Wyze camera. So that's something that's in progress right now. So far, the, the process has been really smooth, especially with having Claude Code to walk me through some of it

• 52:04Scott Tolinski?

  in terms of like flashing, which is, is really pretty minimal. You just, you know, flashing the firmware to the micro SD, popping it in there, turning the camera on and it handles the rest. So really pretty nice.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  Nice. Yeah. I want to look into that as well. Cause I've been looking at Frigate for the longest time and then just have never set it up. Cause I had several Wyze cams as well, but I think that's going to be my next project.

• 52:27Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. I just did it. Now I'm, I've only done two cameras, so I'm, I'm ready to do the rest of them.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  Nice. I would say, so my, for my home automation, I have Home Assistant running as a virtual machine on that Proxmox server that we talked about earlier. So Home Assistant gives you various ways to install it. Like one way is like a Raspberry Pi direct image. They also have a, a ready to go virtual machine image that you can run on, on Proxmox. So that's what I have running there and everything's connected in. And just like Scott, I try my best to find things that are not tied to the cloud. And so every room has a smart switch in it, like installed directly into the wall. And those, I actually don't remember the exact brand that I got, but essentially when I'm searching for this stuff,

• 53:11Speaker 01

  I look for things that have firmware called Tasmata or, or ESP Home. They're both very similar projects where essentially there's like an ESP32 inside and it has firmware that's ready to go and, and will automatically be able to connect to your Home Assistant. And so these Matter smart switches I'm showing on Amazon right now are like 20 bucks. And this would work, like this is not tied to the cloud in any way. You can install these in the rooms and then they'll connect up to your Home Assistant and it's all local to your house. Another brand that I like to use is called Kauf. So anywhere I have like a bulb, not necessarily a switch, but a bulb that I want to control. These Kauf, Kauf bulbs, K-A-U-F are, when I bought them, I think they were maybe 10 bucks a piece.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  But again, you don't have to do anything crazy because they ship with ESP Home and you can put Tasmata on them and they're ready to just plug right in. One other thing I do is I have these GOVI temperature sensors. These are interesting because they tell you, you should install an app. And then the app is like some Chinese app and it's like you're sending your temperature data to China.

• 54:17Scott Tolinski?

  There's so many of that app that is like the same app cloned a billion times, like Smart Home or all this stuff. And every time if it tells you install, I'm like, first thing I'm like, no, bro, no.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. But the cool thing about, so this, this one is this, this three pack is the one I got. So it's 35 bucks and it comes with three sensors. They each have humidity and temperature on them and they keep track of like min and max temperature. But they are just Bluetooth devices. So they are constantly just sending over Bluetooth, what is my current temperature? What is my current humidity? And so you don't need to use that China app. You can use an ESP32 or a small Raspberry Pi running what's called a Bluetooth proxy on it. And all of that comes from like Home Assistant. And so Home Assistant has an integration for the Bluetooth proxy. That Bluetooth proxy just sits in my living room and slurps up the Bluetooth of all of these devices.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  And so I turn them on, link them in the Home Assistant dashboard. And now I have temperature sensors like in every room and like on my porch, but they're, they're just Bluetooth. It's not like Z-Wave or, or any of those other things.

• 55:23Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Which I'm running like everything. I'm running Z-Wave. I'm running Matter. I'm running all that stuff. Yeah. Just to support everything.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Right. And I think if, if I could find cheaper, like these devices are like less than 10 bucks a piece. It's very hard to find cheap, like cheaper Z-Wave or B, I get, what was the other one? B, is it B-Link or B?

• 55:42Scott Tolinski?

  B-Link, uh, B-Link is the, um, is B-Link the company? What is the protocol?

• 55:49Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. But these various like wireless protocols that you can get on, on devices. But yeah, this, this was a fun one, the, the temperature. And then my lock that, when I bought the house, it actually have it was a Z-Wave device. So you can unlock it and lock it. And there is an integration for Home Assistant. And all I had to do was get like a little Z-Wave USB that plugs into my server. I then mapped that USB into the VM. And now my Home Assistant is able to connect to Z-Wave devices and, and everything else. So.

• 56:22Scott Tolinski?

  Zigbee. You're thinking of Zigbee.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  Zigbee. Yeah.

• 56:24Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  And I do have a, some, another thing I have in my house is, oh, my thermostat is actually Zigbee. And again, that my house came with it, so just using that one.

• 56:37Scott Tolinski?

  Your house came with it. That's cool.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:40Scott Tolinski?

  Sick. Oh, man. Yeah, I love all I could geek out on the home assistant stuff forever. Because I got so much running on mine. I have like an automation that plays our family music playlist, like our dinner music playlist, which is a highly curated 600 song playlist of all kinds of stuff for dinner every single night. So when we're gonna eat dinner, we get a nice little, all of the speakers around our house start playing at the perfect volume of random songs from this playlist and stuff. It's the best. I love all the automation stuff. Let's talk about like apps and stuff that we're running, services that we're running, because I know CJ, you're running a whole lot of stuff. Some of the stuff we're running the same stuff. But for media, I have been running Jellyfin and Plex side by side. Reason being is that

• 57:24Scott Tolinski?

  I was running to some issues with the Plex offline downloading and I've just been, I was so wrapped up into Plex. I was like, you know what? I got Plex on my TV. I didn't want to flash all this stuff to my my Tizen TV for Jellyfin, but I've I've since been working with Jellyfin pretty much primarily lately. And I do really like Jellyfin in those regards and being able to customize it and that type of stuff. There are some things I don't like about both systems, like how collections work and how media and movies or whatever, all that stuff works. Like, none of these media services really are the way that I want them to just just work, like point it at my thing and have it work like Netflix type of deal.

• 58:05Scott Tolinski?

  Like, there's so much management setup and all of this stuff, but I do really have my Jellyfin and honestly, my Plex pretty dialed. And yeah, I really like it. I did install, end up installing a custom app on my on my TV for Jellyfin. So that's how we watched that, which was a whole process in itself. I run Audiobookshelf, which is a great app for audiobooks. It is kind of like the Plex for audiobooks. It's very wonderful. The mobile apps for it aren't great, but there's a ton of third-party ones. And since vibe coding has been a thing, people are vibe coding Audiobookshelf requests a whole ton. And then I run Image for my media, for my photos as a

• 58:48Scott Tolinski?

  Google Photos replacement, even though I do still run Google Photos because my family's sharing Google Photos. So I got all my stuff in two places, which I don't love, but I do like having Image to do the backups automatically and everything instead of, you know, like having it backup locally, knowing that I could delete my entire Google Photos at any point and have it just work still. And then I am running a Minecraft server for a bunch of kids, of which we've just gotten into modding. So we're modding our server, we're doing all kinds of fun stuff to it. And yes, my, whenever I ping my agent about my Mac Mini struggling, it's always like, well, you have this Minecraft server, you should stop. And I was like, well, I can't stop it.

• 59:31Scott Tolinski?

  I got a bunch of kids gonna be texting me if I, you know, they're gonna be, my son has the Tin Can, which is like a, like a landline phone for kids. And like, the moment the server goes down, that thing starts ringing off the hook. Man, it's got the server down.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's great. Sweet. So I have a very similar setup for media. So yeah, Jellyfin for all of my movies, TV, but also music. Recently, I didn't even realize that Jellyfin supported it, but if you you throw your music in there, it pulls in album art cover and it has like a view for showing you're the track track lists and everything. And on Android, yeah, and on Android, I use an app called Finamp.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  Integrates perfectly and allows me to sync music. And so I actually don't access my Jellyfin server outside of my house.

• 1:00:20Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  But with something like Finamp, I can choose the albums I want, download, and then it works offline. And they also have like a CarPlay, not CarPlay, but Android Auto.

• 1:00:31Scott Tolinski?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I sync all my albums. So my albums live on that media server, the NAS server I showed earlier. Jellyfin reads it from there and then the Android app allows me to sync them locally. And so I can choose the albums I want to listen to this week and then not have to stream it from a server. All my movies, TV are there as well.

• 1:00:49Scott Tolinski?

  And Audiobookshelf does podcasts, like offline, local and offline podcast saving to save it to your your home network instead of downloading it and syncing it to your device or whatever. I don't use that very much. I do access my Jellyfin though off-network, but only on tail scale network. So I guess it's not off-network. Yeah.

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I didn't know Audiobookshelf did podcasts too. But yeah, Audiobookshelf has been a huge unlock. I'm listening to so many audiobooks now.

• 1:01:19Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I love it.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  Have you heard of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series?

• 1:01:22Scott Tolinski?

  I've heard of it. And it's it's one of those things that I would listen to or be into, but I just haven't, I don't know, I haven't had the the time for it, even though it's on my radar for sure. You like it?

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  But yeah, it's so the the narrator Jeff Hayes is so good. He does different voices. And in the studio that they're in also adds like sound effects. So like, it's a really immersive audiobook experience, but I'm on book six of Dungeon Crawler Carl, listening through Audiobookshelf. So again, there's also an Audiobookshelf app where you can download any audiobooks. Those stay on your phone. You don't have to stream them. And then you can listen to them just like you would with Audible or whatever else.

• 1:02:00Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, yeah, yeah, big unlock.

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  We haven't gotten too much into like, how do you get media? And I don't think we're gonna talk too much about it, but I will say, check into

• 1:02:08Scott Tolinski?

  I rip all my, I buy a DVD from amazon.com and then I rip it and then I use MakeMKV or whatever to turn it into media files. That's how I do it, folks.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  Definitely. And I do the same for CDs. But one thing to look into is an app called Sear. S E E R R dot dev. It's a media request management app. That's all I'll say. Look into it. But basically, it makes it much more seamless to get media if you're have multiple people in your house that want things on your on your media server. I'm gonna do a whirlwind tour of all the other media apps I have. So I have my my own RSS feed reader. I use Miniflux for that. I've talked about that in the past. I think we did a dedicated episode on RSS feeds, but yeah, I use Miniflux for that. And then I use an app called Wallabag for read later. So any article I find in my feed reader that I want to save, I save it, that syncs with Wallabag.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  And then again, I have a Wallabag app that can download articles, so I can read them offline. Both of those apps are running in a container on my machine that I talked about earlier. One app that I use running in a container is called TubeArchivists. So one thing that I've been wanting to do is like just have as much media as possible offline and not need the internet. And so TubeArchivists lets you point it at various YouTube channels and you can pick and choose which YouTube videos you want to save onto your media server.

• 1:03:26Scott Tolinski?

  Man, that rules. That's cool.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, we think about like other types of media, but we kind of just assume YouTube is always gonna be available. But I've gone through and like all my favorite YouTube videos throughout the years, those are on my my media server as well.

• 1:03:38Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, that's cool. I never seen that. Yeah, I use YouTube DL whenever I want something, but then like in the same regard. That's it breaks all the time. I'm annoyed with it. Or then I gotta click and drag and it's not automatic and all that stuff. Yeah.

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  And as far as I know, I think it uses that behind the scenes, but it basically gives you a web dashboard where you can pick which channels you want to back up. You can set automatic backup schedules, that kind of thing.

• 1:04:01Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, that rules. Yeah.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  And then the other thing is just like offline internet. So I have offline copies of Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, and then a ton of different Stack Exchange websites. So like Ask Ubuntu, Ask Computer Science. I forget what it's called, but it's like Ask a Veterinarian. There's an entire forum where people ask questions about pets and stuff like that. But I have backups of all of those. And those actually come from a service called Kiwix, K I W I X. So if you go to kiwix.org, you can learn about all the stuff that they do. But they run regular backups of Wikipedia and various other websites. And then you can download those as individual ZIM files. And so those ZIM files, again, are stored on my same media server, but that means I can access Wikipedia offline. I can access all these other things offline as well.

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  And then I built a couple of internal services. So I have what's called a ZIM Library Manager, where I can check to see, is there an update to this ZIM file? It's a much more streamlined browsing experience than what they give you on the Kiwix website. So I just have that running on my home lab where I can basically say, like, I always want to have the latest Wikipedia, download it when it becomes available. And it allows me to kind of search through all of the backups that they have to pick and choose the ones that I want as well. Because one of the other things that they offer are DevDocs backups, so fully self-contained offline backups of Node.js documentation and MDN documentation and all of those other services. So I've got a giant folder with hundreds of backed up websites that I can like, I can access.

• 1:05:34Scott Tolinski?

  That's crazy. I bet you're gonna, it's gonna come in handy for you when the entire internet goes down with all these hacks that are happening.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  Exactly. I'm preparing. This is my my doomsday, like, the internet will go down, but I'll also have internet in my house. One last piece, which is just good for managing a household, is an app called Paperless NGX. And this is just document storage. So you can upload PDFs, text files, Word docs, and then categorize them. And it just gives you a nice dashboard to manage all of them. But one of the main things I use this for is for all of my manuals for every device that I buy. So like my washer, my dryer, my my TV or any other like one-off device, my headphones, like the number of times I forget how to turn on, like do Bluetooth pairing for these like random headphones.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  And then I have to like search the web to find the the manual. I download the manual once, upload it to the server, and now I can instantly instantly search for it. So.

• 1:06:33Scott Tolinski?

  I have so many thoughts about that. I've been wanting to create a complete catalog of every single device, model, software version of everything in my house, which like to be able to work with any of them or have all that information at a glance or be able to to use AI to to modify them or, you know, hack them myself or whatever. So, man.

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  That's the way as well. Like, it's because a lot of the sites where you download manuals these days are just very scammy too. Like, there's just like ads everywhere and like they don't let you, like you have to use their site to download the manual. So Paperless NGX has been a huge unlock there because I don't have to go searching once I've once I know that I have the manual locally.

• 1:07:13Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  I think a lot of people use it for like, I don't do this, but you could use it for personal documents too, like tax documents or it's basically like a virtual filing cabinet. But it has like built-in indexing and search and things you would expect if you're storing all your documents on your home lab.

• 1:07:30Scott Tolinski?

  Ah, cool. Yeah, I've been doing it all via my own kind of like custom markdown thing that I've been building, but this seems pretty cool.

• 1:07:41Scott Tolinski?

  Ah, man, I'm getting so interested in everything you're doing here. All right, let's talk about AI coding agents. I have an agent that is running kind of all the time. That was initially based off of that personal device that I had. It's like the personal prompt device that I had. This is an agent that is running via PiDurable. And I set up a stream mode version where it like changes all of my to do names here. So none of these are, uh, none of these are real. Uh, but either way, I, it's like, it's the to do app of my dreams. I can put personal to do's in here. I can set their priorities and at any given point, if I want to have things blocked, they can block,

• 1:08:25Scott Tolinski?

  or I can send it to an agent to start work on and it just starts work on it instantly. And as part of that, I also have this document editor, which is really great. I, by the way, I'm trying to sell this sure KSM 32, if anybody wants it, they're expensive. Trying to find out what, what I can sell it for. Either way, it's a full on document editor that saves everything to markdown that has multiplayer. Uh, so my wife can use it. Um, and then it also has like, uh, agent integration directly in here. And every single tool I have in this has its own agent panel that I can chat with. And when I chat in this agent panel, it automatically, uh, references this document. So if I'm chatting with this agent, it's not a generalized chat. It's going to reference this document specifically.

• 1:09:08Scott Tolinski?

  Uh, or I also do have a general chat again, and this is all running through PiDurable. I have my calendar set up in here. I have auto fixing bugs and errors in here. And, um, there's a lot of stuff going on in this app, but again, it has, it has a chat that I can work with any document, any to do or ideas. Let's say I have an idea, I can jot it down randomly. I can reference it and this whole thing has web MCP. So my other agents can work with it or the agent inside of this can modify. It has tools to modify or update any docs, to do's or whatever. Man, I'm in love with this tool. So this is all built on PiDurable and this is my own personal agent. I also have been lately, uh, coding with T3 code over my network,

• 1:09:53Scott Tolinski?

  which is really nice because it, it's just like, I have everything running on my Mac mini and my MacBook. And I have found that I do really like the GUI side of things. I just do. I like the GUI side of things. I, I've tried it a whole bunch and in general I've moved back and forth on things. Um, and in fact, I am using something that I can't show you here too. That is a TUI based thing that's kind of like a Herter like, um, but also very, very good. Uh, we'll talk about, I'll talk about it more later, but I'm not at liberty to show right now. But I do really love some aspects of T3 code here. And I'm going to see if I can, um, show you what I'm talking about here.

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  So is T3 code like open source in the sense that you can serve it from your own server?

• 1:10:41Scott Tolinski?

  You can serve it from your own server. Um, and in fact, I'm not paying or connecting to anything. It uses any of the, the harnesses that I want. So I have, I can change from, um, anti-gravity to Copilot to Pi to Codex. Any of this stuff I want to change harnesses is just in here and it just works super well. One thing I really love about T3 code specifically is that it can render HTML in the output easily. So I have a, an AI, uh, it's a script actually that's, that's loaded in via skill that when an AI is responding to me and it needs my opinion, it styles it in HTML in this nice

• 1:11:24Scott Tolinski?

  interface to show me like, okay, what is the actual question you're asking me? What do you need from me? And then it also does this nice UI for my DEX, which is my task management for AI. So it can show me like where it's at in the tasks. And then I also have it kind of, this is just a demo. I'm like working on some new interfaces for it. But it also hides things behind like an accordion in here. So like, sometimes you know, like AI can give you this big old paragraph and you're just like, oh, bro, come on. I can hide things in a details and summary paragraph and it's all interactive. And that's just really nice. So this is one thing I really am missing when I don't use T3 code.

• 1:12:04Scott Tolinski?

  And it took me a lot to use this because, uh, well, I didn't, I didn't, you know, I didn't want to get into something like a deep, deep system like this. I was really happy with Herter. But I can open up a session on any of my machines at any given point on my personal network. I can send them to different harnesses. If I want to update one instance of T3 code and all instances of it, I just click a button and it updates it across all my machines. Same thing with my harnesses. I'm just clicking update with my harness, um, all that stuff and it just works. So, um, for coding, I am using Zed and I'm using Zed Remote to do any of my actual getting into the code side of things. So same deal there.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  This is dope. Yeah. The, what you showed in T3 code looks awesome. I guess that's, that's just a built in way. They have like, is it like custom card rendering that it taps into, that kind of thing?

• 1:12:59Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it's just HTML. Uh, just because it can render HTML in its output, I just instructed my agent to, um, have like a, a protocol in which it sends information to a script that generates the HTML that I want. And then that pops it in there. So it's not having to invent the UI every time. It's, it's a template that I made and then therefore it, because it has like direct inputs and outputs, it knows, okay, this is the format I need to send. And that's all just done via a global context, like a one sentence in global context. Use this template, output in this format, whatever. It's been working great. Yeah.

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's cool to see your, your to do app because like I also have my own custom to do app. I've seen so many, uh, posts on X too of people building their like, they're basically like life management app, but it's theirs. Like it's not, it's not something you're going to release to the world. It's like what you use and it works for your workflow. Cause I, I built a similar app for my wife and I to use. Yeah. Has like to do's and reminders and like a chat window. But it's for like the workflow that we have haphazardly put together that we've been tripping over in like, uh, a Google calendar and like Google Keep. But now it's in a one spot, solid spot. So that's really cool to see.

• 1:14:14Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. And you can share to do. So I can share to do with Courtney or I can have them just my own personal ones. They show up on your calendar so that you can drag them onto a specific day. I can add a lot of details to a to do. And then maybe I can, maybe I can have an agent chat with it or whatever. Um, again, the calendar, okay, good. This is all fake stuff. Uh, I was like, I want to show my whole calendar. So like I can have a to do on here and just drag it onto the calendar. So if I have something set to be the deadline today, I can say, ooh, I'm going to do this at this time, at this time today, or whatever. It's, um, really pretty sick. And then, um, so, oh, one cool thing I built in here CJ, uh, is I built a little repair UI tool. So I can click this and then let's say the UI is broken in any way.

• 1:14:59Scott Tolinski?

  I can just highlight it and say, um, here's what went wrong with it. So it's going to send an actual screenshot. It's going to send the DOM, the route and everything and say, oh, this sucks. Um, and then it's going to send that to a repair process on my own agent and then automatically merge it. So I like, it's made fixing this thing really easily. Um, yeah. Which is really important when you have software your spouse uses.

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's, I mean, that's the thing, like actually, like we've gotten in arguments because, not in arguments, but like I've gotten sad at like, I thought it was working and then it wasn't working.

• 1:15:32Scott Tolinski?

  The amount of text I get, oh, the AI chat is down, the AI chat is down. Oh, it is what?

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  Nice. So for my sort of setup, I've used open code for the similar purpose that you're using T3 code for. And so if you, if you're not familiar, open code has built in serve. So if you say open code serve, it used to be open code web, but now it's, I think it's just like default in open code two. Uh, that is just a background process that, uh, you can visit in a web browser and start up sessions and start coding with open code. And so, uh, one of the machines on my Proxmox server is a dedicated dev machine. So it's got the most RAM, the most CPU. And that is running open code. And then all of my projects live on that server and I just load up open code in the web browser and it's able to, to code on that specific server.

• 1:16:18Scott Tolinski?

  Mine are still split CJ. They, some are on my MacBook Pro and some are on the Mac mini. And that's only because that Mac mini has only got eight gigs of RAM and is underpowered. Yeah. This MacBook Pro 64 gigs of RAM. So it's like, I want to run things on my, my, you know, desktop, but like, it's just struggles. Yeah.

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  Definitely. And that's one of the nice things about having like a big beefy machine that you can change the amount of RAM or amount of CPU on the VMs. Cause so for

• 1:16:46Scott Tolinski?

  Wait, you can do that? You can change RAM on machines?

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

  Like you have to shut them down, but yeah, in the settings you can allocate more RAM or allocate more CPUs. And then when you spin them back up, they have more resources. And so for a couple of projects I was working on, it was running like a giant build, build process. And so, uh, that made sense to give it more RAM, give it more CPU for the amount of time that it was running that build process. But yeah, open code for everything. Like I mentioned earlier, there's that Thermix app. It lets me, uh, access any of my servers from the web browser and access their terminal. So that's also very useful. And then if you're running like local AI or you just want to set up like a local chat, even if you're talking to like cloud hosted, uh, AI, um, open web UI I have running on a server as well.

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  And this, this basically like, it gives you chat GPT, but you get to configure it yourself. You install whatever MCP servers you want. Um, you can add users, decide which, uh, AI services you connect to as well as like local AI, if you have those running. Um, and so this is kind of the way to do it without coding a custom dashboard.

• 1:17:52Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, like I have, yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, which, which I'm not downplaying because like it, it makes it better for the stuff that you want to do. But this is definitely more of like a drop in solution of, uh, you want to be able to chat with your local AI or even chat with cloud hosted AI, but set it all up in the way that you prefer. One that I haven't used a lot, but I've, I've tested is it's now called Vane. It used to be called, uh, perplexica, but it's basically like a self-hosted version of perplexity. Where you get a search box where you can type, it pulls in results and then it gives you back uh, answers based on those results using AI. Um, so it's a bit more of like a streamlined open web UI with all of this stuff built in where it can automatically like summarize search results and stuff like that. That can also run in your home lab.

• 1:18:37Speaker 01

  And then, uh, one of the other pieces of, of coding is I use the VS Code server. So there's a, a repo called code dash server. So it's github.com slash coder slash code dash server. And this is essentially just, uh, VS Code in the web browser. And so that same dev machine that is running open code, if I ever want to be able to see what files it's working on or whatever else, the code server is running there. I can choose the folder, I can navigate just like you would inside of VS Code, but it's running inside of the, of the web browser. So that makes it super convenient. And then the last piece is a GitHub repo called openai-owith. And so it's from Evan Zhao Dev.

• 1:19:18Speaker 01

  And the idea here is you can, uh, run this on a server, log in with, uh, chat GPT, with your chat GPT subscription, whether it's, um, like your Macs or whatever else. And then that server just stays running and can receive requests just like an open AI server would. And so that then allows you to plug that into any other service that needs open AI or like, or needs an open AI compatible server without needing to re-log in or create a API token. And so I have that running on one server in my home lab. I've logged into chat GPT once, and now any other service that needs AI can, can use that particular, uh, proxy.

• 1:19:59Scott Tolinski?

  Very cool.

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:01Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Man, uh, I love to hear your setup. It's, it's fun. And folks, what are you running? What are you, what are you doing in your home lab? You doing stuff? Uh, I want to know all about it. What are some stuff that we didn't talk about that you find interesting or whatever? Um, I don't have too much else. CJ, do you have anything before we get out of here? That's pretty awesome.

• 1:20:18Speaker 01

  No, I, I would also ask the audience to roast our setups. Like if I'm doing something dumb, let me know.

• 1:20:22Scott Tolinski?

  Don't roast my stuff. Yes. Yes, don't roast my head up. I'm not a network admin. Yeah.

• 1:20:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, but that's, I mean, that's the beauty of, of the modern era of you being able to use AI for this stuff. Like you don't have to be an expert. Like you can, you can fumble your way through it. You can use AI to help you. Yeah, but yeah, that's all I got.

• 1:20:39Scott Tolinski?

  Sick. All right. Cool. We, we will catch you in the next one. Thanks CJ for filling in for West Day.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Later.

• 1:20:47Scott Tolinski?

  Peace.