Jos Poortvliet from Nextcloud- HGG420
We had Jos Poortvliet this week from Nextcloud on the Podcast this week as we talked about why taking control of your data is important, how Mike uses Nextcloud in his setup and why you might want to consider it too. At the end of the show we talk a little Storj and Jim does a review of the Alxum 2 Bay Hard Drive Docking Station. I think you will enjoy the show.
Full show notes, transcriptions, audio and video at http://theAverageGuy.tv/hgg420
Join Jim Collison / @jcollison and Mike Wieger / @WiegerTech for show #420 of Home Gadget Geeks brought to you by the Average Guy Network.
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Jos Poortvliet
Head of Marketing
Review
USB3.0 Aluminum Hard Drive Docking Station with Offline Clone Function:
1. Offline Clone Progress indicator with LED: 25% – 50% – 75% – 100%;
2. Capacity of hard drive when Offline Clone: A＞B;
3. Sleep mode without operation in 30 minutes;
4. Support 2x 12TB hard drive, 2.5 inch and 3.5 inch SATA;
The link for Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07W7LHVY5
The link for website:
https://www.alxum.com/products/usb-3-0-hard-drive-docking-station-offline-clone
Jim Collison [0:00]
This is The Average Guy Network and you have found Home Gadget Geeks show number 420 recorded on October 24 2019. Here on Home Gadget Geeks we cover all your favorite tech gadgets that find their way into your home news reviews, product updates and conversation all for the average tech guy. I’m your host Jim Collison broadcasting live from the average guy TV Studios here in a beautiful Bellevue, Nebraska Mike, get a little chilly. Is it kind of nice to a little frost on the ground? I enjoy it
Mike Wieger [0:38]
We’re going to the Husker game this weekend. And I kind of like that perfect no where coat. You can get a little cold. That’s my perfect Husker. Game Day.
Jim Collison [0:46]
I enjoy it. It’s kind of nice. Not like maybe fall in Germany. Jos joining us from Nextcloud. Jos. What do you think if I lived in Germany, it gets a little chilly. You like fall i n Germany? Is it pretty beautiful?
Jos Poortvliet [0:59]
Well, I think does look good like we have nice few from our apartment looking out over well lots of trees and it’s all getting yellow and I like to view but when the end and have to go outside and it’s slippery of the leaves and cold and wet and you know the dog wants to go back inside so though I
Jim Collison [1:15]
That’s right, that’s right Berlin. I can’t I can’t imagine a beautiful or more beautiful time then fall German beer Berlin Christmas is coming It’s got to be great, right?
Jos Poortvliet [1:26]
Actually, I would say Berlin is more of a summer and spring city it’s it’s you know what you say? I think that’s more Munich you know, southern Germany. So better time I think for fall
Jim Collison [1:38]
You’re originally from the Netherlands. Any is Christmas pretty special in the Netherlands? Do they? Is that is that a good time to be there wintertime.
Jos Poortvliet [1:47]
It is but it’s the Germans Of course, who came up with the idea of Christmas markets and everything around that. So I would still stick with Germany copying it too. But
Jim Collison [1:57]
yeah, well, it’s it It’s a magical time and we’ve got great seasons here in Nebraska Of course, we post the show with world class show notes, and they’ll be a few of them out there. Here at the very end of the show, we’re going to do a quick product review and so some all the show notes will be available at the average guy.tv slash HGG 420 will get you there as well. Don’t forget you can join us live every week on our mobile app Home Gadget Geeks. com will get you there Android iPhone, it’s all available for you. It’s free. Just download it. We want to thank our Patreon subscribers who helped me pay for that and Spreaker who does it’s a bang up job of putting that mobile app together and it’s super easy. Don’t forget you can join us in the two groups Facebook at the average guy.tv slash Facebook on discord the average guy.tv slash discord we don’t make that too difficult to find. And so we want to have you join us as as well. Well, you’ve heard from him already. And Jos is joining us from next cloud us. I can’t pronounce your last name, so you’re gonna have to do that for me. But Welcome to Home Gadget Geeks.
Jos Poortvliet [2:53]
Hey guys, I’m really happy to be here and this Poortvliet and please don’t bother with it. It’s okay.
Jim Collison [3:00]
Well, we appreciate the path. I do appreciate that you told me right up in the pre show and we were doing that. That’s your like, you should probably not try and pronounce it. So So I appreciate you doing that. Give us as we get started, give us a little bit of your role and position and next cloud, how long you’ve been there some of those kinds of things just so we can get to know you a little bit.
Jos Poortvliet [3:20]
Well, I was there at the beginning. So June 2016. I’m one of the co founders and head of marketing today. Because you know, I was, well, the one who was willing to write blog posts when we started the company. And they are that’s essentially what I still do have a team now of course of people who help me, well write blogs and everything else that falls on the marketing.
Jim Collison [3:45]
That will the Nextcloud team has grown quite a bit. I was on the website today, getting your information and I just kept going through some kind of pages and pages and pages of folks. How many are there now? And are you guys kind of in a growth mode?
Jos Poortvliet [3:57]
Yeah, I think it’s about 40ish This year we didn’t grow our team that much. We have a bunch of positions open, trying to hire especially sales also marketing person actually, hopefully interview next week. But sales is hard. Engineers is much easier simply because we generally hire people from the community and our people to contribute. That’s it easy to hire people like that because you already know them. You’ve seen the faces that that’s you know, meetups that we organize a lot. And because everybody worked from home, essentially, in our company, it’s very easy for new people to to join. It’s an extension of the volunteer work they do, obviously, thanks, James a bit. When you get a paycheck, somebody can tell you what to do. So you do have to, you know, provide support for customers. But often the things that people worked on that they did as a volunteer, get extended into their their employment. And that’s of course a model that makes it easy for us to get new people on board and that makes it I know, it creates a nice community. Feel in the company as well.
Jim Collison [5:01]
Nextcloud kind of comes from and I think you can correct me if I’m wrong kind of lives and comes out of an open source community. Right That’s That’s right. That’s that’s a premise. That’s that’s an idea that’s held very dear, very close to it. today. You know, a lot of times when we do our podcast, we kind of get the history of things and then we work our way up to today. actually kind of want to start with today. Tell me a little bit like, what’s the best what’s your pitch for for Nextcloud today? Both when we think of enterprise and when we think of and we’re going to we’re going to use kind of Mike as an example to be for the for the average consumer. So let’s start with enterprise when you’re, you’re talking about your very best pitch for some of your spiel on why Nextcloud Why would I want to use you guys for for my storage.
Jos Poortvliet [5:52]
So I guess the strongest pitch is as a company, you want to stay in control of your data. It can be floating around all around in the clouds. And honestly, one of our favorite customers is one of these people who say, look, you know, we have a lot of data, people are working on it, but they’re sending it around by email, or they have to work on the windows network drive, which means it’s not available when they’re home or on their mobile phone. And we want the benefits of all these tools like Dropbox and Google Drive, and you name it, the benefits of working together with people in the clouds. But we don’t want to go to the cloud because we don’t want lose control over our data handed over to another company. I know contracts and all that stuff. But still, you lose quite a degree of control. You have a degree of vendor lock in that can be pretty severe with some vendors. We want to stay in control. Well, that’s essentially the premise of next cloud. This is what we offer. We give you all the benefits of online collaboration as a team, mobile clients sync clients, the whole thing in a very easy to use interface that’s definitely like consumer class, which is also something that’s actually pretty rare in the industry because well, we all know how to use like SharePoint can be less than optimal for normal human beings to work with. Being nice. I mean,
Jim Collison [7:20]
it was very good. I know. Everybody uses it. Nobody likes it. That’s the interesting thing.
Jos Poortvliet [7:25]
I didn’t want to say that. But
Jim Collison [7:27]
we will. But we will. Yeah.
Jos Poortvliet [7:28]
Fair enough. So for us, it’s really about to be easy to use. Yeah, I mean, our customers they say look, you know, sometimes they have for example, document management system. Now its next level document management system. It can do a lot of the pieces you have workflow tools and the x we have tags and search and this stuff is so primary what we do, however, we have quite some customers, we have document management system. And then it turns out that only the people in finance are willing to use it because you know, they can make a do their work. For our Somebody else’s like, this is too much work. This is not easy to use, it doesn’t do exactly what they want. And then they introduced X Files and then most people got the next files and maybe someday the finance department to. And so for a company it is about productivity, ease of use, but staying in control of your data. That’s the gist of it.
Jim Collison [8:23]
You know, you’re in Berlin, and we know you know, Germany is was a big driver behind GDPR and is been on the forefront of privacy. Does that does that bleed through it’s that way next cloud is what it is and does that idea of privacy and it’s your own stuff and does that bleed through talk about how that influences now
Jos Poortvliet [8:43]
you go through history because this is what what X Factor was initially started with, I mean, under an old name, etc. We can go back as far as you like in that regard. But the key was to give people individuals control over the data privacy and now company has no privacy. I mean, that’s that’s a concept for human beings not for corporations, which I still believe it was, at least not in Europe. And so the idea was to give private people away to do to control the data to protect the data and keep it from being while exploited, left and right. So we all know, I guess, these days with all the leaks, and all the bad news that’s coming out these days that even the biggest companies just fail to protect data of people. And even those who don’t fail to protect it, they fail to handle it responsibly. I mean, I think the biggest I don’t know I think one of the nastiest examples still is the action that Facebook did when you know you gave they asked for your phone number for two factor authentication, and then use that to get, you know, advertisement to you as well as to your family and friends and everybody else. I mean, that kind of stuff is just irresponsible honestly gives the whole tech industry a bad name. And that’s that’s plenty Facebook. That’s right, I suppose. But this kind of stuff is just nasty. And for individuals, that’s not how the internet was supposed to be. Right? We were all supposed to be in control of our own data. Now you guys are very much about home servers and staying in control of your data. So I think a lot of your listeners must kind of feel the pain when I say the internet isn’t what it used to be. And it’s all getting centralized. It all depends on four or five, six big tech companies that host and control 70 80% of the traffic these days. And, you know, when Tim started this idea, it was about being able to serve your own page. Now I get that not everybody can run their own server. Yeah, but there’s a middle ground between the incredible degree of centralization that we have today on an infrastructure that was designed to be decentralized, and everybody running around web Again, I know that’s not realistic. But even just having your day that local provider in the city of Berlin is big enough to actually have a Berlin provider that targets Berliners. And that’s cool, I think and that that means you can go there, you can talk to the people, look them in the eye and decide if you trust them or not drink a beer with them. If you are, if you don’t trust it yet, figure out what kind of people are have access to your data, because it’s just the reality that when somebody stores your data, they have access to it. I mean, I I can’t feed the people who claim to offer services that are end to end encrypted, but access through a browser, which usually really annoys the hell out of me, because when somebody sends code to your browser to be executed, and to locally encrypt something, obviously, that code could also just accidentally sent that encryption t maybe to another server because Maybe, even if they’re not evil, there might just be a court order that forces them to do that. So the idea of being able to encrypt stuff in your browser as just just kind of nonsense, I mean, sure, it’s a little harder to get it. But it doesn’t fundamentally change the fact that you need to trust the people who hosts your data. And that’s a lot easier to do with people you can go to talk to sit down with visit, than with people that are part of some huge corporation that regularly gets in the news for all kinds of stupid shit that I did. And that, you know, is under the pressure of shareholders to make more money every couple of months in Google, just others pricing to Gmail. Why did they do that? Were they about to go bankrupt and that they need to squeeze? Not exactly. They just have to show growth every year and there’s this pressure on every public company. And that means there’s a huge incentive for them. At some point to do something that you might not like, and Well, there you go control.
Jim Collison [13:05]
Yeah. And do you feel like, you know, GDPR and there’s some new regulations coming in California that will probably be falling across the United States, right? Do you think that is going to go far enough? Or do you think we’re going to need to even go even farther to get kind of back to an idea where you there is more control over it?
Jos Poortvliet [13:27]
That’s a good question.
In in Europe, right now, the term digital serenity is really hot. And I have already seen communication purportedly coming from industry, advocacy organizations, but my feeling was rather a mouthpiece of Microsoft. And the way they presented the subject of digital software and at the end and and what it is about of courses, Europe, and a lot of countries in Europe and people in Europe being worried that all the data goes to the US But of course, even in the US, you can say, are we in control of our data? Or are a couple of companies in Silicon Valley in control of our data. So even there, I think it is relevant term. And the way this was presented i thought was rather clever in an evil way, I’m a PR guy, I do PR, I can respect it when people do something really evil, but it’s still clever. And there’s a thing called an example of that. And the way they presented is that they said, Look, you know, you can have kind of a some kind of digital slavery, you know, you know, that control. You You have your date and it’s completely locked in at the fender and you have no choice. That’s of course, that’s fair enough big red mark next to it. Then you have digital serenity. You are in control. You choose where to put your data, but of course you pick the best choice, that will be Microsoft. And then tree will be digital autocracy, you are so adamant about being in control that you blindly pick the choice. That is not the best, of course. But that gives you 100% control. And of course, it also got the red mark. And I thought that was kind of clever. Because, well, first of all, it’s obviously a false dichotomy, right? I don’t believe that it is, by definition, so that, you know, the solutions of the big companies are better than the small companies otherwise, it would never be new companies. We’ve all seen history play out over the years. And well, I think SharePoint has came up, let me just leave it at that, when it comes to the quality of the solution. I mean, what keeps these companies in charge is market power. And while the fact that they can pull up and they can have salespeople for a single potential customer of ours that’s bigger than our entire company five times over. At that’s what keeps Companies buying these solutions. And well, that’s sometimes a bit frustrating. I do think that solution that that will rules laws like the GDPR help in this regard, they create awareness. At the same time, of course, the big companies are very much aware that there are risks and they will lobby the heck out of it. I think Facebook is now fairly worried about one of the potential democrats candidates for presidency. And well, that might not go as far as to influence the advertisements that get shown on the platform that would be particularly nasty, and they could and I think we all know that they could completely sway the elections if they just wanted to, which I think in itself is already scary. But they will certainly lobby, which is what every company of course, can do and does do as much in Europe and any other country in the world. And well, I think it’s a bit of a problem that that’s that’s much power is coming Right now, and I don’t really think that GDPR and these other privacy laws really solve that problem, because for that you would need data portability. He would also need, I guess, more incentives for people to pick an alternative. And there is, I mean, I’m still using email. Let me be honest and upfront here. Why? Honestly, I’m just lazy. It’s convenient. Right, exactly. And it’s installing. That’s right. It’s a pretty decent solid solution. And I’m a, you know, open source free software privacy. I could say activist, but let’s just say I promote that stuff. yet. I haven’t moved away from Gmail. Okay. So the problem isn’t necessarily as much a law as it also is, I think awareness and an important is given to this. And I think the companies that do offer alternatives can do a better job to That that includes us. Right? We tried to make it as easy as humanly possible to sign up to next files. And I can talk a little bit about that later what we’ve done in that area. I think that there’s also a big part of the solution for this. It needs to be easy.
Jim Collison [18:16]
Yeah, no. And so as we make a shift a little bit, you know, most of our audience we have a lot of sis admins. So we’ve got a lot of folks who can sympathize or know what you’re talking about are and are managing those either on prem or off Prem servers, right. So that’s an enterprise discussion, but we all control our own data and I and so for the rest of the time, we’re really going to spend a bunch of time kind of talking about in the in our space, the space, we control our home server space, however we decide to do that. In you know, in this community, we’ve got a lot of guys and gals who are still running from a terabyte to 100 terabytes and maybe more storage at home Mike, talk a little bit about because let’s kind of set this stage for where you’re at. And and yes, we will spend a little time you can kind of listen and hear where he’s at. And could talk a little bit about then the average kind of consumer in our space or one of our listeners. So Mike wanted to kick it off. Talk a little bit about how you’re using in a way you got it set up on.
Mike Wieger [19:16]
Yeah, so well initially for me when I wanted to switch over the the big, you know, pain points for me was, our whole family is an Apple family, right, so we’re on iPhones. And so we were just naturally using iCloud for a lot of our contacts, our calendars and things like that. And then for documents, we were kind of across the board, Hannah was still Hannah was actually using a little bit of iCloud just because it kind of just worked for her she’s really comforting. I had been using Dropbox previously for kind of a file synchronization having it everywhere. option so I kind of wanted to unify everything. And then for photos, we were both using I photo to you know, or sorry, the photo library through iCloud to sync everything and I was OK, we can unify this and I kind of became the same thing. A data control privacy kind of nut. And so you know, I switched to bit organize my password manager because I can self host it. And you know, the odds of them getting to my last pass were slim. But it’s just that last I want to host it right I wanted on myself, I trust myself. Yost was talking about I want to be able to talk to the guy who controls it. Well, I can have a great I talked myself all the time. So it’s great. I can sit here and chat with myself all day. And I trust myself maybe more than I should. Um, so those were kind of some of the factors data control, unifying our whole family on something. And then my wife also needed something that she could use. So she was a she’s becoming a professor. So she’s teaching a few classes, but she’s still working her full time job at the hospital. So she needed a way that she could do stuff at home and then go to work and still access it. And so I was like, okay, we can figure this out and next cloud had been selling our community had been talking about for a long time. It actually started with, you know, own cloud way back a long time ago when we first when I first started with you, Jim, like five years ago. Then it started to switch The next cloud and we had this conversation like, Okay, I gotta look into this. So my setup is I have an upgrade server in my home. It’s got, I think now only, like 28 terabytes in it used for a lot of different things just 28 that’s all you got. Well, you know, that doesn’t hold up now in our community, Jim, I’m not in the hundreds yet, so I gotta do some work to get that, that storage, but so I have unread and unread if you don’t know, everything pretty much runs through Docker. And so you’re using Docker for pretty much everything on there. So that is how I’m running bit Warden, Plex, and Let’s Encrypt as my reverse proxy. And then I use next cloud obviously and so I was okay, this is gonna be great. So I found a great tutorial if you guys are on raid, and you want to put up put next cloud on it Space Invader did a great tutorial on YouTube. So if you go look him up, I think it’s Space Invader one, his tutorial i mean it is just flawless. You can get in here he covers getting next cloud installed on on raid and also getting it setup with your reverse proxy. So that guy is the go to source someone in our community, I think actually sent his video to me. And that’s how I found it. He does he focuses he does a lot of unread videos, but that one I’ve actually gone and watched about 10 different times, if I need to make a change to something, I can’t remember how to set it up. I just go back and watch it. So I’m on run on raid, running it and Docker. It really couldn’t have been easier to set up. I mean, there’s a few things you have to do the video that he did, walks you through just a few minor adjustments to some files, things like that. But once you actually have it up and running, it’s it’s pretty simple. So once you get it going for the first time, I was really impressed with for the fact of getting user setup. So you know, you type in I typed in my wife’s name, her email address, hit go it sent her an email she signed in, she set it all up, and you just kind of are off to the races. And at first we started out with just the document, I guess storage thinking aspect of it, and I replaced it. I ran both for a while. So for me, I pulled everything over from Dropbox, copied it there, and I rambled Just to you know, kind of test it out test the waters for about two months. And I realized I just I liked it a lot better the web interface super easy to use the sharing aspects of it. And I loved that, you know, then Dropbox they just brought about the same time maybe a few months after they announced this whole three device limit for their free plan. And I hadn’t dropped
Jos Poortvliet [23:21]
Dropbox. Yeah,
Mike Wieger [23:23]
yeah, right. Yeah, I’m sure you guys got
Jos Poortvliet [23:26]
a nice set incentive for people to finally make that step at
Mike Wieger [23:30]
100%. Because I was I was using the free plan from them. And I could I have paid, I think, like $10 a month, yes. But also then you’re still limited on on storage. And I have a 28 terabyte servers and over here, I could be essentially unlimited when it comes to documents and photos. And so I’m like, Okay, this just makes sense. Well, I’m just gonna switch it over. So we switch completely over. Next cloud offers the, I guess I’ll call it the sink application for the average guy. You install the application on on Mac on Windows, I think on Linux. I don’t know. running Linux boxes around here. But you can run it pretty much everywhere. So I have it on my all my max, I have it on my iPhone, we have it on an iPad My wife has on everything she has. And that essentially is just like if you’ve ever use Dropbox, same sort of thing, the file stay in sync. They’re just everywhere you need them to be, you can selectively set which ones you want to sink and which ones you just want to live on the server, which is great for me because I love to use next cloud for all of my massive video files when I do any sort of YouTube videos and things like that. But I don’t necessarily need those to sync across all my computers and take up storage on the local hard drive. So they’re very good about the settings of being selective of what you want to sync across. So we started with that we started with just the files and it worked great. My wife’s favorite feature is that she’s at home, she’s on the laptop, she’s editing, and she saved something, she sends a presentation. Then we’re on the drive down to the family farm and she needs to access something her boss calls her she whips out her iPhone, she has it she emails it. Then she’s at work, and she pulls up the web browser and she can get to our server, it’s not blocked by her IT department don’t know why they don’t like file sharing sites. But for some reason our home IP doesn’t get blocked. And so she’s able to access it there, get her school documents that she prepared. So for her, I think she’s actually in our house probably the power user of next cloud, mainly because at my work, we I have to I’m tied in with their systems. Right. And so I use a lot of Microsoft have to you know, I’ve got the word and on next cloud, though I do, I’m trying to talk the IT department into it. But so she is a power user. She loves that feature. So then step two for us was really figuring out we had been trying to figure out a good solution for sinking and backing up locally all of our photos. My whole point was that okay, I cloud is great. But what happens if we were to die tomorrow, we get in a crash tomorrow, and they don’t know our passwords to to iCloud. I have, you know, I could put passwords in there and they could probably figure it all out, but I have kind of a an SOS manual that I keep your that people wouldn’t know about. And it’s all here. And it’s local. And it’s secured. And we’ve got the key and we know about it. And so I was like, okay, we need a place that we can store our photos. And the app on the iPhone for next cloud is fantastic for backing up your entire photo library. It just doesn’t in the background, flawless, it’s always updating you don’t you never have to open the app. It’s just always doing it. And so we both have both of our phones set up to backup to an iCloud box for all our photos. So that was step two. And it works great. And then the great part about that, too, is that it’s really easy to from any browser, access all of your photos right before you might have to go to iCloud com, sign in. And then maybe an iCloud on the browser is not a fun experience. Especially I don’t even know if you can access all your photos in the browser, but it’s not fun if you can. But with next cloud, it’s super simple to just get the same web interface and you can see all your photos. So when we’re away from home and we don’t have our phones and she’s at work, and she needs to email something to all your photos are right there. I find that actually next clouds Sometimes syncs up faster than I can even get in there and like, share it and like, Okay, how do I get this photo over to my computer by email it to myself, trying to figure how to get on my computer most of time, it’s already Synced by the time I go in and do that, which is great. So then step three for us was I had to really decide, we had had an experience where we were trying to get our contacts and our calendar on a non Apple device. And it was extremely hard and unwieldy. And we found out that we were really locking ourselves into the apple ecosystem. And although Apple has gotten a little bit better about being available on Windows and things like that, try getting your contacts on a drunk on an Android or some like that. And it’s just it’s messy. So I’m like, you know, going forward, I’d love to future proof ourselves and have a system that is not tied to an ecosystem. So I said, I’m going to get all of our so I one night I just sat down and it was super simple on the Mac because the Mac syncs with iCloud so I had all the contacts there. I literally just export them, pulled him in the next cloud, and we were off and running and then I switched just turned off iCloud contacts. on our phones and switched over next cloud users car, Gavin Caldera, so very standard protocols for you know, synchronizing your contacts and calendars. And we are up and running with contacts. And then I ended up doing it with calendars as well. So our entire family calendar, we have one shared family calendar that lives on next cloud. And then we have each have our own personal calendar that we can keep stuff on as well. And it integrates with the iPhone, just as well as I call it ever did. And if I ever need to move over, if I need to pull those from somewhere, if I’m remote, all my contacts calendar is accessible via the web and a great interface. And it’s private. And I know where it is, and I host it and no one’s going to get to that data. One thing I do really like and I’ll throw this out there, you can actually do a security check. Next cloud has a tool that you can go plug in your URL for your specific server, and it’ll run through a check and use I’d love to know maybe a little bit as we get to talking to hear about what that checks for. But I’m proud to say I got an A plus. It’s a Good as I can get it’s up to date all the security checks out. But it gives you kind of peace of mind that okay, this is you know, if this is being used in a commercial setting, I’m I think I’m pretty safe from a home user perspective that my data is secure okay on my server so that’s how we use it. We have now replaced everything so we no longer use Dropbox. iCloud for us as we have we backup our photos twice. We do use iCloud Photo Library and that’s really only because we do a lot of I movie projects and it just it pulls in pretty nicely. So we use it but we also use next cloud so we have it personally as well. And but as far as Contacts, Calendars and all of our files we are going through neck cloud and it has been we talked about Jim and iOS we have this term it’s called the wife approval factor. You know as as as a tech guy, sometimes you do something in the home, you get this fancy new Wi Fi or get this fancy new TV and it drives him nuts we think is cool, but the usability of it isn’t and next cloud is complete opposite of those complicated things. It was 100% white approval factor. From the beginning, and I think she liked the fact it was actually all unified into one system, I know where to go one place where my contacts, my calendars, my files, my photos, everything is right here. And it’s fast on our local network. It is extremely fast. Obviously, when you’re at home, that stuff is just in you don’t you don’t ever worry about bandwidth either. If I’m at home, and I’m creating video files, and I’m throwing it over there, I’m not having to wait for a 500 gig or, you know, file to upload to the cloud. It’s just there. And it’s all local, which is another great feature. So that’s my kind of home use case. And I would suggest if you do have unafraid to just at least give it a shot because it’s super simple to install and you kind of play around with it. See if you like it like I did run it alongside your current system, because I think you’ll you’ll really be surprised at how well it works.
Jim Collison [30:49]
Well, that was a great commercial The show is over.
Mike Wieger [30:54]
I’m a fanboy. I was so excited when when we said that yo yos we got next cloud coming on. I was super pumped. I’ve just been such a fan of this product. It has never failed me once. The only time it failed me is because I failed myself and my I crashed my cash drive on my server and all my apps died. That was nothing. It was not Next slide. It was me. All my doctors were blown away. And so that was not fun. I had to go through an old backup but so it’s never failed me. It just works. It just straight up works.
Jim Collison [31:19]
Mike, you’re on raid. And we do have a lot of windows, you know? Yes. I told you we we come out of the windows kind of community. Canada’s asking that question. When will it support a run on Windows? Lots of Windows servers here in the community? some thoughts on it?
Jos Poortvliet [31:34]
Yeah, it did in the old days, you know, before next files, and it was a bit of a pain to keep running because we will do a fair bit of file system stuff and all that that’s completely caused all kinds of issues. I mean, the most simple issue you can probably think offers that the Linux and Mac a file name in capitals is from Different from the same file name, lowercase windows won’t see the difference, therefore, boom if your server doesn’t see as it’s unable to do that, so we had to essentially maintain a separate file system layer for Windows as we had for Linux. And that caused a lot of work, and also a lot of bugs. And that’s at some point, you said, Look, this, this isn’t worth it. Linux is, at least in my opinion, but then again, I’m a longtime Linux guy, far better platform for server anyhow. So yeah, I think running it in a VM will do fine.
Jim Collison [32:41]
So is that does that would be your recommendation for this community? If Yeah, I was familiar with windows of running a Linux box inside of the
Jos Poortvliet [32:50]
to do card these days is available. I don’t know exactly what it would do. I mean, the thing is, of course, as storage you indefinitely use Windows system and mean somehow windows network drive as storage in next cloud is not a problem. And even as primary storage, a lot of lot of our customers do that they just have their their user directory and their windows network drive just connected to the next level and every user login that gets her home directory and all that stuff.
But as the application server itself,
yeah, it’s not supported at the moment. So that’s pretty simple.
Mike Wieger [33:31]
But this runs on a Raspberry Pi, right? I mean, you can literally just grab a pie and she does not need a lot of horsepower. Do people would so for example, for me, my own raid server, you know, it’s like a, it’s an old, like maybe third or fourth Gen I five, but I noticed a big slow down if I went to a PI or really for what it’s doing. I don’t notice it using really any CPU on my box.
Jos Poortvliet [33:55]
A few things each CPU for example, the gentleman Off thumbnails, that kind of stuff will eat some CPU. And there are a couple of other tasks that will keep it busy a bit. And it depends, of course, how intensively you use it when you’re pumping over files. I mean, that’s, of course not so intensive. When you would use the server side encryption, I generally don’t really recommend that we can get into that if you like, but that eats quite some CPU power. transferring files, sometimes depending on the settings you have in your server, it can eat CPU power, because what it will do when you have really big files and you use like the web interface, it will upload in chunks. And then at the end of the process, a test to assemble the chunks, but that’s more disk IO, even if you run collaborate online or only offers the online office solutions, they will eat CPU especially in the case of clever online because that’s what everything or server,
Mike Wieger [34:52]
you know, and I use that as well and on unread the way Docker works, that’s a separate Docker and then integrate this into next cloud. It’s doing fantastic.
Jos Poortvliet [35:01]
It works. Yeah. I mean, I mean, you mentioned AX generation I five. So I run my next lot on I five 750. I think that’s the first generation I something in general. And I’ve done clocked it at it’s a quad core and it runs normally at, I don’t know, two and a half gigs or something of down clock, the dual gigahertz. I have no performance issues. And I mean, the modern Raspberry Pi, add the new one, which comes with a quad core a 72, I think, which runs on like two, one and a half gigahertz, I think. I mean, that probably kicks the s in terms of pure CPU horsepower of my server. So I mean, I run collaborate online, I run next slide talk on it, and calendar, contacts, mail, we use all of it, and it’s fine. So yeah, you don’t need a lot of CPU. You do need enough memory though. That’s also why I think the older Raspberry Pi’s FU still got a Raspberry Pi two tree or tree be lying around the bottleneck is going to be memory. Because for next slide to be smooth, you need to have the mem caching set up, I read this especially and well that kind of goes down the drain. If you don’t have enough memory, of course, it doesn’t work. And that actually is a bit of a performance hit. Because then without the caching, of course, it has to compute everything and suddenly your CPU usage goes up. And you know, you get latency and everything else.
Mike Wieger [36:27]
So two things you mentioned number one number 1am I, is there any reason I shouldn’t be using next cloud in Docker on unread? Is Docker a decent way to use next cloud any night Think
Jos Poortvliet [36:39]
so? Okay, yeah,
Mike Wieger [36:40]
I think I’m spinning up a VM on on right instead and doing a Linux VM compared to Docker. But I’ve never experienced any problems with Docker.
Jos Poortvliet [36:49]
I don’t think it makes a difference. I don’t think it makes much of a difference. I mean, personally, look, I I open source guy, I just run pure open source on that. And then I’ve just installed the tar ball and I manage myself happily. You know, I like to exercise in and just screw around the bed sometimes. But yeah, I mean both the VM and the Docker image I think are perfectly fine and there’s also the snapper which is also supremely easy to us because that one you really never have to look at because it updates by itself. It’s completely like I think the snap is the most serum maintenance you can get. It’s also the one that usually most I don’t want to say outdated but running behind a bit. In the pre show you mentioned you were on the next slide 16 I think the snap is still or 15 or recently moved to 16. So the snap is very conservative, which is mostly because the people running it building it maintaining it, they just really want to make 180,000% sure that it won’t ever break because it really designed to be Sarah maintenance. Therefore Come break and they have to make sure that everything, never ever will require you to do anything. And that’s of course a bit of work to keep that. I appreciate that. So careful with that. But I personally I want to run, you know, release candidates, I always upgrade my private server. By the time sometimes the bad sometimes release candidates. My colleagues always tell me to back up with a downs for that for that issue. So hey,
Mike Wieger [38:28]
so and then Okay, so we talked about we talked about the file side, we talked about contacts calendar, there are two other things. You mentioned that you run that I’m kind of interested in the talk feature and then mail, maybe go into those kind of talking about what kind of options those give you?
Jos Poortvliet [38:41]
Yeah, so talk is our audio video chat integration. It’s a web RTC based audio video calls, you can have runs completely on your own server. So you have the data and the metadata, which is actually nice, because web RTC is always end to end encrypted. You have that to thrown in for free in the mix. And it runs in a browser. So with next slide, you can send somebody public link to talk room. And they can join the call. And they just need to have a webcam, or now it’s just a microphone at least. And there’s no accounts, nothing needed. So that’s quite nice. And it’s just a one click install, like there’s no extra Docker images or anything like that. It’s just completely in PHP. It’s actually historical fact. we rewrote it from go to PHP, so that you can install to one click rather than having to run a Docker container. It has scalability limits, because well, it’s peer to peer, which means if you have a call with five people you’re sending or receiving five streams. Obviously, that’s not going to work with 50. At that point, there well we we as a company, we resell a solution that is a combination of parts from a partner and parts that we build Michelle’s in go. Because it’s not like we have this with go. It’s good language. It’s just, you know, every tool has its place. And, but for home users, I mean, the chats we have mobile chat apps, it’s really awesome. You can get a workflow where, certainly with next, our next new and 17, you should upgrade. You have like this this text editor, it’s a collaborative text editor. It’s markdown base. So it’s really simple. But when you look at it, it just has bold and you can insert an image and make a list and all that stuff. You know, just to do star an Asterix or the star symbol space better to collateral that’s
Mike Wieger [40:38]
pretty simple. Replacing
Jos Poortvliet [40:40]
collateral No, no, I mean, it’s just mark down. Now. They’re essentially just text files. So if you make notes from a meeting, it’s way better because you don’t have the overhead of a complete Office Suite, which lets you build tables and do all fancy stuff. It’s just super thin and light and has like eight buttons on top and not like toolbar menus. And then the sidebar just like with Culebra in the sidebar, you have the chat. And you can have a call even in the sidebar. So you’re, you’re having a call with someone. And this is actually what I now do. Like I have calls with partners, sometimes about marketing. And what I do is I created a text file, I put in a couple of bullet points for the agenda points, and I just shared a file with them. And then I tell them, you know, we set a goal around four o’clock, and I tell them, hey, just ping me in the chat. Yeah, you can add mentioned me as a as a guest. And they had mentioned me and I get ping on my phones, like, oh, they’re in you know, and I can either pick up the coal in my phone call, or what so what I usually do just get on my desktop and just join there and talk to them. And then you know, you have to chats or to call or both. And so
Mike Wieger [41:49]
yeah, it doesn’t need to be a user that’s on your server. No one,
Jos Poortvliet [41:53]
including the admins nameless. It’s actually really neat. Wow, okay. Yeah. It’s It’s awesome. I mean, it’s, it’s getting better and better integrated. So for example, when you read files, you have the share button, and you can click it, and you type the name of the chat room, hit Enter, and you just share it directly in the chat room. So you don’t, don’t just share to people you can share to chat now, which is very neat. And of course, within that chat, you can click a plus button and then share a file from your neck out into the chat as well. What we’re working on, of course, is that you’ll be able to turn like this chat room immediately into a collaborative editing session. But there spoiler alert, that’s not done yet. That’s obviously something we want, right? So yeah, this this is really nicely integrated. What was the other thing male? Male? Yes. Well, it’s a male clients. Now set, so it doesn’t host your mail. Yeah, you you have to use it now difficult or something as an observer, and connected but it’s male clients, male web clients, which is recently be responsive. So it’ll work in your mobile browser as well, if you don’t have an app for that. I personally for me, it’s just this backup when you’re somewhere and you know, you need to access your mail and you don’t have like an app or application around. And it works fine for that. I mean, I, personally, I’m not a person who lives in the browser, other than browsing pages, I suppose. But I don’t work, usually in the browser. Although I must say actually, next up Texas danger index. I’m very often now making notes in the browser rather than in text file. But I am not yet ready to move to email in a browser, actually, not by long shots. I love my desktop client. And you can take it from Michael that.
Jim Collison [43:45]
It does look like just as we’re talking you were talking about using Docker does look like you can now use Docker on a Windows desktop. To be able to do that. There’s been a lot of there’s been some changes in Windows. I think Linux subsystem has been a part of that, but So what I would think that would be pretty heavy for, for most, like, if you were going to do something like this, might as well Mike, in our case, might as well go to unrated first, because it’s so much lighter. I think Docker management’s a little bit easier there and then go to a PI actually might be the easiest if you’re just like, I don’t know, what’s like for a home user? What’s the easiest intro to next cloud? easiest way to kind of get in? Is it? Is it a Raspberry Pi?
Jos Poortvliet [44:28]
So if you want to host yourself? Yeah, that’s actually good question. Because I can very well imagine that actually, if you’re a Windows system administrator, that getting a Docker image running on your system might actually be the easiest way. If you’re a Linux person, snap install next clouds, it doesn’t really get any easier. So if you have no server, then I do imagine Raspberry Pi is a pretty neat way because the only things you need to do You need to get a PI and you know, connected to a hard drive and power and everything, downloads. One of the next rap pie. So there’s an extra pi project, which builds essentially, images that you put on SD card, plugging your pie, and you’re up and running. It’ll auto configure itself and of course that you need to connect to it and set up user accounts and etc. But it’s essentially pretty much self managed from what I can, from what I remember from playing with it. So that that is a pretty neat way of doing it. But yeah, the bench rights I mean, running a server is the work. It’s not next cloud, that’s a hard part of running a server. It’s the you know, SSL connection, and opening the ports of your firewall and getting a domain name that’s going to be the hard part. In any case where we go for a pie or usually Windows system or your Linux system. The hard part isn’t going to be next file. It’s just a sad truth. We can only make it so easy
Jim Collison [46:00]
through a couple of comments coming in a chat, I think Justin had said, Yeah, you can but limited use cases still not 100% caught up on BSD Linux.
Jos Poortvliet [46:09]
So that’s about the Docker on Windows image. Yeah. I mean, the big question is, is there anyone here who has tried Docker on Windows Live next files? Because I mean, limited use case. The question is, does it cover everything next cloud needs from Docker? If it does, or doesn’t matter, it can do something else. If it’s the next fact that’s what you’re looking for. I just don’t know. I really don’t know. Honestly, it’s an interesting question. I’d love to hear it. If somebody here knows. I’d love to hear it.
Jim Collison [46:39]
Yes, me. If you’re doing that send me or you want to try it. Send me an email Jim at the average guy TV and we’d love to kind of interact with you on that. Justin also says running Docker on phonology and that would be out right? Oh,
Mike Wieger [46:52]
yeah, absolutely. That’s a lot of people have those, you know, kind of home style NAS devices. And I think Docker is going Going to be if it’s not already on cue nap as well and some of the other kind of homes down as is but yeah Docker and synergy be good that’s where all your all your storage is
Jim Collison [47:08]
which drove supported it that you know I’ve got this Robo network drive in and they’ve got they’ve made a lot of headway on those, you know, since the change in ownership over their adobo, their apps have gotten infinitely better but I still haven’t seen Docker on Drupal yet. So that would that would and those those CPUs aren’t great. They’re okay they’re not great. So that may not be great synergy definitely is one of those perfect boxes where it’s a great combination of drives and memory and processor like they just do they build really good box Joe asked in the chat room any chance of supporting something like exchange or open exchange on the email client.
Jos Poortvliet [47:52]
I’m guessing that open exchange support IVF and honestly exchange also supports I met ish for Understand, I don’t know how compatible it is. Yeah, I found that an interesting point. I didn’t know about that. And honestly, I mean, my mail client connects to my gmail account via I map as far as I know. And I sure as dirty words have more than 10 k messages in some folders. So I don’t know. I don’t know it might speed that you can work around that or not. Yeah,
but then maybe at that point, you need to set up a filter.
Jim Collison [48:32]
So I do think from a from an average guy standpoint, at least from the average tech guys that are listening to the show. Really, what I’m hearing it really unless you’re going to run your own Linux server, maybe Mike in your case on raid, that’s a pretty easy, easy ish setup with Docker you’ve, you’ve done it, it’s it’s doable. Sin, ology is another one of those boxes that would kind of work to get that in queue nap, I think may do something along those lines as well. Then kind of let it rip, I’ll be honest, I went out and looked at the website and look through some of the documentation because I was gonna install it before the show and then I was I kind of dug into this and I was like, Oh, this is a little more work than I thought it’s just not
Jos Poortvliet [49:15]
a Linux user because I had been download the tar ball go into the folder where you extracted it type PSP minus s localhost colon 3000s. And then go to localhost colon 3000 your browser and whether you know, login release
Jim Collison [49:34]
it You’re right, I am not and there are plenty Listen, there’s plenty of listeners who are like, Oh, yeah, that makes total sense. That is not because I’m a Windows Home server guy. And because I’m was an MMO and Windows MVP for a lot of years. I’m pretty used to the GUI and you know, configuring it that way and making it work. Not and not a not no commentary on Linux or any of those other kinds of things such as the system to
Jos Poortvliet [49:58]
use to
Jim Collison [50:00]
Yeah, no, but after this conversation so a couple times I’ve started the upgrade process right away. You know, I have 100 terabytes here. And I was like, I should start the upgrade process and use Docker and Mike just follow. I can always ping you for questions and, you know, get something up and running because I am a little bit sold after hearing kind of the way you use it, Mike. I was like,
Jos Poortvliet [50:24]
All right. Well, it’s a pretty cool and I think, typical, although in terms of use case, I think the average user doesn’t have 28 terabyte of storage, let alone the hundreds, right. I haven’t dare to mention the small number that I have. It’s under 10.
Jim Collison [50:37]
Yeah, no, no, no, hold on. One second. No storage shame here. Hold on, just like no store enough.
Jos Poortvliet [50:43]
Fair enough. So I do. I do actually have more than 10 terabytes in my computer, but I haven’t set it up properly. In terms of rates. I’m using butter Fs and I plan to use like this. Rate Five, six, about professional With this extremely flexible, like, you can just make one terabyte and three terabyte and six terabyte drives and just throw it all in. And they will make one storage out of there. And then you say, I want to be able to have two random drives crash on me. And then but first, we’ll just figure out how much storage that means you then actually have available, which is like really awesome. But there is still some uncertainty about whether it might eat your data in weird cases. And I do like my private pictures. And I have until now been too lazy to do a proper backup. Therefore, I haven’t really had the balls but you can migrate from what I’m using now, which is right one, you can migrate to the right sex like easily so I’m actually going to do that. I don’t know at some point. When I feel it safe. Butter Fs lighter. It’s like the file system. Kind of the next gen file system for Linux. But it’s been a development for a long time. And so I’m using social Linux or Paul open Souza. And they, they have this very nice habit where they essentially disable everything and butter Fs that they think is not safe. And because they do a lot of development work, I made that kind of trust their opinion on it, therefore, as long as it’s not enabled, I’m not going to use it. And when they enable it, I’m going to go all in on that. Yeah. So I have to drive in there. And I have a couple of drives and just they’re not enabled yet.
Mike Wieger [52:34]
Well, fairness, we only in our entire next cloud instance, I think we only have 500 gigs used. And that’s including all of our phones and everything. I was just saying, I love the fact that I’m Unlimited, essentially as my new since we’re only using 500 now and it’s all our phones or documents, so that I’m never going to run out of space. And if I do, I buy a hard drive and I throw it in right.
Jos Poortvliet [52:54]
Right. That’s the beauty of it. Yeah, it costs nothing. I mean, I took my old desktop and slept in a few more hard drives and put it well initially behind my couch and later in the storage room and that’s beautiful on the clock that little bit you know sex and power and the environment.
Mike Wieger [53:14]
Yeah and Jim i think i think it would be great for you especially because your family is all in different ecosystems right you’re not a purely at you’re on Android, you’re on Apple, you’re on Windows. Your kids are all over the country. But you are the data guy, right? You know how to backup the stuff and you could keep them all centralized. You can share stuff amongst each other and it would be a great family. Yeah, it’s time for you guys to live in.
Jim Collison [53:39]
I started down that path by the way just just a quick update the the the Bundaberg rum has eaten through the glass just spilled all over the place.
Mike Wieger [53:49]
It’s um, it’s
Jim Collison [53:50]
that was you have to listen to the live pre show if you want to know what we’re talking about there. But, Mike, I started down that path but the maintenance like 14 Individual kids in the responsibility to backup their stuff and have it available 24 seven, and to make sure like when they’re having trouble, they call me like I did that for a couple years, even when they were in the house and I kind of made the decision I’m like, I don’t know if I want to be the backup dad. You know, I like it’s it’s easier for in some cases, because I messed it up a whole bunch of times. So I can be like, Oh, hold on, it’s down, you know, or whatever. Right? And, and I kind of this then started teaching them like come up with your own solution that you control, whatever, that’s whatever that’s going to be you you know, for, for some of them for some right or they their university provides it or whatever. And to be honest with some of them that like my kids are millennials they don’t have as much data as you think they they have they’re going to have and many of them are using Facebook as their storage right all their pictures are on Facebook. Yeah. And so and you know, you kind of think like, how are you going to get those pictures back? You know, and in their own?
Jos Poortvliet [55:08]
They don’t think of it? No, No, they don’t. And there is a data export function that at least give you your pictures back. Right? So
Jim Collison [55:14]
well, so Okay, so that being said, though, it Mike, it just has, it’s been easier. I have five kids. So like, that’s a lot of data. And it’s just been, it’s been one of those kinds of things. I started down that path of being kind of the data dad. And then I was like, life’s a lot better if I’m not managing an infrastructure, 24 seven. And anytime I want to make a change, like, Hey, I’m gonna have to reboot the server, it would always be when they were doing stuff. And then the fatal blow is one time when I lost some data because I wasn’t careful. And I did something stupid. And I lost data and I thought, okay, I don’t know. I don’t mind being responsible for my pictures and my stuff. I don’t know if I want to be responsible for other people’s stuff. So I just stopped 10 offering To be honest, they stop kind of asking. And so we kind of left it at that. Now, that being said, I still have a lot of my own stuff. And I’m super, you know, I’m thinking, Okay, like, all right, this weekend, how am I gonna? What am I going to do? How am I going to install this? What kind of what kind of infrastructure do I want to put in? That’s literally
Jos Poortvliet [56:19]
what Raspberry Pi for in fact that for I know.
Jim Collison [56:22]
Yeah, I got an extra one.
Mike Wieger [56:25]
Raspberry Pi. And
Jim Collison [56:27]
I got nine PCs now. So like I have enough equipment. Like to like I’ve got something I can put it on. It’s just a matter of configuring it. It is a weekend of setup to get it, get things going, getting them set up, getting it configured, punching through the firewall, those kinds of things to kind of, you know, make it
Jos Poortvliet [56:42]
a fun weekend. So hey, are it’s true?
Jim Collison [56:45]
No, they are they are. Um, so as we think of the future at next cloud and stuff, you know, as you guys are looking forward, what would you tell for the folks that are listening and, you know, we’ve already mentioned Mike’s on 1617 is out It looks like Justin pretty recently here, what what, how would you get excited about the future of next card? What do you guys looking forward to.
Jos Poortvliet [57:06]
And I think torque is is a good example and also the integration that I mentioned, where we’re building a collaboration platform, and there’s a lot more in that area that we can do. So we have an app called deck which is essentially come on board. Really beautiful for collaboration, planning tasks, you can assign people to card stuff like that. And I think this this will continue to be the direction that we take that there’s more things that you can put in the tools to plan a wedding planner wedding and plan a family holiday that you can assign people cards, you know, like hey, pay the pay the bill, etc. There’s already an app for like money planning. I mean, I think on one hand, we are going to keep working on this collaboration and and you know, doing stuff together stuff and communicate and integrating it all deeper, at the same time our ecosystem is, is really exploding. There are more than 200 apps for next cloud and our app store. And there are password managers, you know, you’re the S multiple. And there’s just a crazy number of tools from external storage is a you have like storage a car and, you know, guys talked a little bit about that pre show was just blockchains storage. And there’s all kinds of fancy stuff, their authentication methods, like there’s two factor authentication that come out of your nose, you know, like, we have this really cool one that lets you authenticate a second factor with notification on your phone. So well, that’s really nice. I mean, you might know that of course from Google, but like there are very few websites that offer something like that. Our you get an email or you can get an SMS reading it. And all that stuff is apps. And of course, the newly people are releasing new apps and new stuff from really simple things like I don’t know Show more information about downloads. Two people are building completely new tools and stuff. And that’s, that’s going to continue. I’m pretty sure. Right So what is it going to be? God? I don’t know. It really also depends a lot on what people are gonna do what they want to do. And it’s Well, yeah, world is their oyster.
Jim Collison [59:25]
So we’re big in the WordPress community, of course, because of podcasting and WordPress go together like peanut butter jelly. When you talk about, you know, next cloud lives kind of in an open source community and there’s you’re talking about a lot of plugins and stuff that are kind of open source. How are you guys kind of checking what people are creating against it? So you know, the plugin community in WordPress is a nightmare. Or what what kind of partnerships Do you guys have or what are you doing to kind of make sure those plugin communities those open communities that are building on top of what you’re doing? or kind of staying in line? So?
Jos Poortvliet [1:00:03]
Yeah, I mean, first of all, of course, we’re bit younger, a bit smaller still the WordPress I mean will overtake them, but we’ll good Mark good. Yeah,
Jim Collison [1:00:13]
yeah, the only run the only run a third of the web.
Jos Poortvliet [1:00:15]
Yeah, exactly right. I mean, how hard can it be come on there are 7 billion people on planet Earth. I mean, we have this excellent global scale that, as the name suggests, get there. In the meantime, in the meantime. So to get an app in the app store, you have to upload your private key. Sorry, you have to upload your private key and interact a little bit with us. Now, that’s not a whole lot of interaction. But it’s not that anyone can just make an account and hop upload something. And we keep a bit of an eye on it. We don’t have anywhere near the resources to really monitor everything. But we do run a security bug bounty program. Where you can earn 10 K, we put our money where our mouth is, we think we’re very good at security, prove us wrong, please, you’ll get up to 10 k for that. And this formally doesn’t cover the apps because that is completely impossible and insane. And we will be bankrupt I think very quickly gives you know how button I mean, come on, there’s a business model at you right in that people the big security bug in it. And then you let a friend of you reported the bug bounty program. So this wouldn’t work. But people do report bugs also in the apps and a lot of people do go and check out the apps kind of, I guess, triggered by the bug bounty program. So we get quite a bit actually in fear there. And then we talked to the app authors. And when they don’t take action we do. Yeah. So there’s not a whole lot that we do preemptively, also, in part because we’ve put in quite a bit of effort to make our framework really secure and actually make it hard to write insecure apps, and you get warnings and actually like a lot of stuff just got blocked. When you upload an app to our app store does a static code checker that will just check if you don’t use private API is not a staff that will give warnings and block stuff, etc. So there’s a fair bit of stuff in place at the same time. Yeah, we don’t have the resources of Apple and Google, we don’t review it that way. So some common sense. And caution is certainly in place when you when you check out the apps,
Jim Collison [1:02:27]
well, in the community itself would lend itself to more tech, smart people, I would think anyways, and so it’s just not an probably not the environment where you’re just going to have people clicking and downloading these things.
Jos Poortvliet [1:02:42]
Now, of course, it’s not as easy as it is to install an app on an iPhone at the same time, of course, we want to lower the barrier and and we’ve been scarily successful, perhaps in some ways with that, I mean, I estimate there are about 250 to 300,000. Next up servers on the web, and those come All be professional sis admins. So, you know, there are quite some people out there that run my next lot. That’s that’s run, you know, that aren’t super professional at it and a lot of people use really a lot of apps. I mean, I, we actually heard at one point from somebody who had who claimed to have over 150 apps installed, which I think is like, that can barely be true. But he claimed that like he was running it for friends and family. And, you know, he said they really used all of them. So well, who am I to argue with that? They won’t go.
Mike Wieger [1:03:40]
I’ll give you I’ll give my two favorite real quick if you’re just starting out Culebra we already talked about it’s pretty much a it’s like Google Docs. But in next cloud, private, you can all do it. So Jim, if you had it installed, we could replace our Google Docs with that, and we could both be typing in their same thing. And then draw.io you’ve probably everyone here who’s probably done any sort of network, right? What’s it called? documentation essentially, right? You’re graphically laying out schematics of your network, draw it out IO, you’ve probably used it, it’s built in, when you install the app, you just create a new document and draw it out. I was one of them. And you can just start. So that’s how I’ve now done the schematic of all my networks. And it has all the draw features and everything you would need in there. And it works really, really well. So draw to do and collaborate my to do actually really the only two external apps that I run
Jim Collison [1:04:33]
and draws a Vizio replacement. Is that right? Essentially,
Mike Wieger [1:04:36]
yes, yeah. Yeah, that’s that’s the beginning. Everyone was busy. Oh, it’s a visual replace.
Jim Collison [1:04:40]
Yeah, yeah. No, super cool. Um, y’all see anything else? So I want to be respectful of your time you’ve stayed away
Jos Poortvliet [1:04:48]
will go over to 200 apps.
Jim Collison [1:04:52]
But anyways, we think of if you were going to, you know, one final shot to our community to, you know, say, Hey, give this thing a try. What would you say to our community?
Jos Poortvliet [1:05:03]
I look, it’s open source. So I wouldn’t just say give it a try. But look at how you can make a difference very easily. If there’s something you don’t like, go ahead and change it. If there’s something you think you can do better build an app. I mean, and these apps do then sometimes become part of next slide. Like we had a guy who built a right click app, so that you could actually right click on the web interface, which is something we hadn’t enabled because you know, most people like don’t have like a finger that the special enough that your phone can see right click, and our designer wasn’t a big fan of that. And so this this conservative came up with the other day said, Look, you know, but there’s this three dot menu. So what they’ve right click, this always gives you the same. So you’re not doing anything special. And Come on, you can’t argue against the right click in that case, the designer was like, yeah, that’s actually good. And, you know, this app is now Part of that trial itself. And I think that’s beautiful. And I’d like to see more of that. So please, I had it on and I just
Mike Wieger [1:06:07]
tested it. I’m like, that’s beautiful. I didn’t know that word. Yeah, I just learned something new. There we go. Oh, that’s amazing.
Jim Collison [1:06:14]
But besides next cloud com would be there any Are there any community sites if people want to get involved the best place to go to kind of join the community? What is it in a Reddit communities on discord? where’s the best place for
Jos Poortvliet [1:06:26]
Reddit? But we have a very active community on help next level comments. That’s just a community forums essentially, and and a lot of people are hanging out there. I tried to keep Twitter alive very well as well. But people are also on mastodon while I’m plugging that there’s an app for that, of course, and how could that not be? It’s called social because, you know, we all love to be social and all that. And there’s a Reddit community which is reasonably active, I think XERR file system like that. The developer and is one of the most active people there. There is a bit of IRC, but we used to use that internally in the company as well. And that makes it an easy to hang out on IRC. But then this next laptop thing came and we’re the kind of people who try to eat our own dog food and therefore now everybody is on the internal talk channel. And we haven’t yet made like a bridge to IRC. I think if you’ve seen the XKCD comics, you know that everything has to bridge to IRC because 500 years from now, there will still be this one guy that refuses to move over to whatever else it is, but uses the bridge. So we haven’t done that yet. But when we do obviously we will be on IRC and on talk and you will be able to join us via public talk channels. Nice. We’re working on that. Nice,
Jim Collison [1:07:48]
nice. Yes, thank you for again, thanks for staying up for us. You are you’re an honorary Home Gadget Geeks home server show reset FM Remember now you have to now that you’ve been on the show you fit in really, really well with us. By the
Jos Poortvliet [1:08:05]
way, I made an absolute pleasure to be here, guys, and we’ll catch a little bit of feel.
Jim Collison [1:08:10]
If we if we ask it in six or seven or eight months to come back, would you would you say yes. Would you join us
Jos Poortvliet [1:08:16]
again? I’d love to I got here by promise. Seriously, ice? Yeah, call me. And if you want every release, we do them every four months. Oh, good. Talk about what’s new.
Jim Collison [1:08:27]
Yeah, that might be that might be interesting. Are you paying more as you get close to the next one?
Jos Poortvliet [1:08:32]
The next one is in January. So it’s the end of January sometime
Jim Collison [1:08:37]
work? Yeah, that could work. And we’ll do it. We’ll do a quick update on that as well. And so we’ll let you get to bed. And fortunately, since you telecommuters into sleep, your remote worker you can sleep in a little bit and we appreciate your time and we’ll let you go. Thanks for jumping in and appreciate it. Have a great have a great morning. And and thanks for coming in. Appreciate you
Jos Poortvliet [1:08:56]
guys have a good day evening night sleep too. Hey Ben,
Jim Collison [1:09:00]
we’ve got hours of podcasting the guy,
Jos Poortvliet [1:09:02]
so, alright, have fun.
Jim Collison [1:09:05]
Yes, thank you very much Have a great night. Or I should say a great morning for you. You can just close your browser and it’ll drop you out of here for us. Um, what do you think Mike?
Mike Wieger [1:09:19]
I like I said it was it was fun talking to him because I’ve been such a fanboy of next cloud for a while and trying to get the the inside scoop there. And especially I thought it was really interesting that first, you know, 10 minutes where he was really getting into the data privacy side and kind of the theories behind that and why people choose to go one way or the other. I think he was totally right when I was thinking about this, it’s, it’s convenience, right people go with iCloud people go with Dropbox will go to Microsoft, cuz it’s so convenient. And I think as they start to get better about making this just completely easy to install everywhere, it’s, I love it. But then again, I’m a data security just kind of nut about this, right? Like I want to control everything. I know willing to put in the work because I really enjoy it like tweaking with this stuff is so much fun for me that they I really enjoyed that. Yeah, it was great. And Tony just said in the chat, so they have a slack equivalent. That’s what I was thinking of as well as he was describing the talk feature. And I’ll admit I’ve with without running full Linux, it’s a little bit complicated in Docker to get talks it up. I tried it in the past. And really I gave it like, a lunch hour, I had a lunch hour that was like, oh, maybe it maybe it’s super easy one click Install. It’s not you need to install like a TURN server, and things like that. So it’s not super easy unless you’re running full Linux. But essentially, yes, that’s what they have. And I dig it up and running a little bit. And I mean, it is it’s FaceTime quality. And it’s peer to peer. And it’s super simple to get running. And I didn’t know I love the fact that now there’s almost a collaborative text file going along with it. Because that could be really useful for meetings, especially if your if your company was set up on this, you know, how easy is that? Right? Every someone’s looking at me, there’s really no easy solution. There are a few. But for the enterprise level where it’s all just integrated in one so if this was your file sharing if this was your contacts, or this was your counter if your company centralized on this, and then using the talk feature, it’d be really convenient.
Jim Collison [1:11:18]
I’ve gone on record on this podcast is saying, Hey, we both were read today. But if I just do just, I’ve gone on record is saying I need a Raspberry Pi, like I need to hold my head. Couple years ago when it first came out, you know, it was like, you’re gonna do Raspberry Pi. And we even thought John’s Adler and I even thought we do a Raspberry Pi show. We never it never worked out and you know, I’ve made that statement. But you know, I’m kind of thinking like, that would be a great way a great use case for it. Yeah, and you can map your drove a storage over to it. So that could be the storage and then just the pies a server, I’d even put the pie I moved. I moved the drove Oh, this week, it’s just right over here right now. Behind Me and that would sit nicely right on top and just be be good so that may be yours maybe talked me into picking up a Raspberry Pi because it would be again I got a bunch of PCs but I don’t know if I want to drop I don’t know if I want to make a full Linux server at any of them
Mike Wieger [1:12:19]
know and replies The easiest way to do it. You know, the lite version of dB on it and Brand
Jim Collison [1:12:25]
right? No. All right off to think about that. In the process and anything else you’d add I got a little review we’re going to do a pretty quick your own. with anything else you’d add Mike before a couple reminders you guys have been bugging me about a meetup. Like forever so I’m here announcing our first home certain home so I said well said home server show. Our first Home Gadget Geeks meetup London December 1 2019. If you’re going to be in London in the area, I talked about this on the show a while back I’m just joking with Tony to on that. I will be Just a reminder, that’s all true. I will be in London December 1. And would love if you’re in the London area I’d even train out to you if necessary whatever. Love to get together enjoy a few brews maybe even a cigar and love to get together with you. So December 1, the first home syrup, Home Gadget Geeks, I said home server show me that for too many years. Who many years Home Gadget Geeks meetup London December 1, not really the first one but love to meet with you in December. Mike I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I got this duel dry dock the company called awesome spelled ALXUM they pronounce it just awesome. Actually they have two brands. We me is another brand that they fall under if you go to Al XUM. com you can see these are available on Amazon as well. They reached out to me and said hey, we’re doing these these Dr. docs and would you review one and I thought you know what the heck I’ve been buying a bunch of these because I’ve been using them in the crypto world to put drives in. In fact, I still have a four day drive that’s running a bunch of three and four terabyte drives for burst and such and so I thought, yeah, I’d give it a try. Mike, you mentioned you’ve got one I think that’s very, very close to it. Yep. The let me give you the quick specs on this thing just really quick as we do it again. It’s a USB three it’s aluminum hard drive. So nice. Nice hard cover the ones I’ve been buying it Best Buy it little plastic D You know, you kind of get a plastic you
Mike Wieger [1:14:30]
get one feels like it fell off the desk. It might survive it actually,
Jim Collison [1:14:33]
you would you could actually step on it or put a monitor on top of it as well. I mean, it’s they’re pretty sturdy standard to Bay drive, right? Three and a half, a two and a half inch drives go in there. But what has the slot for also a two and a
Mike Wieger [1:14:47]
half? Yeah, right. Yeah. So throw an SSD in there. It also works. It just slides right. not small. No, right on,
Jim Collison [1:14:53]
right in the right in the small slot here. Yeah, one of the cool things in and I don’t I didn’t do this on lot but offline cloning right so you don’t even have to have a need to connected to a PC to be able to clone off of it. This one’s got an LED indicator on the front that tells you how far so it’s got a 25 5075 and 100. It will take drives all the way up to 12 terabytes in here. So if you’ve got those if you’ve been buying those hard drives anyone to do it that way, sleep mode within 30 minutes so if you’re not when you stop using it, it just automatically shuts itself off in the process. I loaded some discs up in and I showed them I got it right here I got a one terabyte 750 that I had available that I threw in there and ran it up and pushed a little burst, some some burst plots to it. Move some data around works great. And And so again, these are these have been really handy for me I actually have three of these which is I never thought I’ve got one day I’ve got a to Bay. To Although to be honest with you today died after about after about I don’t know six or seven months. One of the ones that the one of the cheap plastic ones I bought Best Buy, it’s sitting in my recycle box. And then I got a four Bay that I’m using as well. And so this will be a nice replacement for the two Bay that’s in here again, awesome ALXUM calm if you want to check those out available on Android as well, I’ll have a special link in this show. So HUG for two zero have a link from them. If you want to think about purchasing or buying it, just a good standard price will depend go ahead and look it up when you go take a peek at it, but appreciate them sending it out. It’s actually going to replace the two Bay that I
Mike Wieger [1:16:34]
that I brought will be a good user you should give us a report in six or seven months because with burst you hit those all the time all day. 24 seven. So you’re a pretty good stress test user for that kind of unit. Yeah, tell us in a few months, you know how well it’s holding
Jim Collison [1:16:49]
up? No, they run and they get hot. These drives. In fact, the four Bay the drives gets so hot I have an extra fan that sits on the outside just to keep those drives cool because they run So much so you’re right that’ll be one of those things that but already it feels a little more solid than some of the other ones that I have bought to get that done ALXUM Thanks for sending those out and like Mike like you said we’ll do some will test it over the next couple months I just gave it a quick week long test to see how does in the long run with first Mike we’ve come to the end of another week we have yeah anything you any tech you’re working on or anything new on your side of things.
Mike Wieger [1:17:31]
Oh, store JR. Storage I Why do I still do my still stay? That’s how we know Jay. That’s how we know it right. So I’m going to keep saying storage a storage store. J Yeah, that has been a fun little project and so unrated has a in the community applications has a store storage. Docker so has the image in there, super easy. You’re up and running takes no time at all. I did the there’s some terminal stuff you have to do it. On a separate machine, it’s little bit easier, you have to essentially get a node set up. So they send you a unique key, you have to generate essentially are doing like, almost like a block chain style, generating a key. And so you have to get up to 30 level difficulty. So the more power you have on that computer, so I did on my Mac, it took 10 seconds, then you sign in with your unique key, they email you, so you have to wait a few days. So if you’re going to do this, go right now to storage, calm and sign up. It says they’re in beta, but you’ll get your key within probably two days, maybe even sooner. Just be ready though, because if you kind of let this thing run wild, and they are pretty good in the Docker container about being able to limit it, you tell it the storage that you’re going to give it so I set my in Unreal, I just set up a new share for storage. And then I in the app, it tells you, you know, point me to where you want me to store the stuff and how much you want to give it to me What’s your bandwidth allocation, and I let it kind of run wild and I will say there are some unique things here if you’re running it on unafraid with Docker. Typically the default is to give it 10 seconds when you tell it to stop, it’ll give it 10 seconds before it kills the app. Well, storage takes a lot longer than that, and then you end up with corrupt databases. So and there’s a lot of terminal stuff you have to do to get those restored. I’ve had to do it twice now cuz I forgot to manually cuz you can manually it takes two seconds to manually stop it with a 302nd stopper. And I just keep forgetting. So I ran an unrated update. And obviously, that killed everything. And then I rebooted one time that killed it on its own. So I’ve had to rebuild the databases twice, which now the way storage runs, it actually does a lot of uptime checking, but it hasn’t great dashboard. Now a web dashboard for your usage. So I can go in and see out I’ll actually just real quick, we have two seconds here I’ll just show it and how it looks for the dashboard. That’s kind of neat. This is this is the new thing they just released this month, or maybe last month
Jim Collison [1:19:53]
might be good to come over to the YouTube channel and check out this part. You can share your screen and I’ll bring it up full screen here for us. If you
Yeah, good way to do that. I will do that.
Okay, so can you guys see it now? Nope, not yet. Share it with me share it into the shared into the video here so I can see it Oh, you know what a share screen
Mike Wieger [1:20:16]
telling me that my share screen is blocked
Jim Collison [1:20:20]
bomber? Well, this is we mentioned at the beginning of the show storage may be the one that gets through all the craft of blockchain and crypto. And so I keep in mind, I’m just afraid with my one terabyte limit that I’m going to blow through that pretty quick. So when you said yeah, it’s kind of chatty. I was like, okay, probably not. Probably not time for me to do it just as a quick update on the other side of things. But on the burst side of things, you know, there are now a bunch of burst derivatives, burst and boom and LHD and HHHDD and BHD. And those are All burst equivalents. And I’ve been working with Ken on some of those and staying close to those, they all use the same plots that we did on bursts, sort of sort of. And it’s been fun and fun to keep up. There’s a lot of things still going on there. So that’s still rolling. I’m not sure I’d go out by any additional hard drives today. But man, that was sure a lot of fun to get that done in those days. And so, No, we won’t do any crypto in the post show. We did a lot. We did some updating last week, the crypto markets kind of dropped out a little bit. And so we’re at 773 75, I think somewhere in the sevens. I’m at this point. So it continues to roll. And if you want to, if you want to have a conversation about it again, any questions around it, you can send me an email Jim at the average guy.tv. We want to say anything else you want to add?
Mike Wieger [1:21:42]
Well, I was just gonna say one final thing on storage. If you want to know what they’re up to go to their YouTube channel. They just had their cue three Town Hall. Great. And the question and answer at the end, actually, you could probably skip the announcements go to the question and answer because people ask the real good questions. And you can go watch that and get all the updates. They’re really pro about it. There are They’re very pro, they have a game plan. They address questions. They’re very transparent. I really enjoy what they’re doing on
Jim Collison [1:22:08]
do we mentioned on the show they’re partnering or they’re doing some work with next cloud?
Mike Wieger [1:22:11]
Yes. They’re partnering with a lot of places like next cloud, I think phonology is actually another one they’re partnering with. So companies like that, that you could end up using them as the backend for something like a next cloud. So right and it’s all secure. And it’s secure client side with storage, so you know that your stuff is going to be securely stored. And the speed really the big updates from storage was the speed and the reliability. I think they’re getting four or five nines of reliability now on our stuff, so they’re really trying to rival Amazon AWS, and we’ll see we’ll see where it goes. But I love being a note and they go public, I think in December is when their new public open it up to everyone goes live.
Jim Collison [1:22:52]
I think they got a shot at some ZYC Well, we’ll see how it goes. Don’t forget we want to thank everyone who supports us on Patreon Patreon. dot com know the average guy.tv slash Patreon. We get you there if you want to support us $5 plans available if you want to jump in, we even have a month long if you want to support you or your business wants to support the live stream. And that means you’ll get mentioned on the show every week, there’ll be some branding on the livestream a bit as well. hundred bucks a month gets you for the shows that we do in a month. And if you want to support you can do that on Patreon. You can do it for one month or you can do for multiple months. So if you want to jump in and get that done, you can check that out the average guy.tv slash Patreon I mentioned the average guy.tv slash discord if you want to join that group hasn’t been joined in a while but if you want to do that you can and then the average guy.tv slash Facebook again I haven’t had a new person in there in a while, but the community continues to roll on and some great conversations if you want to join us. That way if you want to send me an email Jim at the average guy.tv gets that done. If we not if we do want to thank Christian and the theAverageGuy.tv platform both web and media hosting. Powered by Maple Grove partners get secure reliable high Speed hosting for people that you know you trust. Just tonight as I was logging into update for the show, I noticed my SSL certificate had gone in for the first time in five years in Christian had gone. What’s the word? expired? That’s the word I’m looking for. And I pink Christian, and I was like, hey, and he’s like, Oh yeah, I’m working on it. I forgot to commit something. It’s done. Boom. It Like, that’s how great it is. From a from a hosting perspective. And so if you want to know apply and start at $10 and visit Maple Grove partners com we think Christian for support. We do we’re trying for a cyber frontiers next week. So we’re hoping to get that one in as well. And then don’t forget, you can download the app. Home Gadget geeks.com and I have a whole bunch of new coupons on on for Hello Fresh. So if you want to jump into that I gave a couple away the other day. Folks are trying it out. We are still doing it Mike. just totally agree. It’s just I’ve got a bag in the fridge right now. That’ll be tomorrow night. Standards taken care of. Send me an email Jim at the average guy that TV if you want to try it out free for a week. We are live every Thursday 8pm Central nine Eastern out here. The average guy.tv live will stay around for a little bit of post show. With that, we’ll say goodbye, everybody.
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