How to lose friends and alienate people

What we cover

• Getting to know Stephen and his MSP business
• The sad saga of the fall of MinIO
• MXroute/SimpeLogin and self-hosting email
• Quick Hits:
  • Snapraid v14 release, now with a GUI!
  • Jellyfin 10.11.7 release, patch immediately to address 4 major CVE’s
  • Opt out of Microsoft/GitHub training CoPilot on your data
  • Trivy (popular CI/CD vulnerability scanner) compromised
    • See also Dockhand release notes
  • FCC Bans Commercial Routers in US

In Episode 3, Adam is on vacation (or something like that), but Alex, Geoff and Stephen are here to close out our “meet the hosts” segment as we talk to Stephen about his tech origin story — from disassembling the family PC as a kid to enterprise storage work and eventually founding his own MSP.

Then we dig into MinIO’s troubled relationship with the open source community, how it affected two of the hosts directly, and whether alternatives like Garage and SeaweedFS are worth exploring for home lab S3 storage.

Next, Geoff walks us through his email journey — from Gmail to ProtonMail to FastMail to MXRoute — and how a newly discovered API in MXRoute let him ditch his SimpleLogin subscription entirely. We also get into email aliasing, privacy, and why self-hosting email is a hill none of us are willing to die on.

We close out with our new Quick Hits segment: SnapRaid 14 ships with a GUI, a critical Jellyfin security patch, GitHub Copilot training opt-out, the Trivy/Dockhand compromise, and the FCC’s controversial router ruling.

Topics: MSP, Minio, S3 object storage, Garage, SeaweedFS, MXroute, email, SimpleLogin, Snapraid, Jellyfin, GitHub, Trivy, FCC, routers

Links

• Replace GitHub with This - Tailscale YouTube
• https://blog.fuzzymistborn.com/restic-server-over-minio/
• https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/
• https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs
• https://blog.fuzzymistborn.com/mxroute-email-aliases/
• https://mxroute.com
• https://simplelogin.io
• https://mxroutespammer.com/
• https://gitlab.com/tomhello56/mxroute-alias-manager
• https://github.com/bfpimentel/bitwarden-mxroute

Transcript

Alex: Well, we’re back again for episode three. Welcome into BitFlip, the podcast where we talk about the wider conversation around technology and the pragmatic side of infrastructure. 00:00

Alex: Adam is out this week. He is, where is he? He’s either in Portugal or Asheville. I forget one of the two. Anyway, the upshot is he’s not here this week. But I am joined by Stephen and Jeff. I’m good. I’m doing pretty good. Thanks, Alex. And this week, we’re going to lock a little bit into the backstory of Stephen. You’ve heard Jeff in episode one and Adam in episode two. And Stephen, you’re up, my friend. So that’s what we’re going to talk about this week is a little bit about Stephen. We’ve also got a deconstruction of the Min.io platform. mess situation, situations being polite, the MinIO situation, and maybe some open source self-hosting alternatives for your S3 needs. 00:09

Alex: We’re also going to talk about MX route and a replacement for simple login, if and when we get there. Also, we’ve got a bunch of quick hits coming at the end of the show. So this is, we’re experimenting with the format, we’re figuring out what’s going to work, all that kind of stuff. 00:54

Alex: So we’ve got like a bunch of new stories and we’re going to give each other 30 seconds each to talk about these things. So it should be a good time. Anyway, let’s move on to… A little bit of housekeeping, first of all. I need to remind you all that there is an email address because we had one whole email this week, so it does work. 01:09

Alex: And those that wrote in, so those of you, the person that wrote in was someone coming from the self-hosted audience saying, hey, been listening for a while. It’s good to hear from you. Hello and welcome into Bitflip. You can write in to us at contact at bitflip.show. Please give us topic suggestions, feedback. There was a second email. I lied. Someone else wrote in saying that Jeff’s audio last episode was really bad. It’s okay. If we 01:29

Geoff: have time, we’ll talk about it at the end of the show. But yes, we all know it was bad. 01:54

Alex: He’s got a new microphone, people. It’s serious. All right. Let’s talk to Stephen about, well, how you got into self-hosting, how you got into computers in general, because you’ve got a pretty interesting backstory over there, don’t you? 02:00

Stephen: No, not at all. But we’ll try to make it sound interesting. Yeah, so about me. How did I start this? I started way back when I guess I was like six years old and I built a computer. And I think at the time. 02:15

Alex: You built a computer when you were six? Yeah, no 02:29

Stephen: lies. 02:31

Stephen: What 02:31

Alex: was it made 02:32

Stephen: out of? 02:33

Stephen: What was it made out of? Legos? Mostly beige, hard, thick metal. But I think basically I got into this because we had a computer that my parents had saved for and something broke on it and it seemed expensive to take it to an actual technician to fix the thing. 02:33

Stephen: And so my father came home to a 02:51

Alex: kitchen table just full of parts. What sort of spec was it? I imagine it was… 02:54

Stephen: It had a turbo button. So I think it went from 03:00

Alex: like 33 03:03

Stephen: to 66 or whatever at the time. So back then though, like technology was changing pretty rapidly, right? Like we had, you know, really slow modems, then you got a slightly faster one and then like eventually got to 56k. 03:04

Stephen: But my point being is that we didn’t really want to pay someone to do these things. And so I just learned how to do all of it. 03:17

Alex: are we talking windows 3.1 or is it no 03:24

Stephen: it was dos and then eventually 3.1 but 03:28

Alex: yeah wow 03:32

Stephen: i remember uh what is it word perfect that was like an actual application you had to get into and you had this um this little overlay that you put over top of the keyboard so you knew what the functions did in that app It’s pretty old. Yeah, so I guess I started way back then. And then of course, gaming got interesting. And I figured out I could get, you know, Duke Nukem, like Duke 3D, to connect to my friend’s house over a modem when we directly connected to each other. 03:32

Stephen: And of course, we could just run around a big map and shoot 04:02

Alex: at each other. 04:05

Alex: So that was pretty exciting. It is a shame Adam isn’t here because I think he’d have a lot more to say about Duke Nukem. I never really played it. My jumping off point was Monster Truck Madness. That’s the first game I ever remember a long time ago. 04:05

Stephen: So did you ever do the whole like Doom, Wolfenstein 3D thing? 04:20

Geoff: No, not really. 04:24

Geoff: I was never a big Doom guy either. I think my first video game that I can really remember, actually, I kind of mentioned this on the Discord, because Worms is kind of the first game I can really remember playing. 04:26

Geoff: Oh, 04:36

Stephen: yeah. 04:36

Alex: Yeah, 04:36

Geoff: I forgot about that one called 04:36

Alex: UFO. 04:38

Alex: Worms Armageddon was the bomb, quite literally. Worms, yeah, yeah. Wild. That was a good one. What else? A Transport Tycoon, of course. Oh! The actual OG from 1994, I think. 04:38

Geoff: I mean, remiss if we didn’t mention Oregon Trail. I don’t know if you guys played Oregon Trail at all. I’m not quite that old. 04:54

Stephen: You guys have jumped around in age so much in these titles. 04:59

Geoff: I’m remembering older games that 05:04

Alex: I played. 05:07

Alex: Right. 05:07

Alex: The 05:08

Geoff: older 05:08

Alex: we get, Stephen. 05:08

Alex: Yeah. 05:10

Alex: The more the past was, first of all, rose-tinted. Everything back in the 90s was perfect. It’s so good, 05:10

Stephen: right? 05:15

Stephen: Yeah, until 05:16

Alex: you 05:16

Stephen: go back and 05:16

Alex: play the 05:17

Stephen: games. 05:17

Stephen: But anyway, I digress. Yeah. So I guess I was always the fellow when we had LAN parties over at Friends House that would set up the network, right? 05:17

Stephen: And back then it was with like a hub because switches weren’t really much of a thing. And if they were, they were extremely expensive. Yeah. you know you plug in too many things you get packet collisions on a hub which was pretty wild but oh yeah these things don’t exist anymore uh and then that leads me I suppose into high school and then gaming was just more of a thing and then Linux was kind of a thing around then as well um 05:28

Alex: what was your jumping off point with Linux then 05:54

Stephen: uh hating Windows I suppose because we had like We had Windows 2000, which was pretty fantastic, I guess, at the time. 05:57

Stephen: Because what was the – I guess it was 98 SE and then 2000. I forget what it was. I just didn’t really like – no, it was Windows ME. I hated that thing with a passion. ME, yeah. Yeah, we talked about this 06:07

Geoff: last episode. 06:18

Geoff: It was ME, then 2000, then Vista. Yeah. 06:18

Stephen: Was 06:21

Alex: ME the NT kernel or was that the last hurrah of the 98 kernel? Yes, 06:22

Stephen: that’s correct. 06:26

Stephen: Yeah. 06:27

Stephen: So that was the difference, right? Because ME was its own like home version, but 2000 was the NT kernel that you could finally start doing things that weren’t pouring on. 06:27

Alex: Yeah. 06:37

Alex: Yeah. 06:38

Alex: And then, and did you ever run, and this is after XP, I know I’m jumping around a little bit. Did you ever run the sort of early releases of Longhorn? Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah, 06:38

Stephen: yeah, 06:48

Alex: yeah, for 06:48

Stephen: sure. 06:49

Alex: Did you get into the Ricing game? It wasn’t called Ricing back then, but the desktop customizations you could do, all the tweaks. 06:49

Alex: You could go in the registry and change the start button. 06:56

Stephen: Yes, actually, no, I just didn’t recall it. But yeah, no, there was full packages that you could get, like software apps for that, right? The taskbar and everything else could look pretty wild. I never really fiddled with it much, but I do remember the time. But it was right around then that I also started fiddling with the original… CDs that you could get from Ubuntu. You know, you would ask for them to send it to you over a physical mail. Yeah, and snail mail and you get a bunch. I just kind of did it, I think the first time because I was like, there’s no way that someone’s actually going to ship me a CD, but evidently it showed up. 07:00

Alex: Yeah. 07:32

Alex: We used to have these magazines back in England. You can go to the news agents. What do you call them here? The kiosks. The newsstands or kiosks. Newsagents. And I remember it was like PC. It was probably Linux format, maybe, even back in the day. And you could get Ubuntu or whatever, Mandrake or Mandreva or whatever it was on the front of a magazine. 07:33

Alex: I remember thinking that was cool. Save up my pocket money for a Linux magazine when I was a kid. Not because I was interested in Linux particularly, just I wanted a CD with like, oh, this is free. Yeah, 07:53

Stephen: it comes with all the stuff. You have to download the actual OSL. I do remember stuff like that. I think PC Gamer back in the day was like a big thing because I was able to get all of the demos of new games on a CD and I didn’t have to download them because it would have taken forever on dial-out. 08:03

Stephen: But I remember they had this application inside there and there was this little mascot. I think his name was Coconut Monkey. Yeah. No, that’s going to hit home for a lot of listeners. Absolutely. You guys will think I’m crazy, but Coconut Monkey. No, no, I 08:20

Geoff: believe you. 08:33

Geoff: I believe you. 08:34

Stephen: Okay. 08:35

Stephen: So that was, I think, my jump off for Linux, but it was never to do server things. It was always to just fiddle with something else that wasn’t Windows. 08:37

Alex: Yeah. 08:46

Stephen: I remember trying to get the compets stuff to work so that you’d have like the effects on the screen. 08:46

Alex: Spinning cube, all that. 08:52

Stephen: Right. 08:54

Stephen: But yeah, but back then I was trying to get the bloody drivers to work for the graphics card to actually make that happen. 08:54

Alex: Yeah. 09:01

Alex: Not an easy, not an easy situation. Not 09:01

Stephen: back then. 09:03

Stephen: And surely it’s completely fixed now. But 09:03

Alex: so how did you get from there and sort of messing about like high schoolers do with computers to you had a bit of a career in sort of enterprise grade storage for a while? 09:07

Stephen: Oh, but that’s in a bit. So I went to college. I did go to college after high school and I ended up doing just like PC technician sort of things like systems admin stuff. 09:17

Stephen: During that, it’s pretty boring. I mean, if you have a pulse, you could probably pass it. Yeah, I ended up going to a newspaper that was actually was called Sun Media. 09:28

Stephen: And they did a number of newspapers. And I used to support a whole bunch of Macintosh stuff because I had all the designers that were doing graphic work, all on Mac. 09:41

Stephen: And so there was a server room that had some Mac G4 servers and stuff like that. But all the hard drives were connected by Firewire. So it’s kind of like the equivalent of today, a bunch of USB hard drives hanging off the side of your computer and then just sharing those files. 09:50

Stephen: So I remember trying to make that better back then, right? And so you figure out how to do that. But jumping from there was a position with another company that allowed me to do a lot of enterprise stuff. 10:06

Stephen: And that really got me into server room, fairly deep into it, expensive stuff. We had some 3PAR stuff. We had a bunch of Dell-compellent stuff. And that really just gets me into the whole world of a SAN, like a proper storage network. 10:18

Stephen: From there, of course, you have all these concepts of snapshotting and whatnot that nowadays we take for granted. They were big dollar things back in the day. So that was pretty much where I got my start with a whole bunch of enterprise stuff. 10:40

Stephen: Of course, I come home and I want to do the same sort of thing, but I don’t have $500,000 for a SAN, right? And so you start reading about ZFS and you start getting in there. 10:55

Alex: So what was the first place that you ran ZFS at home with? Talk us through what that server looked like. Oh, golly. 11:06

Stephen: So it was definitely, I’m not going to lie, it was definitely probably on, well, whatever TrueNAS is, but back then it was FreeNAS or what was it? Free NAS. Was it free NAS? 11:14

Geoff: I 11:24

Stephen: think so. 11:24

Stephen: Before it changed names, but I was definitely doing it back then with the, with the GUI. I was not jumping in the terminal and doing that. The only thing I did terminal back then was old Cisco stuff. Cause you had to configure all your switches and turn with my dick. Um, what did that server look like? It was probably, I don’t know, like one terabyte hard drives, two terabyte hard drives. It wouldn’t have been anything large. But it was pretty great because I was able to do all this sort of snapshot stuff. But again, not in the console, right? And so the console stuff only started happening for me because that’s basically how you do everything now, right? 11:25

Stephen: It only started happening really for me in the last time flies, probably like 20 years ago. So I’m 40 for reference. But yeah, so I guess when I was like 20, 25, I was starting to get more into what can I do for server stuff on Linux. 12:00

Alex: It’s one of those things that you kind of look back at your history and you go, oh, yeah, I’m actually old now or get in that way. I’ve got enough experience to know which way is up. Which leads me to asking you about founding an MSP. 12:17

Stephen: Yeah. 12:33

Stephen: So at a certain point, I didn’t like doing the corporate job. And so I really wanted to move on to something else. And so COVID kind of hit and more effort was put into that because I was stuck at home. 12:34

Stephen: So why not do all of the business things? And then I just started pushing out and getting clients and starting to do that stuff. 12:46

Stephen: I went from doing corporate style server stuff like building server rooms to the cooling, the storage, everything else, to going back to basically fixing people’s Microsoft problems, I’ll call them, which is kind of funny, but it’s quite rewarding if you’re building your own business. 12:55

Alex: resetting people’s uh email passwords and all that yeah just you just hadn’t had enough of that clearly 13:16

Stephen: yeah oh i really love it i had to go back to it it was 13:22

Alex: but i i know for a fact because some of the infrastructure we’re using for this show is running out of your msp’s server room that you’ve built out in fact some of my some of my off-site infrastructure is in that room too uh i know for a fact that you still have not fully scratched that itch of building out and racking and stacking equipment and it’s what i like you’re always plugging in new enterprise new unify gear and messaging me at 2 a.m going hey look at this cool new switch that i absolutely definitely do not need but i’m going to buy it anyway well 13:25

Geoff: that costs like twenty thousand dollars 13:56

Stephen: So that’s the, that’s the big part of, of an MSP, right? Like you have to support more than just the desktops. And so, uh, because of the experience that I have, I can, I can do all of the network. I can do custom storage stuff. I can do, you know, all your, all your networking requirements, wifi and whatnot. And so. Yeah, no, it’s past experiences really just led me to being able to do a pretty full service MSP, which is pretty handy these days. 13:59

Geoff: And I realize for all those people at home who don’t know what MSP stands for, I don’t know if you’ve actually said what 14:24

Stephen: MSP stands for. 14:29

Stephen: Managed Service Provider. 14:30

Stephen: So where they just think of an IT section for a business as a subscription. 14:32

Geoff: Okay, makes sense. 14:38

Alex: Do you want an IT department if you’re a car dealership? Probably not. So you give Stephen a call. 14:40

Stephen: Yep. 14:46

Alex: That’s it, really. 14:48

Alex: Well, thank you for that, Stephen. It was really interesting to hear your backstory. And for those of you that want to, you know, you’re in the northern Toronto-ish kind of area, how do folks engage your services? 14:50

Stephen: Yeah, absolutely. 15:03

Stephen: I have a website, NDLS. Wait, here it is. No, turn my head that way. There we go. NDLS.ca. There’s a little contact form on there, and it also kind of lists basically what my services are. 15:04

Stephen: We’re a small company. We’re growing. But I think I could definitely help out if you have a business that requires an IT section. 15:18

Alex: Or you want some kind of off-site service. That server room has a few slots available. 15:27

Stephen: It sure does. 15:31

Stephen: Yeah, absolutely. 15:32

Geoff: I wanna talk about Minio, MinIO here for a little bit and S3 object storage. So back in 2020, I was kind of playing around with setting up my backups and I used Restic and Restic had S3 compatible backup storage. 15:34

Geoff: And so I was looking for an easy solution for setting up S3 object storage and I came across MinIO. And it was great. There was a Docker image. I could set it up on my Synology that I had running at the time. And I swear it was the biggest pain in my butt because, you know, got it all set up and I would leave it alone. 15:50

Geoff: And then I would go to do upgrades. And I swear every time I would go for an upgrade, there would be some massive breaking change that required me to spend literally an entire day undoing. 16:13

Geoff: And really the last straw for me was in 2022. I will remember this and I have a blog post about it. I’ll have it in the show notes. I went to go update only to find that they had completely changed the file storage system for the Docker image. 16:25

Geoff: And the only solution and the only migration path was literally spin up a new min IO instance and run a copy command to go between the one instance to the other instance. And also what annoyed the hell out of me was the documentation for that migration was complete crap. 16:41

Geoff: And so I literally, I had to like, I went like back to different versions to try and get something working so that way I could run the stupid command because I feel like they took the command out of other versions. And… Ultimately, I just threw up my hands completely. I moved over to Restic server, which is basically like an HTTPS endpoint. 17:03

Geoff: It works fine with Restic. And that’s what I used for my object storage. But Alex, do you want to talk a little bit more about S3 object storage and kind of what it is? Because I think you did a video recently on this and I’d be curious for your perspective. 17:25

Alex: Yeah, I did. 17:39

Alex: Now, S3 is a way essentially to store files on the internet. It was originally developed by Amazon. You might have heard the term S3 before. It stands for Simple Storage Service, hence S3. 17:40

Alex: And you can access it via an API. It’s not like a traditional file system where you would mount it to a mount point and things like that. 17:53

Alex: It’s API-driven rather than a typical file system. So that’s the big difference. You would talk to it over an HTTP request or something like that with what are called get and put requests. 18:01

Alex: Now, where MinIO enters the picture is self-hosters like us, we wanted to have a version of S3 that spoke the same protocol because S3 became a standardized way of doing these kinds of file storage operations without being locked into Amazon specifically. And many other vendors, you know, we’re talking DigitalOcean, Linode, you know, all of the sort of second tier of not quite hyperscaler people offer S3 services. 18:12

Alex: But again, you’re tied into their pricing structures. And I’ve already got a bunch of hard drives in my basement. So why don’t I just use those? Why don’t I just throw MinIO up in front of those hard drives and then use MinIO as an S3 compatible object storage layer for things like Resting? 18:41

Alex: And in fact, I did exactly what Fuzzy did. And I put it on, I should say Fuzzy, by the way, Fuzzy Mistborn, Jeff. Hello. That’s his nickname in our Discord, which you can find by going to bitflip.show, by the way. 18:56

Alex: So I threw Min.io on a Synology at my mum’s house in England. And I was doing Restic across the ocean with many terabytes. And I ran into the exact same situation, I’m going to be polite and call it situation, as Jeff did, where I was left high and dry with many terabytes worth of data in 2022. 19:08

Alex: But the timeline of screwing their users started even back in 2021. So in 21, Min.io moved to an AGPL v3 and commercial dual license. 19:26

Alex: It was still open source, technically, but the license became stricter with a much clearer delineation between the sort of personal community editions and and the commercial editions so this was really if you were paying attention the first sign that they were going to try and do a rug pull in 22 they did a gateway in fast system mode deprecation and removal which required as Jeff and I found out much to our chagrin the migration of spinning up a second I say migration in 19:41

Alex: There was no migration path between those two schema changes. No. It was just, it was a crap experience as a user. Then in 24 and 25, they introduced this thing called AI Store as the primary product direction. 20:13

Alex: Of course, you’ve got to have AI in your product these days. And the enterprise operator took over from their community operator in Kubernetes world, and they pretty much stopped supporting their community operator. 20:28

Alex: Another red flag. 20:41

Alex: Then in 2025, users started to report things like missing features in the admin console was missing from their community setups. The Docker image distribution became really inconsistent. In other words, they stopped updating the community version. They’re still shipping to their commercial customers, like fair play, where the money comes from. But they kind of forgot the user base that put them where they were by doing this. 20:43

Alex: I don’t think they forgot. I think they just don’t care. Yeah, well, they’re too busy diving into their Scrooge McDuck piles of money. I don’t know how successful Min.io as a company is, honestly, but they were pretty hostile towards the, I mean, to be fair, the users were pretty hostile with them. 21:10

Alex: As you can imagine in GitHub comments, people were getting pretty heated, which led to closing and censoring of many GitHub issues and comments and things like that. Things being closed as, yes, we know we’re removing features from the free tier, works as intended, closed, will not fix. 21:28

Alex: It was a common outcome for these issues. And so during 2025, that was really the year where the trust really seriously started to break down with MinIO. 21:45

Alex: And then, of course, that culminated, I think it was late last year or early this year, I forget exactly when, where the GitHub repo got archived and marked as read-only and officially is now no longer maintained. So the open source version of Min.io was effectively frozen. Way to just kill any good. You 21:56

Geoff: had a good product, you had some goodwill in the community, and you just shot yourself in the foot on so many occasions. Yeah. Like, I’m hoping they’re swimming in Scrooge McDuck money, to be perfectly honest with you, because that’s the only explanation I can really come up with for why they’ve behaved the way that they have. 22:13

Stephen: So my question is basically, if this is your backup, why object storage? 22:31

Geoff: Honestly, the reason I did it was because it was an… easy way to use rustic because rustic didn’t have a whole lot of endpoints so you know the the other option i think that i looked at was like ssh and i really didn’t want to have to do a whole ssh setup for every single box 22:36

Stephen: to 22:53

Geoff: you know log in and run the backup that way you need to do over scp so s3 was an easy way to do it until i found the rustic server which just Honestly, part of my thing at the end of this was just gonna be, I really don’t think HomeLab users need S3 storage. 22:54

Geoff: for 23:12

Alex: anything unless you’re running terraform or something like that and you need to store your state somewhere which is the video that jeff referenced i did for tailscale last week i did a fully self-hosted alternative to min io well to github really with self-hosted runners self-hosted open tofu s3 back back end layer using garage which is a distributed object storage with the s3 api built on top of it Garage runs as a single binary, and there’ll be a link to the project in the show notes, of course. 23:12

Alex: It has minimal dependencies, and it can support multi-node clustering as well if you want it to. It has something in it called CRDTs, which are conflict-free replicated data types, and these are ways for the different nodes in a garage cluster to reconcile writes that happened asynchronously between different nodes. 23:45

Alex: It’s a pretty cool technology. There is no official UI. There is a CLI, and it’s config-driven. So it’s quite a small ecosystem, but I found that to be absolutely fine. The one rough edge I found specifically with Terraform and Garage wasn’t a Garage limitation, I don’t think. 24:05

Alex: It was a Terraform HashiCorp. Another another business source license kind of drama where Terraform didn’t work with the open source garage instance, but Open Tofu did. 24:21

Alex: There was some like hash check, some completely spurious error that Terraform just put in so it would only work with their proprietary paid for cloud and Amazon’s S3. So anyway, just be aware that there are dragons most of the time with this open source stuff, particularly where there’s a lot of money involved in business use cases like S3 and Terraform. 24:34

Alex: So Garage is a really good option. You should take a look at that, and we’ll put a link to that down below. Seaweed FS is another one that you might want to look at, and this combines object storage, so S3 storage, with Fuse file system storage, as well as a volume-based storage system all in one kind of 24:56

Alex: Wrapper. 25:12

Alex: It’s a pretty interesting project. It’s a bit more complicated to set up. It’s still easier than going full enterprise level with like Ceph or something like that. 25:13

Alex: But there are moving ports. There are more moving parts to this than there are to Garage, for example. The architecture is based on masters and volume servers and filers. 25:23

Alex: So it supports tiering and other sorts of useful things that you might want if you’re a super duper storage nerd. If you’re genuinely trying to replace an Amazon S3 grade thing locally, then Garage is probably not enough for you. 25:35

Alex: But if you’re just like me and Jeff and you’re just doing it locally in your home lab, I’d probably go for Garage. 25:50

Geoff: Yeah, that definitely sounds a little bit simpler to set up. I like single binary things, you know, simple. The lack of a GUI would kind of… I know people don’t like GUIs and I would prefer to configure things over the console, but just sometimes, Stephen’s giving me a look of no. 25:56

Geoff: Well, come 26:12

Stephen: on, what’s 26:12

Geoff: wrong with 26:12

Stephen: the 26:13

Geoff: GUI? 26:13

Geoff: Sometimes for the initial setup of something for me, sometimes it’s just easier to kind of poke through the menu and see what all the options are versus scrolling a gigantic list of all the different variables and things. I mean, I agree with you. If I’m going to replicate something, you know, permanently and be able to recreate it, I fully agree that console is the way to go. But I think the initial fiddling around with something, sometimes it’s easier to play around with a GUI. 26:13

Stephen: So here’s the thing. A lot of people are visual learners, right? Not everyone can, yeah, same here. For the listeners among us, we’re holding our hands up saying that we’re all those people. 26:39

Stephen: Jeff was in there. But the thing is, is that I can’t just, I’m not Alex, so I’m not superhuman. I can’t just stare at a terminal and think, hmm, how am I going to make this work? I know, I’ll read for 45 years and then I’ll just take all this knowledge and it’ll all just work out. 26:51

Stephen: I have to click on things and I have to explore what options are available to me, right? Like ZFS, I have no idea what I’m doing at first, but if I just click around a GUI and go, oh, what’s a snapshot? 27:08

Stephen: Oh, what’s this? 27:20

Stephen: Oh, I can schedule this. Oh, I can move those off to another file system. Holy cow, that’s really neat. It’s just a quick way to learn for me, right? So I don’t know. I don’t subscribe to the whole like GUI is evil 27:21

Alex: thing. 27:35

Alex: I 100% do not read the documentation before I jump into anything. I just want to dispel that myth right now. It’s gotten me into trouble many times over the years. I am the sort of chap that will look at a project and I will try and read the absolute bare minimum that I can get away with to get that thing off the ground as quickly as possible. 27:37

Alex: It’s even worse now in the days of LLMs because I don’t honestly, I don’t read anywhere near as much as I used to. I just throw it into chat GPT or whatever. And it does a lot like I used to spend. I think back to when I was an infrastructure consultant, you know, I’ve got this vision. I had to set up artifactory for a company, which is like a way of storing like a bill of materials for like NPM and build artifacts, that kind of stuff. 27:58

Alex: Like caching. 28:24

Alex: And I remember just going through forum post after forum post because it had to be clustered or something on the back end. I don’t know. It was like 10 years ago. I forget. But yeah, I didn’t read the documentation. I went straight to random people posting on the Internet. Lo and behold, after like a few days, I went and read the docs and it was like right there. So I felt a bit silly in that case. But I like learning all sorts of different ways. Like give me a YouTube video for some things. Give me written documentation for others. It really depends. But I do love me a good CLI. You will never, ever get me self-hosting email. I don’t care what your arguments are about to be. But self-hosting email is just a waste of time. It’s a waste of time. It’s a waste of effort. I couldn’t agree with you more, Alex. I mean, no, no, I really agree. I thought. No, God, 28:25

Geoff: no. 29:15

Alex: Come on now. 29:15

Alex: I mean, I. 29:16

Alex: Go ahead. 29:18

Alex: We have a section in the doc here talking about MX route as a replacement for simple login. And I assumed, not knowing much about the project, that this was a self-hosting email situation. 29:19

Alex: What is it? 29:27

Alex: What’s MX route? 29:28

Geoff: No. 29:29

Geoff: So MX route is. I’ll go back through a little bit. So in 2020-ish, I got on the I don’t like Google, I don’t like Gmail having access to everything I’ve ever written and what they can do with it. 29:29

Geoff: So I started looking at alternative options. And so I tried ProtonMail. Good service, but we’ll talk about this later. I think it’s overkill for email. I really do. Yeah. So I spent two years on that and it was fine, but I, you know, wanted to try something else. So I tried fast mail for a little bit and that was also pretty good, but I started seeing people talk about MX route. 29:43

Geoff: And so MX route is just, it’s an email service provider. It’s basically what it is. And, you know, you can go and you can sign up and they have different plans, different sizes. 30:08

Geoff: So I signed up my first year for just, you know, a one year plan, you know, I figured I would test it out, see what it was. It was like $45 for the year, so pretty reasonable pricing. 30:18

Geoff: And it worked incredibly well. And so every year on Black Friday, the owner does a pretty decent Black Friday sale. 30:30

Geoff: Uh, and so, you know, that year, I think I started it in January and that November, I picked up a lifetime subscription for about a hundred bucks and I get 10 gigabytes of storage on an email server. And I can basically do with that email server, whatever I want. So I can create, like, I have, you know, an email address for me. I have an email address for my wife. I even created one for my kids. So that way, you know, one day if they want to have an email address, you know, they’ve got one, um, 30:39

Geoff: And so this is not a paid promotion for MX Route. They’re not sponsoring or anything, but I just really like the product a lot. 31:07

Alex: Today is a bad day to be talking about MXRoute. It’s April 1st as we record. So the internet is basically just garbage today. I’ve gone to MXRoute.com and there is some weird… 31:19

Alex: They’ve taken over with some April Fool’s promo AI nonsense. The owner has a bit of a sense of humor. I’m seeing that. In simple terms, in one sentence, what is MXRoute? It is an email service provider. Okay. Because that’s all I want from your website, MXroot. I don’t want… And that’s all it… In fairness, that’s 31:33

Geoff: all it usually is. 31:56

Alex: Okay. 31:58

Geoff: It’s just today he’s doing some fun things. His name is Jarland. He has… If you kind of look for him on Reddit, you look for him around. He has a very particular personality. I mean, he’s got a very strong policy on, you know, there’s no refunds. You sign up. Too bad you don’t like the service. It doesn’t work for you. Too bad. He is militant against spammers. So if he catches you spamming, you’re gone. He actually hilariously, I think I’ll include a link to this one in the show notes. He’s got a page dedicated to a repeat spammer, and it’s just like a clown page. 31:59

Geoff: It’s kind of funny. Right. He’s just one of those guys where you know what you’re getting when you kind of sign up for the service. 32:33

Geoff: Okay, so where does Simple Login come into the picture? So Simple Login, so about the same time I found MXRoute, I signed up, I was looking for, again, I was kind of into the whole privacy idea and protecting my email and stuff like that. 32:45

Geoff: So Simple Login is a service that if you’re familiar with like a non-addy or there’s a couple other services like this that lets you sign up and you can create email aliases that are forwarders. So I could create amazonadexample.com when I sign up for amazon.com 32:57

Geoff: And it will forward to my Gmail address or my Outlook address or whatever other address I would like. And so for me, it kind of serves two purposes. One is it’s a privacy thing. So one, they don’t have my actual email address. Two, it’s a spam protection thing because we all know there are some websites you go to and they want you to sign up for a discount or something like that. 33:13

Geoff: So you really don’t want to give them your actual email address, but you still want whatever the discount code is. And so you can use this to, they have an email address for you and it works, 33:37

Geoff: But after you’re done, you can turn it off and they’ll no longer be able to email you. And then the third idea I kind of had that never actually has worked out, thankfully, or never had to be used is, you know, I create an email again. 33:49

Geoff: I’m not going to pick on Amazon, but Amazon and example.com. If I suddenly start getting emails from a third party to that address, I know that Amazon either sold the email address or it got involved in a breach or something happened to that email address where it got outside of whoever the 34:01

Alex: provider was. 34:16

Alex: Now, I noticed in your blog post here, you talk about now saving $36 a year. That’s about to be my next question, was how much does Simple Login cost? It looks like the new API that’s here saves you that subscription. 34:18

Alex: Yes. 34:32

Alex: So 34:32

Geoff: Simple Login is $30 a year. I think it’s $36 now. So it’s not terribly expensive, but it’s something I could save. And so I was browsing around because I was having some issue with SSL certificates on my MX route. 34:34

Geoff: Long story, detailed a little bit in the blog post we’ll have linked. And I discovered that the owner had come out with an API for the panel that he has that runs a whole bunch of stuff. 34:47

Geoff: And one of the things the API can do is it can create these email forwarders for you. And so people have taken that and a lot of developers have started creating different browser extension. So you can create, you know, an alias from the browser. There’s basically a full page that you can, you know, you can create a different alias on that page for it. 35:00

Geoff: And it syncs, you can delete it, you can, you know, pause it, you can do a whole bunch of different things. Someone’s even written one that will tie into Bitwarden. So if you go into Bitwarden, you can generate a username. This will let you generate a username for yourself with a full email address and like that. 35:22

Geoff: So it’s a one-click process. And so I basically spent an evening, once I kind of discovered this was a thing, and I migrated all of my stuff off of SimpleLogin because… 35:40

Geoff: One of the issues I have with simple login, it’s a me problem, was you can’t have two MX DNS entries for the same domain name. So I couldn’t, you know, if I wanted simple login to work on my main domain and MX route, that’s not possible. 35:52

Geoff: So I had to work around that by doing like sl.example.me for my simple login email. And so it was just… 36:07

Stephen: Little bit annoying, not super annoying, but just a 36:15

Geoff: little bit. 36:17

Geoff: And this just kind of solves that pain problem because now everything is on the root domain instead of somewhere else. 36:19

Stephen: So I do have a question for this. You know that Cloudflare has like a free service where you can do that whole like, you know, Amazon dot whatever, right? 36:25

Stephen: Yes. 36:36

Geoff: Yes. 36:37

Geoff: But then you have to trust Cloudflare. And I am again, I have opinions on cloud. I think it’s great. I think it’s wonderful. I’m just worried you give too much power and authority to, you know, too much under one company and you’re asking for trouble because they can rug pull just 36:38

Stephen: like 36:53

Geoff: that. 36:53

Stephen: That’s fair. 36:54

Stephen: That’s fair. 36:55

Stephen: So that second question, have you ever considered about just paying for Outlook and or an actual Gmail account that’s paid? Because being an employer, I’m sure you’re knowledgeable about this stuff, but they actually have different terms of service for the paid subscriptions versus we read all your email because it’s free. 36:55

Geoff: I did, but again, I paid $100 four years ago for my email, and I’m never going to have to pay another dime for it instead of paying a yearly subscription. So yes, that is a valid option. 37:17

Stephen: So I guess I worry. This is the MSP side of me, right? Is that I worry that you paid for a service one time, which is fantastic because it’s something you continue to use. 37:29

Stephen: But then one day his, his, uh, his sales model doesn’t work out for him and he has servers and they’ve gotten quite expensive to run and he’s not really collecting a whole lot of money anymore. And your email goes poof. 37:39

Geoff: Yeah, but the other thing is it’s all an IMAP. I have a Docker script that backs it all up, so a forced-case scenario, I can migrate it without much of an issue. 37:52

Stephen: Fair enough. 38:02

Geoff: And it’s tied to my own domain, so I own the domain, so it’s not like I have to get everyone to move from my Gmail address to a different address. 38:03

Stephen: Fair enough. 38:14

Stephen: What are you doing about this, Alex? 38:15

Alex: Well, it’s funny. 38:17

Alex: What occurs to me is actually I’ve had the same Gmail address now for… When was it in beta? 2002-ish? No. I think I’m going to go with five. Four, maybe. Anyway, Gmail’s been around for a while when it was like four gigs of storage was considered a lot. 38:18

Alex: What was that? 38:39

Alex: 2004. 38:40

Stephen: Yeah, 38:41

Alex: all right, I’ll take that. I’ve had that same email address that whole time. I didn’t really think about it, but that is quite a single point of failure in my life, is just having that same email address for 20, 22 years. 38:42

Alex: holy cow um 38:58

Geoff: let me get 39:00

Alex: we just assume it’s never going to go anywhere don’t you i suppose and maybe i don’t want to self-host email but maybe decoupling it from big tech might be a smart move 39:00

Geoff: again it goes back to you know we’ve all seen stories about google killing someone’s account for whatever reason you know it could be legitimate it could not be you lose all your 39:12

Alex: there was one just this week wasn’t there i think there was i Oh, it was 39:22

Geoff: someone whose son did some inappropriate things with Gemini. Yes, but then got the entire 39:26

Alex: family back, not 39:33

Geoff: just 39:34

Alex: the individual. 39:35

Alex: And then a few years ago, there was the CSAM thing that we covered on Self-Hosted, where they had medical pictures of… Anyway, it’s not hard to see how you end up in a bit of a dystopian situation here, is it? 39:37

Geoff: No, and again, just real quick, because I teased I would talk about this, with Proton… My other thing is, I know a lot of people are like, Proton, keep your email secure. 39:51

Geoff: Email is only secure if both ends are secure. So if I 40:02

Alex: email from my 40:05

Geoff: Proton email address to someone else, the government could just go to that person and subpoena that person and get the email, same exact email that I have in my account. So email is not secure, and therefore, I don’t really see the appeal of ProtonMail personally. 40:06

Geoff: Or 40:23

Alex: print them out and take them to Mar-a-Lago and just leave them in a box. I didn’t say it. Okay, brand new segment time. What are we going to call this? The quick hits? These are the news headlines in the self-hosting world that we think you need to know about. We’re not going to do much discussion. We’re just going to hit them quickly. Okay, SnapRaid14 is out. If you know me, you’ll know that I am the maintainer of perfectmediaserver.com, which is where you use MergerFS and SnapRaid to kind of replace Unraid. 40:24

Alex: It’s a good job Adam’s not here this week, otherwise he’d do a pluggy plug for his shill job. The Snap Raid version 14 is out and it now comes with a GUI. Snap Raid has a GUI? I don’t know. I haven’t looked at it yet, but this one caught my attention in the news this week. 40:51

Geoff: Yeah, that looks pretty cool to me. I’m excited for the GUI because it might replace some of the snap rate runner stuff. 41:06

Geoff: So definitely one to look into. Easy for you to say. Yeah. So Jellyfin version 10.11.7 is out. This is very important if you run Jellyfin. The devs have said there are four. I think I saw they were level 10, you know, 10 scores on the CVE. 41:12

Geoff: So patch now basically is the PSA here. 41:30

Stephen: I’m assuming all of you use GitHub. Everyone has an account at this point. Just so you know, they’ve opted to start training Copilot on pretty much all that data. 41:34

Stephen: Right now, it’s something you have to opt out on. So feel free, maybe go into the settings and take a look at that, unless you’re just comfortable with training their AI. 41:45

Geoff: Yeah, that was an easy opt-out for me. Trivi. Trivi is a… They talked about this on 2.5 admins, but it’s a scanner software that a lot of companies use to check their Docker containers for vulnerabilities and 41:54

Geoff: They were compromised pretty hard a couple of weeks ago. And so you might want to just double check to make sure if your container is running Trivi, make sure you update because I ran into this with Dockhand. 42:09

Geoff: They had to release an emergency patch and just something to 42:21

Alex: be aware of. 42:24

Alex: The notes on the Dockhand repo, which will be in the description down below in the show notes. talk about they give you all the details of how docan was compromised and the github action stuff injection stuff that was going on and this is a pretty nasty one folks so yeah make sure you’re all up to date 42:25

Stephen: in other news the crazy americans the fcc have banned commercial routers if they’re from china 42:42

Geoff: What does that even mean? No, no, no, no. I’m going to click. Not just from China. If they are not produced inside the United States, 42:48

Alex: they are not. 42:56

Stephen: Right, sure. 42:57

Alex: My mistake. 42:57

Alex: So the typical rationale, like the antidote to this comment would be, sure, well, the U.S. router companies must have paid someone on Capitol Hill big bucks for this to pass. there aren’t any routers made in the usa what is going on this is completely crazy i’m legitimately 42:59

Stephen: beside myself because like honestly i’ve yet to figure out if i were running an msp in the states uh who am i supposed to buy a router from and then what is the legal actual uh example of what a router physically is because If I have a TV and it has a network card in it, like a physical click in network card and then a Wi-Fi adapter and somehow it connects and talks over both interfaces at the same time. 43:17

Stephen: Is that a router? I don’t know. But it’s like through legalese could be. 43:44

Alex: Now, don’t forget you can write into the show at contact at bitflip.show. Send us your feedback, questions, email, anything you think we need to put in the quick hits section. Let us know what you thought of the quick hits section. I quite liked it personally. Yeah, we’re also going to look at setting up some kind of a Patreon at some point so you guys can support us. 43:49

Alex: We don’t have huge server costs or anything like that, but it would be nice to throw Stephen a few bones for his MSP towards the… The cost of the server room or something like that, you know. He’s got to pay his heating bill up in the frozen north. 44:09

Stephen: I’m also hosting the things for this podcast. 44:22

Alex: Yes, you are. 44:25

Alex: Yeah. 44:25

Alex: And we’re very grateful. And the audience, we are currently ad free. We don’t have any sponsors, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. We don’t have any. Well, it’s just there’s no messing about. I guess just straightforward relationship. Us and you were a bunch of independent guys bringing you this podcast. So help us help you keep bringing it, you know, real, real life, all that kind of stuff. 44:26

Alex: Contact at bitflip.show. 44:47

Alex: Now, until next time, I want to say thank you very much for watching or listening. I’ve been Alex. You can find 44:50

Geoff: me on the internet. I am Fuzzy Mistborn, or you can find me at FuzzyMistborn.com. 44:55

Stephen: And I’ve been Stephen, and you can find me at Stephen at LastPackets.ca. 45:01

Geoff: That was bitflip.show 45:06

Alex: slash three. 45:08