Chris: [00:00:00] Winter may be coming to an end for us, but it's just beginning for the Mars Linux copter. You know, that things may 27 flights. Unbelievable. But recently the little Linux copter on Mars has been struggling. Dust has settled on its solar panels and it's having a hard time recharging. It's six lithium ion batteries.

You know, I just had this problem, Brent. I had to get up on the roof and clean off my solar panels. Are they going to hire you to clean 

Brent: Dust the wings of this little 

Chris: copter too? Yeah. I don't know what the big deal is. Just get out there and dust it off. Yeah, just blow it up.

hello, friends. And welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris and my name is Brent. Hello Brent Wes is out on assignment this week. I think he's actually at the airport as we record right now. Welcome. We still have a heck of a show. Nvidia has done it. They have kicked off the process of [00:01:00] open-sourcing their compute end GPU drivers.

So let's chat about that. Let's chat about what you can expect. Let's chat about what's happening first and break it down for you. And then later on in the show, one of the co-founders of tail scale is going to join us. Let's see if we can get a sense of maybe what makes tail scales so different by chatting with him.

And then we'll round out the show with some boosts, some picks and a lot more. So before we go any further, let's say time appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, mumble room. Hello. Hello guys. Thank you for joining us today. I might sound a little different. I am remote on location, right? I am down in Southern Oregon, getting the very last bits of damage from the Denver Roadtrip fixed on lady Jube.

She, her suspension took a beating on the way into Denver, and there's just one bit of repair needed still before we're ready for our summer road trip, because we are working on another JB road trip and we'll have details on that as soon. So I'm down here and of course, it's right after my Starling died on [00:02:00] me.

If you heard last week's episode, I started link is out. So I'm doing this an older school way, low bandwidth. So if I sound weird, that might be why, but, and Brent, you're back at home now, all done traveling. I am, 

Brent: it feels funny that we kind of switched spots. You're traveling now and I'm home. So it feels good for my 

Chris: end.

Yeah. This is funny for me though, because I traveled over 400 miles. It was like nearly nine hours of driving yesterday and I get down to Southern Oregon and I park and everything's where I've left it. It's the weirdest thing. It's like, I'm in a different climate because it's much nicer down here. But all my stuff is in the same drawers.

It's almost like when you, when you close all the windows, blinds and stuff, it's like, I really never left. I feel like I'm still in Washington, but then I step outside. Of course I'm in a totally different, different spot, but I love it. Job's did great on the drive down. We hit some traffic, but other than other than that, she did so good.

And you know, the cellular system I have now, just so seamlessly switches between different networks that we remain [00:03:00] connected the entire drive these days, which is so awesome. So we're, you know, streaming podcasts and stuff and listening to him on the way down, we towed the car. And so it's just the wife and I, the kids are at home, cause it's just a quick trip and I'll be down here for a couple of episodes that I'm recording one Linux unplugged in one.

And then we'll be heading home, but it's nice. It's nice to be on the road again. It's nice to be getting ready for the road trip that, uh, we're going to do later this summer. So we'll be sharing details on that road trip and office hours, if you're curious, but let's, let's talk about the big news. Let's just get right into this because I don't know if I ever thought this would happen every now and then there have been these just ginormous, Everest size mountain.

For the Linux desktop that we had to climb. And once we're on the other side, looks like life has changed for Linux users forever. This was definitely the case with wifi a long time ago, automatic X configuration. I think maybe could even [00:04:00] get this treatment. There's been certain milestones that we have hit that have just changed life for all future Linux users, whereas old timers look back and go well, if you only knew what we had to do back in my day, this is one of those weeks.

Nvidia has announced that they are releasing the GPU kernel modules as opensource. It starting with compute was so focused on Kuda and that kind of stuff with an eventual solution for desktop graphics as well. And I think there's already some example code on their get hub. This is going to change the game for distributing the Nvidia driver on Linux.

And we have a couple of really great links in the show notes for you to read up. If you're curious about the details. And then also I want to mention that Christian Schaller joined us for Linux action news two 40, and we dedicated the entire episode to our conversation with him to get some of the details.

And Christian is here now as well, live in our mumble room. Christian, welcome back [00:05:00] to the show. Thank you for having me. This must have been the hardest secret to keep there. Must've been a point where you realized this was really going to happen and that must have been through. 

Christian: Yeah, no, for sure. It's a, it's one of those things where I, you know, even it was even top secret inside red had, so, I mean, I had even conversations with other red hatters where like they're saying, oh, we realize we can do something here.

Yeah. That would be nice. Um, because I couldn't confer more this, uh, what do you call it? Not affirm it until it felt public. So, um, yeah, definitely a hard secret to keep for a long time. 

Chris: But I, I mean, it wasn't too long ago that Matthew Miller was, uh, on Twitter saying, you know, this is something we've really got to address as a community, getting the sense that a lot of people didn't know it was coming.

And in part I have to imagine this is something that they have to manage carefully because it is. As a company it's kind of an indefinite commitment to now supporting something on an engineering level, isn't it? 

Christian: Yeah, no, I've mentioned that is a Twitter thing. I ended up reading into the news [00:06:00] after that to think like, yeah, maybe we need to let Martin also, he knows that there, maybe this isn't exactly the best time to stir about 

Chris: that's fair enough.

Probably a good idea. I suppose. So I'm curious. I know I got a, I got a couple of questions for you since we chatted, I suppose, as you'd expect, there has been some skepticism around the announcement. Um, but I think probably the most prominent skepticism has been around this sort of line of thinking. Well, sure.

They released the stuff that's going to touch. The kernel was open source, but they just moved all this stuff to the firmware. And now there's a 34 megabyte firmware blob required. And I've heard this from a couple of different people. I'm curious to know what your take is on that. Not like, you know, what the official position is, but just your opinion on, on this method of driver development.

Christian: Okay. So from a purely sort of ideal standpoint, I would love for everything to be open, including firmer. That that said, I mean, I, I guess the one reason I felt it was a little unfair when people started going off with apple is that everyone is doing this model of [00:07:00] having a binder from bearer and, um, you know, the driver being, uh, mostly sort of connecting that.

Uh, so I mean, it's, it's, yes, it's a little unfortunate, but it's, it's what everyone does. So this is not, I don't think that's the right to Singleton video. Then you have to basically go after more or less every vendor there. I mean, The Linux Turner Violet's growing forever release due to more and more people putting more, more functionality into the firmer.

So that's just the way it is some sort of something we, as community has accepted. It gets for a 

Chris: long time now. Yeah. A lot of vendors are doing it this way. Um, and I think the only thing that's a little unfair about the criticism is the file size is being used as like, like a negative, you know, 34 megabytes of firmware.

But if you actually look at the firmware, there are just a ton of architectures that, that 34 megabytes supports. In fact, Longhorn on Twitter did just that he says the 30 megabytes supports multiple GPU generations, as well as a bunch of other elf sections and things specifically for ampere and terrain and [00:08:00] all kinds of little bits in there that aren't necessarily like control mechanisms and stuff like that.

So you can't really derive anything from that 34 megabyte file size. That's a, that's a bit of a red herring addition. It seems to me that that means the problem solved on the Linux side. So now as a consumer, this has just a different set of pros and cons that you have to weigh. But it's clearly a benefit because it's gonna make it easier for manufacturers like system 76 that are shipping and video hardware.

It's going to make it easier for folks that have existing in video hardware, but it's also going to be a benefit for the new driver too, which I think is sort of been missed in all of this. And I don't know, can you share any details there, Christian, about what what's kind of maybe the next steps for the new.

Avery: Yeah. 

Christian: I mean, it, it opens up, um, opportunities for us right. To outside. As I mentioned in my blog, GaN is, is that so starkly? Um, what happened was that when we switched to sign firmer, it basically meant that, uh, all could induce that farmer. So, so we had, we [00:09:00] reached all done, you know, Anita was kind enough to work with us to say, okay, let's, let's make a firmer that make less, and we'll keep working.

That of course ended up being a big effort for it, for a media, because they had maintained an extra firmer and it took time to get features in, I mean, one big feature people kept to course missing was the ability to re clock the DPU. Um, because , by default, the fault is sort of like almost like a power saving level of GPU.

So, so if you are stuck in that, you know, don't get a lot of performance, all three of GPU. Um, so also there, we were in talks with them about like, hold on, let me fix this. And then, you know, when this thing became a thing, we said like, okay, maybe this solution. And they said, we can then, you know, Uh, tie things together.

Um, it's your new lease and then we have a shared folder between 

Chris: right. That is exciting. That seems like massively simplification of engineering efforts and just way easier to maintain longterm. Yep, exactly. Casey points out in, in the IRC too, that, you know, four 30 for a 34 megabyte firmware. You get a massively parallel computer with 12 gigs of [00:10:00] Ram.

Anyways, continue Christian. I know you had another point 

Avery: in there. 

Christian: Yeah, no, I was just going to save it from her. I think also, I, I sort of came to terms, had firmer in general, when we launched Shelby Fs, I felt a doctor I couldn't create alter and scream order. Every time I saw from, from altar being available, closed source.

I 

Chris: bet being involved with LDFs does give you a pretty good perspective on that. I feel like this is one of those stories that after we were done recording land, I just wanted to take the rest of the week off. Like I was so excited. It's like, what else could happen in Linux? That would even matter this week.

It's such a big deal, but now really in a, in a weird way, Now a lot of the hard work starts, right? Like I look at the GitHub and I see all these issues that are being opened up by the community and people that are jumping in. And right now we're really just looking at a solution for compute as well. And so we should probably set our expectations.

I mean, maybe it's not even unreasonable to expect maybe summer of next year before there's something people are going to want to install on their machine. Do you, what do you think you think that's. [00:11:00] Well 

Avery: all, I mean, I think if, if, 

Christian: if you want something to just certain compute, like, you know, you need the, I want the driver and you want to sign it yourself for the time being to run on, on, let's say your blade machines to use you for compute and you are definitely ready to use it, but you yeah.

Need to wait until the graphics comes in for one before able to run to on desktop. And of course at the same time, we in the district world, our course making, figuring all topping or to deal with signing and packaging this thing. And, you know, it's, it's not an upstream Davia to, that's another thing people need to remember.

Like it's still an Autotrader driver. So that has, you know, like any Autotrader over its own set of challenges for us in the distributor to deal with. But, uh, you know, I think the piece of a fall in place and will make, make things easier as we had 

Avery: going 

Chris: forward. Well, this was really the result of years of investment in our relationship and those details and more are in Linux action news, two 40, uh, where Christian covers all of that.

But I think this is a obvious win. I know some people are very skeptical, but to me. This [00:12:00] means that people can now buy laptops or desktops with Nvidia hardware. And within a year's time, it's going to work out of, out of the box, like your AMD or Intel graphics does, that's just indisputably a win. If that means some, some of the functions are in a blob.

Yeah. It's maybe it's not ideal, but it seems to be the compromise we have decided to live with. And it does mean we deliver on the best end user experience that we can right now. And it is such a tectonic shift. From where we were a week ago that I think people just haven't really even processed what this means.

So extremely excited. And Christian, thank you for giving us the scoop on all of that. And so we can help people understand what's going on and set their expectations accordingly. And again, I will link to your blog post in the show notes, which I think everyone should give a read over as well, because you put a lot of great info in there.

Thanks for joining 

Avery: us again. Yeah, 

Christian: my pleasure. I'm just maybe one last item. I would ask everyone to try to be patient with 10 Vito here too, because in the end, this is a big change for them too. Right. And they have to [00:13:00] come up with all the deal with the community around the driver. And I mean, we'd have done open source before in various things.

It's not like they were completely new to it, but this is like, you know, the heart of their hardware, which is not the heart of their business. So, you know, if, if takes us all to go super Smith from Dave Vaughn, you know, we'll give them some patients on trying to work with them. And I say, you know, iron out their own interaction with the community that will spring out, uh, spring up around.

Chris: Leno.com/unplug. Go there to get $100 in 60 day credit on a new account. And it's a great way to support the show. Leno has been doing this for nearly 19 years and their mission has remained unchanged. Since that began make cloud computing simple, affordable, and accessible to everyone it's led to the best in class experience.

And that's why we host everything on Linode. We look at the options I hear from some of you sometimes tell me about some great bargain basement deal you got. And then usually about six months to a year later, I hear about why he switched to Linode to [00:14:00] take advantage of the a hundred dollars. It's just a great way to go try something.

And Lenovo has a lot of one-click deployment applications as well. Some of the apps that we've talked about here on the show, one click to get going, zoom replacements. Yeah. They got Jitsi up there. You want to try get lab? Yeah, they got that. In fact, some of the services I'm going to deploy soon for, um, some backend stuff that we'll probably talk about in the future.

I'm just going to use one of their one-click deployments. They've also got a great one for WordPress and they're always adding new ones, like just constantly. So I check in there from time to time and I'll just deploy a project and try it out. And it's a great way to try it. That a hundred dollars to, so from development tools to game servers, to the backend infrastructure for your business.

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Linode makes it easy. And their community support runs deep. Go get a hundred dollars, support the show and try something out. leno.com/unplugged.

Tail scale is a mesh VPN powered by wire guard. We've talked about it on the show before, and I should disclose they are a sponsor on Coda, radio, and cell phones. They don't sponsor them. But you can go to tail scale.com/coder or tail scale.com/self hosted. If you want to sign up. And it's a tool that we all use as a team.

And there's a lot of great tools out there. We've mentioned Nebula in the past. We've also talked about S shuttle or shuttle in the past. We've covered all kinds of mash, VPN solutions like tink and others. It's always a problem we've been [00:16:00] trying to solve, but tail scale really has seemed to solve it the best for us.

And I had an opportunity to sit down with Avery Pentagon, who is one of the co-founders of tail scale. He spent the previous eight years at Google where he launched some of their first P2P payment systems for Google wallet. He was involved with Google fiber and working out the Google fiber. Wifi strategy he's been involved in other high profile alphabet projects.

So it was just a great chance doing these podcasts sometimes just gives me a chance to talk to people I normally would not get to talk to. And I wanted to get kind of an insight into tail scale because it just almost seemed too good to be true. And I was hoping maybe to get some insights and I walked away from this conversation with some of those I think.

So I wanted to share it with you. Avery sat down with me just recently. And we were chatting just before we got started about some of his previous projects that I was familiar with. I have been looking to solve my desperate network problems for years, [00:17:00] and I've been rolling my own crazy solutions. I had tried a few different things with wire guard, but I actually started with shuttle and we talked about it a long time ago on the show.

And I believe you were the original creator of shuttle VPN, correct? 

Avery: That it was 2009, I think. So you've been 

Chris: thinking about VPN stuff for awhile. I take it was wire guard, like the missing piece. Wirecard 

Avery: was definitely a missing piece. I've actually been thinking about VPNs all the way back to 1997. When I wrote my first one for my, the first startup that me and my roommate started in our dorm room in university.

And that particular one made some major structural mistakes that you should not make when designing a VPN. We, we, we didn't exactly roll our own crypto, but we took the crypto primitives and we put them together in ways. You probably shouldn't do. I learned a few lessons from that we did TCP over TCP, which you should not do in a VPN, but it was, it was educational.

And in fact, this, this carried our product forward. We had a company, we, it was the thing that actually launched us this [00:18:00] VPN, because it was on a network appliance server. You could install it in small businesses and it was quite easy to configure compared to other VPNs at the time, but it had these other flaws, you know, fast forward to the shuttle days.

I'm like, okay, I learned a lot of lessons. I know what a few things not to do. And I'm a little frustrated that, you know, our product got acquired by IBM, IBM sort of dismantled it and killed it. Uh, no more VPN that I liked alternatives. They're like PVP and IP sec, which are pretty terrible or open VPN. So shuttle, the motivation was like, I don't want to do the encryption myself and I don't want to do TCP over TCP.

So SSH has good encryption. Let me just like piggyback on top of SNC. You know, rather than sending the pockets over SSH, I'm going to disassemble the TCP sessions and then reassemble them on the other side, which bypasses this TCP over TCP problem that actually worked quite well. And it was an open source project.

I didn't try to commercialize it, but I used it for all kinds of things. It helped you, you know, any, any server that supports us, the Sage can be your VPN server, which is quite handy and performance wasn't the greatest, but it was perfectly good [00:19:00] for like transferring some files around and then doing some remote terminals with tail scale.

When, when wire guards showed up, I was really excited because it is like, look, I don't have to do my own encryption, but I can understand the encryption that these people are doing, which means I can take this like simple primitive for encryption and plug it into a bigger picture of the way I want the world to work.

Right. A really simple VPN that I control everything about the way the experience happens, but I'm not sacrificing. 

Chris: It is deceptively simple on the front end as a customer experience. It's a very simple application to install. It's very simple to authenticate. It uses my existing single sign-on provider.

It really couldn't be smoother. And so I'm not surprised to hear that you've been thinking about this since 97, because when I first tried tail scale, I thought they must be pulling some real magic off on the backend to make this. So simple. So what are some of the more complicated things that are being solved on the backend to make it just such a seamless thing?

For me to have a flat network of all my devices, [00:20:00] there's 

Avery: quite a bit of magic in there. The first step is just this key management. So in shuttle, we got out of key management by just saying like, look, it's your job to do SSH key management. You already know how to do that. We'll just piggyback on top of that, which is great, except that in fact, many people do not know how to do SSH key management.

And so there's a bit of a limited market. It's only people who can figure out how to manage their SSH keys effectively, which at least is most developers. If you want to deploy that, company-wide for example, most of the people in your company are not developers. And so they don't know how to set up SSH keys.

And so shuttle was never a, you know, a useful product for the general community, even if, even if pushed by an it team. So tails skills, key management, instead of using SSH keys, we used what is now, you know, 12 years later, Uh, 13 years later, keep losing count. 13 years later, really common, which is the single sign-on system that people are using on web apps.

Right? Click, click here to log in with Google click here, to signing with GitHub. This stuff [00:21:00] in the intervening years is become like the standard thing to do. Everything is turned into a web app. All the web apps have a button for like logging with Google. So we make eTail scale look like a web app for the purposes of authentication, right?

You load up the tail scale app, which is a native app on your phone or your PC or your Linux machine. And it gives you a URL which sends you to a web browser, which then acts like a SAS app, which can use your single sign-on. So that's, that's the first trick we piggyback again on somebody else's authentication, just like shuttle did, but this time we're picking back on authentication that everybody knows how to.

The second thing we did is what we call natural Versal. So this is especially magical. Other VPNs I've built myself and I've used require one end of the VPN connection to be on a public facing open firewall port, which is not that shocking. The whole internet kind of runs on this principle. The client can be behind a net or a firewall, but the server has to be outside waiting for your connection.

Otherwise, how's it going to work? The problem is people setting up a VPN [00:22:00] or trying to make a connection between two devices. This is really limiting to what kind of connections you can make. It essentially turns the whole internet and decentralized system where nowadays the only people that get a public IP address are cloud providers.

And then you have to rent one from a cloud provider. And now everything is like the hub is the cloud provider and the spokes are everybody else. Right? You're paying rent to these cloud providers to do anything you want to do on the internet. So tail scale, the magic involves like you could literally have you in a.

With your laptop and your coworker in a cafe with their laptop, they log in to tail scale on the same domain. Those two devices will find each other. They will not go through an intermediate server. They'll actually make a direct peer to peer connection between those two devices. And now they're connected.

You can go to a service that your coworker is running on their laptop and try out that web service, or you can SSH into their bias or do file sharing. 

Chris: Well, this is sort of what I've discovered using tail scale is that it is essentially allowing me to create my own decentralized [00:23:00] internet. And it's kind of a sneaky way to do it.

It's not really like tail scale is selling itself as build your own decentralized internet, but that's kind of the end result. Isn't it? 

Avery: Well, I mean the word, the word decentralized has become a bit dirty now because every time someone says decentralized, they assume you're talking about blockchains and Bitcoins and stuff.

Chris: Sure. Yeah, yeah. Or any kind of weird crypto. 

Avery: Yeah. And that's, that's not what tails scale does. The way I like to think of it is like, look, we actually did decentralization in a way that's actually decentralized and therefore like achieves engineering goals, right? We're not, we're not doing decentralizations for like religious reasons.

We're doing decentralization because it's the most efficient way to solve your problem. 

Chris: Well, and it really is about connecting to my devices. Isn't it? That's the issue is I don't have a great way to connect all of these disparate devices, double net, different cloud providers, VPs, and some of them are locked behind a VMs or containers.

It flattens off. So the neat thing 

Avery: about tail scale is that it sort of what I call a hybrid centralized decentralized system, the control plane, the part that decides which devices can talk to each other devices, the part that [00:24:00] sends your public he's around in the same way that you would send a public key to an SSH server and put it in your authorized keys file.

That part is centralized. You go to the tail scale SAS product, we run a little tiny thing that we call the control server. That is basically just a collector for public keys, but also connects to your identity system, right? That is where everybody else goes to rendezvous. So me with my laptop in this cafe, you with your laptop and the other cafe, both of our laptops contact the control server and say like, Hey.

Where are my friends, right? And you find out the IP address and the public key, go back to that. And then those two laptops do the data plane, actually extending pockets back and forth, initiating connections with each other in a purely decentralized way. This ends up being a really elegant algorithm because it's extremely inexpensive to run a centralized control plane where they only use it occasionally.

And there's no latency sensitivity, but it's extremely inexpensive to run a data plane where we don't have to transfer any of the bytes for you. Right. It 

Chris: keeps the infrastructure cost down. In fact, [00:25:00] you had a blog post that I really liked. It's titled how our pre-plans stay free. And you write in there.

All this is to say our costs are carefully managed like other SAS companies. We don't build physical infrastructure. We avoid touching your packets for privacy, but also to reduce our costs. We fixed bugs and docs instead of answering the same questions over and over again, our control plane is lightweight and our DEP network is cost controlled.

This allows us to maintain a healthy operating margin so that a free. Isn't competing for resources with our paying customers. And I think there's a lot of insights just in that paragraph right there that I, I felt like I got about the company and about you. I mean, It's very clearly plainly written.

It's very easy to understand you don't really mince any words there. And it makes a lot of sense as a customer. My first concern was, well, is this thing going to stick around? And is that a problem that you have discovered our customers worried that this thing is too good to actually stick around? That 

Avery: happens pretty often.

One of the most common bits of feedback we get is like, [00:26:00] please, please don't cancel the free plan, please, please don't get acquired by, you know, list of competitors. Please don't add any more features to the product because I like it just the way it is. And I know what happens when companies add features to their products.

I feel like the whole industry at this point has kind of been scarred by a bunch of software companies that have been, I guess, kind of selfish. They care more about their business model than they care about their users. It 

Chris: feels like the VC model in particular is tricky. And so I wonder if we could speak to that for a moment, because also a congratulations.

I know you've recently raised a series B round of funding, and it looks like you have a blog post that addresses that as well. And in here, you know, you kind of address that issue is some people are concerned after they hear about some series funding that there's going to be a whole bunch of feature creep, but all of a sudden it becomes this giant platform that like a chat system has to be built on top of what are your thoughts around that?

Avery: The biggest concern that people and, and even me, when I see an answers like this have is if you had to raise money, does that mean you were going to go to business if you hadn't raised money? [00:27:00] Because if that's the case, then you're on what we call the VC treadmill. Where you have to keep running faster and faster just to not fly off the treadmill and smack into the back wall.

Most startups find themselves in that situation. And when that happens, the desperation level rises and rises. And so you'll see a product that starts off really good, but they didn't quite find their footing. Couldn't figure out quite the right business model. Didn't make quite enough money to pay their expenses.

And they had this tough decision. Am I going to lay people off or am I going to raise more money and keep trying? And most of the time the companies go and try to raise more money and keep trying, but that, you know, they keep trying and it may not ever find their way. Right. And that's where you get these more and more desperate, weird things where like, I'm going to add a chat system or a chat bot to my unrelated product.

Tail scale is a little different. And I tried to get that across in this blog post. So we announced a series B funding of a hundred million dollars, right. Which is pretty big for a series B. We're not raising that money just to stay in business. We actually had [00:28:00] a bunch of money still left over from our series a we were on track to be profitable by the end of 2022, kind of efficiently, because in fact, it's, it's all, you know, if you're going to raise this much money, you should actually spend it.

Otherwise you've kind of wasted your equity, selling it to investors. So we, we intend to spend a hundred million dollars, but we wanted to do this in a way that we never end up at that desperation level. Like we want to be the ones in control. We're tracking our spending rate related to our revenue. And because we've got extra money, we're trying to sort of clear out this buffer of extra money by spending a little faster than our revenues, but the revenues we look carefully at how fast we're growing.

So we could become profitable at any time we want. And that's a really important attribute to maintain in a company where you don't want to end up with this level of desperation. So we believe we can do it. I mean, you know, there's famous last words. We can always make mistakes, but we really, really put a high premium on not screwing this stuff up because all three co-founders we're we're, we're getting a little older.

Now we're into our forties. We've [00:29:00] seen this before. We don't need to make a million dollars tomorrow, but we are really tired of spending five or seven years building something. And then it fails and gets canceled out from underneath us or acquired. And then somebody tears it apart. Right. I don't want that to be my legacy as a person.

When I retire is every project I've ever done has been ripped out from under me and torn apart. 

Chris: I've noticed what seems to be a consistent, long-term thinking in a lot of this and a lot of what you. You're currently thinking about like what we're doing today, but you're also thinking about where things are going long term.

And I wonder if, is there something particular in your past experience that has, has really drilled this into, we have to be careful when it comes to VC funding and we have to think in a certain way, is there something that you went through an experience you went through that really codified that? I 

Avery: mean, my first startup of course, was, was in this category.

We absolutely got ourselves into this trouble where we built some really cool technology, including that VPN. I mentioned the pre shuttle one. We'd also had a bunch of other stuff. We found the traction users were getting excited. We never quite [00:30:00] figured out our go to market model so we could sell the product.

But the expense of having salespeople, calling people to try to find the ones who were willing to buy, it was always a little bit higher than the actual revenue. From selling the product, right? And this isn't the pre software as a service days. So it was kind of weird back then. You was, you would sell something once and not a monthly subscription.

And that, you know, the whole mathematical model of that is very different from the monthly sales, right? So if you have a sales team today, each sales person say, can add 50 K of ARR per month. Right then that's great. You, you just have this one sales person and they keep going and the ARR keeps going up.

And of course, you're going to have turn and so on. So sooner or later it maxes out, but you have this really nice model when you have people selling one shot each time, then. Your revenue doesn't keep going up over time, right? The sales person that you have something a certain amount per month means you get that much revenue per month.

Not that much additional revenue per month. So the models are very different. But back then, you know, we were selling [00:31:00] appliances. You bought appliances. The device was, you know, there was no subscription element to it. And so we got ourselves into this treadmill of the long-term value of the customer was slightly less than the cost of acquisition of a customer.

And eventually we ran into money related to the.com crash and everything else are around. I shouldn't say we ran out. We never actually ran out of money. We ran low on money and eventually we had to look for an exit strategy. The exit strategy we find was through acquisition, right? So our investors made their money back, but none of us got super rich from it.

Right. And then I worked at Google for while. I don't want to say too much about Google because everybody talks about Google all the time, but I saw many, many projects inside Google succeeding and failing for many, many different kinds of reasons. And I'm extra curious about that stuff. So I talk to a lot of people while I was there to understand what was working in their project and not working in their project like this.

There's definitely patterns to the things that work and don't work. And a lot of it involves just sort of like, I think I'm not, I'm not a real sports person, but some people call it like getting ahead of your skis, right? When you over-invest money [00:32:00] and start spending faster than you understand the business model.

That's when you get yourself on this treadmill. And it happens just as much as startups as it does in teams in large companies. Do you 

Chris: feel like larger teams are more susceptible to that problem than smaller teams and smaller companies? 

Avery: It's not so much about team size is about money, right? So they, the curse is having too much money and not having the self control to know that it's too much money.

Back in the old.com days. People used to say this about Amazon losing money on every sale, but making up in volume, right? A lot of startups to this day, still try to do that. And it still doesn't work. Amazon was not actually doing that. And Amazon was doing something else, which is why Amazon is so successful, but it kind of looked like that.

And there were a lot of startups that were doing that at the time, but they still do it. Now, if you have a business model that you can't make money per unit at a small scale, you're definitely not going to make money per unit at 10 or a hundred times. This. 

Chris: I want to shift gears, but kind of in the whole business model arena, tail scale is open source.

And most of the times when I talk [00:33:00] to CEOs, they tell me that they can't open source their software because somebody would just copy it, stand up a clone and take all of their profits. And it doesn't seem to be a concern of yours. 

Avery: I mean, it's a concern. It is. It's also a backup plan. So like I said, one of my number one concerns is like, when I retire, I want my stuff to still exist.

And one of my favorite things about shuttle, which is actually one of our competitors, is that no matter how much I lose attention in it, no matter how much money it doesn't make, shuttle is still around. Right. There's no company that can just disappear and vaporize the software that was attached to it.

And I really liked that about it, but the source, I think there's a lot of people out there who open source things and that's like, at least half the reason they do it is so that when the company they're working for goes away or when they leave the company they're working for, they can see. I have access to all that source code that they wrote is not destroyed.

Right. So I have to admit, I have an element of that. Like I personally want to make sure that this thing can never die, and this is one way to do it. That [00:34:00] said it's also beneficial to our customers. First of all, you can get blank, faces and contributions. Secondly, people don't like installing proprietary VPN clients in their Linux machines.

Just generally speaking, you've got almost the whole stack you're using in your cloud. Servers is open source. If you have this one proprietary VPN server, it very much slows down the adoption. And thirdly, we do, there is a component of tail scale called the control server that we operate that is not open source.

Now there is an open source control server called head scale. It's not maintained by us, but we contribute to the head scale development. We work with the developer and so on. It doesn't have as many features as tail scale. It doesn't integrate in exactly the same way, but it works with the same tail scale clients.

So people who are really concerned, they want to have a hundred percent open source system. Can 

Chris: do that. Yeah. I was going to ask you about head skills, so I'm glad you touched on that. Looking at tail scale. I think a lot of people identify it as one of those quintessential, this is how I get my work done now tools and there's others out there, slack and Dropbox come to mind.

Do you watch some of those companies or [00:35:00] are there companies that you watch and go, okay, we're not going to do that. What are you looking for? Not doing like, I'm curious as a customer, like what are you not going to do? 

Avery: That's an interesting. In the case of slack, I really liked the way they've done their business model.

The way they did their authentication was a series of missteps that I think they're finally getting to correcting many years into their existence. So we're probably not going to copy the way slack did identification, but I really love their business model, right? The way that individuals in a company can adopt slack, they don't even need to necessarily know that other individuals in the same company are adopting slack in different slack instances.

And then at some point you can group all those instances together and say, okay, we're all using slack here at this company. Why don't we get by a company subscription and get a discount, right? That is a really nice business model. That's something that in the security world and infrastructure, which is what retail scale finds itself, you almost never see that.

Like there's almost no such thing as a security product that is adopted in this bottom up way. And the reason for that is pretty simple. [00:36:00] Security products almost never solve the problem you have right now. Right? If you're a software developer, you're trying to get something done. The only thing is security product tends to do is stop you from getting that thing done.

That's the job of a security product. So it tends to be enforced top-down by the CSO saying like, look, I know you guys have a lot of work to do, but could you please not do these five things that are horrific, horrific security holes that are going to get us in trouble? And then they like slow you down.

Tail scale has this nice model where it comes in as an infrastructure tool, a problem solving tool. And then coincidentally on the side, it's also really secure. So the default thing you do with tail scale is way better than the default thing you would have done otherwise. So the security people who were in charge find out using tail scale it, instead of saying, oh no, no, please stop doing that.

They're like, oh, thank goodness you stopped doing that thing you were doing before. Let's maybe formalize this tail 

Chris: scale being a bit. It makes sense. It does definitely feel like a bottom up tool that people are discovering and just falling in love. I'd like to kind of wrap it up by just kind of getting your thoughts on sort of the state [00:37:00] of the tech ecosystem.

You know, you look out there, we have some major, major tech companies and it feels like eventually if you're playing on their platforms, you get their attention. And I I'm, I'm wondering if, if that's on your radar at all, as far as maybe apple goes or Microsoft or Google goes, have you shown up on their radar yet?

Have you had conversations with them? Are you concerned at all about them influencing or trying to influence the direction of features on the mobile app or something to that regard? I mean, 

Avery: we've had interactions with pretty much all of them. I would say that in general, they're all pretty happy that we exist.

We're not hurting anybody's platform by creating this functionality. There's no like embrace and extend model for them. Because, I mean, if you imagine apple, for example, there actually was a tail scale, like product that apple launched quite a few years ago now called back to my Mac. Right? It did almost that exact same thing, except it only worked on apple products.

Right. Which sounds neat, but almost never solves your problem. Right. And similarly, Microsoft, I just found out [00:38:00] yesterday, there was a product called windows or windows mash, I think came out apparently with windows seven or near the time of windows seven that did similar things to tail scale, but it only worked on windows.

Tail scale has a feature called tail drop, which is a lot like airdrop that apple has that lets you move files between your devices except tail scales. One works on all your kinds of devices and it doesn't care about physical proximity. Apple's airdrop only works on apple devices. And even then only sometimes, and nobody's quite sure why it doesn't always work.

Right. And AWS, for example, they've got an AWS VPN. They've got VPCs, they've got IP sec connections, but it only works inside AWS. So if AWS was going to try to make a tail scale, it might not make it easy to connect to other kinds of clouds because they really have no incentive to make it easy to connect to other kinds of clouds.

Right. But if tail skill is sitting out here independently, making all these things work, then it actually makes it easier for you as AWS, easier for you to use windows, easier for you to use Linux, easier for you to use apple. It connects all these things together. It makes all these platforms better.

Right? So we don't see a lot of [00:39:00] interference from the platform form owners, because we're not. Really hurting their business at all. We're just making it so that their thing works better with everybody else's things. 

Chris: Yeah, really. It makes it so I can get more work done on their devices. It's what it does.

Exactly. Well, Avery, I'm just a huge fan. So thank you very much for all of the hard work. And of course, for everyone there at the team and thanks so much for coming on and chatting with us. Yeah. Thank you. I really enjoyed that chat with Avery. Um, it's not many founders. I can sit down and talk everything from TCP IP to, uh, big tech economics.

So that was really great. And again, if you want to sign up that wasn't sponsored, I wasn't paid for, but if you want to support one of our shows, tails scale.com/self hosted or tail scale.com/coder. The whole idea of mesh VPNs that can defeat double that carrier grade networking has been a topic on the show for a long time.

And when we were in. I was kind of a leaning over to Brent and I was saying, you know, you gotta try this tail scale [00:40:00] thing out. I think you would really like it specifically because you do kind of travel around and you've kind of got places you visit frequently. Now, tail scale feels like it could be a good solution for you.

And I know you didn't get a chance to try it out while I was there, but I think you have sense then. So what is like the, uh, I dunno, let's say the, the Brent review of tail scale, what are your thoughts? Well, I kind 

Brent: of say I'm relatively new to it. It's been 

Chris: maybe a week 

Brent: that I've been into it and maybe a day since I've really dove into it on my own systems here, but whenever you nudge me towards something, I know I need to be listening.

And, uh, so thank you for 

Chris: that. 

Brent: I have in the past, you know, with travel in mind, set up a wire guard, exit node. So I have a little VPs somewhere that. Purely accepts my connections wherever I happen to be that makes me feel a little bit better because there are certain places that I go with my laptop that I don't feel like open traffic is necessarily a good thing, [00:41:00] but that being said, now I have access to a VM that Alex set up for me where I I've been doing some Ansible playing with.

And I guess I also have a Bitcoin note sitting over there that I can access from here now. And, uh, so I, the more I dive into it, the more I realize it's solving a lot of my various issues that I have had in the past and have found solutions that were 

Chris: a bit annoying, 

Brent: but also solutions for problems that I've had that I have, didn't had a solution for yet.

So I know Chris, you use it a whole bunch, but I'm like tingling with excitement now of diving into tail scale and really getting a sense of how it can just make things easy and seamless. 

Chris: For me, the progression was at first for like a month or two, I set it up and I was like, oh yeah, finally I can, I can connect my RV service systems and the studio systems all on one flat network.

That was a huge thing for me because [00:42:00] I, until tail scale, I never opened up the RVs network to the internet. And there's a ton of like dashboards and control panels and statistics and data that the system in the RV is collecting all the time. And sometimes I'm at the studio and I want to check in on that stuff.

So that was the first problem I solved. Right. Because it takes 30 seconds to get it installed on a Linux box. If that, and you know, they have raspberry PI packages and stuff. So I, that was like, alright, this is great. Yeah. Okay, sweet. I got a VPN. All right. I didn't really get hyped about it. I don't know why it took me like three months.

So you're way ahead of me, dude, until I realized I could install it in a VM. And I had several VMs and projects, like a lot of the Nick's stuff, the next challenge stuff I was doing in VMs and. It dawned on me that wait a minute, I could set up a nix VM installed tail scale, which is awesome on Knicks. And then I could access this VM from literally all my machines, like it's right here.

And I could continue the next challenge from [00:43:00] anywhere, which was great because we were traveling to North Carolina and all of that. And that's when I realized, oh, wait a minute. I actually could run it in this container. Oh. And look at this, Umbro has a tail scale app that runs in Docker and now I can get access to my Bitcoin.

And it just, that is cool. Yeah. That's when it clicked, when I was like, oh, I can do it in VMs. I can do it in containers and I can do it on my physical devices, including my mobile devices. And so I just sort of build out a bigger and bigger network and then it kind of clicked, oh, I can also, you know, support my kids' computers this way.

So I really liked. I've probably crossed over where I have more systems using tail scale. That Nebula Nebula is great because there's like no centralized service. There's nobody getting involved, but it's a lot more of a bring up. So it just didn't quite hit the sweet spot for my, like my laptop and my phone and my raspberry PI.

But it was, it seemed like a really sweet spot for the VPs and the servers on the studio land. [00:44:00] But now tail scale, I think has kind of a clip, some of that too. And it has some really nice DNS stuff. You can actually, if you wanted to do an easy mode, you can put a pie hole in your tail scale net. And it will start resolving DNS for all of your machines on tail scale.

So you can start referring to all your machines by machine name. That is very cool. Yeah. I like it. It's also been really handy while I'm on the road. Again, every freaking time I'm on the road. That's how I, a lot of this, a lot of like the, the boosts and feedback, uh, I do all of that through a VPN. It's really nice to be able to just have that right there.

So it's a, it's a hell of a thing I'm really impressed with the service. And that's why I was hoping to get some insights into how the heck they're going to keep it running. And the, the thing that he touched on in there that I liked is they've set it up in a way where the free accounts don't compete with the paid pro users, which is always like this collision, that it seems like all of these services that offer a free version are always heading towards this, this iceberg where [00:45:00] inevitably the sales team feels like the free accounts are competing with their benchmarks.

And, you know, we end up, you always see like the free stuff getting covered. And the idea that they've kind of designed it in a way where that doesn't happen. I feel like that shows some really good long time thinking long-term thinking. So it was nice to see that, like I said, 

Brent: I'm relatively new. So I've been diving into some of their documentation just to get a sense of how it all works and what I'm could possibly do with it.

And I found their documentation to actually be really, really great and also fascinating, which I don't say very often about documentation. It's slightly, I'll say it's ever so slightly confusing. They have a section for documentation, which I think is a little bit more on the technical it's it's a simple explainer of the technical side of things, which was, I found very, very helpful.

So getting DNS set up for your whole network and those kinds of useful tips, but they also have sections that I would encourage people to just go [00:46:00] browse. And one of them is called the tail scale guides and the others tail scale 

Chris: solutions there. I don't quite 

Brent: know the difference between them. They seem very similar, but there's some amazingly fascinating stuff in there.

So they have a guide on. Accessing a pothole or a raspberry PI from anywhere, which I think is a really nice place to start. Maybe a few are trying to play with this, but they also have, you know, a guide on tail scale and SOS a new Minecraft server in 10 minutes, which sounds really fun. Tail scale in Alex containers.

I know we talked about that a little bit last week, so that might be a place to go if people are interested. And the last one that really caught my eye was, um, setting up a dog cam with tail scale raspberry PI in motion.

Chris: At warden.com/linux get started with a free trial of teams or enterprise or for an individual. When you go to bit wharton.com/linux, simply put it's the easiest way for individuals or [00:47:00] businesses to store share and sync sensitive data. That warden is fully customizable. You can turn certain features off that you don't want.

And of course, it's what I use for my password and secret information storing. And I'll also add my two factor authentication token. I put it all in one package and man, is that handy when I'm traveling? Oh my gosh, you guys, I won't name names, but some of my friends out there, they don't use. And I have been on a campaign to convert them because it is pain full.

When I sit down and watch them try to log in on some service when they don't have a password manager, like maybe they set up a new box or maybe they're using a system in the studio temporarily. Oh my God, it's painful. But warden makes it so much simpler. They make it easy and safe to store sensitive data for yourself.

Or when you're working with the team west and I use it to manage our passwords and two factor codes and other sensitive data all the time, I use it to work with team members. And I really think it'd be great for open source [00:48:00] projects too. And one of the things they've just recently added, which is brilliant is a username generator stop using the same username.

And every site you go to, I never really thought about it, but that's crazy. Anything you can do. To improve your security online is going to be good, right? But like, I'd say number one is passwords. And number two, I never really thought about it, but of course it's usernames because if, if a service is compromised and their database leaks, then that username is going to be the same username across multiple sites.

At least it is for me, I'm embarrassed to say it's true. So having a different username for each website you use, that's going to make it difficult. I'd say impossible for a hacker and attacker to track you across sites. And of course their generator supports your email service. If it has like the plus addition for an email.

So like Gmail, for example, user plus your actual like fake thing@gmail.com. It's really nice and it's so intuitive the way they do it, because it all just stores in bit Wharton. And then when I tried to log into a service on my phone, I have a nice secure password for that [00:49:00] too. And I'll admit before they got really good password management on the phones.

There just, wasn't a great option and bit warden, nails it. And then on the iPhone, it ties in with face ID. So it's scanning my face. It's importing the password. I mean, it just happens so smooth, so flawlessly. I love it. And like I say, when I'm traveling tools like this, I don't know. I don't know how I got work done without them.

Something like bit Orden. It's the only way I'm going to go. And I love that it's open source and I love that they have a self hosted option and I love that they got a giant community. Go try it out for yourself, or maybe recommend it to a friend and family member like I've been doing recently, or maybe it's time for your workplace to kind of get their act together in this regard.

No shame in that game. It's just, you know, the way things have been in the past, but now a bit warden's changing it and they've got great team plans to individual or team. Go try it out right now at warden.com/linux. Go to bit wharton.com/linux to support the show and to get started with the best password management.

And I'll say it my personal way to keep all my secrets what's in there. That warden.com/linux.[00:50:00] 

We 

Brent: got some great feedback again this week. Thank you everyone. Linden road. I was just listening to episode 4, 5, 7 I'm heavy user of Ansible end LXD and thought I'd share a couple of useful tips. One is the ability to use Alex D to manage hosts with Ansible. No SSH required. If you configure a local Alex D client to connect to a remote Alex D server, you can specify the name of the host and containers in your inventory and configure the Ansible host variable as follows.

He gives an example will include, I think that's kind of neat. And I know Alex got real excited about that, so that's sort of fun. They continue. I know you folks are also bit warden users rather than store secrets in multiple places and use Ansible vaults. I found a plugin that lets you use the bit warden command line client to retrieve Ansible secrets.

Chris: So we'll leave a link to that. That is. Awesome. I didn't really even think of that. It's so great. Why not use bed warden for the secrets? You know, [00:51:00] what are you touches on here about being able to deploy Alexi container or a server with just like a couple of things that you specify in the Ansible does the rest?

I do really appreciate that when we did the nix OSTP challenge, we did a bit of a comparison between Ansible and next and that sort of what's brought up all this answerable feedback and it wasn't really a fair comparison because you know, the NICs system lets you manage the next package and the next OSTP possibly, but you could run the next package manager on just about any.

And it lets you manage that world, right. Where Ansible is like multi OOS, multi distro, multi container platforms. Right. And so that's the big difference. Now I think there is a totally valid argument for only needing to learn a NIC system if that's the scope of your work. But I think it's also really valid to say, you know, there's a lot more I want to get done.

And so Ansible is the way for me and I totally appreciate that. And I feel like I've gotten a whole new set of insights on how people use these tools accidentally. Like we just stumbled into this and I'm learning a lot. So I guess that's a good thing. Right. [00:52:00] So, yeah. And I think that's the, 

Brent: really the beauty of some of the feedback we keep getting we're in a position where people just giving us, they keep giving us some great tips on things we didn't know we needed and it turns out we do.

Chris: And now it is timeful the boost 

Brent: as always, we get some great boosts as well. Sir, lurks a lot is back 1, 3, 3, 7, SATs seems godly specific. Feather for the tin foil hat, if you will, Starlink knows where you are. Even if you bug out in the middle of nowhere, considering how Elan's car company collects an enormous amount of data about its customers, you have to at least wonder how that data is being used or sold or in what form who actually has access and how securely it really is in the hands of yet another tech company that dabbles in hardware are your internet habits and travels valuable to hacker loot.

Hm. Maybe some bacon here, Chris. 

Chris: Um, man. Yeah. I hadn't really thought about the [00:53:00] fact that now there's one more company that's tracking my exact location and they do, you know, they have to know where the dishes in order for it to connect to the satellites up in space. And the dish is always aware of it's longitude and latitude.

And, um, I must have GPS in there too. You know, it's such a trade-off um, I don't know why, but I probably am more comfortable with Starlink than I am Verizon or at and T or T-Mobile. I feel like Verizon at T and T T-Mobile probably have like an automated system that flaw enforcement can just check a box and get your location info for like the last year.

Maybe you Starlink we'll do the same, but it's the trade-off of getting connected to the worldwide community. Right? How else can you get connected to an internet like that? Uh, without some trace, unless you use someone else's system and Jupiter does have on the roof, I have a, um, seven and one antenna array, and a couple of those antennas are dedicated to 2.4 and five gigahertz wifi.

I [00:54:00] can pick up wifi from quite a range. So every now and then there is, I do have the capability of doing like some sneaky network, joining careful with what you have to do here. I know I'm sort of realizing right now. Okay. You know, when you're out in the middle of nowhere and you have to bring your own internet.

Yeah. That, that would be a problem. We used to cry. Marcel wrote in with a thousand SATs. So when does the star Trek podcast come out? I'm kidding. Of course. But I would definitely listen to that. You seem very passionate about it. I just finished enterprise and I have mixed feelings on the pre-show for the member feed.

I think we got into star Trek again, didn't we, I think it was all coded radio's fault. It happens from time to time. We get output with age does come some wisdom. And I have realized that there are some hobbies and passions that I have that I shouldn't make content out of and I should keep them. For myself to enjoy.

And I've decided that star Trek is one of those things. And I have dabbled in the past with star Trek related content, [00:55:00] and I have found that Jupiter broadcasting is its strongest when we really stay on, on mission and focused. And so that gives me an opportunity that is an excuse to just keep star Trek for something I personally enjoy.

However, I do love a good star Trek conversation, and I will always jump in if something's going down on stream related to star Trek. And I would love to like, if, if one of my friends out there starts to star Trek podcast, I'd love to join them for an episode sometime because, uh, yeah, I'm a bit of a themed when it comes to star Trek, but I don't plan to launch a star Trek show.

I think I'll leave that out for all the other folks out there that want to make podcasts around it. We got, uh, several just like, thanks for doing a show, uh, boost. These are great too. We got a couple from crash master 18, uh, and wine bear in a total of about 6,000 PSATs. I just sent in some things. So I just want to say, thank you guys for boosting.

We also got some folks that are doing the sat streaming, so you can set an amount and why you listen. It just is it'll stream OSAT every now and then back to us. And the great news is, is that with the price of [00:56:00] Bitcoin down, SATs are on sale. They're the same sets once that still equals one set. So get them cheap while you can.

Right now I'd probably be on sale for a little while as the market's going to just be in the tank. So go get some cheap SATs and load up a podcasting 2.0 app. You can get them@newpodcastapps.com podcasting two dot O has a lot going on, including they're working right now, very diligently on incorporating live audio streaming into the app.

So you just open up your podcast app. And if Linux unplugged is live, it'll just show as in your feed list, it's live on air and you can tap it and you can listen to our live stream. In your podcasting 2.0 compatible app, not all apps support it yet. Like I don't think fountain or castomatic do, but some of the web apps, there's some really good web podcasting apps, by the way, who knew pod verse is great because it's a web app that syncs to a mobile client as well.

All of these are listed@newpodcastapps.com, but I can't wait for live [00:57:00] streaming and transcription and a whole bunch of other stuff. That's all part of the podcasting 2.0 spec, along with value block, you can check out a lot, all that info in office hours. We covered a bunch of it last week at office hours dot Hare for that, and go try out a new podcast app, a new podcast apps.com.

And if you don't want a new package, 'cause. I know a lot of you love antenna pod. That's very popular in our community. Uh, so was overcast on the iOS side and actually apple podcast app is always a strong contender and pocket cast. Of course. I know. I know you guys love those apps and you, you don't want to, you don't want to change, go try breeze.

You can send in some boosts, he had the breeze app and you don't have to switch podcast apps. That's pretty, pretty nice. I guess what we got to pick and it's on theme. Like I likes it. Brent, how do you think you pronounce this one? Oh, I think I got this one here. I do. Okay. Go for it. I 

Brent: think it's called we're 

Chris: on.

Ah, yeah. Yeah. Like we are on right? You see that? Yeah, we're on. [00:58:00] I think that, I think you nailed it. So this is a secure overlay network. Based on a web RTC. That is interesting. Yeah, this is weird, but it's on, it's on a theme for this episode at westbound. This actually, so it's a shame he can't be here. So maybe if we ever give this a go with him, we'll bring it up again.

Cause I think he actually wanted to talk about it, but the idea is with we're on is that it gives you access to nodes behind a firewall behind it. And that using web RC to establish the connection between the nodes and actually this stuff, it has been built into web RTC all the time. And nobody ever built the tooling around and it always drove me crazy because we basically use web RTC now for video calls and audio calls.

And that's really where we stopped, but it could, you know, you can actually build a fricking CDN on top of web RTC. So they're using the underlying suite of tools that are available for this and the project claims it's pretty [00:59:00] low overhead and it's pretty surprisingly good performance. That's ridiculous.

If you use it between nodes on a land, they say you may not even notice a performance overhead, which is just not. I don't know, man, I don't know, but it's actually pretty easy to get up and going on a Linux box, you basically can just pull down a binary and, uh, get it up and going. So we'll put a link in the show notes to where on, and I could see someone who wants a temporary mesh network, you know, maybe it's up for the day or maybe it's up for an event.

I could totally see that. Oh yeah. Right. You're doing a corporate event or a Linux event. And you want to build a temporary mesh network. You don't necessarily want it assigned to anyone's particular account or anything like that. You could use where on to stand that thing up in five minutes. And now you got yourself an overlay network, all running off a web RTC, which everybody has support for on their box.

Not really something we need because we're pretty much set, but gosh, you could see that. You never know and that's it, that's it we're wrapping it up. I just want to make a mention that [01:00:00] we do this show live on Sunday. Even if that means I got to set up some sort of hack together, set up, run over cellular from Southern Oregon.

We're doing it live. And that means that we get great folks like Christian from red hat that stopped by and. If you're in R if you're in our mumble room and you got a question about this Nvidia open-source driver, you can ask one of the guys that has the most knowledge about the situation directly.

That's a unique opportunity, and it happens right here on Linux unplugged, but also hanging out live, just lets you listen in real time, give us feedback in the chat room. And if you get mumbled, you can actually just hang out in the quiet listening room. Then you get an Opus, codec quality of the show with probably lower latency than Brett and I have between each other right now.

It's great. And it's a totally free software stack. And then you got it. You can join us and you can do things like office hours, which we also do on mumble and other network shows that use mobile from time to time. And if you're in the tech industry, or you're just curious about what's going on in the world of free software and open source, don't miss an episode of Linux action news Linux action news.com.[01:01:00] 

Christian worked with us to make sure that we had the most accurate information possible. So literally the moment the Nvidia news. Linux action news dropped. So that way you could have the context and the information first, and you could make sure that you were commenting, or if you were saying something online, it was accurate, right?

I mean, you see a lot of people just popping off with our opinion, but JB listeners got the facts just by being subscribed to Linux action news. So it's something to consider because when something goes down, we're going to try to cover it there as accurately and as fast as possible. So Linux action, news.com being plugged for that, I guess, hope to see you next week.

Join us. We'll be live on the Sunday, but of course you is always, always welcome to subscribe. Enjoy the show. Anyway, you want live is just one of the options. And of course we appreciate any value can return to the show. Maybe it's a membership at Linux unplug core, maybe it's jupiter.party for the whole network.

Maybe it's a boost, or [01:02:00] maybe it's just telling someone about the show that matters a lot too. Maybe it's a review. I don't know. I can't tell you what, but we appreciate you listening. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode. I will see you right back here next week.

So obviously to make it clear because I was not sure that [01:03:00] non video driver for the future is only. Possible with the right current version, often video GPU's and the future GBO cards. And it is not possible to use that one with a 10 60, for example, right? 

Christian: No, not 2, 10 

Chris: 60. Wow. Has the 10 60 that old. Wow.

It looks like. Yeah. But in fact it could be that if for the 10 60, a working nouveau driver is running, then somehow we could profit from that new initiative. Right. Maybe. 

Christian: Yeah. Maybe. I mean, uh, I'm not sure because once again, right, the driver will say still multiple parts, right? This is a current driver and then there's a user space.

We may have sound and there's also the firmer and we need all three of them to be able to work together on. I don't think the firmer can work with such old car. 

Chris: The other thing I had just becomes, it comes in my, in my now, um, the phone where if I understood it well, um, before all right, deferment actually has some shared [01:04:00] code that is also used on vendors, right?

So the Linux and windows driver with the firmware are share some 

Christian: code. Right? I usually get someone from a medium to go on. An older driver in general is shared between also be an expert. And if there is exactly the same farmer, I think it is, but I don't know between windows and the new systems. I mean, they, they try to, I mean, of course, for ease of maintenance, to keep things as aligned as possible 

Chris: between the two.

Here's what I'm wondering. And this is, this is we'll just see, and it's going to depend on developer resources, but imagine we're four or five years into this, right? So we've, we've all been using an open-source Nvidia driver for a while. We've got the opensource AMD driver. We've got the open source Intel driver.

Do we start to see. Uh, one common interface to start to change some of these settings or whatever it is. Maybe it gets exposed that in the past required an AMD control panel and an Nvidia control panel. Like, do we start to see [01:05:00] maybe some, some basic settings just get baked into the plasma desktop or can own desktop.

And on the back end, they're figuring out if that's for an Nvidia card or an AMD card. Like it feels like the integration and control that could eventually come to the desktop is going to be at a whole new level. When all of the major video card drivers are opening. 

Christian: Yeah, I think my total on there is that they are continuously expanding, you know, what a little kid can do.

So, I mean, I mentioned this to you afterwards over into, but I'm really excited by the fact that, you know, there is a Vulcan extensions coming out to do and we see one and coding and decoding now, which means that instead of, you know, up to this point in time to deal with like, you know, a special encoding library for media, especially in coding library for Intel and so on, we can all as application writers, right.

Have one API target and we will get GPU accelerated and coding and decoding. So this, this is something I'm really excited about. And I [01:06:00] think, you know, I think we'll see a lot more things moving into Vulcan over time, because I think they're definitely plan to go on beyond maybe, you know, the last seen with the video, just doing 3d graphics.

Brent: Christian has a last question. I'm curious about what was your personal. Favorite part about working on this initiative for you personally? 

Christian: Well, the main thing of course is that I know that for fedora users and rail users go to of course, but it's been a pain point for years to have to not deal with going old or first realizing, oh, okay.

I need a driver from a hardware because I think I'll need it. If people sort of assume everything is just there and then maybe not finding it, or maybe the phone, the wrong version, or, or they found a version that was harder to set up. I mean, I know a lot of people of course ended up getting the assuming Vito driver, which I didn't have to build themselves.

And of course I did that myself back in the day and it was, you know, a great learning experience, but, you know, it would have been a lot easier for people to for instance, have phoned the repository of our infusion to just get it pre set up for them very easily. So I think just [01:07:00] being able to get beyond that and sort of say, yeah, graphics is not going to be something that I, you know, I'll have to read a review for a new filler or at least, and people saying, oh, this broke.

That's the big thing for me. 

Chris: I can't wait.