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dnsUNFILTERED: Matthew Fox, The Homelab Episode
In this conversation, Matthew Fox from Lawrence Systems and Mikey Pruitt explore various themes related to networking protocols, content creation, home lab setups, and the MSP landscape. They discuss the importance of community engagement, the role of AI in local computing, and the significance of education in technology. The conversation is filled with personal anecdotes, insights into the challenges faced by MSPs, and reflections on the future of open source in IT.
[00:00:00] Mikey Pruitt: Oh, let's do an introduction first. How about that? Sure. I forget the intro. Welcome everyone to dnsUNFILTERED. Today we have a very special guest, Matthew Fox, who is a content creator now with Tom Lawrence. You guys are collabing on the future of Lawrence Systems YouTube channel, and you're responsible for the community.
I've seen you in their Discord channel. You got a lot on your plate. Thank you for taking the time to chat with me.
[00:00:28] Matthew Fox: Hey, thanks for having me here today. This is fun. We've gotten off to a start that is definitely not exactly on the rails, but that's perfectly fine because I don't see any racks for anything to be railed onto, so it's no big deal.
Yeah. My name's Matt Fox. I've been working in the MSP space. Since 2015, worked at an MSP till 2023, and I've been working with vendors and content creators like Tom Lawrence for the past couple of years. I've been in it since I started my career back in 2000. I've run IT departments, I've run digital media departments.
I've dealt with some significant security situations. 9/11 being one of them. I had a brush with the Napster hack attacks. If you google my name the right way, you'll find some interesting documentation.
You just gotta know the right words and then you'll see my name start popping open in documents.
You have
[00:01:13] Mikey Pruitt: to use the middle initial. Napster.
[00:01:16] Matthew Fox: I don't think the middle initial is in the document. I'm thinking of there's only one or two documents left on the internet. They say that the internet forgets or doesn't forget. It never forgets, but I don't know, it's slipped its mind with these docs and I feel free to get about that.
[00:01:29] Mikey Pruitt: Very cool. Yeah, you popped on here saying the statement, it wasn't DNS. So just for everyone listening, we're recording on a day where Google and CloudFlare are both down and honestly I wasn't sure if we could, we were gonna be able to do this because the internet apocalypse was happening. Turns out it wasn't DNS, but it was BGP, which is dns.
It's.
[00:01:49] Matthew Fox: it's one of those acronyms.
[00:01:51] Mikey Pruitt: World worldwide networking protocol, border gateway. So that's actually what, how DNSFilter runs our anycast network. So yeah, I know very little about BGP other than what it means and what it does, but how it works. No clue. Same thing.
[00:02:08] Matthew Fox: Any routing pro protocol Like what's it?
RIP is another one that I never really got to know back when I was doing the network engineering work earlier in my career. Just, it's one of those acronyms I just thought I would get to later in life. And I guess I doesn't have to really,
[00:02:21] Mikey Pruitt: now that I do the content creation work, that's called the March of Technology.
If you forget an acronym for long enough, you don't even have to learn it. That's it.
[00:02:30] Matthew Fox: That, see now that is some advice I'd like to see on a LinkedIn post right there. That's great.
[00:02:34] Mikey Pruitt: Oh, making a note to self.
[00:02:36] Matthew Fox: I might have to talk to the folks over at the National Society for Unnecessary Technology Acronyms and sda.
You could visit them. Isn't
[00:02:43] Mikey Pruitt: Tom a member from that?
[00:02:45] Matthew Fox: He might be a member, he might be a founder, he might be a part of a group that's loosely organized to have a little fun with that in the future. But yeah. And Suda, WTF is the domain, which is just perfect.
[00:02:56] Mikey Pruitt: Matthew and I would you would, is it okay if I call you Matthew or Matt?
What do you prefer? It's all the same. It's all the same. I'm gonna use Matt since we're bros here. That's it. So we've actually been chatting on LinkedIn quite a bit. Matt has done a lot of content on some things on the Lawrence Systems YouTube channel, which I was very interested in 'cause I'm doing some home lab stuff right now.
You have some new hardware, very excited. And some of your videos were clutch came in very helpful. Nice. And you were kind enough to share some Docker composed files with me. So now I have a beautiful, terribly looking Ansible script that'll spin up exactly my stack that I'm looking for. So thank you for that.
First of all.
[00:03:35] Matthew Fox: Of course I lo whenever I can help someone with that and handing you those Docker container files. Just fun. I, knowing that they work and they work for other people makes me really happy. The speaking of, we gotta bring up 45 drives. How's your machine looking? Is it you get coming together?
It's gorgeous.
[00:03:51] Mikey Pruitt: Other than I have some older GPUs hanging out of the top of it 'cause they're just like a hair too long to actually fit inside. With the door closed. Yeah. That's not gonna fit. The Teslas are not gonna fit. I'm actually in the market for a what do they call 'em? SFF whatever, small form factor.
PU. Yeah. And I've seen some really good ones. There's one from PNY that does 20 gigs of eam, which is very important for the AI stuff. So yeah, I'm, look, I'm in the market. If anyone out there's got one that's used, let me know. I'm
[00:04:24] Matthew Fox: actually going to hopefully be reviewing an AI based NAS pretty soon, which seems pretty sweet.
It's running a rise in processor. It's got an A MDG, PU and A, I think they've got an NPU in there too. And I'm pretty sure it starts or it. I wanna get this right. I think they're gonna send me a model. It's got 96 gigs of ram to start. Wow. And it's got space for four drives in it for a nice bit of a raid array or a ZFS, depending on what your preferences are.
That's gonna be exciting. I can't wait to get my hands on that.
[00:04:54] Mikey Pruitt: I feel like I need to brag publicly about my stats, which are let's see, 80 terabytes of disc spinning rust, nothing fancy. I've got a terabyte mirrored for the boot drives. And then I've got a 64 core Ryzen, CPU, but it's Rome, so it's not super new or anything.
And then I have, what is the other one? Oh, the Ram 128 gigs of ram, which is just, that's nice, but most I've ever seen in my whole life here. All right, so you got these machines. Wait, actually, do you name, did you name this machine? No. No, because I actually come from the DevOps world, so I gave it like a, oh, like blah, blah, blah.
Zero dash zero one? Yes. 'cause it's like ca, it's cattle to me, not a pet. I
[00:05:38] Matthew Fox: used to do that at my job. I was looking at a network diagram from 2002 the other day, and the company was Nifty, NFTE, and it was like NFTE dash NY dash 0 0 1. So it was like the organization, the physical location, and then the the number.
And there were certain numbers that were designated for servers and everything. And then I don't know when I stopped doing that for myself because I've got the most ridiculous machine names. There's the Docker host that you saw in the Pangolin video I did a couple of weeks ago, and its name is Big, sexy.
It's literally just named Big Sexy, of course. And it's named after a character from a really I wouldn't say really obscure, it's just not Fast. And The Furious, a Vin Diesel movie where he played like a DEA agent and there was this dude, big Sexy, that had a chihuahua and he took over the movie at one point.
So I named it after him and I got another machine behind me that I'm working on. I got a new board coming in for that pretty soon. And that's the money maker. It's like a big sexy and the money maker behind me all times. That's like
[00:06:32] Mikey Pruitt: actually their host names are, isn't it? Yes.
[00:06:36] Matthew Fox: Hold on. Can I do a screen share?
You can see Big Sexy Can up and running right now. How do we, okay. Share entire screen. You can see the entire left screen, right? Yeah. Good. All right. There we go. We got it. Big, sexy. Right there.
[00:06:55] Mikey Pruitt: That's
[00:06:55] Matthew Fox: awesome. I usually have five different raspberry pies up and running, but two of them are down for surfacing at the moment.
The Sonology like I said, the moneymaker iss currently offline and so is Zoltan, which is the other machine that I have here at the House.
[00:07:08] Mikey Pruitt: Tan. Is that GI Joe or something else? That's Z Man. Zoltan is, Zoltar is from Big. The movie Big Oh Cheese, the Fortune Teller. We're gonna talk about anything on this
[00:07:18] Matthew Fox: podcast if anyone's still listening.
Zoltan is a fictional character from Dude Wears My Car. So like a point in the movie, they had this cult, right? And the guy was like, watch out, it's Zoltan. And whenever you hear 'em say, Zoltan, we'd be like, Zoltan. And they would do like a z Z symbol with their hands. And now I've got this machine under here and whenever friends come to the house and they refer to it, everyone literally just goes like this immediately.
We'll have a hackathon here. I'll be like 15 of us in this room, in the room behind. And as soon as you hear someone mention Zoltan, 'cause there's like a resource on it. Every point. Zza.
[00:07:49] Mikey Pruitt: So you are in contact with a bunch of nerds. How do they usually name their servers? Are they more in the cattle or pet camp?
I think cattle
[00:08:00] Matthew Fox: for the most part. I think that it depends on how you look at the technology. For many years it was nothing but a tool for me. And now because I get to teach and create content, a lot of my machines have become playgrounds. They have to be a place that I consider to be, a place where I'm comfortable blowing up and doing whatever I gotta do.
And I think that giving things names like that kind of helps with that a little bit. They don't feel as disposable. They feel like an area something that gets broken in over time. And I don't know, maybe I just anthropomorph, anthropomorphizing things. Sure. Because I've got a pair of 3D printers named Bebop and Rock Steady Master Shredder.
Can you tell what decade I grew up in?
[00:08:43] Mikey Pruitt: I know it's each of, you don't even need this shirt. It's fine. So I'm curious. So you're on a pretty large YouTube channel. How many followers does Tom's, the Tom Lawrence, the Sys Lawrence Systems account out, we're closing in
[00:08:57] Matthew Fox: on 370,000. And an announcement went up the other day, about 60 million views that we got, but it was, and it was inaccurate.
It's 71 million views. I was like, that's 11 million folks. What's going on here? It's an amazing
[00:09:13] Mikey Pruitt: number to work with though. It's incredible. He's a rounding air in those kind of numbers. It's, that's 10 million. Very impressive.
[00:09:19] Matthew Fox: And, it's a lot of fun to work with an audience that size.
And it's something I used to do in the past and I love doing it. Again. I worked in publishing, I worked for magazines namely Latina Magazine, which is where I was at for a very long time. And we used to do tons of interactive events online with the audience. And, it would be hundreds of thousands of people at one time.
And it was a lot of fun to address them, but I didn't really have a whole lot in common with the audience. Fashion and beauty and lifestyle really wasn't my thing. But if we're gonna talk like GPUs and keyboards and input devices and voltages, hell yeah. And it's great. I get messages from people all over the world on different services.
In fact, you were asking me where to message me on, I was giving you like a fairly strict list where I was like, you can find me here. You're gonna have to authorize this. And it's to control the flow a little bit. But there are some networks out there like Reddit that you can message me on and I wake up on a Saturday or a Sunday morning, there's 50 or 60 messages waiting for me and questions or opinions, what do you think of this?
Or, Hey, check out this thing that I just did. I love building custom keyboards. And people reach out to me with their photos all the time, or stories like, Hey, I saw this Lily 58 that you built a couple of years ago. And I, it got me into it and I was having trouble with my hands. I had some repetitive stress injuries, Matt.
And now we're good. We're good to go. Thank you. That's a really cool thing to see happen, get messages for Yeah. And again, the names that Keyboard. Cinnamon rolls. Rice. Wait. Cinnamon Rolls Royce. That's what it is.
[00:10:48] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. I think we, rice is better.
[00:10:51] Matthew Fox: Not only is it named Cinnamon Rolls Royce, we AI generated an entire song about it.
And it was the most beautiful, like hip hop, New York, Staten Island name is Cinnamon Rolls Royce, dip my ass and taste his Choice Donuts and nothing but tasty bagels. Stop fronting. I think that's how it started in the beginning. That's pretty good. Was that uio or Suno? I think that was uio when they first came out, like maybe the first week or something like that, that it came out.
Me and some of the guys I worked with just went nuts on that thing. Probably killed the bandwidth of the office that we were in, messing with it. But so much fun and we're getting really close to having that locally. I was generating instrumental audio on my machine over the weekend, last weekend, and that's the Docker host back here and it's got A-A-R-T-X 30 50 with only six gigs of ram.
Low cost under a $200 GPU and I was generating instrumental music on the machine. It's pretty cool thing to do. Yeah, I think that's,
[00:11:47] Mikey Pruitt: it's really important for businesses, especially businesses with technical people that would know how to like, deploy and maintain this stuff, is that you can run like Chad, GBT and Mid Journey and soon to be UDO and like even video generators, like you can actually run those locally if you have the hardware.
Of course. Yeah. And that is sometimes it can't be pricey. Have you done this? I've got some, I got some price alerts set on a few places right now, but you can I have a, an Ansible script that will just spin up. I like Comfy UI from your Docker composed file and a few other services, N eight NI don't know if you're familiar with that.
Oh yeah. I actually use Pangolin. Thanks for your video again. Nice. That was a fun video
[00:12:29] Matthew Fox: by the way. That was a really fun video to do.
[00:12:31] Mikey Pruitt: There's a lot of and of course O Lama and Open Web ui. There are tools out there that are on par with what you can get, what you can pay for. And if you have the GPU and the electricity, you can do this yourself.
I, the electricity is where it
[00:12:46] Matthew Fox: hurts. Did you take a look at anything LLM. I've been using it more than, yeah. I've looked it
[00:12:51] Mikey Pruitt: more locally before.
[00:12:52] Matthew Fox: Oh, there's some of the custom agent actions in there are getting really good. I wrote a workflow the other night that looked at a Lawrence Systems video, gave me a synopsis of what the video was about, and then analyzed the comments for anything that was critical.
You guys could have done better with this, or that was incorrect, so that we could look at a video and go, it's been a year since we've hit this topic and now we have an idea of exactly what people want. And I just thought that was like the coolest use for an LLM. Everyone's out here, making LinkedIn posts and photos of themselves looking like they're Indiana Jones.
But to be able to analyze data that's on the internet like that and get some really great suggestions to help us improve content, there's, that's awesome thing to have
[00:13:32] Mikey Pruitt: at our disposal. There's so many workflows you could do. I could think of you can take all the comments from all the videos and have that kind of help create the path of what topics you're gonna cover next. What are people asking? Topic verticals if you can't read thousands of comments or the 50 messages you get, plus I'm sure your email inbox is super quiet. So you've got all this mountain of incoming information with no way to parse it.
[00:13:56] Matthew Fox: And a way to funnel it and filter it, if you will is a nice thing to have. And I, gosh, you saying how all those messages, I have a compulsion. I have to read them. I read every single thing that comes in. I read everything. That's, look dude. I've got a reference manual from 19. Ooh, my video's stopping on me, isn't it?
I've got a reference manual from like 1981 on my desk for tandy's. GW basic, I don't know. I'm never gonna re, I'm never gonna write basic again, like 10, go to 20, please. But it's there. I've got a compulsion. Everything that gets put in front of me with information I have to take in. That's the
[00:14:29] Mikey Pruitt: great part of having a home lab or a home server is like you can be a hoarder.
And it's all contained in this, in these bits on this black box. Oh,
[00:14:38] Matthew Fox: I've
[00:14:38] Mikey Pruitt: got a question about no one knows about your obsession.
[00:14:42] Matthew Fox: That's a, yeah. I gotta ask you, you mentioned having a whole ton of spinning rust. Do you go really high quality with your drives or do you find yourself buying some budget drives now and then depending on usage?
[00:14:52] Mikey Pruitt: I buy Iron Wolf Pros refurbished. Oh, that's all, pretty much all I buy. And one of them I thought actually died when I put 'em all in. I put, I think I have six of those and I have six old, like four terabyte ones. Nice. And I think one of, I thought one of the newer ones died at her 20 terabytes each. And I was like, oh gosh.
So I went on to look to get a new one. You can't even get 20 terabytes anymore. You can only get 20 fours. I think. I was like, oh, great, now I'm gonna have four wasted terabytes. 'cause ZFS is king of file systems, blah, blah, blah. But anyway. I digress.
[00:15:26] Matthew Fox: Did you like, do like a stick it in the freezer, see what happens, a thing with 'em or, I let
[00:15:29] Mikey Pruitt: it resil and it actually just worked.
I using, I'm using Tru Nas virtualized and Prox Max and Nice True Nass just took care of it and hasn't had any issues since. So I'm just crossing my fingers hoping it's good.
[00:15:42] Matthew Fox: Oh, the reason I ask is 'cause I have been purchasing these NVMe off of like Alley Express, knowing full worth what I'm getting.
There's no question when you buy a $7 NVME, you're really getting nv. The Em me is just not there. But I've been buying these things and I set a bunch of these up into a machine the other day and thought I was gonna install Prox Mox. And then I found out every single one of this model Drive has the same serial number on it.
[00:16:11] Mikey Pruitt: Like it's hard as the same drive. Basically.
[00:16:14] Matthew Fox: I installed Prox Mox and then I rebooted the machine, and Grub was just like, eh. And you, I'm like, why do I see the same serial number like seven times on my screen? And it was between having them like onboard and then like in a separate adapter that had like another four of them.
Yeah. My gosh, you can't use these together. They're great for testing quickly and see how a machine works or something. That's throwaways, but you can't put them machine together. Yeah. Their computer's
[00:16:38] Mikey Pruitt: gonna like that. They're like, this is the same drive. I do not know what you mean.
Yeah,
[00:16:42] Matthew Fox: It didn't go well. I'm just happy I didn't try building a raid array or something like that. I, the machine would've probably exploded like that guy's head and scanners or something like that.
So with your home labing, and I realize we are here to talk with Mia and I'm just curious what do you got going in there other than the AI stuff that I put over to you? You've gotta be doing some video and coding 'cause you've got the two. TI 10 eighties, I think
[00:17:06] Mikey Pruitt: you have. Yeah they're, those are more of like a testing situation.
They were actually my old Bitcoin miner or Litecoin, oh, Ethereum, et cetera. So I was like I do wanna put some GPUs in this thing, but I don't wanna go buy some unless I know that it works. So I have the Nvidia Docker runtimes and all that stuff to make sure they actually worked and it worked.
They worked really well, but they're just old and slow. But a lot of what I do, so I've been running a home lab or a home server, whatever, for about 10 years. So I like cut cable like a decade ago, and I used that for my home entertainment. The R stack, don't tell anybody. You're not even supposed to say that.
That's like a dirty word on YouTube. But anyway, yeah, it's been doing home entertainment stuff, a lot of purchase stuff gets ripped, things like that. But there's, it's so easy for my entire family, my wife and my child to use Plex. I think I have Plex now thinking about Jelly Fin.
There's a little license issues that are getting a little questionable, but we've been using Plex for about a decade. Got the lifetime passed at that time. So it was, I don't know, on a sale. It was like 30 bucks, 50 bucks. So I'm in a good spot with the, the workflow that I use. I just needed some new hardware and it felt like it was time to get like a big boy rack mountable.
'cause all my network gear is already rackmounted.
And I was like, I'm gonna get the nice case at 45 drives, which I understand you talked to recently. And it is just the best hardware. I remember when I was, I think it was, see, I think came out 2007, so I was like, in the working field or whatever.
And my mom had gotten me like this compact Presario handheld with the stylus thing.
[00:18:49] Matthew Fox: Oh my gosh. I had the H, it was like the Newton, but slightly better. There was the Ada and the Compact had Oh my goodness. Yeah. Flashback. It was terrible. Oh my goodness.
[00:18:57] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. It was like Windows base. Yeah.
Which, they weren't trying to make a mobile operating system, it was just like cut down, trim down windows on the thing. And I was like, mom, how much was this thing? She was like it was a lot. And I was like, let's take it back. I'm not gonna use it. And then it was like two years later when the iPhone came out, I didn't even have an at t account and you had to have at and t.
Then I went and bought it and used it just with wifi basically. And I was like, this is good hardware and software. This is what I want to use. So I waited until my contract ran out and then got back, got to at t so I could use it like as a real phone. And the same, I've got the same feeling with that 45 drives home lab case.
And I was like, this is gonna be the platform for my. Home life for the next decade or more, hopefully. Oh yeah. So I was like, I don't, and a lot of people will hate this, but I didn't mind spending, I think it was 800 when I got it, I think a little bit more now, but it is really good hardware and you can just tell the quality and the I, you can almost say love that they put in to their hardware, to the metal, like all the folds and the, it's, the edges are not sharp, they don't cut you, things
[00:20:05] Matthew Fox: like that.
Ev, everything's rolled. Everything has been D with deferred I think would be the term for that. They're powder coating the casings and they just look great. I've got a pro four that they had sent me and they put my face on it, which was pretty funny. Like it came in and it was just like, and but performance wise, it's a great machine.
They gave me a what? I selected one with a zon. I like zon processors. That's one of those things I get a lot, I get some hate for that these days. And I'm like, and. I got, I'm, they're sitting here. I'm see a boy. I can't help you,
[00:20:40] Mikey Pruitt: but how many xons do you have in that drawer? Don't ask too many. I used to have this obsession where I would go to our local dump and I would take like our trash or whatever, and there's always that computer bin.
Yep. And it's did it rain in the last week? Let's take a little peek and see what's in there. My wife's get out of there. I'm like, come on, that's fine. I'm just looking around.
[00:21:02] Matthew Fox: I got a contact over at Ali Express at a vendor that I've gotten to know over the past four or five years.
And every now and then I'll get an email and it's Hey Matt, we just came into this thing of system pulls. Do you want anything? And that's a, I forget, that's like a 3.4 gigahertz zon 2011 dash three model with 20 core, 20 core 40 thread. I think I got like for eight bucks. Nice. So I was like, yeah, I'll take 10 of those, send 'em on.
So I do have a bit of a stockpile here of machines to be able to build, but you're absolutely right with 45 and the quality that's I think the best thing about what I've seen from them, the quality and also almost a brand neutrality. There's nothing proprietary about their equipment.
I've got, in mine, I'm sure you've probably got like an aroc brand motherboard or something like that.
[00:21:51] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. I think I have, I forget the name, but yeah, it's an aroc server board with two get 10 gig ethernet. Yeah.
[00:21:57] Matthew Fox: Oh yeah. You get that, you get the management port probably with it and some other things.
[00:22:01] Mikey Pruitt: And it's just IPMI, which is super easy to use. I've never used that before. And I was like, oh, wow, this is great.
[00:22:07] Matthew Fox: It was like, I think the last time I had done remote management would've been like lights out or something like that on HP's years ago. And it's just, it was great to see how everything functions with this, but.
It's just solid. I think that's what I'm trying to get at there. Industry standard brands and parts being used. Nothing is custom manufactured with regards to the internals, but it's custom, I forget what the term is that they use for it. Custom. It's not custom manufactured. There's a term they use that's really great.
That's that really is saying that they're building these machines for you. And that goes back to the quality that you were talking about.
[00:22:42] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. And you film that when you get it, like you take it outta the box, everything is well packaged and there's like a letter in there that's thanks for your, for welcome to the family type of letter.
Oh thanks.
It's miles. You kind go right back and say hi,
[00:22:53] Matthew Fox: thank you. Send them some muffins or something, yeah, you do. You want to, but it really, it is the polar opposite and I didn't even think about this till now. It is the polar opposite of, dude, you're getting Adele. Because that's just I'm shoving this thing in your face with 45.
You're like, please bring it to me. I have configured this to my needs. It's exactly what I want. I understand what the workload's gonna be. I'm choosing the right hardware for it, and I can't wait for it to arrive in the mail. It's a very different situation and honestly, it's the first time I've done a BTO type of order like that's been, concierge is not the right word, and that's almost ass kissing, but friendly and very much focused on guiding you towards making the right decision, not the right sale. It wasn't get the highest end this get the highest end. That it's, what are you gonna do with this machine? Do you need 128 gigs of ram or are you good at 64? 'cause you're probably not gonna go above that with what you're trying to get done.
And I hate waste. And as soon as I said that to them, they sat down with me like, let's talk about exactly what you're gonna do to make sure you have room with, as far as resources go, but you don't have this, huge amount of stuff that you're never going to access. That drives me nuts. And they really went through it all with me. That's what I have. I appreciate that.
I think that being in charge of backups and running things like disaster recovery cabinets, cross country, I've always gotten to the point where I'm like, yeah, minimal data. Minimal data. I don't give myself, I don't give myself room for sprawl to take place. It's like I contain my insanity in this room.
If you can't tell, there's a lot of stuff that's going on in here between like gigantic aquariums, old Microsoft certifications Danish butter cookies. We got everything in here. Actually, hold on. You're gonna like this. Yeah. Snacks.
I'm just gonna assume, oh, is my camera acting up again? There we go. Don't worry.
[00:24:40] Mikey Pruitt: It'll be fine in that recording,
[00:24:42] Matthew Fox: I'm assuming that, you're not gonna think, oh my gosh, there's a bunch of danish butter cookies in the guy's office space.
[00:24:47] Mikey Pruitt: Oh, there's a bunch. Wow.
[00:24:50] Matthew Fox: Wow. What is that? Just microcontrollers, Arduinos, ESP 30 twos, pro Micros.
You name them.
[00:25:00] Mikey Pruitt: They're just all in here for projects. You're a bit, Matt is a bit of a hoarder. A bit of a hoarder,
[00:25:04] Matthew Fox: yeah. I can't help it if it blinks or it is got a light on it or something like that, it's probably in here. But yeah, there's a lot of, and going
[00:25:10] Mikey Pruitt: back to 45 drives I think there's like a deficit of just delight in the industry, in the tech industry and the MSB industry.
Absolute, like vendors are guilty of this a lot. DNSFilters drops to not be like that. But there's a, there's just a, like money extraction. Vacuum cleaner on for a lot of these, a lot of vendors. And I think MSPs are like getting really sick of it.
[00:25:34] Matthew Fox: I agree with you and I'm sure that it extends into internal IT departments as well.
'cause I had my share of that before moving into the MS P space. You get a budget together, you know what you need and then the next thing you turn around, you quote something, it's three times what you expected it to be. And you haven't even put a power supply in the thing yet.
[00:25:52] Mikey Pruitt: And that's the crazy like other side of the coin from like home lab and open source software.
It's but there is a free option for this. And this, actually, this is something I did wanna ask you.
So there is really great open source software that you can use for free. A lot of them have a model where you, their business model is like you pay for support if you want that, or they'll host it for you, that type of stuff.
But there are really good versions of lots of software that businesses need. If they maintain it themselves that they can use for free they could pay extra for support, hopefully keep the company alive and updates coming out. Do you think there's a way to make a fully or close to open source?
MSP or IT department? Ooh, yeah, I did it.
[00:26:39] Matthew Fox: Oh, you did? When I worked at Latina magazine, it was the peak of the financial crisis of around 2008. And we had gear that was dying out left and right. And we didn't have the money, the budget to pay for brand new servers and proper licensing in certain areas.
So I started making replacements of equipment. Imagine having, oh boy, what was, I gotta think about this for a second. I'm on PTSD man. The second day I worked at that place, the PBX caught fire. That's how bad it was. Yeah. Poor Nortel, but there was a server, it was a Hewlett Packard ProLiant, DL three 80.
'cause it was like a two, two U or four U. It was a bigger one and it had a back plane. That died every other week. For the first six weeks I worked at the company. Imagine the raid back plane just dying on you every other week. It was like, oh, is it payday? Okay, time to get a new back, back plane. And I ended up just getting like an old workstation that someone had like a IBM precision.
No, it's Dell. I don't just,
[00:27:43] Mikey Pruitt: anything that was stable, I just need some stable hardware.
[00:27:45] Matthew Fox: Exactly. I got that running. It had two scuzzy drives in it. I think I was able to set up at least software rate on it and replace the functionality of that machine. And it was running Debian. And I think I had some samba file shares, a FP kind of emulation and some other stuff there.
And as time went on, I just kept removing items from the network. Now, software wise, that doesn't always work inside of a business because you do have to have interoperability with other with other businesses, especially when you're doing production work, video and publishing and things like that. But on the backend, I think you can security concerns.
Absolutely. There are many security concerns, especially with say like an open source RMM or other type of management configuration, state related tool. I think that there's a good discussion there and it's not for today. 'cause there need to be smarter people than us on it. Exactly. But how do you properly secure and open source tool?
Is there a component to that? A black box, if you will, that has to be generated by the organization that's going to use it. So that is unique to itself. Almost a gauntlet, if you will, between functionality and the interface to ensure that even though the product is open source, there is some kind of artificially proprietary mechanism in there.
A key if you will, something that has a particular pattern that needs to be met to be able to function a certain way. Maybe there needs to be something like that in the future, who knows? But there is a MacGyver out there that I'm sure is gonna make it happen at some point.
[00:29:11] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah, there is. Like home.
The home lab community I think are really good at securing like their access. Okay. So like DNS or using Pangolin is pretty, pretty good. You can tie that into other systems to make it, access is really good. But I think where they miss out and where a lot of people that are new to this skimp is like hardening the server itself.
So Prox Mox is running on Debian. If you spend a VM on Debian or Ubuntu or Fedora or whatever, that is not really secure until you do a few things to it. Things like disabling the root user. SH key SSH key access only authentication of course. Exactly. And running things like closing the, as the firewall as much as you can, UFW and then like running things like fail to ban are really helpful.
And then, I actually installed crowds SEC on my Pangolin install and I got myself in trouble 'cause I banned myself. I was like, what is going on? I cannot, like the internet works like it wasn't today. I would be like, oh, it's probably Google or CloudFlare. But I was like just my home server is like in the next room.
I can't get to it. How did this thing just become isolated? Yeah. I'm like, oh, wait a minute. I installed crowds sick on there. So I like SSH in and looked at the list of ips that were banned and my home, I wan IP was on there. I was like, yeah, probably should have configured that. But yeah, I, and I learned that, the hard way, but only for an hour.
It was funny.
[00:30:35] Matthew Fox: That's great though. And you're right. Hardening of service is something that is unfortunately neglected and I think it's because everyone considers themselves to be somewhat safe. It's in your home, you're safe in your home, eh, not so much. You might as well consider the internet without care.
The same thing as leaving, say. The egress window to your basement open or something like that.
[00:30:57] Mikey Pruitt: Exactly. I love that you used the word egress to your basement window nerd. That felt right. It was perfect. It was perfect.
[00:31:06] Matthew Fox: But that's really what it is. And you do have to take steps to take care of your security and maintain a security posture that is the equivalent to what I think you would do in the workplace.
And I think that's a perfectly good thing to do. It's practicing what you preach all day. If you're going to go to client's offices and tell them what they're doing wrong and how to do it right, I think you gotta fi, you gotta follow the same exact advice. And and I think that's
[00:31:30] Mikey Pruitt: The best piece of having a home server at your house is to learn that stuff.
Oh yeah. In a safe ish environment, like you should probably have it on a vlan so that it doesn't infect, let's just use the word, infect the rest of your network while you're learning stuff. But those are real skills that apply to the real world. I did a job that, that's, that was my job all day, just securing servers, deploying software via Ansible and Docker containers.
That's a real job. And if you can do it at home securely, you can do it in a corporation in the workplace.
[00:32:03] Matthew Fox: Yeah. I, gosh, I think you've mentioned Ansible a few times in fact, and I haven't worked with Ansible in years. I used to deploy websites for big pharma using Ansible. I was the the IT deployment guy slash marketing kind of reviewer.
So whenever a, I wanna say it was like a 20, I forgot the code from the FDA, whenever a prescription has a revised prescription sheet talking about, like side effects and that kind of stuff. I think it's like a 2270 something. It comes out. And I was like, I had space, like their walled garden for a bunch of different big pharma companies.
So I would get to read how badly your kidneys are gonna suffer from this drug? And go, okay, that doesn't gimme too much of a nightmare. Let me fire up Ansible real quick. And I would deploy the site for them. And it always felt so strange to do, but Ansible is so darn nice. You get your playbooks in place, you get everything running, and you could just, you can bring so much up with Ansible.
So you gotta, I gotta ask you, what else are you doing with it other than bringing up some of the Dogger stuff? Do you have any other kind of like provisioning
[00:33:05] Mikey Pruitt: going on in the home lab? I actually used Ansible to harden Prox Max itself, harden Tru Nas, and then spin things up, create a couple of cloud and knit files.
So like my goal is to have run an Ansible script that could redeploy my entire server if I were to like, just nuke it to zero. I don't, I'm not anywhere close to that and I probably never will be. But that's in the back of my mind I'm like, it would be really cool if everyone server burn down or 45 drives wanted to send me another one.
Then I could just go and it would just be almost identical to the one that I have.
[00:33:40] Matthew Fox: That'd be a pretty cool thing. That's almost Matrix right there, man. You'd be like, we're good. All set. Let's go.
[00:33:44] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. My, my open web UI is back up. My innate end workflows are running.
[00:33:50] Matthew Fox: It'll just be
[00:33:51] Mikey Pruitt: back
[00:33:51] Matthew Fox: in business.
That's gorgeous. That's what I do for restores for my raspberry pies. I don't know if you have any pies, but every now and then, I mean I think I burned through so many of them over the years. I've had a couple of bum models where like you do three or four reboots and the SD card gets completely corrupted such, and it takes some time to go.
I think it's the device, because you keep replacing new one.
[00:34:13] Mikey Pruitt: And how many eyes do you have in those drawers behind you? Like 4, 5,
[00:34:17] Matthew Fox: 10. There's one here, there's one hanging here on a P OE connection. There's another one hanging over here on a P OE connection. Actually. Oh, let me get a little more careful with this one.
This has, oh, you're like,
[00:34:29] Mikey Pruitt: that one's running my network
[00:34:31] Matthew Fox: actually that has the Lawrence Systems project management system on it.
[00:34:36] Mikey Pruitt: Yes. Actually got my start home lab on raspberry pies, even before I was working at DNSFilter as a DevOps engineer. And I was using things like Cody. This is when I first cut the cord.
I started with Cody and on raspberry pies, way worse than the R stack. But anyway. I forgot about
[00:34:56] Matthew Fox: Cody. Goodness. Oh
[00:34:57] Mikey Pruitt: yes.
[00:34:58] Matthew Fox: Yeah, I think the pie is a great place to start with Home lab. That is one of the first things I put in front of friends' kids when they wanna get into technology. It's either you, this
[00:35:07] Mikey Pruitt: is a computer,
[00:35:09] Matthew Fox: that's it.
Give them the pie, get 'em interested. Last weekend, and this is gonna be part of a Lawrence Systems video, so I'm not gonna go too far into it, but spoilers, a friend's kid came to me and goes, Matt, I got a project I wanna get into this weekend, not weekend, this summer. And I want your help building a system.
'cause I know you got stuff. You can put something together for me. And the kid's looking at me, he's come on. You got this, don't worry about it. And I'm like, all right, what do you want to do? So he starts trying to explain it and he's I want, I need some docker containers and I wanna he's talking about lamp environments and some other stuff.
So I'm like, okay, you're talking about going to the web. Maybe a development PHP is an interesting choice. And he goes you know it so well that you can help me. That's why I've chosen it. I was like, damn, kid, you're smart. All right. You're figuring out a support research structure for this research.
So I go, the only thing here is you're missing one thing. And these are kid this kid, and some of my other friend's kids have grown up with me giving them hard times about technology. Like I poke them and they're used to it. They like the challenges. I go, I will let you take this minis forum, mini PC that I've got, but I need a document from you first.
What is it? He looks at me and just kinda goes, functional requirements. Yes, they learn young and they do well. So I actually had him draft up a functional requirements document for the project that he is working on. I went over it. I made sure that the machine that I'm gonna, I gave him would meet the requirements that he had.
And I put Debian on it just to get him started because they hit raspberry pie. He could sit down, he'll know the basic commands, get things started. He could use, apt to install and do all whatever he needs. Did you at least add pseudo to Debian? God, I hate that. He was all set. He had everything he needed.
It was almost like getting into a raspberry pie. He had a username for himself. It was enabled with pseudo. Everything's good. So he felt at home. I went to the house Sunday night to take the computer away from him. And it was, again, me being a bit of a jerk. But that's, this is, that gets them, that gets him fired.
Like me, right? And I go, I'm taking this back. You knew I was gonna do that. Did you back up your data? Yeah, I got it backed up and he is like looking at me, look at the eyes. Don't take this from me. I said, I'm taking it, but I'm not taking 'cause I wanna take it from you. I wanna see what you did with it.
I'm gonna take some time and poke around with it and if you set this up the way, I think you should set it up or basically on your functional requirements, it's yours to keep. I got home and I was blown away. He wiped out the Debian installation and replaced it with Prox ox. Nice. I get in, I poke around, I start looking at the ISO images that have been uploaded into the system.
[00:37:52] Mikey Pruitt: It's like Minecraft or something?
[00:37:54] Matthew Fox: Nope. Debian 12 and Alpine Linux. I see VMs in play. What's Net oh one Oh shit. They set a bind. They set up a bind server. That's not easy. And they said it. It's forwarding out to quad nine for DNS resolution. But something weird is going on here. Because it's not responding.
On Port 53, holy shit, they put a pie hole in the same vm. They set up a VM to take care of basic network services and filtering for themselves. I call him, I go, what's up with the DNS stuff? He goes I wanted to set up a domain and have a pro reverse proxy that we could use. And in order to do that, I have to have a DNS server that I can control the records on.
And I was like, so you didn't just throw PY hole on and make a couple of DNS records? No, I did things the right way, Matt,
[00:38:44] Mikey Pruitt: the hard way For sure.
[00:38:46] Matthew Fox: You're 14. It was just like, please. But it was so cool to see that happen, that it's becoming a video on Lauren's systems. I'm not gonna have names or photos, but just talk about the system.
I still have it underneath my desk. I gotta finish recording it tomorrow and just show what one 14-year-old mind that has an idea and is bucking the concept of vibe coding. He's going to do, he has a lamps stack installed. He's got a VM with Docker running where he is, got a bunch of different utilities.
He figured out how to do pass through of the A MD, not even an Nvidia. Oh, that's not easy of A-M-D-G-P-U. And he's running a llama inside of a vm and it's taking advantage of the GPU. Go on to Reddit and see how many people can't figure out how to do that. And he did it. That's awesome.
[00:39:42] Mikey Pruitt: And
[00:39:43] Matthew Fox: I was like shocked.
That's one of those moments where like my eyes are tearing up a little bit right now thinking about it 'cause it's so great. But handing him an Arduino a couple of years ago and he like, Hey, let's make some LEDs light up and let's look at a light sensor and let's look at a thermometer and going from that to a raspberry pie.
Picking up basic Linux commands and understanding how to set up a system and then being given a machine and just going from that pie and just having a couple of little local services to a full blown network on a box with five or six VMs that have been set up very well. A couple things could have been done better, you gotta learn.
But if I put that machine in front of you and said, poke around on it, you wouldn't sit here going, what is this? Or that thing doesn't make sense. It'd be like, what are we doing this today?
[00:40:31] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah, let's plug it in. Yeah.
[00:40:34] Matthew Fox: And that, that was just a really cool thing and I'm so happy to be able to turn that into a piece of content because again, it may not be a how-to or tutorial, but I think it can inspire people.
A lot of people wanna know about mini PCs. I think you, you mentioned that before. And you can do a lot with them if you plan out what it is that you wanna do. You start off with a plan and he had that plan and that's why he got that machine from me and he got that done. He probably didn't
[00:40:57] Mikey Pruitt: have that plan until you forced him to give you the requirements.
So then you, so you, so like you're not only teaching the internet things, you're also teaching like local kids and like family member kids or whoever Oh yeah. Which is great. 'cause they're, probably near you and you have access to the hardware, but you're like, okay, this is not just say, I'm not just giving you this thing.
This is, there is a, this is a lesson that I'm gonna teach you. Oh yeah. I'm not gonna tell you that I'm gonna teach you this lesson, but, and I'll see if you can learn it or want to learn it. And he passed the test.
[00:41:29] Matthew Fox: I'm always gonna be that little bit of a hard ass because that's what happened to me when I was a kid with technology and I think it worked out well.
I'll always be there to support them. I'll never push them too far. And they see the smirk, they see it like, I'm gonna give you a hard time because there's gonna be a lesson in this. And, they go with it. And I appreciate that they do. And I'm sure that they appreciate the. The advantages of doing so, being able to have access technology and just being handed a machine to go take whatever it is that you're dreaming and make it something that we can maybe look at in a couple of months.
[00:42:00] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. I have a lot of young, younger kids in my life. Like under 10, like between five and 10. My son's only four, so I haven't done this to him yet, but they don't have like iPads and like iPhones, like they know how to swipe and click and they can do anything on a iPad when they're like eight. So I'll be like so like nephew, what do you, how do you think that works?
What do you think is happening there? And it like judging based on what he says, I'll be like, okay, this one's got it, this one's got the gene, or whatever it is. I don't know what it is, but some people are just curious, oh, about what's behind that glass and how is my finger making to do that?
[00:42:36] Matthew Fox: Oh, that's a big part of getting into this field, I think.
And I was talking to one of my first bosses about it recently, how folks that are, I dunno, like forties and older. We worked in data centers more than younger people today and we sometimes have this weird server whisperer thing. Have you ever walked up to a server and put your hand on it and been like, there are two power supplies in this thing.
One is running hot and the fan is rough. This is going to go in the next two weeks. And it happens like. I just like some people with motor
[00:43:12] Mikey Pruitt: motors and things like that, they're like, I think is a certain tactility.
[00:43:17] Matthew Fox: Yeah. There's a certain level of tactility, I guess is what I'm getting at in that experience, and I think that's a cool thing.
And there's less and less of that these days. So to be able to put more experience in front of people to learn those types of things, it's just awesome. I'm rambling at this point. I need a little bit of caffeine. I think I started my first meeting at four o'clock this morning.
[00:43:34] Mikey Pruitt: Oh, only four o'clock this morning.
Just for the audience. We're recording late in the day after. We're both finished working, so that's why this one, yeah, I'm on. That's why this one's off the rails quite a bit. I'm on hour 14 right now. I've been getting run through the ringer on discord and LinkedIn all day and in Slack. Gosh,
[00:43:51] Matthew Fox: you know what?
Let's talk MSP for a bit. All right. I know. That's what we want to talk about. We've gone everywhere. I'm reining things in a little bit. How long have you been in the MSP space? I'm like, I'm curious about that.
[00:44:03] Mikey Pruitt: Before I've had two passions in my life, which is electricity and technology. So I was, early in my life, I was, my family owns an electrical contracting company, so I have an electrical license and did that.
And actually in that near the end, I we did a lot of smart homes and, which I, based around the network 'cause I'm all about like the networks. The next thing people would be like TVs and speakers and I'd be like, no, no circulatory system. Yes, exactly. And I would have to tell people, like convince 'em to choose me over, the old school guys.
I would be like, what about the speakers? Which I would do that too, but I was like, we need to have like serious network gear in here. Not like unify stuff, like good stuff. And so I was like, this is really interesting and I didn't even really know the word MSB at that time. This is probably 20 11, 20 12.
And I was like, I could. Go and be like an MSP. I just had this thought I could do this for people be like a consultant of sorts. I didn't even know what to call it. A few years later I get hired by TNS filter and then I'm like, oh, MSP, like that already existed. I didn't even know, but it is already a thing.
I was very close to becoming one. But, always had this fondness of it's almost like MSPs are not the trades necessarily, like electricians and plumbers are, but they're very close. It's the same, especially ones like Lawrence Systems who did cabling and things like that.
They they are very similar businesses, but the MSP has the benefit of that recurring revenue and like software and services and consulting that electricity electricians don't have. So anyway, when I got to DNSFilter. We needed somebody to like really focus on that. After my stint in DevOps and support and product for a little while I was put in a position to really be in charge of our MSP partner program and later on, like resellers from, VARs and things like that.
So for the last probably four years, I've been like deep into this partner MSP VAR world, and it's been like really fascinating and I can, I see so much potential in that business. But I see it's also just hard. Like it's, it has those same drawbacks as the trades, like electricians but it has so much upside and you have to figure out how to be.
Good at business rather than good at technology. And I think a lot of people like me, I would probably be like, no, I don't really want to do that. I would rather do the tech stuff. So yeah, kinda have to make this trade or find people that you can join up with that are good at both or stronger in one area than the other.
But yeah, that's what I see in the MSP space. But yeah, my, my time even knowing the word, probably only six years.
[00:46:52] Matthew Fox: Interesting. Yeah. I've, I was first made aware of the word in 2005 when an MSP tried to take my job from me. So it was a very dirty word for a while. Yeah. In fact, this is great.
I still have a screwdriver here 'cause it's incredibly handy. It's just one of those things I've had for 20 years from the company Mind shift. They are an MSP. They got bought out by Rico years ago and I successfully defended my position from them twice until I moved on to a new company and then they took over.
But. I've been dealing with MSPs for such a for 20 years now. Hired, fired, worked with, collaborated argued with all anything, everything and anything with MSPs. And it's just, it's a very unique space to be in. It is a bit like, kinda like ragtag in a way. And I think that you're right, there needs to be.
People need a certain sense of balance in what they're able to do to be successful in the space. There needs to be a balance between the technical know-how and the understanding of how to run a business properly and quite frankly work with customers in ways that generate revenue and make them happy.
That could be a challenge at times and there are some people that really get it done well here. Tom has done an amazing job over the years. His business partner Jason Slagel, it's the NWR amazing job. There are plenty of other. MSPs. But when you get to know the people behind some of the ones that really have that kinda vibrant growth and fun factor to them, aside from the ability to deliver solutions, they're typically people that have multiple disciplines or have their minds in so many places at once, that they're just everywhere.
And that in Tom, that in Jason. I see that in my old boss. And I think that's hallmark to success in the space. Is that just a little bit of too much going on and quite frankly, I love that.
[00:48:39] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. You mentioned the word ragtag and I'm like, yeah, but in the best way. Yeah, it is.
It's like the Goonies. It's, that's perfect. Perfect analogy. I'll let you, I'll let you LinkedIn post that one. Someone's gotta be like Rocky
[00:48:55] Matthew Fox: Road.
[00:48:56] Mikey Pruitt: Exactly.
[00:48:58] Matthew Fox: But that's what an ms, the MSP space is it's very much like Goonies. Everyone's a little different. Everyone's maybe a little wacky in their own way, but everyone bands together and really great things get done.
Look at an organization like MSP Geek. They get so many people together to do great stuff. The yearly MSP Geek Con conference is so much fun. I didn't get there last year, but I played a large role in prep for the first year. I did a lot of the design work and all that kind of stuff, and photos, gosh, I had so much.
I got a rug burn on my stomach at MSP Geek in 2023,
[00:49:32] Mikey Pruitt: taking so many photos.
[00:49:34] Matthew Fox: Yeah, I was like on my stomach, on the rug at the hotel, taking photos so much, and then all of a sudden I'm like all red. But it's worth it because it was capturing so many people having a great time and I. Again, that's what the MSP space represents.
For example, when I was in 2023, now I don't know if you know this, but I like building custom keyboards, like really complex stuff. Oh really? I heard that.
[00:49:53] Mikey Pruitt: Maybe now I got a couple of them sitting around here on desk. I think there's like a r slash matt builds keyboards.
[00:49:59] Matthew Fox: Actually this is the new hotness.
I'm gonna start pretty I that thing because
[00:50:03] Mikey Pruitt: we don't need numbers. What are numbers anyway, right? Yeah. I was like, I think you're missing a row there. I'm missing numbers
[00:50:09] Matthew Fox: and I got two space bars. Makes no sense. But I like doing stuff like that and my boss at the time and I decided we were gonna do a pre-day at MSP Geek in 2023, call it boarding school and build keyboards with a group of people.
And it was so much fun to do. It was like 15 or 20 of us and everyone walked away with oh wait, hold on. I got it right here. This is not the board, but it's the same kind of board. A rev Young 34 split. Ortho linear board. These are a lot of fun to build. And when the event was over and everyone was getting their keyboards packed up to get into the proper, the real beginning of MSP, geek Con, this one young man walked up to me and he was crying and he came up to me.
He was just like, Matt, and you could see the tears coming down. I was like, are you okay? I thought maybe he cut his hand or he burnt himself in a soldering and I thought he was like, in some form of distress. He just goes, I gotta thank you, because every day when I'm done working, I play video games for six hours.
Maybe eat something, go to sleep, do it over again. You just gave me something new to do and you didn't just gimme something new to do. I wanna learn about small electronics. I'm gonna go out, I'm gonna buy a soldering iron. I'm gonna get all this stuff. I'm gonna get some of these keyboard kits, and then I gotta go learn C because you told me a little, you showed us how the firmware and these things is built and it's a framework and it's actually easy to understand, but you have to have a basic understanding of c.
And that's awesome. And I'm gonna build something that's gonna look really good on my desk. So I've got all these things to look forward to in a keyboard. And he just, when he said in a keyboard, it was like this sense of disdain, like disbelief, just like out of everything. A keyboard. He couldn't believe it either.
Yeah. That's the MSP community right there, doing something because you enjoy it. You think others will enjoy it. And you turn around and you see the positive impact that even just sharing a hobby of yours has on other people. That's a big thing. And when you think about that, it wasn't just giving him something to do.
Think about how many skills are most likely transferable into the workplace. With what He just did a, he's building an input device and he's gonna customize for his own style of typing. Be small electronics and no, you're not gonna be like, Hey, that Window's update's not working. Let me get my soldering iron out.
But it's nice to know about things like resistors and diodes and how those types of components work because when something goes wrong and you understand it, there's a good chance you're gonna have at least a sense of what's going on. If you plug a device in, you're getting a weird hum and it's not turning on.
Yeah, there's probably a really bad capacitor or something someplace like, you pick those kinds of things up, those are markers, there's signs of things he's gonna learn a little bit of software programming. That's just a really great skill to be able to pick up. And you gotta admit, once you learn C or any derivative or descendant of C Java, JavaScript, whatever it is, everything starts to look familiar to you and you start connecting dots when you see things.
And it's no longer a weird block of code. It's something that tells a story. And he gained that through that exercise too. And all those play into the workplace in the MSP space. So there's a beauty of just being, they say you know what it is? It's giving a kid a bowl of mac and cheese and hiding the vegetables in it.
That's what it is. I popped a couple of Flintstone vitamins in there for the guy, but again, it's just the MSP space the knowledge, the randomness the communal support that people show each other just makes it a really great place to be in. And gosh, the more I talk about it, the more I wanna talk.
I haven't talked to anyone like this in actually a couple of months and it just feels so damn good, which is why we're off the rails. You got me and I got
[00:53:40] Mikey Pruitt: so much stuff in my head. This is great. This is the the Home Lab episode of dnsUNFILTERED.
[00:53:46] Matthew Fox: This is gonna be like the Criterion Collection eight hour Lord of the Rings episode of this.
Oh wait, Tom's messaging me. Let's see. He got, he's got something good. Ah, yes. He's like
[00:53:56] Mikey Pruitt: 45 drives. He is gonna send us,
[00:53:59] Matthew Fox: no, he's sending me he just created a new email address for, zero trust networking event that we're gonna be doing in the next week or so. Oh, nice. With the vendor in the space.
We'll talk, I'll, you'll see the promotions for that. I'm not gonna use that for this. It's good though. It's gonna be a nice event for anyone that just wants to know more about ZTNA and how it works. It's not even gonna be marketing related, it's just Tom and a dude talking about what it means, which is gonna be fun.
But again, that comes down to the fun stuff in the MSP space. I can't tell you how many people come to me and they're like, Matt, zero trust. We gotta talk about this. I don't get it. And I end up using my Willy Wonka example of you get nothing in the movie. It's you walk in and you start, you get nothing, and then maybe you show me your idea and I realize, okay, I have record of who you are.
I understand you can now have these two things. Yes, exactly. You are a janitor. You get access to that wing, get a mop, and I use that example and it makes sense. But to have Tom and someone else get up there and have this conversation and understand that it's about educating the space so that better decisions can be.
And it's not necessarily the better decision going with company A or company B, it's having the knowledge to know whether or not company A or company B is gonna be the better fit for you. And that's a really cool thing to be able to offer. And I think that even, I'm sure you admit as someone that works at a vendor, you have to take actions that are going to somehow be tied to revenue.
There has to be a return on most things that go on. But in this space, when presented right, most vendors look at this and go, you know what? You're right. If we can just teach people a couple of things that are gonna be valuable, maybe they'll remember us when they need something. And of all the industries that I've worked in, education publishing, a couple of others, I've never heard that sentiment said so many times where it's just, you know what, yeah, let's put a few hours into this.
It's gonna help people and it'll probably come back. We work in a somewhat closed system. People remember what you do, and the more good you do, the more comes back. And again I've never seen that, even in educational industries that I've worked in, I've never seen that type of sentiment. Not just said, but practice that strongly.
[00:56:07] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. The MSP space, the people are really, we were talking about like the circulatory system of your home, your modern home. Like they're the circulatory system of the world.
[00:56:18] Matthew Fox: Oh, yeah. With
[00:56:19] Mikey Pruitt: our connectivity, our software, hardware, like they're bridge bridging everything together because most people don't have the skills to do it.
The in-house,
[00:56:29] Matthew Fox: most people shouldn't have the skills to do in-house because most people have skills. Yeah. They concentrate in other areas.
[00:56:36] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah.
[00:56:36] Matthew Fox: It's just, I think technology's become so pervasive that sometimes we expect people to have more in that area, but. Shoot. If I needed to go crack my back, I'll probably have paralyzed myself,
[00:56:46] Mikey Pruitt: yeah. My wife got some acupuncture recently and was like, oh my God, it's the best sleep I ever had in my life. I'm like, what did they do? She's it was right here on the wrist, and that was the spot and on both wrists. I'm like, I think you could do that yourself. And she's no, you can't. You dummy.
[00:57:01] Matthew Fox: I got some paper clips in the desk. Hold on. I'll be right back. Yeah, i'll be
[00:57:05] Mikey Pruitt: right back.
[00:57:07] Matthew Fox: Just
[00:57:07] Mikey Pruitt: come back from the basement with some darts from the dartboard. I got some semi ejectors and I'll just stick 'em in there. Get a little tap. That's it.
[00:57:16] Matthew Fox: Have you ever gotten acupuncture or anything like that done before?
[00:57:19] Mikey Pruitt: I have not, but now I have to now I'm like I had no idea. It was so amazing. Alright, give it a
[00:57:23] Matthew Fox: shot. It's bizarre. I've had I've gone for sessions in the past. I've got significant damage to my right shoulder. I got I got shot in 2009. Oh, from attempted robbery. We just started with that story.
DNS nah, man gunshots in my back and out the shoulder. So every now and then, I do end up having really bad days. In fact there's some nerve damage to where I'll be fine. But if I were to go like that and my arm was inflamed, don't do it. I would've blacked out by now. I would've been gone.
So acupuncture helps with it. Yes. It helps control the inflammation that leads that level of sensitivity. And I have a friend who's an ACU acupuncturist and she'll come over and help me out every now and then if I really need it. And it doesn't happen that often, but there have been a couple of times where it's like I try to get outta bed and I pass out 'cause I gotta put arm, she'll wait on my right arm.
And she's we're gonna do this blocking thing and we're gonna change the energy. And I'm like. It sounds like you're, what is this? Some layer three, Q thing. What's going on here? Yeah. You're able align my chakras too. What are we doing? Is there like a disallow rule going on over here in my arm?
Yeah.
[00:58:27] Mikey Pruitt: UUFW, like close port 80. Yeah.
[00:58:30] Matthew Fox: Something's wrong. It works. It really does. When I would have the problem with my shoulder and have a sharp pain before blacking out, I would have this weird thing where like my left leg would buckle. Like I would just lose control of it. And she did this treatment like three times over the course of a week and it just started subsiding.
And when it flares up, it usually bothers me for, I don't know, a month or something like that. Wow. She had it cleared out in four or five days worth of time. Wow.
[00:58:57] Mikey Pruitt: So my wife's not crazy is what you're saying. I can, I can't, I cannot confirm. No deny
[00:59:02] Matthew Fox: exactly. But I think it's worth checking out just 'cause it's an interesting experience if nothing else.
Yeah. Now I'm gonna
[00:59:08] Mikey Pruitt: have to go figure, find her acupuncturist and go figure this bizarre acupuncture thing out. I'll probably be just, I'll be a convert. I'll be telling everybody. Yeah.
[00:59:17] Matthew Fox: What you need to do is, if you're gonna do that, we gotta get a little custom tattoo made that's like a little reset button, like a recessed hole in the back of your neck and you just got a little reset, poke it.
I didn't realize, hey, I was getting that
[00:59:31] Mikey Pruitt: good. You could probably tie your nerve together to like some spot and then have like in the future, implants, augmented humans. We'll get there one day.
[00:59:40] Matthew Fox: Have Matt? Matt,
[00:59:41] Mikey Pruitt: there's actually an, there's,
[00:59:42] Matthew Fox: we gotta call it, yeah, no,
[00:59:43] Mikey Pruitt: go ahead. No, you go ahead.
[00:59:46] Matthew Fox: If you haven't seen it, you have to look up an episode of Ancient Aliens that's dedicated to that. There is a guy, oh gosh, that has implants all over his body. He can turn his motorcycle on, he can unlock his front door. What I think he's got an altimeter inside of his wrist and a bunch of other stuff.
He has a hidden compartment in a table in his living room and he like waves his wrist over it and it opens up to reveal all of his like equipment and management tools.
[01:00:12] Mikey Pruitt: I got it right here. Yeah, I
[01:00:14] Matthew Fox: think that's required watching for the evening as soon as we're done.
[01:00:17] Mikey Pruitt: Absolutely. Matt, thank you so much for joining me and I can tell why Tom has given you the reign, so to speak, to join him on its on his channel because you're an amazing storyteller.
Thank you. Just talking about, even random things like your, the 14-year-old friend and your acupuncture and the My Danish butter cookies. Yeah, your Danish butter cookies. You're like, I'm even more excited to wait for the next video to drop on lawrence systems.com. And you can find Matt on all other places.
Reddit, like we mentioned, LinkedIn there's a Discord channel for Lawrence Systems that I'm sure you're in a lot. Friends steer the 45 drives, went a lot.
[01:00:58] Matthew Fox: Friends steer eBay. You can find me on
[01:01:01] Mikey Pruitt: MySpace. I hope you like Blink 180 2. And if you come across a 2020 gigs of VA S-F-S-F-F-G-P-U hook your boy up.
[01:01:14] Matthew Fox: I think we might be able to make that happen, man.
[01:01:16] Mikey Pruitt: We'll talk
[01:01:16] Matthew Fox: soon.