I miss your product updates on software such as TrueNAS (been a lot of changes recently, not all of them well received) and pfSense (some things have changes but yes not a lot). Your insight into software updates helps me be aware of what’s important.
I always love the security analysis too, tracking an incident or vulnerability from origin to fix.
Real-world installations are always a good watch too, to see how larger scale stuff’s done properly. Plus homelab installations, from concept to execution to evolution to a settled state.
Videos on best practices would always be of interest to us who are not immersed in your side of the industry but still have a need to gain such knowledge.
I wouldn’t mind if you didn’t speed up the dialog in the videos quite as much
I watch his videos on the YouTube algorithm from time to time and I love when he finds some weird bug to exploit within it.
I have been doing them for major release updates, especially since there are a lot more changes this year I could certainly do a few more. I did cover the per-app IP changes as a dedicated video.
I saw the per-app IP TrueNAS video but since then there have been some major changes to virtualisation and there are some changes to SMART scheduling coming up in Goldeye. I watch the T3 podcast from the iX and while that’s great, I really value your more objective analysis of the released changes.
Here are some of the major changes which have happend:
VDEV expansion
Virtualisation inc switch to Incus and back, LXC containers
Fast deduplication
SMB offloading for macOS
And it seems like now the iX team are no longer developing CORE, they are charging ahead with a lot of changes in CE. The six month release cycle has irked a lot of folk so your expert insight into the changes would be useful to many people, especially for the more conservative business/enterprise users.
What I would LOVE is for chapter marks on the longer vlog videos. I often don’t have time to watch the whole video so it’d be useful to see the chapter marks and titles so see what is of interest (the range of topic covered means that not everything is).
As for the speech speed… I know that fast cadence increases viewer engagement and attention and I do dislike videos with slow speech because they make me feel bored and sleepy, but sometimes the speed on your videos is too fast, especially for dense technical subjects which are perhaps new to the viewer. I know the videos are sped up because the inset of your face shows the gestures are too. Does that explain it better? I have seen the same comment on a few Reddit posts so I am not the only one. I know the video can be slowed down on YT but then the audio gets a bit mangled.
BUT… I do love your videos and watch almost all of them, even when perhaps the subject is not 100% relevant (such as UniFi kit, of which I own none). The production quality is superb and I appreciate the effort you to go to in writing and preparing them. If there was a gold standard for technical YouTube videos then your channel would be it.
And I might do a video on deduplication now that it has improved but the video would still be very niche because there are only VERY VERY rare instances where it makes sense to do.
I have avoided doing video on TrueNAS virtualizion because it’s just not great and the breaking changes make it even less great.
Actually they are not, unless you are watching YouTube at a faster rate. The only times I speed up a section is to get a loading bar across the screen faster, but usually I just cut that part because it’s less editing steps and I still do all my own editing.
Yes, the virtualisation stuff in TrueNAS has been a bit, um, less than ideal recently but hopefully it’ll settle down.
The dedupe being niche is true but your comment “there are only VERY VERY rare instances where it makes sense to do” is kinda why I think a video on the subject could be useful - so that folk know the limited set of cases where they’d want to apply it. The audience for such a video might be small though.
For Truenas I think it would be nice if you cover the changes and what workarounds there are like the switch to ce and how it impacts Core users network setups. Jails acted like a vm that sits on a defined network where docker containers share the hosts network and the “per app ip” only sets an ingress option. You might go down a macvlan config or a rough overview to docker networking and performance comparisons on ipvlan, macvlan, vnet, etc..
Many people use TN bare metal so storage is only one side of the use case and containers and VMs and internal networking could get more love from you.
But in general I still love your content bc you care about the topic and the community!
Tom, At first I wanted to quickly post, “would love to see some intro to hacking videos” but then thought that you or others might feel like there are thousands of videos on YouTube that already do that. But after thinking about it. I don’t want to listen to those people, I want to hear about that topic from you, and be taught by you. Because I enjoy you as a person and love learning from you. So if it helps. Make videos no matter who else makes them, as long as it interests you Tom.
So ya, would love some intro to hacking videos!!
Thanks Tom for everything you have taught us so far. You have made me more confident as an IT consultant and helped me build wealth that will change my family forever.
I watch a lot of your content. It’s good stuff man. I like your content along with a few others because I trust your opinion and thoughts, especially on where you come from (experience and beliefs).
I do catch a live show once in a while. I need to do better at planning to watch them. I think I’m just unaware most of the time.
I’ve been a homelabber and small IT guy for 20ish years. I recently moved into a larger organization (4,000 users). I am amazed at how terrible the product and support is from the big players in this space. It’s all promises, sales buzz, and no result. I enjoy hearing you talk about some of the bigger companies and how they compare to Pfsene and Unifi. Your Cisco SMB video a while back was a great example. If you head over to the toxic wasteland of sysadmin on reddit you’ll see the hate for Unifi, but as someone who lives in Aruba Central daily, Unifi is miles ahead of Aruba Central. We’ve had issues for 2+ years that our VAR or Aruba cannot solve. They just point the finger at device manufactures. Enough ranting…
I look forward to more videos.
Edit:
If it’s every possible, I’d love to see you on Wendel’s Links With Friends show. Ryan did it solo last week. It would have been perfect to bring on a guest cohost.
What negative thing do your want to see? Ruckus, Fortinet, etc. are companies that have had really bad security issues that I covered because of how poorly they responded to those issues. And I have been very critical of UniFi like when they dropped the self host NVR platform or no just how bad their firewalls were before version 9.
…or SonicWall.
I would love to see some general guidance, what to look for. How to choose if I have to pick between vendors. For example recent bugs and how (quickly) they fixed it. Information available on their website. Support plans…dropping supported devices.
The problem is that information can be hard to come by because these companies don’t generally do a good job of putting that information out there. It takes research and reading though posts from security researchers notes (provided they even post about it) to dig into that.
For example the Sonicwall incident that lead to the to the losing peoples configuration backup was first downplayed by Sonicwall by claiming it was less than 5% of their customers but later revised to be all customers that used their config backup. We also learned they did not encrypt the backups which is what what made the issue so much worse.
I have covered Fortinet not because they have had security issues, but because those issue reveal ed and were caused by failure to follow well known modern guidelines designed to prevent those issues.
I did bring up UniFi CVE-2025-52665 on my last live stream but because it was found and responsibly disclosed by a researcher and UniFI paid out $25K to that researcher for finding it while also getting a patch out within 2 weeks, it’s not anything to panic about. Also it was a flaw in UniFi Access that required an attacker to be on a trusted network with privileges to access the firewall.
Maybe I could make a video on the challenges of finding information about these products.
