I need a new travel mass
and a travel router. Tomorrow I'm taking my
wife and six kids to Japan. Like we're leaving in the morning and
I'm realizing right now in this moment that the travel mass and router I made
for my last trip isn't going to cut it. It's got to be faster and smaller. I've got more kids and I got to take it
on a plane and Japan and I wanted to do a lot of stuff like
stream plex to everybody. Operate as a really awesome mass so
I can back up my vlog footage as I'm traveling to my studio so
my editors can edit it. I want to add some fun little docker
containers and VMs along the way because I'm extra. But here we go.
I'm going to speed run, creating a travel mass and travel router.
Now, before I leave in the morning, I dunno if this is going to work, but
test it with me. Get your coffee ready, let's go. Now, if you were
here for my last projects, I built a raspberry pie router as my
travel router. It was running open WRT. It was amazing. Kept me connected and
safe on the road. It was a road trip. I also made a travel nas
out of a raspberry pie. This was running open media vault
and it was actually pretty great. I did the one thing I needed it to do
and that was back up my files to my servers here at the studio. Now I've got a lot more things I want
to do and I don't think the raspberry pi can handle it. Maybe the five can, but honestly I'm kind of full of
raspberry pie. I've had too much. I want to try something new and something
I think is more powerful and maybe more fun. So I looked in my closet to
see what I might have laying around. Companies do send me stuff and I saw
something that I kind of heard a lot about already. You may have seen this
before. Check it out. Where to go. This guy, I'm sure
you've seen this, right? It's the zema board or the Zema board.
I'm not really sure how you say it. This thing is kind of a beast. Here it
is compared to the raspberry high five, not much bigger and
it's already in a case. But here's what got me excited about it.
This thing is not ARM-based. It's X 86, which means we can do so much
more than we can do with the pie. We're not limited to open media
vault and open WRT. Check this out. Here are the specs of this thing
they sent me, and by the way, I sway all the company. They did send me
this. It was free, no strings attached. I forgot about it until now.
They sent me the 8 32 model, which means it has an intel
cell on quad core processor. It's got eight gigs of ram,
32 gigs of onboard storage. This is dumb and by dumb I mean
amazing. It has two sayta connections. Are you kidding me? I want to build
a NAS and it's got sayta connections. I'm already drooling, but check this
out. Two ethernet ports. USB. Yeah, we got that, but man, A-P-C-I-E port. Look at this now it's kind of weird. It's like sticking out on the
side like a wound. I don't know, but I can do stuff like this.
Maybe I want more USB ports. Bam. How about a 10 gig Nick? Sure, why not
hop out a whole bunch of ports or even, and this is what I got really
excited about wifi six. Look at this thing that got my
wheels turning wifi six router. Can we make this happen? Then
I'm factoring in this, hold on. Nested virtualization. Can I install
Prox Oxs on this? Yes you can. And after I heard that, I mean I
don't care about anything else. I had to try Prox Maxs, so I did
it. Hey Chuck, from the future here, I'm back from Japan. And let me
tell you, throughout this process, I would've been nowhere stumbling in
the dark, flying blind without skills. I learned from training at places
like IT Pro by a CI learning. They are the sponsor of this video and
one of the reasons I can do any of the stuff I'm doing throughout this video,
networking, Linux, virtual machines, storage, all essential skills.
You need to do stuff like this, you can learn from it. Pro two me. And
it's not just skills for lab stuff, it's for skills, for life, for jobs. You can turn these really fun things
you're learning into a career, a life-changing career like I did. So
if you're just getting started, man, check out the A plus, get
a good foundation in it and
then move on from there. Advance your career. Learn networking with the CC NA on some
Linux or cloud or ethical hacking it pro TV will keep you awake with their amazing
training even when you're super tired and you can't focus and you may have a
flight the next morning that you're super late for because you're
trying to get a NAS ready. They've got you if you're ever
in that situation like me. And if you're getting ready for that exam
to get that certification to get that job, they do have practice exams and labs
to cement those ideas into your brain. So if you want to learn it like me,
check out it pro by a CI learning, I got a link below and if you use
my link, you'll get 30% off forever. It's a no brainer. Just check it
out. And now let's do this. Now, just so you know, Casa Os is what this
thing ships with. It's based on Debon. It's essentially just like a
pretty wrapper on top of Debian 11. And it helps you install a bunch of apps,
which seem to be mostly Docker based. Now I could just make that work, but
come on, prox Ox on something this tiny. Lemme get this thing off. I feel
like it's going to put me in the app, something this tiny that I can
take with me anywhere. Come on. So installed Prox Box on my zema board.
I installed it to an external SSD. And honestly installing it is
like installing it anywhere
you put the image on A USB drive. I booted to the USB on my
zema board and just did the thing. I will say this. One thing
I wanted to have enabled, it was PCI pass through which Prox PROXIM
eight does enable because I want to be able to pass through my PCI devices,
but you have to enable this, the io MMU and VTD and all that stuff
in the bios before you install prox mox. So I installed it initially,
never worked. I re-enabled it in bios, then I reinstalled it after I enabled
the settings in bios. Bam, PCI worked. So proxim is installed. Let get
logged in. It's just crazy to me. You can install on such a small device.
Bam. I'm in. So now I have my two goals, right? I wanted to have a router
and I wanted to have a nas. Now you might be thinking, Chuck, why do
you need a travel NA and travel router? Well, if you miss my previous video, the travel router is meant to make things
easier for me and my family wherever we go, whether it's hotel wifi,
Airbnb wifi, or plane wifi. All I have to do is connect
one device, my travel router, it grabs the wifi or ethernet
connection from wherever I am. It then takes that connection,
broadcasts its own wifi to my family, offering them all that
sweet, sweet internet. Sweet, sweet internet. I always hated. It saves me time in two ways. When
we get to an Airbnb or wherever, I only have to connect one device
to the wifi time saving there. And then all my family's devices are
already configured to connect to my existing wifi instantly
giving them internet. Also, I can have that same device
configured to automatically, automatically connect to VPN protecting
and encrypting all of our traffic. And it has the added benefit
of me being in Japan, maybe wanting to watch some US shows
or engage in some US-based content. I can be there while not being
there. Very cool. The travel nas, I need that sucker to run Plex. I got to have those TV shows
on the plane for all my kids. I don't know if the plane's going to
have bluey in their little cinema system. I got to have that myself. 14 hour
flight with kids ages one to 12. This is what I need. Also, I'm going to be recording this entire
adventure because I want to capture this. Taking my whole family
to Japan. That's crazy. So I wanted to capture that craziness,
upload that footage to my na, that's with me, and overnight that sucker can just
upload my footage to the cloud and get it back here to my studio where my
editors can edit that. That's the idea. I decided to tackle the router part
first because I thought it might be the hardest I could run PF since. But
you look anywhere, people say, do not run PF sense with wireless
capabilities. Just don't do it. It wasn't meant for that. It was
an afterthought. PF sense is great. Is it still great though? I ignored
all the drama. I don't deal with that. So PF sense was out. So I'm thinking,
okay, I installed open WRT on my Berry pi. Can I install it on the
ZEMA board? Zema board? I'm going to call it Zema board
because I used to love zema. The Zema make a comeback. Now officially, you can install open WRT BAM directly
on this software to hardware. But I wanted to install a virtualized
image, which is not easy to do. But I did find this great article from
this guy and a video of how to install it. I did get it up and running, but getting the drivers to work for
anything was virtually impossible, at least for the time I had. I'm
sure if I tinkered with it a bit, I could get it to work.
But in the hour or so, I tried getting a USB adapter
to work, getting PCIE to work, getting my wifi six antenna to
work. It just didn't pan out. So I abandoned open WRT, and then I
found this other thing called RASP ap. This is a project that does
a lot of what open WRT does, but you can install it on any EOS, whether it's a Raspberry Pi or just a W
and machine running on Prox Mox on your ZEMA board. So I tried that.
This actually started to work. I struggled with PCIE pass through,
but I did get a USB antenna to work, and this is kind of amazing. I'm running a wireless router inside a
virtual machine on a zema board on Prox Mox. That's just cool, right? And I was
about ready to say yes, let's do it. But upon testing, I
kept losing connection. And when I would lose connection on
my phone, it wouldn't reconnect again. Now again, I'm sure if I troubleshooted
this enough, I would figure it out. I don't have time. I got to have something
that works now. Now at this point, I felt kind of done. My dreams of having a travel router and
NASA on one device running virtualized on Prox Max were dead and I
felt dead. So with no more time, I looked elsewhere for the router portion. How do I turn this thing into a router
while also having it function as a NAS and whatever else I needed to given time. I could have made RASP AP work because
I think it was just using DNS mask and Host a PD just had a pretty wrapper
to it. But then I found this guy, I forgot about him, this little guy.
You've probably seen this before. Maybe it's a little device from GL
inet. It's a gigabit travel router. It's meant for travel. I mean, first of
all, just look how cute this thing is. This is purpose built for
exactly what I'm trying to do. A lightweight travel router that can
give my family access to wifi without reconnecting all their devices and making
it secure while also tethering it to my resources to give them access
as well. It's running open WRT, and it has a pretty
wrapper on top of it. Now, if you watch my travel router
for the Raspberry Pi open, WRT is not for the faint of heart
getting it set up this thing. It's stupid easy. You turn it on, you select what wifi network
you want to connect to, and you choose what wifi network you
want to broadcast, click, click, click, it's done. That's what I need on a trip
where I'm taking my family to Japan, something easy and stupid. So when
I'm half awake, coffee deprived, maybe do they have a lot of coffee
in Japan? Please tell me they do. Then I can just easily figure this
out while my kids are screaming, bluey bluey bluey, your kids
watch Bluey. So I thought, okay, that's not too big, right? I mean, I can somehow figure out how to 3D print
these together into one nice package. So bam, my router solution is
solved. So I'm back to travel nas, what do I do with this? I could go
back to Prox Ox and figure that out. But then I saw a fellow YouTuber, Nova Spirit Tech talk about installing
true NAS on zema board, true nas. That sounds interesting because first
of all, it's a NAS software or a NAS os. Now, I've never played with true
nas. So automatically I'm like, okay, I'm already doing something new here. Let's install a new OS I never
encountered before and see what it's like. True NAS is awesome. Getting it
installed is straightforward. Like any other OS on any
device you've ever installed, flash the OS to your USB drive boot
to the USB drive and install it. Now for my na, I do have two terabyte
SSDs that I'm plugging in via theta. There's a nice little y
connector that plugs in both. Then giving it power from one port pretty
sick. Now again, I'm new to true nas, but it wasn't too bad figuring out how
to set up a quick storage cluster and get some things rolling. Well, actually it kind of did take a minute
because true NAST is a whole thing, and this was my first time using it and
I didn't have a lot of time to mess with it. Tinker with it, learn it. But
hey, I did get the storage set up. This was pretty easy, relatively
easy with a bunch of Google searches. I fumbled my way through it,
but you know what tripped me up? Trying to set up Plex. Yes, you can install a ton of different apps
on true NAS Plex being one of them. And it's pretty cool. It actually
installs with Kubernetes, which I love, but man, did the permissions just kill
me. I didn't know true NASS permissions. I kept changing things, tried to
get it to work, and I'm just like, you know what? I'm done. Let's blow
that sucker wide open. Allow everything, everyone, come on, people come and hack
me. That was my attitude at that point. I didn't care. And that's
what I did. And sure enough, when you open everything
and allow everyone, usually what you want to get in gets in. So Plex now had access to the libraries
where I uploaded the movies and TV shows. So we're good. Which by the way, when you're in a rush and you're
just trying to get things to work, that's how most hacks happen in those
moments. Always plan and slow down, except when you're about to get on the
plane to Japan, then just go crazy. So anyways, yeah, I uploaded
a movie, tested that, so cool. I uploaded some bluey because I had to
make sure my kids could test that and work with that. So I uploaded Bluey and I actually
decided to do a test with them. So I loaded up my na, went to the house
and said about doing my experiment. Alright guys, I need you to test
and see if Bluey works. Okay, it's. Not working. What? Okay, it's 1154, almost midnight. I'm leaving for Japan very soon. Truness
failed me. I thought it was great. I was confident and happy about it. I bundled it up and took it to my
house to test it with my daughters. I booted up and Plex never comes
up. It just doesn't come up. I log into it and look, it's the
dumbest thing. So Kubernetes, when it's deploying Plex, it's pulling
the newest image from GitHub every time. And when it can't reach GitHub to pull
that image or just at least make sure it's the latest, it won't boot. It
just says, oh, I can't reach GitHub. I'm sorry. Now could I figure
out how to make that work? Maybe, but not in this state. Not this
close to the finish line here. No. So back to the drawing board and I ended up going back to Casa Os. The Os I was sleeping on
actually is pretty cool. It took me a bit to get
things rolling, but I got it. I'll detail all that stuff here later
because I can't tell you about this right now. I've got to get it set
up. I got to go to Japan. I'll tell you when I get
to Japan, how about that? Okay, I'm back from Japan. Let me tell
you about Casa os. Casa os. The Os. That ships with Zema board. And the one
I started with is what I ended up with. Now, honestly, I'm kind of bummed about this because I
wanted to do something cool and crazy, nothing default, but I ran out of time and I was about
to drop the entire project altogether. Who needs an ass? I'll just wing
it. But I thought, you know what? Lemme try one more Hail Mary. Let's
try Caso os that thing it came with, let's see what it can do.
I was kind of surprised, so I re imaged it back on there.
Didn't take too much. And here it is. It's got a beautiful web interface.
I can just access over the network, which is super handy. So when I
got to an Airbnb or even the plane, I just plugged it in, waited for it to
boot up and I would log into it again, this is just a pretty wrapper on top
of Debian 11. Now, right off the bat, you can see I was doing some fun
stuff, but before we jumped there, let's talk about storage. The main
thing I needed it for, I needed that na, well, here it is right here. Let's
jump in there. This was plug and play. I had my two SSD drives plugged in
via theta and they just were here. They were recognized. So I labeled them. The only downside is I
couldn't combine them into one. They did have a beta thing that
I could do to merge the storage. I wasn't about to play with beta on a
trip where I wasn't going to do that. No. So I just made one hard drive my
plex and one hard drive. My na. I say hard drive my SSD. And then really most of what I did was
just access the file app right here in the browser jumping into my nas. I would just have a folder
for each day of footage. I recorded and we recorded a lot and
getting the footage on there was super simple. All I would do is
have this external hard drive, load up my footage on there and then
connect this to the Zema board. So watch, I'll plug it in right now. You
should show up here in a second. Yep, there it is. So cool.
That solves one problem. I'm getting all my footage to this na, but now how does that mask get
my footage to my studio here? Normally when I use something
like Sonology and then Tru Nas, I would've synced all my footage to
Google Drive and Google Drive with NSYNC down to my studio. I didn't
see a quick way to do that, but I found something even better.
It's kind of amazing. Actually, check this out. Now, just so you know, Casso OS has an app store clicking
on that will take us to it, I think. And they have a bunch of stuff. And this is where I simply
downloaded and installed sync thing, which will run as a docker container. And this might be my go-to for all
syncing. Let me launch it real quick. It'll open up its own web interface. And
how this thing works is simple. First, I'll define the folder that I want to
sync, which is this guy or right here. Let's just go Japan. Keeping in mind this is sync
thing running on my travel nas. Then I log into my NAS here at my studio
and on this NAS I ran sync thing as a docker container. And you can actually
see that here as a remote device. And how you do this is so simple. All I had to do is click on add a remote
device here and I would just put in the device ID and then name it something
I wanted to and then click on save. And the device ID would be
found under actions and show id. And just by adding that remote
device with that device id, they magically over the internet
found each other. No VPN. And they started syncing. Of course, I defined some folders and some
syncing rules. Like for my use case, I only wanted to send data. I didn't
want it to sync back and forth, but this just stinking worked. And
no matter where I went in Japan, they connected up, they found each
other and they started syncing. And it was pretty fast. Assuming
my internet connection was fast, sometimes it was not. But leaving
this thing up and letting it trickle, upload overnight over
time was pretty great. So if you need a way to sync two remote
places, sync thing is pretty amazing. And then finally for Plex,
this was pretty simple. You saw that I had my
files here and I had Plex. My Plex SSD simply had two folders,
movies, TV shows, all the essentials. And then going through the app store, I
just installed Plex and this was simple. And accessing my plex plex
system, I could watch any show. Bluey kind of saved our lives
a little bit while in Japan, but this worked like a charm. And as we traveled throughout Japan and
we had all of our kids with their iPads, they could simply connect back up to
our na, watch all their stuff. And yes, this did work on the plane. I just put
this device under my seat, plugged it in. Felt kind of weird because I'm like, you got to wonder if people are thinking
about me, like what's this guy doing? What's this device he's putting under
the seat and what's he plugging in? I had those thoughts, I ignored them
because it was a 14 hour flight, but it worked. And we did this
everywhere on trains and hotels, Airbnbs. And real quick, lemme give you
a clear example of our diagram, our network diagram as we traveled.
So we have our zema board here. I'm going to make it a square. He had two SSDs connected to a state
of ports with the state of Y connector, which is pretty cool. And he was hardwired in and I had an
ethernet cable plugged in from him into my little travel router. My
gl i.net travel router. I'll give him his antennas here. Now this router was doing a few
very important things. First, he's being a router, he's being
himself. He was in charge of DHCP. I had A-D-H-C-P reservation
for Mr. Zima board down here, 10 point 19.7 point 19. That's what I had. And he was also broadcasting a wireless
network called Let's just Go fam, that we would connect to all our devices. Now a fun little thing here for DNSI
was actually using Pi hole running as a docker container on the Zema board,
which you can see it right here. Lemme show you. Pi Hole was definitely one of the apps
that we're running when we get logged in. And here it is, my
activity over, let's see, long-term data graphics all time.
And there's all my time using it. It's kind of fun to
watch a lot of requests. I also write an uptime Kuma
little thing called smoke ping, which would tell me how healthy the
internet connection was. Wherever I was, I was geeking out. It was pretty fun.
But anyways, back to our diagram. The key thing was the
internet and wherever we go, what I look for first is a hardwire. Where is the router in this Airbnb
that I could hardwire my router into? Thankfully a lot of Airbnbs just had it
sitting out. I would hardwire myself in. Bam. I've got extremely fast internet. Other times I would have to use the
built-in client mode for the router, the gi.net, to connect to whatever
wireless they offered. That's my wireless. I dunno why it looks like that. But
seriously, this worked like a charm. As I traveled throughout Japan, we
went everywhere and it served us well. I'm proud of this little
device. That's all I got. That's I'll catch you guys next time.
