The Uncast Show
Owning an Unraid server gives you the ultimate control over your data and reduces your dependence on The Cloud. Join host Ed Rawlings to learn how to get the most out of your Unraid server, stay up to date on relevant news and topics, and get to know members of the Unraid community!
The Uncast Show
Behind the Code: 20 Years of Unraid
In this special episode of The Uncast Show, we go behind the scenes at Unraid as the platform approaches its 20th anniversary.
Co-CEO Tiffany Jones and Director of API Platforms & Cloud Services, Eli Bosley join host Ed Rawlings for an honest and insightful conversation about how Unraid has evolved—from its humble beginnings in a garage to becoming a global platform powering homelabs, NAS systems, media servers, and virtual machines.
We cover:
- Why Unraid moved away from hardware sales
- The shift to a sustainable licensing model
- Growing a fully remote team from the community
- Building the upcoming public API
- Improving onboarding and security
- A brand-new backup system in the works
- What’s next for the OS, the UI, and the distro base
Plus: We answer community questions and share behind-the-scenes clips from our latest team off-site.
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Hi everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Uncast Show, or, if this is your first time tuning in, well, thanks for joining us Now. Today's episode is a really special one, and, in fact, we're just a few months away from Unraid's 20th anniversary, and we thought this was the perfect time to do something we don't do nearly enough Pull back the curtain and show you what's really been happening behind the scenes. Now this episode is going to be a little bit of a mix. We're going to be talking about big internal changes that have taken place at the company over the past few years, how Unraid is investing the dollars or, if you're from the UK, like me, the pounds or euros that you, the community, have put into the platform. And, of course, we're going to be talking about what's coming next, including some major feature upgrades that you've been asking for.
Speaker 1:In fact, we're going to be walking through at least six new major features during this episode, so make sure you stick around to the end so you don't miss any of them. Plus, you're going to see some exclusive clips from our recent offsite in California, where the whole Unraid team got together just a couple of weeks ago. So I've got the perfect guests on the show today to talk all about this. I'm joined by Tiffany, unraid's co-CIO, and Eli, director of API Platforms and Cloud Services. They're here to share insights from both sides how the company is evolving and where Unraid is heading technically. So hello Tiffany and hello Eli.
Speaker 2:Hey everybody, Great to be here with you guys.
Speaker 3:Hey everybody, it's nice to be here.
Speaker 1:So, anyway, before we get into all the company details, I'm just going to share something that really stuck with me recently. So we all went over to California for an offsite and I spoke to a friend of mine before going who I had met through my YouTube channel about 10 years ago. A good friend of mine called Dan, and he very kindly said that he'd pick me up from Los Angeles airport and actually drive me to where I was going. So I was really grateful about that, especially having just flown from the UK to Amsterdam and then Amsterdam all the way there I can't remember it was a long flight so it was very nice to actually have a friend pick me up. We'd never actually met before, which was really cool, so it's the first time I'd ever met him in 10 years.
Speaker 1:And on the way down we stopped at this really nice kind of diner place for pizza and whilst we were there, dan brought up something we'd never really spoken about before. He said that he'd always loved Unraid and he bought his license way back in 2008. So he's a real OG Unraid user and he said that he basically was really confused about how Lime Technology actually managed to make money. He was going look, I bought this license in 2008, and I've never given any more money to the company and Unraid's been getting better and better. And he was actually quite worried about it, saying, like what if new users stopped coming in? Would Unraid just disappear one day?
Speaker 1:So basically I explained the new licensing model that we introduced last year that it's still perpetual. You own the license forever, but if you want to support continued development, you've got the option to renew for another year of update, so you're basically kind of paying for devs. That's how Dan put it to me. He's going oh, so you're paying for devs, basically if you want. And I said, yeah. That conversation really stuck with me and I think it's a perfect lead in to talk about how Unraid actually works as a business. So, tiffany, can you walk us through how the company is funded and how licensing model helps keep Unraid sustainable and also independent?
Speaker 2:And one of the very first things that was talked about when I first came in kind of as a consultant actually in 2019, and then my role grew from there. You know, it's pretty obvious that the one time license sale, one time model, where the only other way that someone even was able to invest more in Unraid was through upgrading their license, was an unsustainable model. Now I will not say my dad and I go back and forth on this sometimes that it was bad or wrong that we were in that model for so long. I think there are a lot of really great things that came out of being in that type of model. But as we were getting closer to, you know, our 20 year mark and watching our customer base grow and grow and grow, we knew that this path was not only unsustainable as a business, but unsustainable in our commitment to our community. So when you, from a business perspective, when we look at that model, there's kind of two paths we can go down. If we were to continue with that model, one thing we were going to need to do was invest heavily in marketing in order to constantly be reaching new customers, and so that meant that money coming in was going to need to start going more and more and more to the marketing side and not taking that money and putting it into the product. So that is an option, something we explored and looked at, but ultimately not something we felt great about. And another option would be to take outside dollars, investment into the company and then now we're beholden to whoever those people or companies are, and that didn't feel right either. Another option would have been to go down more of an enterprise type of path maybe huge support contracts, working with larger businesses and that also has its downsides. And at the heart of it, we really felt like none of those options were going to end well for our community and for the product in general, and so we spent a lot of time years, actually a lot of money invested into.
Speaker 2:We worked with a consulting group to help analyze our data, our customers' usage of Unraid, what our customers are looking for, what's important to them. Obviously, we knew a lot of that, but we wanted hard data, we wanted information straight from our customers. We put out a survey if some of you might have taken that a couple of years ago, that really helped to steer a lot of this decision making and ultimately we came up with a model that we feel really confident about, because it's not this traditional sort of SaaS subscription model where you stop paying and you lose access to the product. We knew that if we put that out there, we would die. Our users would never have been okay with that. Our community would have revolted, and we knew that, because our team is made up of community members. We hire from our community, so we're not just working on a team of random people who don't really know about Unraid OS or not passionate about it. No, we're working with users plucked right from the community, and so they really are representing our community at large out there. And so the model that we came up with not only gives our users the freedom to choose whether or not they're going to extend their license for another year and make it eligible for the next year of updates, but we also really wanted to show, with our actions, our commitment to our community, and so, with this model, we give our users the option to pay and, furthermore, we do not penalize them if they want to jump in later on. So let's say you, your year comes up on your license. You decide, for any reason, you're not ready to pay to extend your license, no problem. Come back in a couple months a year, pay that fee and you're right back into it. There's no penalizing for that, and so this model has been really received really well.
Speaker 2:Obviously, we were nervous about it, but one of the core things that we always had as something that was a non-starter, something we were never going to mess with, was grandfathering our current basic, plus and pro users into the new system. That was never a negotiable for us. There was never a model that we ran through that questioned that. That was like just a non-starter. It was put on a table in a box and said we do not touch that.
Speaker 2:And I just want people to hear this out there, and I think we need to keep repeating it that that is not going to change. We are never going to come around to you guys and screw you over. I promise you that as long as I'm here, we're not going to do that. So you guys can trust that. So that's how we moved. That's why and how we kind of moved into this, this new model, and it's been going really well. So thank you to everyone who has defended us out there in the online world and tried to understand where we're coming from and ultimately know that your investment, your, whatever your currency is that is going into Unraid is going directly into the product to bring more and more value to you guys. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And what I really like about it, tiffany as well, is when you buy the Unraid license, you are buying it and you're keeping it. So even if you don't renew, you're not actually having anything taken away from what you actually bought. Now, what you bought, you keep, and it's only if you want to actually extend your license. You're then going to get something new. So nothing's ever taken away. It's not like what some companies and products are. The term is, you know, and shitification. So you know excuse my French everyone, but you know that's something I'm really glad isn't happening. And you're talking about marketing as well, um, about how the other kind of way would have been putting money into marketing. And if you think about it as well, if you put money into marketing like that, you're kind of quite beholden to how much the marketing costs. It might cost x amount of dollars one year, and then I don't know if it's kind of things on youtube they decide adverts are going to be twice as much. Well then, twice as much money is going to have to go into that. So what I really like about the license is how it actually keeps not only funding development, but it keeps us independent as well. So how I kind of see it is.
Speaker 1:It wasn't just a business decision, it's actually a principle as well. That's something Tom, I think, feels really strongly about. And for people who don't actually know who Tom is Tom is Tiffany's dad and also the founder of the company. We were recently at an offsite and some of the talks were being recorded. At the end of the talk, tom started speaking about VC venture capital and I don't think he actually knew he was being recorded at the time and I'd actually gone out of the room and I didn't hear this until I was actually going through the footage preparing for the podcast. But I think it gives a real insight into what the founder actually thinks about the company being independent. So I'm going to actually play that clip now for everyone to see.
Speaker 4:Yeah, the other thing is kind of odd thing to say, but I'm growing up in Silicon Valley and working in, you know, working with a lot of tech companies. I got a real sour taste in my mouth for a VC. I did not want to go to VC route. I didn't want to put on a suit and get presentations and pitch decks. You know, pitch decks, business plans. You know I didn't have the energy for that. Beholden to Beholden. You know, yeah, didn't ever want to do that.
Speaker 1:So, Tiffany, it definitely seems that your dad really wants to keep Unraid independent and has always thought that, right from the beginning. You know what are your takes on what your dad is saying there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's funny. This is like father, like daughter kind of moment. Both of us do not like being told what to do. That is just something that is a through line in my life in general, and I think he's the same way and very similar, and I think that was his biggest fear is being told what to do, where to take the product, being told no, you can't do that needs to go this way. You know that was not something he wanted, especially at the time in his life when he started this company. Well, when he started the product, really I should say he was just coming out of that world. He was on his own.
Speaker 2:Finally, after many years of, you know, working very long hours. I remember going to the office with him on the weekend. My brother and I would run around this huge office building just causing all kinds of trouble while my dad sat there coding, you know, and working, and he was finally in a place where he didn't have to do that. And so you know him and I agree on a lot of things. Obviously, there's we have disagreements on certain things, but our general sort of character and the things that we really value are very similar, and one of them is being able to have our own say in what's going on with the product.
Speaker 2:And again, this is going to be a through line throughout the podcast and it's it is very genuine in that we are we. We are very beholden to our community and if we were to go a different route, if we were to go a different path where we were taking money or even had various shareholders or whatever model is out there where other people are able to tell us what to do, this would be a very different company, if it even existed at all. So I'm really proud of my dad for bootstrapping this company for many years and even when he took the leap in 2015 to actually hire a couple of employees, there were some rocky days, there were some rocky months, but he pushed through, he didn't give up and really hung in there, and that has paid off tremendously now and we're in a really, really great position to continue to build on that legacy, to continue to build out our team and, ultimately, to continue to bring more and more value to this really awesome product.
Speaker 1:And I think it kind of ties back as well to the origins of Unraid.
Speaker 1:So if we can take a moment to go back to where it all started because I think the origins of Unraid aren't where many people might expect it didn't begin with a business plan or even really the idea of building a product at all in the first place. It started with something really simple a personal need for your dad. He had a growing DVD collection and, after spending lots and lots of time ripping his discs, he wanted to make sure he didn't lose them. So, like a lot of us back then, we were using a mix of cheap white label drives and Tom was looking for a way basically to keep his data safe, but without the overhead and complexity that came with traditional RAID and that one practical problem. It led to the really creative solution that became the foundation of UnRAID. So if we can, let's hear it from Tom himself in the recent offsite where he tells us about the early days of UnRAID. So I'm going to play a clip for everyone and let's listen to that.
Speaker 4:And some guy wrote a program that took that off so you could copy DVD content to a hard drive. Okay, and so I started doing that with my DVD collection, you know, and it took a long time. You know, each one it would take about as long as it takes to show the movie to do it. Okay, maybe a little faster than the DVD player. And I was using cheap hard drives and I thought, okay, this is not good, and my background at the time was disk controllers and RAID systems arrays, and so I thought, okay, this is what I need.
Speaker 4:So I started looking around and Linux had a driver called MD and they had RAID 1, raid 5. And I thought, you know, the secret was that the data coming from a DVD drive was so slow. Modern hard drives at the time anyway, had no problem keeping up. I mean, coming off the DVD was only a few megabytes per second, 10 megabytes maybe, but the hard drives were, you know, an order of 60, 70 megabytes per second. So I thought you don't need to stripe data across the array and I didn't want to have to move. You know, I had all these hard drives. I didn't want to have to try to buy another set and somehow transfer them to a RAID 5 array. So I came up with the idea of UnRAID, where there's just data drives and then one parity and it does a block level across them all. So that's what started it.
Speaker 1:So, tiffany, you were obviously there for a lot of that well before Unraid was actually a company. So what was it actually like growing up around that whole early phase seeing your dad working on this thing that would eventually become Unraid?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, at the time it was cool for us because he would put all of the DVDs that he was ripping onto our TV, which was a really cool plasma, which was also like new and fancy. And so we were like the cool kids on the block where we could be like come over and look at our great movie collection and we could just scroll through. And if it wasn't there we would just request it from dad and he would get it set up for us. And so, you know, at the time we were just reaping the benefits of the whole thing. And then I watched as things evolved and my dad started building servers and shipping servers and all of a sudden our garages were turning into server building shipping stations. He eventually moved. He was in Colorado.
Speaker 1:And Tiffany, what was your favorite machine?
Speaker 2:My favorite part of the server assembly line was he had this thing, this tube, attached to the ceiling that you could reach up and pull these big handles and it would release a ton of those packing peanuts and that was the best part.
Speaker 1:You never wasted any of them at all, tiffy did you?
Speaker 2:No, I did not do that for fun or anything, never Didn't make a mess that pissed my dad off at all. So that was really fun to watch. You know, at one point him and my brother got a big warehouse and they were both building servers in this warehouse and also brewing beer. They had an extensive beer brewing setup going on and so you'd walk in there'd be music blaring and there'd be servers being built and there'd be my brother doing whatever needed to happen for the next round of beer brewing. And it was a really fun time and just a really fun thing to be around and to watch my dad do this.
Speaker 2:And in the background, you know, I'm in my career. I'm, you know, in film production and running design studios and doing all these other things. And then, slowly, as I'm getting more and more into my career, him and I start talking more and more about his business and what's going on there. And so you know, I'm starting to give him advice. So what if you did this? What's going on with this thing? And and eventually, you know, he sucked me into the business and here I am.
Speaker 2:But you know it's really special to have seen the, to watch my dad's commitment to the product and his just diehard attitude about taking care of customers the best way possible.
Speaker 2:Attitude about taking care of customers the best way possible. You know we'd have family vacations, family functions, different things going on and you know he was, you know he was present but he was always making sure because he was a one man show taking care of the company side of things. You know that customers were being answered in the email inbox and I just I just remember him always saying to me like this is the most important part of running a business like this is making sure that your customers are happy and they're taken care of and you're doing the right thing by them. Even if that is difficult internally for the business, doing the right thing is always the best thing to do and so you know, hearing those principles along my career helped shape me as a professional person. But then also, when we started working together, it was really great to kind of have this shared foundation of values of how to run a company, both for customers and also with our internal staff.
Speaker 1:So it's clear then, right from the start, tom just wasn't building a tool, he was building around a set of values. So I guess values like keeping things simple, solving real problems and giving people the freedom to use technology their own way and over the years I guess that mindset's really stayed at the heart of how Unraid operates Staying lean, staying focused and staying connected to the community. Now, during our last team offsite, the team actually spent a lot of time putting into words something that's really guided Unraid all along. Now I know we've never shared it publicly but, tiffany, would you be up for sharing the mission statement and what it means to you personally?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. We're really excited about this. It's kind of our North Star internally, and I think what's really cool about it and I'll say it in a second is that we can break down each kind of section of the mission statement and see how that plays out and is playing out today and the past and even going forward. So I'll just go ahead and say it. You know, limetech believes that technology should be accessible, not intimidating. We give our users the freedom to follow their own path, unleashing not only what their hardware can do but what their imagination can achieve. And so for the first part where we talk about the technology should be accessible and not intimidating, actually our word of the year this year internally, has been accessibility, and I'm not going to talk too much about that right now because Eli has a lot to say about that, and especially as it relates to the API project, but even beyond that. So I will put a pin in it and let Eli expand on that part. But giving our users the freedom to follow their own path, unleashing not only what their hardware can do but what their imagination can achieve, you know, obviously is a nod to our tagline, which is unleashing your hardware. But I really love this last part where you know, unleashing what our customers' imagination can achieve.
Speaker 2:One of the really cool sentiments that I see out there as I'm reading all of your commentary and chatter about Unraid Online definitely not all of it, just a small portion, but I try is that you know, people come to Unraid for one specific use case oftentimes, and once they get into the product and they check out all of the incredible resources out there many of which are created by the one and only Space Invader sitting in front of me now they realize that there's so much more that they can do, and that part is really fun for us to see internally, and even for my dad.
Speaker 2:I've talked to him and sometimes he cannot believe what people are doing with this product. He's like I never realized he had no idea it would go in a certain direction, or people would take it and do this, that or the other with it, and he's just he. It's fun to see the founder and creator in awe of what people have been able to do with his own creation, and so that part of the mission statement I really love what their imagination can achieve. So hope that lands well with everybody. I don't know, eli, do you have anything that you wanted to add to that mission statement, or maybe what it means for you as not only an employee, but also as a user of the product?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean I think I've been. I've been using the product for for many years now. I started using it in college and what? The whole reason I even started using the product was through this like accessibility aspect. I had limited time and my friends all wanted to watch movies and I was trying to solve the problem with a Windows machine and a custom. I was trying to run like Gluster FS at one point, which is this crazy distributed file system, and then I found Unraid and I was like, wow, I don't have to do any of the setup I had to do with all these other things, and then I just sort of snowballed into this ecosystem and I think it has really unlocked a lot of my desire and where to go with my career and even on like what I'm interested in in technology because of the opportunities that opened up. So I think it really encapsulates how the product is like transformative for for me and for a lot of our users, just like really introducing people to a much nicer and more friendly way to use server hardware.
Speaker 1:I'm going to have to stop you there, eli, because you've really sparked my interest with something you just said. So you are using a distributed file system, glusterfs, and that was it.
Speaker 3:How are you using that for?
Speaker 3:Not well, my friend was like, hey, you should definitely try using this file system as a way to do like you know, you have a bunch of drives like maybe it's a good solution to solve, like you know, your storage needs on one server.
Speaker 3:It obviously was not the right tool of choice, but I was naive at the time and, yeah, I'd spinning that up and it was extremely painful because really it's designed to run an enterprise and many file, many servers and different data centers and all sorts of stuff like that. So, yeah, it was not the right choice for me. And then before that, I was using Windows storage pools, which are I'm sure a lot of people came to on raid with those and they're they're fine, but they're a little questionable, and using Windows as a server is super painful. Raid with those and they're they're fine, but they're a little questionable, and using windows as a server is super painful. So I'm sure a lot of people ended up going the other direction. Just, I mean the, the web gui being a web gui and not just like having to like rdp into some server is so helpful. So yeah, in itself is a major differentiating feature for me, coming from, not a NAS product.
Speaker 1:It's like really nice, so I'm just going to switch gears. Well, not switch gears really. I'm going to go back to what we were talking about before. So, living out that mission, it didn't really happen overnight. In the early days there were, I guess, definitely moments of trial and error, and one of the big ones was trying to run a hardware business on top of building software, and Tom actually talked about this pretty openly in a recent session, so let's take a look at what he said.
Speaker 4:I look back on it was kind of a big mistake okay, because I spent a lot of time on server hardware building. No, not only building them on server hardware, not only building them but getting the right parts and ordering the parts and bringing them in and testing. I spent a lot of time on that which should have been spent on the software. But I came remember I came from this background of Maxtrat. We sold hardware, they sold systems to Cray supercomputers and that was my whole mindset, which was wrong in hindsight.
Speaker 1:Anyway.
Speaker 4:I ended up selling 254 servers. I built every single one of them. I know I told you it's dumb.
Speaker 1:I love how honest that is, just calling it what it was. Tiffany, what was the shift like from those early hardware focused days into really leaning into the software side, and how did that change the way the company started to grow?
Speaker 2:sort of we have different perspectives on is, while his stance might be that there were mistakes made, you know I really don't. I don't believe in that kind of mentality. Like, I really believe that things happen at the right time and for the right reasons and, without getting into all all the things going on during that time, I think there was a lot of value in my dad starting the company that way and I think that everything that we learned, that he learned along that journey, was incredibly valuable and brought us to where we are here today. Sometimes even, you know, we look back and regret not changing our licensing model sooner, but again, I think there were a lot of reasons of why it didn't change sooner and I think that when we actually made that change and the big shifts that have happened in this company have happened at the exact right time, and a lot of that has to do with our team.
Speaker 2:It's really, really important to have the right team in place to navigate through these big changes and you know we had the right team in place to get through the licensing model change. We had the right team in place to get through the licensing model change. We had the right team in place to move away from hardware sales into software sales, and that was really a huge part of it, and so I think it all happened and it's in the right time. I actually kind of joke that the product has gotten smaller and smaller and smaller over time, like physically smaller, and so moving to a digital download, to to only having having that as our product.
Speaker 1:Excuse me, tiffany, when did that happen? You know so. When did the shift to just software actually happen?
Speaker 2:In September of 2015, the very last server was sold, and then in April of 2016, our last pre-configured flash is sold. So we used to also mail out a pre-configured flash drive with Unraid OS on it, and we stopped doing that in 2016. So you know what that allowed us to do again, going back to resourcing internally is to really consolidate our resources into the product itself and nothing else, and to really focus exclusively on Unraid OS and no other product lines. Around that time, interestingly and we'll get into this more I plan on putting out a really great kind of look back video for our 20th anniversary in August of 2025 here, so you'll get more details about this. But around the time of September of 2015 is also when a really big video from Linus Tech Tips dropped about Unraid OS, and that really put us on the map.
Speaker 2:As soon as we stopped selling servers, lots of other things were happening too. That wasn't the only thing, but license sales went way up, and that a lot of that has to do with the fact that we were dedicating all of our resources and time into the OS itself and nothing else. So that was a huge, pivotal moment for the company. 2015, 2016 time.
Speaker 1:And if I've got this right, tiffany, correct me if I'm wrong M-Tech didn't actually become an official company till around 2015. That's when it actually incorporated.
Speaker 4:That's right.
Speaker 1:It had been around for 10 years and then became an official company then and also I know you've always been part of this as Tom's daughter, but I'm especially curious about what things look like once you became on board officially in 2019 and how the company has also grown since then, from when you came on board.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So in 2019, a lot of things happened. Spencer, my husband, came on as the community manager, so that was the very first time that there was a dedicated full-time person internally to managing our community. That should tell you guys a lot. We didn't hire a developer, we didn't hire a salesperson, we didn't even hire a support person. We hired a community manager because what was happening is that my dad was basically the community manager, the accountant, the developer, the roadmap, the director, the CEO, the founder he was all the hats and he felt, as time was going on, he was getting further out of touch with the community because he was so focused on the product and keeping this company going and he felt very uncomfortable with that and he knew that that was not a good path and that we needed someone dedicated to making sure our community was being heard. And then that information was being brought into our team in a really useful way that helped us make decisions for the product and for the company. And so Spencer came on as a community manager and really just immersed himself in understanding what our community is asking for and then getting that to the team. And then, a couple months later, I came in as an operations consultant At the time there were about five of us.
Speaker 2:Larry was brought in around that time, zach was brought in around that time. Larry's now our director of product and Zach is working on the API team, with Eli working on some really cool things that I won't steal Eli's thunder about, but we'll get to in a little while. Responsive web going excuse me, had a little cough there, and so the very first thing I noticed coming in was that we were severely understaffed Compared to the amount of customers that we had and our growth that we were experiencing. We were understaffed, and so very quickly I started getting things in place internally from an operation standpoint to prepare to bring more people on. But again, remember, we were bootstrapping. So this wasn't like oh, I have all this money to just like hire all these people, how exciting. No, no, I kind of viewed my job as a surgeon with a scalpel I have limited money, I have limited resources, and, not to mention, flooding the company with a bunch of extra people was also not really going to work for a lot of reasons, and so we had to be very, very strategic about who we hired and when and how we shaped this team, and that is how we have moved forward.
Speaker 2:Every decision we make, whether it's about the product or about hiring or restructuring or whatever the decisions are we have to be really careful, because we don't have money to just burn like that, we don't have resources to just burn like that. We can't go down a path for a year that isn't well thought through and has a strategy to it. We just we can't waste time like that. And so you know, when I came in and even up until now, the way I describe what I do here is I'm just in the bowels of the company.
Speaker 2:I am down there making sure that we are creating a great place for our employees to be, and then that extends into creating a really great product. So that is what I've come in and done here is set an environment where our developers have a lot of freedom, our leaders have a lot of empowerment. I trust everyone on this team completely and as a remote team, that is the fabric of our team is that trust, and my role here is to make sure that when Eli sits down to do his job, when Ed sits down to do his job, you guys are not distracted by stupid bureaucracy and rules and policies. There's just enough to get us by, but you are focusing on creative, awesome work that is bringing more value to our customers. So that's been my focus here for the last six years.
Speaker 1:So it's basically a scal here for the last six years. So it's basically a scalpel, not a sledgehammer approach. You mentioned how the team's been growing and bringing in fresh ideas and stuff, and actually that reminded me of something Tom said recently that really stuck with me. He was talking about what he was most excited about for the future. I think that ties in really nicely with what you just shared. So let me just take a moment to play a clip so you guys can hear it from him directly.
Speaker 4:The most exciting thing to look forward to for the future is to see how the people, especially the younger people that we have on staff, are going to bring in new ideas, new ways of doing things, new ways of writing code, and I think one thing that we've always tried to do is be flexible here at Lime Technology about what technologies we use. I wrote a lot of code, but I don't care if it's all thrown away, if it's better, and so I think that's probably the biggest thing I'm looking forward to is what are all these people that we're hiring? What are they going to create? How are they going to improve the product and help our users? So that's it.
Speaker 1:All right, eli, I feel like Tom might have been talking about you in that last clip as one of the younger devs. Now, eli, enjoy that young dev title while it lasts, by the way, because I tell you, time comes for us all. But anyway, seriously, you've been working on some big stuff behind the scenes, especially the public API, so can you walk us through what it's enabling and why it's such a big deal for Unraid right now? Oh, and actually someone from the community asked we've had quite a few questions which I'm going to sprinkle in through the podcast, and the ones that aren't sprinkled in we'll have a section later on. So someone from the community asked is it still targeted for 7.2? And will it include the new front end and back end or just the API layer to start? So, eli, over to you.
Speaker 3:Awesome.
Speaker 2:Just a couple softball questions for you, Eli.
Speaker 3:For sure. Well, first of all, I want to say I love that. I love that video of Tom being like, yeah, you could throw away all my work as long as you know as you build some good new code. I love that Tom has no ego about his coding work. That's one of my favorite parts about working with him is that he's very capable of stepping away from the work that he does and seeing code as not an identifier of himself, but just as something you have to do to get the job done, and I think a lot of developers struggle with that. So it's awesome.
Speaker 3:It's been so fun working with them and having somebody who's created such an amazing product be so open to feedback. But yeah, so I guess, about the API, right now, our internal 7.2 build has a built in version of the Unraid API, which you guys may have seen through the years in various forms. Uh, recently, unraid connect has had the unraid api inside of it, but it has not been a key component, and there were some other parts of that, like the external access and connect on myunraidnet that we're planning on basically uh, removing from the base os so that you'll just have access to this new GraphQL layer.
Speaker 1:I guess a good thing to also talk about here is just Sorry, eli, I'm just going to just stop you just a little bit. For people listening who don't know what GraphQL is, I'm just going to get in. Oh I'm sorry. I'm sorry, it's all good. Go on, man go ahead.
Speaker 3:You might be wondering what graphql is and uh. Graphql is essentially like a way of similar to how most websites use uh, something called uh rest, which is essentially like you send a message from your computer and it your server responds with a specific message format back and then that tells us your client like what it needs to do. Graphql is a form of that, but it essentially creates very tight bindings between what you can send to the client and or what the client can send to the server and what the server can send back. So that means that as a developer, you have a lot of tools that can basically tell you exactly what endpoints you're allowed to call. They can even generate code for you if you want. So, rather than having us have to write a bunch of documentation about these, are the exact responses for all of our endpoints, the endpoints sort of self-document, which means that when you install the Connect plugin right now, or even on your server, when you boot up 7.2 for the first time, there'll be a little toggle that says enable developer mode and you can go to a page on your server where you can just hit queries against this api running inside of unraid and get data out, um, and it's really.
Speaker 3:It's been really cool because we've actually had multiple people in our community have like created already there's like an iOS app and an Android app in testing. There's somebody just built an AI powered log viewer. There's all sorts of really cool work happening and please join our Discord Just a call out for that If you want to follow along the API show and tell channel, connect API, and then the connect plugin channel, which will be renamed at some point to Unraid API with a connect subcategory once we get around to that. But that watching the community just build off of what we've created has been so fun and it's going to really help also just add in a ton of additional features that developers can use to make it easier to work and build things for their on-rate servers.
Speaker 1:That sounds really awesome, eli, and on that note, we had someone ask if there are any plans for a more guided setup process, something more kind of noob-friendly for people just getting started, I guess like a wizard thing. Is that the kind of thing the API work you've been doing could help make possible, and what would that mean for the whole onboarding experience to have wizard?
Speaker 3:And I'm realizing it didn't answer the second part of your question. On the first part, which was will this impact the front end or the back end? So what I was talking about just now is mostly back end stuff. The first thing you're going to see in 7.2 is there's a whole new notifications view that's been built from the ground up with GraphQL and the really cool thing about that is that you can actually go now use the API to get those notifications somewhere else. So, like, if you want to get those notifications into I don't know, like a mobile app and you build a consumer, you could push them to your phone. So that's really cool. But just to talk about essentially the you know the plan for setup guides and that sort of stuff, the idea right now is that we're going to go through and build out individual pages and individual flows and try to make them as user-friendly as possible. What I want to do is try to make it so that the setup guide for Unraid is just walking you through the pages that Unraid provides to you.
Speaker 3:One of my least favorite things about software products and I don't know if this is controversial I hate wizards.
Speaker 3:From the perspective of it being a wizard that dumbs things down and then you get into the product and it's really impossible to use because you don't really understand what the actual product looks like, since the wizard took away all of the stuff that would typically be shown to you by the actual product.
Speaker 3:So a lot of companies, I think, go that route where they'll do a setup wizard that sort of dumbs down the UI and then you get into the real thing and you're like Whoa, I've never seen this before. My goal is that we will have a guided setup, but it's going to sort of walk you through how to use the tools that we're building and we're going to try to make it so that we're giving you smart defaults everywhere and there's an advanced toggle if you want to go advanced. But typically the setup that we are providing you is going to be like the easy mode, if you will, and so we can sort of get, I guess, two in one, which is like we get set up wizards and we also get brand new UI for users that use the product every day in one go. So that's the hope and I think it'll start becoming very clear as we continue to work through 7.2 and beyond.
Speaker 1:Tiffany, just seeing the kind of stuff Eli's been building, like the API, it really feels like that devs have a lot more freedom, like you were saying beforehand to kind of just run with things.
Speaker 2:So this has been a conscious shift, giving people more room to lead team, like I said before, came from the community and has been a user of the product, because when you have a team made up of users I don't even know how to put that into words it's like it's like some another layer of value that you're getting out of your team, and I think it's pretty unique about us, and you know you will have when we are discussing what's going into a release. 99% of the time, the debate that's going on is based on what our users are asking for, what our employees as users, are struggling with themselves, with the product not in service of again going back to the VC or any of that. It's not in service of anybody else other than like how do we make this product better in the most strategic way? And so, in order to do that, I, as the leader here, need to make sure that our staff members are empowered with a level of trust, and so what we have been working on is coming up with guide rails around. These are the types of decisions that you should feel empowered to make. I hired you as the expert in this position. You have a ton more experience than I do, or maybe even other any other person on this team in your specific position. You are the expert here. You guide us as the team into what you think is the best. And then there are some decisions that do need to be brought to the leadership team to make a group decision about. But within those boundaries we have a lot of leeway and Eli here has been such a great partner working with me over the years as he's come in and really shared his vision for where things could go and how we could get there.
Speaker 2:We had to spend many years digging out of some tech debt, dealing with the pricing change, that licensing change man, that took up a ton of resources internally, and we're so glad to be on the other side of that. So you know trusting our people and, when things go wrong, having their back and being you know how do we put better guardrails in place to protect ourselves from things going wrong and just people understanding that we are all a team. We're here working together. If one thing happens that doesn't go quite right, it's good, it's all good, let's work through it, and I truly believe that every single person on this team has the best of intentions and is doing their absolute best to make the best decisions they can, and that is a really awesome way to be leading this company. It feels really good and really empowering.
Speaker 2:And you know, last thing I'll say about that is I've seen a lot of rumors online about what kind of company we are, how big we are, what we're up to it's pretty funny when they're like so way off are what we're up to. It's pretty funny when they're like so way off. But sometimes I've seen people thinking that we're this huge company, you know 150 employees. They just kind of assume we're this OS. We must have some, you know massive staff, and I actually think that's kind of cool because it shows you how fast we move, how productive we are, how many things we have going on all the time with a really small staff. And I think a lot of that is due to the fact that we empower people with a lot of trust.
Speaker 1:And also going back to what you're saying about hiring people from the community the recent offsite what I noticed is everyone there. They are working for the company, but also it's a passion and a hobby for them as well, so it's literally combining their job and their passion together. So it was just a whole bunch of really passionate people and I just really enjoyed being around a whole bunch of really smart people who had loads in common. I thought that was really cool for me. So during the offsite, really cool for me. So during the offsite. One thing I found quite interesting was, even though the web UI has evolved quite a lot from the beginning of when Unraid first came out, you can actually still see the DNA of the original version in the web UI today. And actually Tom brought this up and I'd like to play a clip of where he mentions it, so let's take a look yeah, this is v1.
Speaker 4:It looks kind of similar, right, and it uh it had. It wasn't php, it was a homegrown system that was able to parse data and display it okay, so eli the web ui.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about that and where it's heading now, because we had a great question from the community, I'm going to read that out Any major UI changes planned, aka something more modern? What are the biggest improvements we can expect and how is this new design going to improve things for users on a day-to-day basis?
Speaker 3:Well, yeah, I think there's two parts to this. So the first part is that right now and in 7.2, we're going to have a responsive web GUI, and what that's going to mean is just that when you go to the website on your phone, it's going to actually fill your screen, you're not going to have to like pinch and zoom a bunch of times, and the nav bar won't be totally broken and and all these other little quirks that have been around for as long as I can remember with Unraid will at least be.
Speaker 1:So that will be such a major thing for me because I'll tell you like today I actually went to the barber. Yeah, I know I've got no hair, but I do go to the barber. I have my beard trimmed, okay. So that's why.
Speaker 2:That's why I was there and it was a whole big. I have a question for you about your bald head do you use? Uh, do you use shampoo or body wash on your head?
Speaker 1:I just use, like the shower, all-in-one soap stuff. Yeah, that's good, that's good enough, yeah. But anyway, I was. I was in the barber and there was a really huge queue in front of me and I had my had my earbuds with me, which I'm pushing in my ears again now, and I thought, oh, it's going to take probably half an hour. So I thought maybe I can watch something on my Envy server and I realized the Envy server was off because I'd been fiddling around with it. So I had to tail scale in and try and pinch and zoom, and when you've got glasses it's not really great. So I can really see how using the phone is going to be more and more useful going forward, especially now we've got tail scale integration, everyone can just have a straight interface to their unraid server through tail scale. And when we've got a responsive web ui as well, wherever we are, we can just be controlling our server really, really easily. Sorry to interrupt eli. Anyway. No, no, please, please, go on I feel the same pain.
Speaker 3:There's so much time I'm like sitting on my couch and I have to go, like I don't, like my buddy will message me and be like, hey, the media server is down, can you please fix it? I'm like, oh my god, I like literally it. I swear he's like on there like every hour of every day, because if it's down for 10 minutes I get a message. But anyway, um, I'm often logging into my server on my phone and trying to manage it. I've even been at, I've gotten to the point where I'm like, man, I really gotta like try to get like a phone that like folds open or something so I can manage unrate on there, and I'm like I'm so sick of it. I just want to be able to use the product on my phone, and so this responsive Web GUI is going to be huge for that. But to talk a little further about future UI changes, I think that the responsive Web GUI is just the first step. It's not going to fix these things where, like, I find the Docker page very hard to use, even in responsive mode, because it's still a really big table that you have to scroll across. So ideally, we're going to get to a point where we're actually rethinking a lot of these UI flows to be really good for both desktop and mobile users. So I'm not saying we're going to go mobile first. I'm saying we're going to make sure that when we rebuild our UI, we're thinking about what happens when the screen gets small. What can we hide? How can we make the UI more mobile friendly and make it so that, instead of scrolling across a big table which is what you're going to see in seven too, which is a huge improvement from the current state it's still not as good as, like, native mobile UI, and so the is that we'll start building that sort of stuff into the product, and the way that's going to work is you'll start seeing it come in. So, like the notification view is a great example that's going to come in in seven to. That's an API feature that's built using view j s.
Speaker 3:It's not on the same like unrate OS is on a completely different web framework than the new stuff we're building, and we're going to keep adding features in like that. So we'll keep replacing pages as we go and basically slowly migrating in this new UI, and the reason we're doing it that way is so that we can sort of replace things in Unraid without having to totally disrupt your experience. We don't want to Windows 8 our users, like we really want you guys to feel like the upgrades are happening in a very thoughtful way that feels like it's really easy to, you know, navigate. I have been through a lot of pain with companies trying to upgrade their UI frameworks and upgrade the way their interfaces look, and it can be pretty painful. So I really want to try to keep that minimal, because I'm a user too and I use the product every day, so yeah, so you know the responsive web UI.
Speaker 1:it's been a big request for a long time and looks like it's finally here now, and I think that's a great example of truly listening to what users want. Tiffany, something you've touched on before is it's not just the requests themselves that matter, but it's how users actually talk about their needs and the words they use, the context they give. That helps the team build features that feel natural and actually solve the right problems. Can you share how that kind of insight actually shapes the roadmap and how it helps you stay grounded in what the users are really experiencing?
Speaker 2:Sure. So one of the major benefits I think I touched on earlier was about having a small, really tight knit team of users of the product is something that has really helped us to be able to be just the right amount of reactive to what's going on with our customers, what's going on in the market, what opportunities are out there. And one of the reasons why we have not put a roadmap out thus far is because we are a we're making decisions. We don't want to put out a roadmap that says this is exactly what we're doing, because that's just not how we operate internally. You know we have an internal roadmap. You know, seven, two, seven, three, seven, four. What would eight look like? We have all that, but there is flexibility within that based on current situations.
Speaker 2:So a couple of examples. Number one a security issue comes out of nowhere, a bug issue comes out of nowhere and we have to deal with that, especially security. We drop everything. I don't care what time of day, what day it is. If it is something major, we are dropping everything and we're working on that. I don't care what the roadmap says.
Speaker 2:But there's other situations, for example, the tail scale partnership. That is something that came up very organically, very serendipitously, last year in 2024. And had we been in a situation where, no, we have a roadmap we can't change it's already been out there. This is what we're doing. We could have missed a really amazing opportunity to partner with a really amazing company and product and technology. And so those are some of the examples of why maybe we talk about things coming and they get pushed, and I want you guys to hear that we do not take those decisions lightly.
Speaker 2:Every single conversation we have, we go round and round until we all feel really good about the feature set that's going into the next release, and sometimes there are people who will fight for a certain feature to be in there or a certain thing to be fixed.
Speaker 2:And then there's reasons why we have to move things around and we make trade-offs. Actually, let's push that to the next one so that this thing could come forward, because that's gonna unlock this whole other thing or it needs to lay the groundwork for a future feature. You know we're really intentional with our decisions. So what I ask for you, our listeners, you, our community, is your trust in knowing that these decisions that we are making internally while from the outside might feel frustrating for you because maybe it's something you've been waiting for. You're holding off on some decision because you think this feature or something is coming and then it doesn't in the time that you hope for. Just know that. We know that that can be frustrating and we really try hard to make the best possible decision for the product and for our community when we're deciding on feature sets and on roadmap.
Speaker 1:So it's kind of like just being precise, and it's much easier to turn I don't know a jet ski into, to do, like you know, a 180 than a cruise liner. Yes, we're able to actually respond to real world events, basically, yeah yeah, exactly, and not too much.
Speaker 2:Like I said, just the right amount of that, because we can't constantly be swaying in the wind of everything. We can't constantly be like reacting to every little blow up that happens on the forum or in Reddit or wherever it may be. We are reading that, we're taking that in. That's all being taken into consideration and ultimately, there are other internal factors that a lot of people, you know you guys just don't hear about. And something that I'm really interested in hearing from our community after this podcast goes out is how much of this stuff do you guys care about? Like how much of the type of stuff we're talking about here is something you want to hear more of, or that you're just like, meh, just keep working on the product and putting out good stuff, and that's how we'll know what's going on. But let us know, I don't know how much you guys, how much people, care about all that.
Speaker 1:We'll see. So it's really exciting, eli, to hear about new stuff in the Docker interface. That's going to be something I'm going to be really looking forward to because that's something I've wanted for a really long time. So it's really cool to hear how everything's evolving and I think a lot of users they actually forget how much effort goes into making something that feels simple, and behind every one of these changes is a team of people, and in Unraid's case, that team is spread across the globe. Tiffany, what's it like actually running a fully remote company and keeping that collaboration between the team going when it's a remote team?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that is a challenge, but it's also really rewarding. You know, on the one hand, everybody gets to live where they want to live, live the kind of life they want to live, wherever that may be, we get to source amazing talent, no matter where they are, and that is really really rewarding and great to know that people are happy where they're at.
Speaker 2:We're not forcing them to come into an office all the time or live somewhere they don't want to be. So that's really awesome. You know the challenges there. Obviously are a lot of the same challenges that in-person or even hybrid companies face, and we just have to have a different way of addressing them. So obviously there's the challenge of, you know, all of us making sure we get to know each other on a human level, not just on a co-working level, and so to solve that, we have multiple off-sites each year where we all get together for a week. Generally, there's a mixture of fun and work, you know, put together into a week. We're starting to have many off-sites. So, for example, eli and his team and the support team met up in Florida earlier this year because they're all kind of on the East Coast of the US, and they did a really focused smaller group working through some cross collaboration between our support department and some of the things that are going to be coming out soon, and so that's really cool to see and it's a really fun way to invest our dollars is to getting everybody together and it's really crazy. There's a ton of data around this.
Speaker 2:I'm really immersed in the remote working world. I'm part of a community called Running Remote, which is an online group of all remote leaders and founders. So if anybody who runs remote companies, I'd recommend checking them out. But the power of off offsites is really incredible. Even just the week after, everybody's just buzzing with excitement and enthusiasm and that lasts for months and then you really feel it start to kind of like. As we're nearing the next offsite, you can feel that we need an offsite Because when we get to see each other and get to know each other beyond just screens and work you know, I know that Eli is getting married soon. He's heading out and you know I got to meet his fiance and I get to meet people's family members and children and one of our co-workers, larry. His daughters are interning for us this summer and it's really a special vibe to be able to bring us all together while still respecting that people get to live the way that they want to live.
Speaker 1:So, since we're talking about being remote, our team is remote. We work across time zones. Let's stay on that theme for a minute. This is my attempt at a segue. Eli, you've been working on something that helps users stay protected remotely to flash back up to the cloud. Can you explain how that works, please?
Speaker 3:yeah, so, um, I'm actually working on a really cool system that's not just actually flash back up to the cloud I kind of misled you there, ed um, it's gonna be a fully a full backup system for unraised oh wow, we've been sort of missing a backup system and a product, and over the last couple of weeks I guess about a month in my spare time which I have very little, but I've been spending a little bit of my spare time at work working through trying to build out a backup flow, and so I've been using Rclone and I've set up now a service that will eventually let us do.
Speaker 3:You'll be able to choose like I want to back up to my Google Drive, and then you'll be able to choose even like I want to back up this ZFS pool to my Google Drive, or something like that.
Speaker 3:So I'm building this system in a way that will let us actually support not just flash backup but other backups too. We may launch with more simpler, like a much more simple approach, which is just going to be like a flash backup and then you can choose a folder to backup to the cloud, but the goal is that you'll be able to configure multiple backup jobs and any one of those jobs can go to any remote target you want to go to. Using our clone means that we can do like our clones, the tool that lets us like you know. It basically lets you map any sort of file provider as just like a drive so we can use, like our clone, to back up to any cloud provider like s3. You can back up to another local device. You can back up to like an smb share. There'll be all sorts of options in there.
Speaker 1:So pretty much, however you want to back up, you'll be able to do it so, so we can back up you know, not only to the cloud then we can back up to another server yeah, that's the goal our buddy's server if we want to. Oh, that's really really, really, really awesome yeah so, um, we'll see how that goes.
Speaker 3:I think it's probably at least a couple months out, but, um, I'm making really good progress on that and I think that it'll be really exciting. That's sort of like a side note to the rest of the stuff my team is doing. We have some really exciting that's sort of like a side note to the rest of the stuff my team is doing. We have some really exciting stuff actually happening with Docker right now, where we have Mike, who is a trained designer on our team, who's also a developer, is working through redesigning our Docker views and creating basically a way to manage Docker that'll be, I think, more friendly for people on mobile, but not just that Also just easier for people on desktop.
Speaker 3:I really want to have a more unified design where I'm not just popping out new tabs all the time. If I want to tweak a container path or a variable, I don't have to go into the entire container definition to edit and add a path, because often there's specific flows with Docker where you're doing them all the time. We don't need to give you the whole Docker edit view every time you go to manage, like the path the containers mounted to or that sort of stuff that sort of. Those sort of edits are much more like quick, and so the hope is that we'll have views that allow you to do this stuff faster, and we're building all this based on our usage of the products.
Speaker 2:Yeah, at our offsite recently, Eli, your team led a really great presentation about the plans of how we're going to attack updating the UI, and one of one of the reasons why we're going to be doing it piece by piece is to quickly get you guys value and we're not just like picking random pages. We went through and did an exercise where we heard from the whole room of 20 people or you know however many were sitting in that room that day of and users of the product, what, what is the most painful, what kind of and even down to super fine details of you know this setting doesn't make sense or whatever it is. And again, just going back to that value of having users on staff like you guys as a community are being represented in the room at the most important level of decision making. And so I don't know, eli, if you want to talk a little bit about the strategy there and how you guys are approaching enhancing our UI and modernizing it in the next couple months and years.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think the big thing for me and for the team is to try and make sure that we minimize the amount of you know.
Speaker 3:I don't want people to get a new UI and feel like man, this is really painful, or like some option I use every day has been taken away from me.
Speaker 3:I really want it to feel like everything that I was using is still just as accessible, but now it's better, and so the hope for me.
Speaker 3:I really want it to feel like everything that I was using is still just as accessible, but now it's better, and so the hope for me is that we can build a UI in a way that we're considering exactly how users use the product, and the other way we're going to try to facilitate this is through. I'm sure I'll be in touch on the forums and discord with people as we go to try to make sure that we're taking feedback and if things aren't going well with one feature or another, we'll update it and we'll get you guys like a fixed version that will have, you know, better user experience. So we really want to keep the community in mind here, especially around all of our build out. So, yeah, and Mike, who is doing a lot of our design work right now is really good at considering user input, and he is also a user of the product and has been for many years, so he's just as much of a user as you or I, so I think it's going to be really cool to have him working on it.
Speaker 1:Awesome, awesome. I just want to bring up a user question, if I may, eli. Someone asked recently if we might eventually support booting from NVMe or even a ZFS mirror, while keeping licensing tied to a USB drive. Is that kind of flexibility something you're thinking about integrating into the product?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So there's been a lot of internal discussions about boot devices and I think, as we see flash drive failures increasing because the NAND chips that they're using on these flash drives are getting cheaper and cheaper, it seems more and more like it's inevitable that we switch to something else for licensing and for booting. I will say right now, like we are, we are in the process of I think there's actually a full RFC that's being actioned on to implement booting off of another device. So we are in the process of figuring out booting off of another device and actually, I think, even licensing off another device. And if we can figure out those two things, we're going to be at a point where we don't have to worry about the flash drive and these failure cases that users are experiencing, and a big reason a lot of people might not even use the product is the flash drive. So my hope is that we can continue down this path and hopefully see a new boot device pretty soon, I think. So it'll be really good.
Speaker 2:One thing, too, that you might want to mention, Eli, is that our intention at this point in time is not to get rid of the current option. Right, we are adding to options, so you know we're not doing this switch over where it's just going to be majorly impactful. It's a matter of offering different options to people for whatever suits their particular use case.
Speaker 3:Yeah, like my usage. I kind of like the flash drive because it doesn't really fail on me and I sort of have like an extra slot in my system, if you will, but a lot of people really hate it. So, yeah, I'm probably going to keep using flash drive licensing, but I'm sure people will be using internal boot the second it's available because that's going to be awesome and about that also, I'm pretty sure we're going to end up supporting utter FS mirrors for booting in the first iteration of this new boot pool, so that'll be mirrored. You can take snapshots. Same situation with cfs. Uh, so it's pretty much like nets, about the same for user benefit as a cfs boot mirror awesome.
Speaker 1:Thank you, eli. Anyway, um, let's switch gears, eli, if we may, to account security um can you explain how logging in with Unraidnet works right now and what changes are coming with OpenID?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so in Unraid Connect there's a feature right now that lets you enable single sign-on with Unraidnet, and we're going to build that actually into the base operating system.
Speaker 3:The way that works is that it actually does the token fetch on your browser, so you don't your server itself actually doesn't even need an internet connection.
Speaker 3:If you can get to your server's web page and your browser has internet, you can do single sign in with unreadnet, which is kind of cool and that allows you to do like you know click up single sign in button and then you already have an unreadnet account, most likely because you needed one to buy the product, so we allowed that. The cool thing is that that whole system is very extensible. So the plan is actually that will enable other open ID connect is the provider name, but a lot of people use something like authentic or they use like Google authentication, or they use Apple authentication, or they use something. They want something, some other service that you could think of. There's so many that support this protocol. You could just add another service which would add another sign in button to your unread GUI, and so the hope is that we'll have our you know built in one that we're going to provide for you, but eventually we'll actually allow you to configure additional endpoints that you can sign in with.
Speaker 1:Awesome, that sounds great. And while we're on the topic of security, we did get a question from a user from user ghost115784, who was concerned about malware risk, particularly because Unraid and its containers run as root. And he asks are there any thoughts internally about improving, protecting or limiting damage if something malicious were ever introduced through a plugin or the terminal or something?
Speaker 3:so I think he's worried about something being downloaded and you're going into terminal and you kind of run a file that you shouldn't um, I think, like the, the, there are some definitely some best practices there which is just making sure you're not using user ID and group ID. I think it's either zero, I think it's zero for root in Docker it might be 99 100. But I'm not 100% sure that can help. The other thing that can be good is just making sure that your containers are like anything you're downloading. You're making sure your containers aren't executing that.
Speaker 3:That's a big deal, and then the other thing that I think is going to eventually happen, and we'll see more of, is the plugin system, and the or the API itself is being built from the ground up, with support for roles and access based permissioning. So I have a strong suspicion that as that gets built out and we consider, you know, the future of Unraid, we'll probably start considering whether or not we'll end up adding in other Linux users as time goes on. I do need for the company to eventually move off of the root user. It can be really nice for newbies, though, because you know you boot the system and you don't have to worry about permissions. You never have to run sudo or anything like that. So, for me at least, when I started using Unraid, that was actually one of my favorite parts was just never having to worry about permissioning and never having to zone files.
Speaker 1:Me too as well, eli to be, honest and just going back to what you said about best practices, I'd also say best practices for people when they're running containers is don't map to things you don't need to Like. A lot of times you see't map to things you don't need to. A lot of times you see people map to forward slash, MNT, forward slash user. Don't do that unless you really really have to, because then if anything goes into that container it's got access to your whole shares.
Speaker 3:Things to their concern, that's the big Docker. Containers are just inherently a much better way of doing this kind of stuff because you're just, by virtue of it being in a container, you have some amount of protection of it breaking out into your root system. But it's still. You know, you still have to be careful with them because they definitely can do some damage.
Speaker 2:And in terms of security best practices, we can link to this in the podcast show notes. We do have a post on our blog that's pretty extensive, literally called Unraid Security Best Practices. So if people want to check that out and help to just educate themselves, at the bottom of that blog post there's also even more links that you can dig into. So we do have resources available for people on the website right now. You can check out for that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that'll be really useful, you know, especially for new users. Definitely go and go and check that out.
Speaker 2:We'll just say that the best place to stay the most up to date on what's happening with Unwrite is our newsletter Once a month. Spencer spends a lot of time curating a newsletter again, making sure that you guys are front of mind, our customers. You know we're not wasting your time with a bunch of crap. There's not a bunch of fluff in there. It's like this is what is happening. This is what's happened in the last month. It's a look back. So each month it's a look back at the last month. Here's some of the most popular guides that came out. Here's some announcements we put out. It's free, it's easy. Go to newsletterunraidnet, sign up, and that is the best way to stay the most up to date and current with what's going on in the product and the company.
Speaker 1:Nice. So I'm going to direct this next question, I think, at Eli. How's the discussion of changing the base distro come up? And we currently use Slackware. Eli, has that been discussed?
Speaker 3:yeah, so that's actually was a big topic, topic of conversation at the last uh off site. I think there's a lot of you know concern and just you know interest in the community and potentially having unraid be on another distro. And for the time, slackware has served Unraid very, very well. It has been a extremely flexible distro. It's super unopinionated. It is like the lowest level Linux you can get, maybe even lower than Arch. If you really want to, you know, go there because there's not even really a package management system. So it's kind of pretty hard to use. But yeah, we definitely talked about it at the last offsite and I do think that it's kind of pretty hard to use. But, um, yeah, we definitely talked about it the last off site and I I do think that it's being explored and we'll probably end up looking at some options and seeing which one uh will work the best for us and we'll announce it way in advance and people will know what's going on. So, yeah, awesome.
Speaker 1:So that's great. Great to know. I'm sure the community will be glad to have that answer today. So, um, my next user question is is Unraid planning tiered storage, automatically moving hot and cold files between SSD and maybe HDD?
Speaker 3:I don't think that's currently on the roadmap, but that is definitely something that could be really cool. I think, like there's definitely improvements to the mover that can be made to facilitate that kind of thing, and I actually think as the API gets built out more, we'll see stuff like that becoming much more possible. The biggest barrier that we have to that kind of feature is actually UI, because it's very painful to build out the interfaces around this kind of thing, and the API is making that really easy. So my hope is that we'll have a lot faster development pace, and we so far have been having a lot faster development pace. So this kind of thing can absolutely start being prioritized more, but right now I don't think it's on the roadmap, at least not in the near future.
Speaker 1:Thank you. And another question any update on support for multiple Unraid arrays?
Speaker 3:Yes, that one is, I believe, on the roadmap. We're doing some other stuff in advance of it, like trying to get alternative boot methods in place, so that, plus trying to like work on some of our API integration stuff, has been taking the bulk of the work. That feature will probably come with a rewritten main page for Unraid that's going to be using the API, so there's a lot of stuff that's going to come with that. It won't just be multiple arrays, it will probably be like a whole new look and feel to your drive management page, so that's going to be a really exciting feature when it comes out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's being fought for pretty hard by certain employees here and we know that it's something you guys are asking for, and this is one of those great situations where we just ask for your trust and patience that we have our reasons for where things are at. We've been laying the groundwork for multiple releases now for that and building up to it, so keep an eye out. We hear you, we know and we are working on it.
Speaker 1:Awesome. And another question kind of.
Speaker 3:I guess it loops back a little bit to what you were talking about with the backup, but kind of in the other way'm hoping that eventually we'll get to a point where we can just have that and built in so you would add a like a desk, an r clone. There's a whole r clone management screen that I'm building and as part of that I would love to have mounts as a part of, you know, that whole system so you can mount a drive and then use it like you would with unassigned devices or something and do operations against it.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, thank you very much. Okay, so I've got one last question that another user has asked Do we have anything special planned for the 20th Unraid anniversary? I'm going to ask that to you, please, Tiffany.
Speaker 2:Yes, so we've been looking forward to this for a while now, and Spence and I have been working behind the scenes to prepare a really cool thing in August. So in August is when the actual anniversary is, but all of August we'll be celebrating. So you guys can look forward to some great content coming out. Potentially a nice little sale coming out and also I can tease it here a brand new merch line coming out for Unraid.
Speaker 2:So we're working with some designers to put some cool stuff together, a little bit higher quality than what we currently have on our Zazzle store, much more unique, fun designs. This has been a really creative outlet for us to be working on and we know our customers are gonna love it. So, yes, the answer is yes. We have some special plans for the anniversary coming up this August 2025. So stay tuned.
Speaker 1:Nice. So I think that was some really awesome questions from our awesome community, and I think we're very, very lucky to have such a passionate and supportive community. Those questions came from the forums Discord, reddit where our community has expanded into. It was just the forums at one time, and I think that leads us perfectly into this next clip, which I'm going to play now, from Tom.
Speaker 4:Well, clearly our community is really the secret to Limetech's success. In fact, some of the people here today are here because they first were either moderators or forum users, love the product and we ended up hiring them in one way or another. Just about everybody has got a background in using the product and we do spend using the product and we do spend have spent a lot of time trying to curate a very friendly and open community. So often in tech you see communities where people ask the same question a hundred times and no one has patience and they tell you you know, go read the docs, go do a forum search. Well, maybe that happens in our forum. I won't say it will never happen, but for the most part it doesn't happen. We have friendly people, friendly moderators and they're, you know, willing to help out and it's a very important part of our business and we protect that very carefully.
Speaker 1:Tiffany, you've spent a lot of time listening to and engaging with the community across all the various channels. I'd like to ask you, from your perspective, what makes our community so unique?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, a lot of what my dad said is true. The friendliness of our community is something that I see come up time and time again and over the years he started with that curating that spirit, because that is how my dad is just his personality he is. I think he would have made, or may still make, a great teacher one day, an actual professor. He is able to really break down very complex topics into explanations that almost anybody could understand, and he does a lot of that through metaphor and different types of ways. But he's really passionate about making sure that everybody feels included and heard and understood, and I'm the same way and Spencer's the same way, and Spencer has worked really hard to continue to take that legacy and build on that in our community.
Speaker 2:As you said, ed, like you know, it used to just be a forum, but now it's so much bigger than that. You know we're on Discord, we're on Facebook, we're on X, we're on all the things. We're on all the things. There's places that we are being talked about and in lots of different languages, and so what he said that you know we would be nothing without our community is absolutely the truth. Yes, the product is great, but if, in coming to use the product, you were met with jerks all the time or it was really hard to get the information you were looking for, you know it wouldn't be nearly as successful.
Speaker 2:So to all of our moderators, our community devs, all of the people out there who are helping to curate these communities, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts, because we can't do it all ourselves. For the first 10 years of this product's life, my dad was fully supported by the community, working with community developers across the world who he still, to this day, hasn't even met in person, but have made massive, massive improvements to the product, and I just think that that is so special. You know there's good things and bad things about the internet, but one of the really special things about the internet is this connection that we get to have with each other on a common ground, and for this one it's, you know, technology and making technology more accessible and fun, and so I'm really proud of the community, we're all really proud of the community and we let the community drive, you know, the future of this product in a lot of ways. So thank you guys.
Speaker 1:So, as we start to wrap up, I just wanted to ask you something a bit more personal please. Tiffany, You've talked before about stewardship.
Speaker 2:What does that really mean to you, especially in the context of carrying forward your father's work and vision for Unraid of the money that we have coming into this company and what we do with it and how we treat people. So you know, for me I am very passionate about the second part of that. I mean, both things, obviously, are important to me, but I really want to make sure that we're a great company to work for, that we treat people like humans, that we let people really spread their wings and explore all kinds of technologies and innovations and ideas and have a really safe place to do all of that. And I feel like being a steward of the money that our customers entrust us with, that you all work really hard to earn and then you spend with us. You know you can take this however you want, but it is completely genuine that I take it really seriously when that money comes into our business and what we do with that. So that's one aspect of the stewardship.
Speaker 2:On the other hand, when it comes to the product, as we talked about earlier in this podcast, I grew up around this product.
Speaker 2:I've seen my dad work really hard to build this. I've seen how it's been able to support our family and everything that he's done with it. I feel a sense of responsibility now to take that into the next generation and to continue to expand on the legacy that he's left behind. We've worked really hard over the last couple of years to capture a lot of his values and the way that he wants this thing to go. And, as Eli alluded to or talked about earlier, you know it's really special that he is so open to all these new kids on the block coming in and shaking things up. You know he has been able to let go of a lot of stuff in service of continuing to make this product better and I think that that's a really special and a really great trait that he has and we all get to benefit from that. So you know, I take stewardship really seriously in all of those ways and I hope that you customers, community, that you guys feel that from us because it really is genuine.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you very much for those thoughts, tiffany. That's really awesome, and I just want to say how genuinely excited I am about the future of Unraid. I feel there's so much momentum right now, not just with the platform itself, but with the community, the ideas, the energy behind it, all being part of this journey, both as a user and now part of the team. It has been a real privilege and I want to give a huge thank you to you, tiffany, and you, eli, for taking the time to join this conversation and for being so open about where things are headed. It's clear there's a lot to look forward to. It's being shaped by real feedback from all of the community, and I also want to say, most importantly, thank you everyone for watching, thank you for being a part of the community and thank you for supporting Unraid.
Speaker 1:So, whether you've been using it for years or you're just getting started, we really appreciate you spending your time here with us today, and if you found this useful, interesting or even just a good listen while you're working on your server, let us know. Would you like more of these updates, maybe twice a year, maybe more often? Well, just drop us a comment in the YouTube comments or on the forums. Just let us know what you think. And again, thanks for tuning in and we'll see you all next time.
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