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
Ibracorp Meets Spaceinvader One: The Unraid OG Crossover Interview
The Unraid Content Creator OGs unite in a a long-overdue chat about Unraid, content creation, real-world homelab security, rack tours, future video collabs, and more.
Ramy shares how a personal need led him to Unraid and Docker, why the community pulled him back to YouTube, and what’s on deck for Ibracorp. We compare media server stacks (Plex vs Jellyfin vs Emby), talk reverse proxies vs. VPN-only access, walk through Ramy’s rack and Ed’s upcoming encrypted-array auto-unlock plugin, and swap practical security tips for Unraiders.
We also announce upcoming Spaceinvader One × Ibracorp collabs—drop your ideas in the comments so we make the videos you want!
Other Ways to Connect with the Uncast Show
Hi Unraiders and welcome back to another episode of the Uncast Show. Now, it's been a little while since we've done an interview on the channel and today we have a very, very special guest. For anyone who's been in the Unraid community for more than a few years, this man needs no introduction. He's one of the original content creators and he's helped thousands of us get our services up and running, and he's actually just returned to YouTube and it's been celebrated by everyone. So please, everyone, give a warm welcome to Rami from EbraCorp. Rami, absolutely awesome to have you here, my friend.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Ed, for having me on the show. Mate, let me say it's been a few years in the making, but it's a pleasure to finally hook up together. Everybody's asked for it for the last few years, so it feels good hook up together.
Speaker 1:Everybody's asked for it for the last few years, so it feels good, yeah. Yeah, we've finally done it, um, and it's great to finally meet you. We, you know, we spoke a few days ago during the week, and we've been like emailing each other, discussing ideas of collaborations and things we might do. Now I think a lot of people listening they're obviously going to think that space invader 1 and ebra corp on the same screen is a big moment, because we're kind of a bit like the ogs of the unread creator world, aren't we rami? So who do you want to be? Snoop dog or dr dray?
Speaker 2:I'll take dray on this occasion, but, um, either is a good option, right, I don't think there's a competition there, but no, look, I think it's true. Man, we started uh, you know, at least I started back in 2020. You started a lot earlier than I did, and people have been loving our content since then, so it only made sense to finally meet up together, hopefully get some more content out together as well.
Speaker 2:You know, what do you remember about the community when you first started back in 2020, rami oh apart from the videos, the occasional videos that we had out it was mainly forums and the community still felt pretty small in the Unraid world, like not really many people knew about it. I felt maybe the company at the time still felt pretty young, you know, in that kind of early stages. And now, when I look back in 2025, it's just amazing how much of a staple item Unraid's become across the environment. So, yeah, it's a very different play playground than we had definitely yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1:You know what actually got you started with unraid in the first place. How did you actually find the os?
Speaker 2:uh, so yeah, I um, I have a sister with a disability, so my my approach was I needed something easy for her to be able to watch media, and Plex was that option. So I went down the deep dive of you know how can I host Plex? How can I make it easy for myself? Obviously, I had a little bit of sysadmin background, so I wasn't too worried about trying something new. But you know, when Unraid came along and that was my first introduction to Docker as well, mind you, I had no experience with Docker whatsoever a way to kind of click and install things and I was like you know what? This is great, so what? Yeah, anyway, I started looking on YouTube. I found you you're one of my first kickoff inspirations, mate so I thought this is awesome. You know someone's covering it as well, I can follow along and it's been great.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, you know someone's covering it as well, I can follow along um, and it's been great yeah, I'm sorry.
Speaker 2:I had to put you through having to listen to my voice all that time ago. I'm sure my microphone was a lot worse back then, like you were. No, you were a diamond in the rough um, as I was finding content. I think one of my biggest gripes with content creators at the time was they tend to waffle on so much. Um, you know, you could get 20 minutes into a video and still not be at the point of the video yet. So I thought, well, I'm going to go ahead and try and make some kind of see what people think and took some learnings from yourself as well. And here we are Awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So a while back, a post appeared on the Unraid subreddit titled I miss EbroCorp and Space Invader 1, and it absolutely blew up. So what was it like for you seeing that massive outpouring of?
Speaker 2:support from the community. That was huge, mate. I mean I was taking a very long break from the channel, just focusing on life and kids and and all the rest that comes with it, and so I thought I just didn't have time. But when I saw the post and saw how many people agreed and said you, you know, hey, we'd love for them to come back. We really missed their content, the way they presented things, broke down ideas, that was kind of like a kick up the butt to just get back into gear and say you know what? We have an audience here that wants and likes our work. I would love to be able to keep serving them and giving them stuff that helps. And you know, part of what we do and I'm sure you might agree, ed is we like to educate and we like to take what could be technical or complex things and try to make it easy for people to follow along, because my personal belief is the more people we can get into, you know, whether it's self-hosting or open source is a good thing.
Speaker 1:Definitely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's one of my main inspirations. But yeah, the Reddit post, mate, it was unbelievable. I mean, you saw it. You saw how many people were screaming for us to come back and pump out some content, so it's been good.
Speaker 1:What caused your kind of break in content creation? I know that you've had, you know, two children. I'm not sure if the community kind of realizes you've had two children in the last four years, isn't it, Rami?
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're four years old now. Yeah, turned four a couple of months ago. So that can take a lot of time, especially in those first couple of years, just trying to support the wife and the family. And then on top of that, yeah, my work priorities started really piling up as well and I was concentrating on a lot of things at once and for anyone with a day job you can imagine it kind of sucks a little bit of the creativity out of you when you haven't done so much on. So I guess I just needed a little bit of time to make the time, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I remember in the post you said you didn't want to churn out content that was poor quality just for the sake of kind of youtube algorithms. I think that's a really good thing and a lot of creators feel that um, but you know, it is quite easy to burn out as well. A lot of people don't realize that a video that um is 20 minutes long that we might create it didn't take us 40 minutes to make you know it takes a lot longer, takes a lot longer than that, and I've just noticed this.
Speaker 1:You have another. There's another fine product from IbraCorp that's come out just a couple of days ago on Pangolin.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that was a heavily requested one. That one, yeah, lots of room to, can you?
Speaker 1:can you describe what pangolin is and why people might be interested in checking out that video? Rami?
Speaker 2:yeah, definitely. Um, so pangolin is a reverse proxy slash tunnel. Um, slash, you know, a replacement for your current way to access your resources remotely. Really really cool application. I would suggest a lot of people check it out, even if it's not with our video, but the project is great the ability for people to replace something like Cloudflare Tunnels. You know we have a lot of our audience that prefer self-hosted solutions, so I thought you know we have to show this one off, and it was great to work with them as well.
Speaker 1:So does it allow people to get around carrier-grade NAT if they've got that like?
Speaker 2:a Cloudflare tunnel would they can yep correct. A lot of the time they use something like a VPS to set it up on rather than directly on Unraid. So we wanted to demonstrate the Unraid aspect. Wanted to replace a reverse proxy. Here's a great option, but I unraid aspect wanted to replace a reverse proxy. Here's a great option, but I reckon the next one we might do.
Speaker 1:We'll do that vps tunneling option as well. Yeah, that that'd be. That'd be a really awesome thing, because you know you can have a vps for, like you know, five bucks a month, can't you? Yeah, yeah so it'd be nice to have a self-hosted cloudflare tunnel that you don't have to worry about. A lot of people worry about streaming, plex, jellyfin, mb and things through Cloudflare Tunnel getting in trouble for too much data going through. So with a VPS, if you've got unlimited data, that would be a really great thing, I think.
Speaker 2:Five bucks a month, as opposed to paying the pro price of Cloudflare, for example, to be allowed to use sort of caching. Kind of makes sense, doesn't it? You want to probably host it yourself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, five bucks is just a cup of coffee, so that kind of gives me a little bit of a good segue to ask you some kind of quickfire questions. I used to do this a lot with my interviews, just to get to know you. So, coffee or tea, rami, what do you prefer?
Speaker 2:Coffee, Coffee first.
Speaker 1:Yeah, coffee, good man. I've got my coffee here, a bit going cold on the desk and a nerd version Butter FS or ZFS.
Speaker 2:I have never been able to wrap my head around ZFS properly, so I'm going to say Butter FS, just based on my knowledge. Set Right cool.
Speaker 1:Let's throw in a really controversial one, and you have to give the right answer here, so I'll never speak to you again. Star wars or star trek star wars yeah, good man. Well, they're both awesome. Really, there was no right answer I.
Speaker 2:I actually liked star trek as well, but I never got into it as much. Um, I wasn't part of that crowd, I suppose. So I just got into star wars, and that was pretty late in my life. But mate, what a cinematic masterpiece that is. But I never got into it as much. I wasn't part of that crowd, I suppose. So I just got into Star Wars, and that was pretty late in my life. But mate, what a cinematic masterpiece that is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've been running a container called what's it called? Ersatz TV and by the time this video goes out, that Ersatz TV video will be out on my Space Invader 1 channel. And it's a really cool application, rami. I'm not sure if you've ever heard of it before. It allows you to create your own tv channel, basically. So it connects either to your media library or you can connect it to your media server, jellyfin, mb or plex, and you basically make your own tv show like live tv okay, you make little collections.
Speaker 1:So I've got my kind of 1990s and and noughties sci-fi, things like dark angel kind of star trek, next generation, all my kind of favorites and you can either have it. So you literally schedule the um the program you can have like 6 pm, it does two hours of star trek, 7 pm it does two hours of Stargate, what have you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so your own TV channels right.
Speaker 1:Basically, yeah, and you then just connect that up as an HD home run channel to Plex, mb or Jellyfin, and so all of your people who you share the channel with can watch these live things. And what I find so cool is you start watching something you'd never normally watch.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I found some sci-fi shows. I thought, wow, I've never actually heard of this one. It's actually pretty cool and because you can't fast forward, rewind.
Speaker 2:You can't assign it with what you've got. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you can actually put adverts in as well. A lot of people download a 1980s advert pack and so you can actually have it. So like a 1980s advert pack and so you can actually have it. So it does filling out the kind of gaps. So like if the TV show is 40 minutes and it needs to do an hour, it can kind of put five-minute blocks of ads during that hour to kind of pad it out to the hour, so everything stays.
Speaker 2:Is this DizQ TV? Is that what you're talking about?
Speaker 1:No, it's called Ursatz TV.
Speaker 2:Ursatz. Okay, yeah, I did try disque tv. Oh, I'm probably mispronouncing that, like everything else with my accent, but um, that was cool and it is a little bit dated now, so I'd be great, it'd be great to see your video and check this one out, because I actually quite liked it. Kids found it quite useful, too, to have a kid's channel that I could just schedule a whole bunch of stuff on and they'll watch it as it as it's, live yeah, it's.
Speaker 1:It's really fun, like if you're kind of working and you, you can chuck it up on another screen just in the background. It's just playing random episodes, you don't have to think about it. I was speaking to a friend of mine the other day and he was saying, wow, that's going to be so good for my mum because she likes the show Golden Girls, his, his mum's in in her 90s and so choosing the shows through plex and that kind of thing is more difficult for her. So just to have it that she can just kind of turn it on, it just plays random episodes, or yeah, I'm really enjoying that. It's probably my favorite favorite container at the moment. It's something that I didn't know I'd like as much as I do yeah, get it out there.
Speaker 2:I can't wait to see that one. That'll be great. Yeah, people will love that.
Speaker 1:Anyways, we went off a little bit of a side tangent there, so I'm going to ask you a question that can end friendships. When you're editing a config file tabs or spaces- Spaces. Yeah, me too.
Speaker 2:I've been burnt with tabs many times and I've been burnt with tabs many times and I've been slapped over the head for it. So definitely spaces yeah.
Speaker 1:And last one. So say you're setting up a media server for a friend, are you?
Speaker 2:going to point them to Plax or Jellyfin. I'm going to say it depends on the friend.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, it depends. If you like them, you'll say Jellyfin, If you don't like them, plax.
Speaker 2:Yeah, pretty much. But I think if they have a little bit of tech savviness, I would say go for Jellyfin, you know, because they'll be able to at least troubleshoot anything that might come up or know where to look. I feel like still, if I'm being completely honest, plex is still the most polished media server out there. I could be wrong, people can correct me, but I just still think it's still the most polished, like it just works most of the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think you're 100% right Rami. Yeah, but you know I love the open source aspect of Jellyfin. That's why I've been covering it a lot lately, just so people can jump on board, because if it can be supported more and given enough donations for people to develop it off their own back, it can be just as good as Plex. The only difference is, yeah, plex is a private model, right, so they've got a lot of capital to keep building on the app.
Speaker 1:That's probably all it is of capital to keep building on the app. That's probably all it is. So, out of the features that you see in plex, what would you love to be able to see in jellyfin that isn't there?
Speaker 2:that is in plex I don't think there is any features in plex necessarily that I uh couldn't get out of jellyfin. Um, whether it's all out of the box, I don't know. It might be a different question though what about yourself?
Speaker 1:um, I don't use plex. I never have to be honest. I I originally. I originally used um, plex and mb and tried them at the same time and I just didn't like plex's interface. I really liked mb and um I I run jellyfin and mb side by side at the moment beautiful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, nice, I did like envy as well. I just gave that a trial, you know, a couple years ago. Um, no complaints, though, it ran great talking about um, um, containers and things.
Speaker 1:I've probably got a question that everyone's dying to know. Give us a verbal tour of your server. What's your main unraid server running these days and also what hardware is running, the software that's running what you're running?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so my primary server. Well, my whole rack is sitting right back behind me there. It's grown over the last few years so we've got a unified switch in there connecting back to the UDM Pro. Inside I have a Dell R720 rack server. That's the new fresh start Unray zero to hero kind of server. I use that as my play bench and then underneath that is a Silverstone case. I did that whole video around building it from scratch, which is a learning experience for me, because I don't know about you, ed, I've never done a rack server with the whole HD enclosures in the front, so that's just the case. But in terms of the hardware running on it, I've got an i9-10900 using iGPU. On there I've got 64 gig of RAM. I got to meet one of my Discord members the other day on voice chat and the guy has I'm not going to drop his name in case he doesn't want to, but he has like a terabyte of RAM.
Speaker 1:Oh man, wow. First time I've ever seen that that's insane yeah that is insane. I couldn't believe it.
Speaker 2:He had a whole story around how that happened, but I just couldn't believe it. I was like a terabyte of ram by the time. So he runs game servers on there. That's what he was saying. Um, that's pretty much the hardware. It doesn't take too much. I don't run a graphics card. I've always wanted to, but I found for my use case I guess I didn't really need it. Um, you, you might be different on your your end, but yeah, I know you've actually covered graphics cards quite a bit in terms of media service, so I did follow along on all that. But for myself, I think the Intel iGPU seems to do a great job on its own, so I've needed to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the Intel iGPU does a better job than you know, something like a Quadro P2000 by NVIDIA for transcoding. It's just so much more efficient, much more power efficient. But are you kind of interested in vms and that kind of thing? Is that something you kind of do or do you tend to? Just, you're just like a docker man and, um you, you run physical machines as opposed to virtual machines no, so I don't run any virtual machines on my unraid server.
Speaker 2:that's really mainly my media server. There's a couple of miscellaneous apps, but most of it these days is doing media automation and Plex and Jellyfin now as well. Sorry, but for virtual machines and things like LXC containers I use Proxmox and I've got that installed on our cloud server. I kind of hate calling it a cloud server. It's just a server with Hetzner Cloud servers somebody else's server.
Speaker 1:Hetzner are great, aren't they? They're really good. I bought of Hetzner one of their kind of used servers from the server auction. I think I pay about $29 a month and I've got, I think, six terabytes hard drive and a couple of 512 SSDs and an old Intel 6700, I think it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it's great yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my partners Hawksy and Duck the late Duck introduced me to Hedstner and here in Australia we get no really good options like that. You know you'd be paying $300, $400 Australian for half of what you get from Headster. Wow, obviously you get the latency reduction. It's going to be here in the oceanic area, but I just can't go wrong. I think I pay 80 euros for this kitted out server with 128 gig of RAM and I just run a bunch of containers on there. Yeah, that's been good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we'll put a link to Hetzner, I think, in the description of this video.
Speaker 2:Yeah, please do. Maybe one day they'll support us.
Speaker 1:I did ask them to once, but you know if you're listening, hetzner, I did ask you when I was doing a video on installing unraid on a hetzner server. I made a script that would download the um unraid and, using their rescue media, it would put it onto a usb flash drive and then reboot. I said would you like, would you sponsor me? And they said no very curious like that.
Speaker 2:Uh, what do we do? So we've just installed Proxmox directly on the server, so it's running on the host, which, with a little bit of trickery and man, it really takes advantage of something. Rather than paying for multiple VPSs, you just host your own static IP. Great.
Speaker 1:So is that where you're going to put your pangolin when you're running on VPS? Do you think?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I'll just do that. I'll run a small container. The networking side I haven't quite figured out yet because we've got PFSense on there and kind of understand how we're running.
Speaker 1:I don't want to get into the kind of weeds too much in this kind of podcast, but how do you find the stateless firewall with Hetzner? I find it a real pain personally.
Speaker 2:I don't even use it. I don't think. Is that on by default?
Speaker 1:you mean, yeah, it's just a stateless firewall so it's very difficult for doing kind of various things. Okay, and so what services are you running on your server? So just kind of media things. Anything else that's not media that might be running on Unraid.
Speaker 2:Anything that's not media related. I've got an application that I like a lot called Notifier Really good developer Nitsua worked on that and that, apart from notifying you about all the services you've got plugged into it, it has a wide range of things it plugs into. It hooks up to something called the Trash Guides as well I kind of covered that in past and you might be familiar, ed, with this but it allows automatic syncing of those profiles too, so you can bring those down to all of your automation apps and make things a little smoother. It's mostly hands-off. I really don't touch the server too much, apart from making videos for people, and then I've got a couple of reverse proxy things running like traffic and Nginx proxy manager, yeah, so anytime I want to get something external or run that yeah, your traffic videos were really awesome, rami, I must say you know thank you.
Speaker 2:I can't take all the credit. That was definitely a team, team effort there. That was a hard one. We actually had some good input from traffic as well, which always helps, oh, oh, wow, yeah.
Speaker 1:So what a lot of people don't realize is you know there is like a kind of community behind EbraCorp. You know, not just the YouTube channel, but you've got a Discord channel. You know you've got EbraDocs, github, et cetera. Can you tell us a bit about EbraCorp, the EbraCorp ecosystem?
Speaker 2:That's the word I'm looking for. Um, I'd love to. Yeah, so I. When I started off making content, I realized, all right, there was a lot of like-minded people. Um should develop a space for them to come in and share their ideas.
Speaker 2:And one thing I've kept to my in the back of my head this whole time, the past few years, is I'm not the smartest person in the room. In every scenario there are people that and you've met them, ed these are people that are super brainiacs, man. They know stuff back to front. The part where they may struggle is trying to get that concept out to others to understand, right? So a lot of the developers I meet, for example, are super intelligent people and sometimes they just don't have the time or the energy to try and translate it for people that may maybe not as super intelligent, right, but I believe their product is so good that I want to get it out to as many people as I can.
Speaker 2:So, anyway, we create this Discord server, people start joining and then I realized this really is a communal thing. So I want, if I'm going to cover a topic, I try to reach out to the developers first. Ask them hey, we want to cover this in a video. Is there anything you'd like to share, that you'd want to highlight or anything like that, and try to make it collaborative, and with or without them. If that doesn't work or it does work, we take that feedback and then I ask pretty much the group and the community what do you guys want to see?
Speaker 2:I say I would love to see a video on this. What do you guys want to see? I say I would love to see a video on this that makes my job easier as a content creator, because I can make exactly what people want right and at the same time, I get to learn. Because I get to learn from all these people, you know. They show me how to do it all, or they might help me and provide input on a video I'm already doing myself and correct me as I'm going. So I get to keep learning and I think that's better than just pumping out content, assuming I know everything.
Speaker 1:That's really great, rami, how you get the feedback from the actual developers. That's really cool that you can get that relationship going. I think that brings a huge amount of value to your videos and I think that's a really great thing.
Speaker 2:Can I ask you, ed, before we move on? I want to know more about you as well, mate, and your channel. I think a lot of people would love to know more about you. I don't know if you've covered it already, but I'd certainly like to know sure.
Speaker 1:So I started my youtube in 2016. There wasn't any unraid content and I've kind of fell into the unraid content making. I'd used unraid since 2012, on and off. I really kind of got into Unraid, you know, I'd say seriously. When Unraid 6 hit and there was VMs and Docker containers, you know I thought, wow, this is just awesome.
Speaker 1:And you know, I started my kind of computer life, I would say, with computers like Commodore 64, Atari 800, the early kind of like IBM PCs, and in those days it was just so fun to me and I absolutely loved it. I've worked in IT for oh God since about 1998. And it kind of got more and more boring, I found as the years went on. Kind of IT, just like you know, it's always a fun subject, but it kind of got a bit kind of stale. And then unraid 6 came out and like docker containers, vms, like just so easy to do, and it just put that same spark of fun back into kind of computing that I felt I had when I was a child with my kind of atari 800 and just tinkering with it and feeling I can do something with it.
Speaker 1:I used to sit in my bedroom like writing stupid games. One One was called light bulb Larry on my Atari 800, where I kind of put little bulbs in a socket on a platform and jumping over things you know, just to be able to make stuff on your own and do things. I found that you know really great. Um, I think it was about the same time it must've been as windows eight came out.
Speaker 1:You know, you're kind of like seeing things like windows 8 and then you know you get unraid 6 yeah, it's like you know, absolutely absolutely no comparison.
Speaker 1:Anyway, I'm kind of drifting off here again, but my daughter said she wanted to do a youtube channel and I was going you know, you know, go for it, just do it. And she's going oh, I'm too embarrassed, I'm too shy. I said I'll tell you what if you do a YouTube channel, I'll do one as well. So I started doing YouTube. I think the first video I did was actually I did it with my brother as we, I think, put some sort of liquid cooler on a GPU or something ridiculous and I think it's called the frost frostite or something cooler, and I quite enjoyed just making the videos. And my daughter a week later said that she has changed her mind and she was on to kind of something else that she wanted to do. I think she wanted to try some kind of sport.
Speaker 1:I think it was horse riding that she wanted to do then and YouTube had become a second sort of thought and I thought I actually really enjoyed it and I was really into using unraid. I've been using it a long time and I thought there's just no videos on unraid at all. There was just absolutely nothing. So I thought I'm gonna start doing them. So and I apologize to everyone who has to listen to my early videos with my macbook pro microphone yeah, oh yeah, I started with a headset, mate.
Speaker 2:Well, we'll start somewhere, right? Yeah, yeah, that's an awesome story, though I used to get a lot of complaints.
Speaker 1:I used to get about the sound quality in my videos, so hopefully it's better now.
Speaker 2:Like we said the other day, I think it's something you only realize once you start really making a lot of content, how important the sound is and yeah yeah, you start to appreciate. Okay, I'll probably need to splurge and buy a good microphone because people want that good sound yeah, there's nothing worse than watching a youtube video and the sound's just hard, hard.
Speaker 1:You know, I'd rather watch a youtube video with crap video and good sound than good video and crap sound. You, you know, I think most people are the same. But you know a lot of people might wonder. You know where I've been with the Space Invader 1 channel.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:A lot of people might not know that I started working officially for Lime Technology at the beginning of this year and I'm making content on the Uncast channel. Various things like you know interviews like Rami and I are doing right now, various kind of tutorials and reviews of things like we reviewed the link station and to run my own business, an MSP, for probably 20 years and it got to a kind of point in my life where I was thinking I'd quite like a change and the opportunity came up to work full time for Lime Technology Best move I ever did. Such a great, great team we've got and I really kind of wanted to get in into doing that. So I wanted to really concentrate on my role there and I thought I want to get the uncast channel up to 10 000 subscribers. So I didn't want to be putting out content on my own channel taking away um kind of views to the uncast. I wanted to build that up first but we're over 10 000 subscribers now. I think we're on about 11 and a half.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I just checked in the other day. It was really steaming ahead. It's good.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I think I can start making some Space Invader 1 things. I've got a whole load of things in the pipeline. Also, just in my spare time recently I've been working on various little plugins and things Like. One thing that I've been working on is a way to actually start the unraid array that's encrypted without having to put in an encryption key. So I'm going to kind of announce it what it is here now. Um, as I finish the plugin now. Um, so I use. I did a video years ago. I'm not sure if you use encrypted disks on your server, rami, or you just not, but I'm listening now because it sounds interesting you know I like to have encrypted disks on my server.
Speaker 1:The main reason being is not that I've got like super secret kind of NASA data there that you know, if anyone found it it's going to be really bad. But if one of my drives goes wrong and it's quite a new drive and I want to RMA it back to the company, I don't have to worry about my data being there because it's encrypted and you know it's not going to kind of just get recycled and maybe churned out to someone else and they could, like you know it's a good point find the data on there.
Speaker 1:So that's that's really my main reason. I want the encryption. So the pain is always where you. You know you start up your unraid server and you've got to put the encryption key in. And yeah, you could have like an encryption key one, two, three, four if you want to be really dumb, um, but you need a long, decent encryption key and that can be a pain to type in.
Speaker 1:So years ago I thought how can we get around that? So I made a script that just basically downloads it from a web server in a in a private ftp place. But then that script was in the go script and obviously if someone stole your server, that script's there and they could. They could decrypt the server. So the server boot up, do that, download the key, unlock the drives automatically. So a lot of people use that for many years and I think most people who auto unlock their servers do still do that. But yeah, you can delete the key from online if you find out your server's been stolen but say you're away for a month, your server gets stolen, they plug it into the internet and they load it up. All of your data is going to be there. Yeah, so you know, for people who might be running kind of like a small business they might be, you know, have more kind of important data. They may have financial data on there that could be a real issue if a thief steals it and they just happen to then go through and find other data that's more valuable than the server itself. So I really wanted to think of a way of actually mitigating that.
Speaker 1:So basically, how encryption works is it uses lux encryption, which saying this more for the kind of audience I know you know this already around me but you can have more than one key. I think in lux too, it's 32 keys we can have, so you can have more than one key. I think in Lux too, it's 32 keys we can have, so you can have multiple keys. So what I figured is we keep the main key that you'd normally type in, and so what the plugin does is it generates its own dynamic key. It takes the serial number or the MAC address of your primary NIC and it also reaches out to your router, takes the MAC address of the router and it combines them and hashes it into a separate key.
Speaker 1:And so then when the server starts up, if it's connected to the router. It can always generate the key dynamically and it will create that key on boot, put it in and unlock the drives. So then if someone steals your server, they're very unlikely to steal your router and your internet and try and set it all up there. They're going to steal just the server. They'll leave the router behind and then you know, it will auto start and it won't be able to make the dynamic key. It'll be plugged into a different router and so the key will be incorrect and it won't auto start. But then you can always get in with your original key, so it just gives you an extra key and allows the auto start. So I've been working on that probably since January, on and off, and surely you're going to do a video?
Speaker 1:Adding more and more things, so yeah, so that's the video that's coming this week after the Airsats one, and I'll release the plug-in officially.
Speaker 2:Mate, look at us. We're coming back with a punch, aren't we now?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know, I think, Rami, how many videos have you done since like the Reddit post?
Speaker 2:It. Rami, how many videos have you done since the Reddit post? It must be kind of like what? Four, five? Yeah, look, I went a little bit too hard that first week probably. I was a bit too excited. Man, you get pumped up, you know. So, yeah, I think I've done about five and a couple of shorts. You know, trying to do a bit more of the shorts and I just want the audience to know as well. You know I've avoided and Ed's probably the same right when I was saying to you, ed, that I like putting good quality content. I'm not always about the algorithm. There is also a point where you're like your channel just can't grow without doing some sort of stuff. You know that YouTube likes, even though they say it's what the audience likes. So it's important to do a couple of things like shorts, and I'm just trying to do a bit more of that. But the main content is always going to be those flagship videos we do. They're the most fun as well.
Speaker 1:Looking ahead, you've come back with a clear vision? Obviously, absolutely. What would you say is the grand plan for IbraCorp over the next year? Now you're back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question. Um, I've been thinking about this yeah, a lot over the past few weeks and my clearest vision is to keep growing the channel, to keep getting more involved with a lot of these projects that I'll probably put off in the past few years because I didn't have the time so I can invest a bit more, more time in that and ultimately, uh, try and really sit youtube at the front. I'm trying my best to do that now rather than, you know, kind of like a side thing, I'm trying to make it more of the main thing for us here, because it just gives me that creative joy that I just don't get out of. Like you said earlier, it gets boring, and you couldn't have said it better, man. You know I do it day in, day out.
Speaker 2:There's only so much you can do before. You just need something different, and doing this gives me something different almost every week. You know we can pick and choose what we want to cover or how we want to cover it, and you're writing plugins for yourself, and you know what kind of job gives you that opportunity. As often, usually you kind of have to just toe the line right. So, yeah, I'm really looking forward to the next 12 months of just getting more and more content, and I'm hoping the channel grows naturally because of it, as it has been anyway.
Speaker 1:Um, you know everyone. You know who doesn't know rami's channel. Get over to ebrocorp, hit the subscribe button. Like both rami and I, we want to get to a hundred thousand subscribers. We need the silver plaque so you know all of my all, everyone watching who is a space invader. One watcher go over to rami's channel and just hit that subscribe button please thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Yeah, please do you know switching gears a little bit rami's um. A lot of people don't realize and you just mentioned it briefly then that you know your career is actually in it and you work in cyber security. Am I correct?
Speaker 2:correct, yeah, over the past two years, I think I've been doing that role specifically.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and um, how do you find does that tie in in any way to your kind of youtube content? Do you find that's kind of helpful in in the kind of type of things you're doing? Is there like a kind of crossover with that in any way that you find useful?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there is, in the sense that I have to deal with a lot of various different vendors on a day-to-day basis, or I'm looking at new products for my day job, so to speak, which exposes me to a lot of various different tools that are out there. Now, generally, we're not talking about the same tools you probably buy to protect your house or your home network. These are usually, as you know, enterprise things but what it does give me is a bit of a visual of hey, you know, I wonder if there's an open source option of this particular tool. Right, you know, and if there is man, people should know about it because I think it's a really cool idea. I, if there is man people should know about it because I think it's a really cool idea. I just don't know if someone at home wants to pay $20,000 to have it, so what options do they have? So, yeah, I do crossover all the time.
Speaker 2:The YouTube stuff is actually pretty funny because I started doing a lot more cyber awareness training as well. So my role is a cybersecurity advisor. That's typically what my role is. Well, so my role is a cybersecurity advisor. That's typically what my role is. So when I'm not advising, I'm also trying to bolster up resilience and I'm trying a new thing for Cybersecurity Awareness Month in October with doing like a retro theme, gamifying it and trying to get more buy-in from the staff. So trying to think outside the box and use a bit of that creativity.
Speaker 2:There has been fun and you know I bring that back to the channel because I can pretty much share all the, all the funny stories that we we kind of get across the line. Um, cyber is one of those things. You've been a lot around, a lot longer, a lot longer than I have ed, but it never used to be called cyber security, just was it security. You know, um, pretty much you wore many hats as a sysadmin as well. You kind of covered that aspect anyway. So, yeah, bringing it back to the channel people have been really keen on okay, we've got all these awesome apps how do I actually protect myself? And so having that experience with whether it's firewalls, next-gen firewalls, thinking like Cloudflare, and at that level as well, it'll be useful People will like it.
Speaker 1:What advice could you give to the Unraid users out there for how they can actually improve the security of not only their Unraid server but the services they have running on it that they expose to the internet? Do you have any tips that you would say are must do things? What would you recommend to the community for that?
Speaker 2:Number one, and I hope you agree with me on this, but please do not port forward to your Unraid server directly. That is the first and foremost thing I'm going to start with. You know, we've heard some horror stories. We've probably all done it at one point. Don't do that. The next best thing you can do is, if you can just avoid opening ports at all in my opinion is your best choice and if you can do it in a self-hosted way, something like WireGuard you're laughing, you know. I think one of the biggest learnings I had from when I started even the channel, but just me learning in Unraid as well was do I actually need everything reverse proxied? Like I was just reverse proxying everything and a few years down the line I thought to myself I probably don't actually need this stuff publicly available. I can. Just A few years down the line I thought to myself I probably don't actually need this stuff publicly available. I can just VPN in and access it anywhere anyway. Why take that risk? So that's probably my two big tips, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely, Like I had a friend of mine I'm not going to say your name, Marco he literally just forwarded port 80 before Unraid actually even had like a password to log in to the internet. And then one day he rung me up and goes ed, all of my data's gone and I went really and, um, he just forwarded port 80 because he wanted to be able to when he's at work, access his unraid server and like yeah so never forward ports, because then you're, you know, reliant on, even if it's an application you know you're reliant on the.
Speaker 1:How good is the security of that application?
Speaker 2:and generally it's all bots. You know it's bots scanning 24 7 and they're going to beat you nine times out of ten. So just don't take a chance if you can avoid it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that's a really good point. You know, rami like it's bots, because I think a lot of people they kind of think, well, no one would bother trying to hack me. I'm just a little home user.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But bots don't give a. I was going to almost swear then. Yeah, bots don't give A rat's earlobe about that. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, rami. Thank you for pulling me out of a hole there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, um, yeah, no um, definitely just protect yourself, man.
Speaker 1:Don't even do it if you can avoid it but you know, I think, um, I was the same as well, I'd reverse proxy things. You know, for the sake of it I think I don't need to be reverse proxying that. But I think, um, now we've got tail scale in unraid.
Speaker 1:I'm not sure if that's something you know, you use a lot rami, but love it yep love it it's great because you can give access to not only yourself, but you can just send a share link to a friend like oh you know, do you want to be able to access, um, this container? You know you put tail scale into it. Then give them access just to that one that's great use case.
Speaker 1:I haven't even, yeah, gone that far well, one use case I really like um. I I'm a big fan of vault warden. I'm not sure if that's something you use yourself, rami, it's a, you know, for everyone listening, it's a self-hosted password manager, um. But with vault warden you have to use a domain. So I don't like using a domain, so I've got to have like a passwordmydomaincom. You have to have that because the clients use it, that you have in your web browser to be able to fill in the passwords. They need that and it needs to have an ssl certificate.
Speaker 1:But I never used to like having it exposed to the internet. You know, even though they've got very good security in the software, it was still someone could go to that webpage and it would say do you want to log in? I didn't like that. So I thought, well, tailscale can fix this. So what I did is I just made an, a record for passwordmydomain. I installed Swag, which is my favorite reverse proxy personally, which is just an Nginx reverse proxy, and I put Tailscale into that so it had its own Tailscale IP. And then what I did is I made an, a record for passwordmydomaincom to that Tailscale IP and so on my Tailnet. It would resolve, it would have an SSL certificate. That's great. On my on my tail net, it would resolve it, would. It would have an SSL certificate and so long as I'm connected to tail scale, I can access my, my password manager and my wife as well. I put tail scale on her phone and stuff, so all of her passwords, and so it's still but, it, but it's it's linked into tail scale.
Speaker 1:So I love tail scale. I of tailscale, I think it's. Yeah, man, um, ever since, uh, I mean, we started with the docker container and then when it came out as a plug-in it was, I remember you did the tailscale. Yeah, you were the. I think you were the first person that actually um showed me tailscale, like I remember the docker container yeah, thanks to hawksy on that one.
Speaker 2:But yeah, we got the video out and then now obviously we have the plug-in. I push everyone to the plug-in. I say, go that. We're hoping to do the tail scale video soon, as well as an update. But yeah, I use it all the time. So all my stuff. You know, when I'm trying to SSH into my servers, first thing I do is I fire up my tail scale, which has access to that separate network, and I can work normally, you know, without reverse-proxy, anything, which is great.
Speaker 1:Well, we've got a little bit of an announcement to make as well, haven't we, rami to the community is Rami and I, we're going to be doing some collaboration videos together, so Space Invader 1 and EbraCorp coming together and we're going to be making some really great content for you, to the community. Is there anything in particular you'd like us to cover together? We've got some ideas, ideas. We're not going to spill what they are right now, but, um, if you guys have got any ideas of what you'd like rami and I to cover together, um, we'd be very happy and open to any suggestions yeah, make sure you drop it in the comments, guys, because that's that, we'll read the comments and yeah and it gives us exactly the right thing to make for you.
Speaker 2:So, um, feel free to jump in and subscribe that'll be great as well to both our channels so you can get alerted when we drop them yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1:So I'm very excited about working with rami, working with such a, you know, great youtuber who's been around for a long time, like, like we're saying earlier, you know, working with my og counterpart. I think that's going to be super fun and, um, with rami's kind of skills and, you know, he brings a different angle to things, teaches things a bit different to me. So the combination of us together I think we can have some great collaborations and have a whole load of fun with you guys out there in the community as well. But anyway, um, it's been an absolutely fantastic chat, rami, um, this has been well overdue in in my opinion, and I know all the community, hopefully, is going to love it. But before I'm going to let you go, I'm going to just say again I'm sure everyone already knows, but where can they find you? You know, plug everything, the YouTube channel, the Discord, the GitHub, all of it when can people find Rami Ibrahim?
Speaker 2:No worries, guys, if you want to find our channel, it's youtubecom. Forward slashC, forward slash at IbraCorp, and you can also get to our website, ibracorpio or IbraCorpcom, and we'd love to have you. You'll find our links to our Discord all across all of the socials, and we're also on Twitter as well IbraCorp. Underscore IO, reddit, all the rest, you'll find the links there on our website. But underscore io, reddit, all the rest, you'll find the links there on our website. But, yeah, we'd love to have you. Thank you very much, ed, for meeting me and, as a fan, as much as I am a content creator, I'm also a fan of yours and your work. So thank you for your work, um, and opening up wise, I'm I'm a fan of yours as well.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, we're both having a bit of a strange moment, like being fans of each other. So, um, but, rami, thank you so much for your time today. You know, and thank you for everything you do for the unread community. It's people like you that make the unread community great, and also people like you in your ebra corp ecosystem. I've got a question I've got to ask you. Ebra corp, I love the name. It's so cool. It reminds me of blade runner. Yeah, that's, that's what it gives me the Blade Runner vibes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm not sure where you got inspiration from, but I want to know where did the name come from? It's such a cool name.
Speaker 2:All right, perfect, perfect story. I love Mr Robot, I love the Matrix. I love, you know, all that dystopian technological future. I love all that dystopian technological future, I love that stuff. So when I had E-Corp in Mr Robot, I thought, you know, I would love the channel to be almost people don't really know what we are a little bit generic, a little bit of mystery, a little bit, you know, dystopian. So I thought, yeah, EbraCorp, which comes from my surname, ibrahim. So I just took Ibra.
Speaker 2:All right, of course, added corp, which comes from my surname, ibrahim, so I just took ibra right of course, added corp and here we are, and there you go, wow, yeah, wow.
Speaker 1:Never thought of that. So, yeah, it's the beginning of your surname. How cool is that awesome what? What an awesome name. I remember you did a video a long time ago. That was kind of like an animated video, with a man kind of talking um, oh yeah, that was like an advert that was my poor, that was that was original. Ai was it wow? Yeah, you were well ahead of the game back then, like you know, um, that was amazing thank you.
Speaker 2:I can't say it was very good, but yeah, it was fun.
Speaker 1:It was fun yeah, yeah, definitely, anyway. Um, it's an honor to have you back, rami. You know, keep pumping out the content please, but don't burn yourself out. You don't need to do five videos a week. You know we're very happy to have you back doing one video a week. You know, maybe we'll push you to do two. All of you guys listening, you know, keep an eye on both of our channels for collaboration content coming soon.
Speaker 1:You won't want to miss it and until next time, take care everyone. So it's a bye from me and bye from you, sir thank you, we'll see you in the next video.
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