EP036: IT Essentials

01:00:00:02 - 01:00:15:12
Robbie
Hey there and welcome back to another episode of The Offset Podcast. And this week we're taking a look at essential IT terms and workflows for post professionals. Stay tuned.

01:00:15:14 - 01:00:34:13
Joey
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01:00:34:15 - 01:00:44:21
Robbie
All right, everybody, welcome back to another episode of The Offset Podcast. I am Robbie Carman, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Joey D’Anna. Joey, how are you doing, man?

01:00:44:22 - 01:00:46:05
Joey
Hey, everyone.

01:00:46:07 - 01:01:11:21
Robbie
Joey, continuing on our trend of episodes that are squarely in your wheelhouse. This one actually came, came up after talking to some friends on a on a discord group I'm a member of, and I have somehow which which is very scary to me that I have defaulted to becoming an IT resource for a lot of people when, I always think of you as my IT resource.

01:01:11:22 - 01:01:39:15
Robbie
So, it kind of got my, my wheels spinning on an episode of. There's a lot of things with just it. Information technology, computer stuff, you know, tech, whatever terms you want to throw on it that I think a lot of people in creative fields are just like, oh, I don't know about that. I, I have a GUI for that or or, you know, or they, they know enough to be a little dangerous but not like, fully versed in it.

01:01:39:17 - 01:01:57:00
Robbie
And to be clear, you know, this is a blind spot for a lot of people. But like there are there are, you know, professionals for a reason. Right? And we're not advocating like if you're outside of your comfort range with anything, you know, of course, listen to this episode, maybe it will help. But also there are art professionals and engineers for a reason.

01:01:57:03 - 01:02:03:17
Robbie
So you don't want anybody to feel like they have to do this stuff. They can get over their heads. You can always call for help, right? But also it's one.

01:02:03:17 - 01:02:17:12
Joey
Of those things like, you should know a lot of these terms and concepts because let's say you're at a massive fortune 500 company with a huge IT department when you interface with them, if you understand the world a little bit, you'll be able to more effectively communicate.

01:02:17:14 - 01:02:39:04
Robbie
Yeah. And for and for the, you know, the, the sole proprietor, the small company a lot of this stuff is, you know, it's easier than it's ever been. It's, you know, standardization, consistency across various companies, platforms, etc.. If you kind of get some of the big, larger concepts, then you can kind of, you know, kind of parlay that into your specific, specific thing.

01:02:39:04 - 01:02:57:23
Robbie
So again, the goal of this episode is not meant to be comprehensive and be like, you know, everything. And if you're already in it professional, this episode is squarely not for you, right? We're not going to get it. We're not getting get into the thick of it. We're not going to once talk about getting into the command line and doing things there or SSH into something or whatever.

01:02:58:03 - 01:02:59:04
Joey
Then if you build.

01:02:59:06 - 01:03:20:15
Robbie
That is a different world squarely. But what I wanted to kind of start at, Joey, is the, the basic building blocks of an IT infrastructure. Because I see this all the time. You're talking to somebody, right? And you say you say something and I'm like, oh, okay. Well, is that plugged into your switch? And they go, well, yeah, it's plugged into the router, but well, okay.

01:03:20:15 - 01:03:43:20
Robbie
Well those are two different things. Could be the same box but two different concepts. Or you know, they'll they'll say things like oh well yeah, it comes in from the wall into my, my router. But I don't know what the wall means. Like, okay, is there a cable modem attached like those kind of basic things. So let's start at kind of the top tier of that.

01:03:43:20 - 01:04:02:13
Robbie
Right. Presumably you're going to sign up for whether it's at home, the office, wherever you're going to sign up for some sort of internet service. Let's just call that group your ISP. The person that is providing you the the pipe to the outside interwebs. And oftentimes when that comes in, it's going to come in in a couple of different ways.

01:04:02:13 - 01:04:34:10
Robbie
One, it could come in through a modem. And people have had modems for years. Right. These are common with, coax type connections. Right. They can be common with other some, you know, fiber providers. But they're also the other thing that you'll see oftentimes is what we refer to as an OMT. Right? Which is kind of if you've ever had a fiber service like Verizon Fios or something like that, you might have a box in your garage or on the back of your house or something like that, that essentially operates as that interface between you and the ISP.

01:04:34:12 - 01:05:02:08
Joey
Yeah. So basically, most internet service doesn't come to your premises as the same type of networking that you would just plug into a computer, right? So whether it be a modem, which is, you know, modulator, demodulator, it's the legacy terminology for what we used to use analog phone lines to convert networking signals. These days it's used for digital cable coax.

01:05:02:08 - 01:05:37:04
Joey
Like you mentioned, OMT is the fiber equivalent of that an optical network terminal. It takes the optical cable connection from your fiber provider, does all the conversions needed to convert it to the kind of base level format for networking that almost all modern computers use, which is Ethernet. So that's your modem or whatever terminal to your service provider from there that will go into something called a router.

01:05:37:04 - 01:06:02:08
Joey
And what a router does is it takes one network, converts and moves traffic from that network to and from another network. Now, in most residential applications, a lot of times the modem in the router and even we'll talk about switches a little bit later, but also a switch is consolidated into the same piece of equipment, but it's actually two different kind of things inside of that that that equipment.

01:06:02:08 - 01:06:36:15
Joey
It's we're going to take our network from our ISP, make it into Ethernet, but then that Ethernet just gives you one network address in most cases on the internet that you can now talk to other machines on the internet from. But that's a public address that you don't want to actually be connecting your computer to. So what your router will do is create an internal network of private IP addresses that all of your computers in your network can exist on.

01:06:36:17 - 01:07:02:18
Joey
And when they talk out to the internet, the router will it will migrate the traffic to and from wherever you're going on the internet to your internal addresses. The next major building block is a switch. What a switch does is let's say you have ten computers hooked up. If you have one computer connected to another computer with Ethernet, they can talk A to B, right?

01:07:02:18 - 01:07:28:20
Joey
But if you have a, B, C, D, E, you need to be able to talk from any point to any other point. Right? So they all go into a central, switch. It's what it's called a source switch. And that switch will broker all the connections from all the connected machines. The last building block is the individual machines.

01:07:28:20 - 01:07:51:08
Joey
And you may hear the term Nic network interface card. That's important because your computer might have more than one. Your laptop might have an Ethernet port and it might have a wireless adapter. Your workstation might have 2 or 3 Ethernet connections. And when you get into more advanced things like internet here, storage here, that matters.

01:07:51:10 - 01:08:06:19
Robbie
Yeah. And we'll talk about some of those, those multi connection things in just a moment I that's a great overview. And I just want to add a few additional terms here. You. So you mentioned the outside internet the ISP coming in and then your internal network. And these these these have these have words or acronyms that you might see.

01:08:06:19 - 01:08:32:12
Robbie
You might see it advertised as your WAM right. And your LAN right where Whan is going to be your wide area network. That's the internet. Internet coming in. That's the pipe coming in from your ISP, which is, as you said, a router then translates that into a LAN, your local area network. Right? So this is a this is an interesting thing because, I think a lot of people get a little confused about how this works.

01:08:32:14 - 01:08:49:10
Robbie
And when it comes to what an IP is now, I think everybody on some level knows what an IP is. We don't have to be that pandemic about it. Right? Like I think people go, oh, an IP is an address that tells a computer where something is located. It could be out there in the world, it could be something local to you as well.

01:08:49:10 - 01:09:17:14
Robbie
Right. But I think a little bit of confusion happens with the following. You have a way, an IP from your ISP right? They assigned you when you sign up, they they go, oh, there's Robbie's house. I'm going to give that house a, an IP. Now, that IP most of the time is not always the same. The internet service provider might say, hey, you know, every two weeks or three weeks or a month or whatever, or the next power outage or whatever, we'll reassign that.

01:09:17:14 - 01:09:36:23
Robbie
Right. But you're your incoming network has an IP. Let's just call that the public IP. Right. That is your that is the world knows, hey, when something's going to rob his house or Joey's house or whatever, this is the IP that I'm sending it to. That public IP is different right from your internal IP and your internal networks.

01:09:36:23 - 01:09:37:13
Robbie
And I think that's a.

01:09:37:13 - 01:09:58:01
Joey
Big and to be clear, just theoretically, you could skip the router, plug your computer right into that single public IP and have your workstation be directly on the internet. And it would technically work. It's a horrible idea, but just so you can understand kind of how this architecture is, in most setups, your router will occupy that public IP address, right?

01:09:58:07 - 01:10:17:01
Robbie
So what that transmit that router is doing is translating. Okay. I'm, you know, 76.234 whatever publicly. But internally I want my machines to be maybe on 192 IP addresses or ten IP addresses, those ranges of IP, which there are there are some standards to it. Right. And you.

01:10:17:01 - 01:10:29:04
Joey
Can go to ten one, nine two and I think one, seven two are dedicated internal network ranges. Right. So they were never they there cannot be an internet address on those addresses.

01:10:29:04 - 01:11:00:00
Robbie
And IP's fall into two major classification zones, IPv4 and IPv6. Right. And six is a newer standard. It basically just allows for larger blocks of addresses. For a long time, the world has been worried about running out of IPS. With the previous version with version four, six is not is still, even to this day, not nearly as widely used as for, we haven't quite run out yet, but just understand that if you will see that at some some times, especially when from.

01:11:00:01 - 01:11:05:10
Joey
Our purposes, when we talk about the internal network, we're never going to be running IPv6. There's no.

01:11:05:16 - 01:11:07:01
Robbie
Exact there's no there's no reason.

01:11:07:01 - 01:11:12:00
Joey
If your ISP is running IPv6, the router is going to handle all that translation.

01:11:12:02 - 01:11:33:17
Robbie
All right. So we understand how that translation happens on the router. We understand the building block. Sorry a switch router NICs. And just to be clear you said this, but I just want to reiterate this. A lot of consumer devices have those concepts combined together. Like you might have a when port. That's where your, internet coming into your house or your office comes, it comes in, you plug that into your port.

01:11:33:22 - 01:11:45:14
Robbie
But on that same device, you might have a bunch of Ethernet ports that are meant for your local area network. And that's where it sort of operating as a switch in that same box. Right.

01:11:45:14 - 01:12:01:17
Joey
So yeah, essentially like if you just buy Fios, you get a box that has the one way in port, there's a router inside that box, there's a switch inside that box, and there's also a wireless base station inside that box. All of those are together in one consumer appliance.

01:12:01:19 - 01:12:22:05
Robbie
So you can break that out, of course, which we'll talk about more in a second. Right. So now that we got that clear, let's just briefly talk about that local area network thing a little bit more. Right. So if we understand that there's external and internal IPS we can create internal networks. Now most people a lot of places you go to just have a single internal network, right.

01:12:22:07 - 01:12:43:01
Robbie
And most on most, systems, the most routers that's going to default to just probably A192 kind of pattern of addresses, right? When that router creates that 192 address or whatever. Most routers are set up by default to do something called DHC, DHP. What is the Http stand for GI.

01:12:43:03 - 01:13:06:02
Joey
The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol. Essentially what that means is you plug a computer into the network and by plug into the network, you could also that could be connecting to it via wires as well. That's the the same thing as plugging into the network, right? You connect to the network hardware wise, and then your computer puts out a broadcast packet that says, I'm here.

01:13:06:02 - 01:13:15:11
Joey
What's what's going on? How do I talk to you? Right then the Dhcp server, which in almost all cases.

01:13:15:11 - 01:13:16:05
Robbie
Isn't that right.

01:13:16:07 - 01:13:39:09
Joey
Hosted on the router. Right. We'll respond to that. Say hey, okay. Your address. Is this my address for the router. Is this the address for your name server. So you can do lookups like when you say google.com something needs to associate google.com with an actual IP address. So the server that that does that is listed in your Dhcp entry.

01:13:39:12 - 01:13:59:08
Joey
Essentially what will happen is when you have that computer plugged in, if the computer is set up to automatically configure, it'll ask the Dhcp server which is sitting on the router in most cases, what's everything I need to know to connect to this network. And the router will say it's this. And it will keep track of who has what IP address.

01:13:59:08 - 01:14:04:20
Joey
So it doesn't give the same address to two different machines, because that would end up bad.

01:14:04:21 - 01:14:21:14
Robbie
And as you said, it's dynamic. And so that's a really important part about this right. Is that in a Dhcp setup now that we've gone we've translated the network to local. Now we plugged in a computer and the router goes hey this is your IP address. That IP address is dynamic. Turn your computer off. Turn it back on.

01:14:21:14 - 01:14:39:05
Robbie
Chances are if something, you know, other activity was going on, the network, it's going to get a new address. You can actually renew this. You probably have seen this in various places on your Mac or your PC where it's like renew, Dhcp, lease, lease rather. That's what it's doing. It's going hey router, give me a new address. This one's not working for me anymore.

01:14:39:10 - 01:15:01:17
Robbie
And it will put it out. So it Dhcp is great for simplicity right. Plug something in. It gets an address. It knows all the information about how to route things. But for predictability, reliability, always knowing where something is on the network it can be a little challenging right? If you always want your computer to be at the same IP, Dhcp can be a little problematic for that.

01:15:01:17 - 01:15:21:16
Robbie
So we can also run what's called a static IP. Right. So a static IP is going to say, hey you know what I'm going to give this device. And there's different ways to set up based on the unique Mac address of that device or or other other protocols. Say every time I see this device I'm going to give it this same IP, right?

01:15:21:20 - 01:15:35:07
Robbie
So, for example, if you always want your main resolve workstation to be, you know, certain IP or a converter or something that you have in a rack mount, be the same IP, you can set static addresses for those devices as well.

01:15:35:09 - 01:15:50:20
Joey
And there's two ways to do that. Like you mentioned, you can do that most FTP servers have an option to do that. So you don't need to on the client and on the computer end actually go in and manually type everything in. That's kind of my preferred way to do it. It's really a newer way to do it.

01:15:50:22 - 01:16:18:12
Joey
That wasn't, you know, historically, most people would settle if you set it on. Okay, I've got a nice I've got a server, I've got a client, I'm going to manually type in those addresses, which is still a perfectly valid way to do it. But for a lot of things, the modern router Dhcp server combo. And I think we'll talk about this next, when we get into kind of an ecosystem of network products where you have centralized management, it's really easy to do it all from one place.

01:16:18:14 - 01:16:40:16
Robbie
Yeah, totally. So once, once we're working for or DSP doesn't really matter depending on your needs. Right. You have a local address. And as we said, those blocks like 192172 10.0, whatever those are different IP ranges. It introduces this idea that's, I think, a little foreign and complicated for some people to get their heads around, but hopefully we can explain this pretty easily.

01:16:40:18 - 01:17:06:06
Robbie
The idea of having multiple networks within your network, right. You like think to yourself, what, what what do you mean multiple networks? Right. I'll give you just a breakdown of my house and the reason that I have multiple networks. So at home I have work stuff, right? I have work computers, right? I have monitors, I have, you know, a whole bunch of things that need IP that I would say are work related items.

01:17:06:08 - 01:17:35:03
Robbie
Then I have a whole bunch of things in the house that I will say are part of the generic term, the Internet of Things. IoT, right? I'm thinking of smart switches, cameras, doorbell, whatever, right? I don't really necessarily want those things to know about each other, right? I don't want some, you know, potential malware on a, you know, a cheap little camera I bought on Amazon necessarily knowing about my Mac studio that I'm making money on and using resolve.

01:17:35:03 - 01:17:58:11
Robbie
Right. And then I have the rest of my family who is, you know, on iPads, phones, laptops too. And I certainly don't want some, you know, bad actor on one of those devices. All of a sudden knowing about my resolve computer and potentially doing something bad. Right. So it brings up this idea of sort of network segmentation and most modern routers.

01:17:58:11 - 01:18:24:20
Robbie
And this is not always true with consumer routers. So I want to asterix that by saying this is usually true more on enthusiast and then pro level stuff. We can set up multiple networks or what we refer to as as Vlan, a virtual local area network. Right? Not physically. We don't have another router. We do this within that same box and say, hey, you know what, we're going to set up this range of IPS as one network.

01:18:24:20 - 01:18:41:08
Robbie
We're going to set up this range of IPS is another one. And how many ever you need. And the beauty about doing that is then you can assign different things in your physical structure to different networks and set up rules about how those different networks can talk to each other.

01:18:41:10 - 01:18:54:08
Joey
Yeah. So this is when we get into kind of the equipment side of things, right? Yep. What do you want to buy if you were setting up kind of studio network.

01:18:54:10 - 01:18:54:16
Robbie
Yep.

01:18:54:21 - 01:19:22:10
Joey
I and Robbie and everybody I know are big fans. We've talked about it at length of our friends at Ubiquiti. And what Ubiquiti does is they're an ecosystem of networking products from what they call their dream machine product line, which is basically a small computer that does integrate the router, the switch, and control software to talk to everything.

01:19:22:12 - 01:19:47:07
Joey
Then they sell switches, they sell other networking stuff like IP cameras and things like that. We won't even go down that road for this episode. But the reason why I bring it up is because when you have all of these different components, it's really nice to be able to manage them from a central dashboard. So let's talk about the the Vlan configuration that Robbie mentioned.

01:19:47:13 - 01:20:04:07
Joey
You could set that up. Let's say you have a working network on a home network. You could very easily set that up on just two separate physical switches, and then connect both of those switches, switches to interfaces on a router, and have the router configured.

01:20:04:09 - 01:20:04:15
Robbie
One.

01:20:04:21 - 01:20:25:16
Joey
Separately between the two switches. Right. And then those networks are physically isolated. That's a very simple way to do it. But now you're managing two different switches and one router, each one. You probably go to its little management page and check its little options and do that. It's a big pain in the butt when you get a networking product ecosystem.

01:20:25:18 - 01:20:28:21
Joey
Ubiquiti is the example we're going to use. There are plenty of others.

01:20:29:00 - 01:20:30:10
Robbie
Cisco, whoever. Yeah, sure.

01:20:30:13 - 01:20:53:09
Joey
My favorite. Nope. You get a center management that talks to all of the components in the same language. And the way that looks with Ubiquiti is, for example, you go to your main configuration dashboard that's talking to the router. It's talking to all your switches. So all the switches are connected to the router. And I can say take these five ports, put them on the work network.

01:20:53:11 - 01:21:19:11
Joey
These five ports, put them on the home network. Anybody connecting to this wireless network put on work. Anybody connecting to this wireless network put on home. And then what happens in that case is anybody that's on the work network can talk directly to anybody else on the the work network, anybody that's on the home network can talk directly to anybody that's on the home network, or they can talk via the router out to the internet.

01:21:19:13 - 01:21:29:19
Joey
But if one from the home network or one from the work network wants to talk to its counterpart, it needs to go back to the router and say, hey, okay, I'm on the work.

01:21:29:21 - 01:21:30:14
Robbie
Mission to do this.

01:21:30:14 - 01:22:04:14
Joey
My address is ten .0.0.1. I want to talk to 192.168.1.1 on the home network. You need to broker that connection and that's where you have things like firewalls. A firewall is essentially just a piece of software that decides what, when and where the router can send different communication. So you can say, for example, the way I have it set up is my work network can always reach out and talk to the home network or the internet, the home network.

01:22:04:17 - 01:22:05:15
Robbie
Can I talk to.

01:22:05:16 - 01:22:24:23
Joey
The work network with a couple of very specific exceptions to get into, like, oh, I want to get to my management page for my NAS. So I let that through the firewall. So that's where this network segmentation can become really, really useful. If you have them all kind of in the same ecosystem of products, because you can manage it all from one dashboard.

01:22:25:04 - 01:22:46:03
Robbie
Agreed. And just in from a practical sense, I want people to think about this. The segmentation and the firewall rules. Firewall rules are they sound complicated, but they're really not there. Literally just think about it as a complete solid brick wall that when you set up a rule, all you're doing is punching a little hole in that wall for that specific use case, use case and nothing else.

01:22:46:05 - 01:23:10:18
Robbie
And the beauty about this, like from a practical use standpoint, is, you know, you have let's say you have your office, you don't want your clients to be able to access your storage servers, your actual workstations, etc. sure, you want them to be able to get on the internet and be able to do things that clients do in the room, but they don't need access to all of your, you know, your proprietary gear or machine, you know, stuff in your machine room.

01:23:10:23 - 01:23:24:03
Robbie
So setting up segment automation like that, to be clear, it requires a little planning, requires a little forethought, and a lot of modern appliance, ecosystems like Joey was talking about make this pretty nice with, like, color coding and different flash.

01:23:24:03 - 01:23:25:23
Joey
Yeah. And a lot of them have presets for this.

01:23:25:23 - 01:23:46:13
Robbie
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So you can make it up. But that kind of idea about separate networks creating these virtual lands and routing rules is important. And kind of related to that same kind of concept is that once we start configuring, okay, different networks, different VLANs, routing rules, you can take this up another level with security initiatives to this because it's semi related.

01:23:46:13 - 01:24:10:10
Robbie
Right. We can start doing things like in those firewalls. We can create specialized parts of firewalls for example for security this is often called like a honeypot right. Where to the outside world you know you're basically saying hey if something is intruding on my network, make sure that intruder knows about this IP to, to go to and try to mess with, because once they're in there, guess what?

01:24:10:11 - 01:24:29:09
Robbie
They're stuck. There's nothing defined. They can't touch anything else in your network. Sure, they can see that it's a network there, but, like malware and bad actors are automatically made to go to this little honeypot. Same thing for things like ad blocking or or other things. You can even do this based on geographic regions, right? If you're hey, you know what?

01:24:29:09 - 01:24:48:14
Robbie
I don't want the, you know, to continually get things like, hey, you know, if you give me $50, I'll make you the, you know, the crown prince of wherever. But you can block countries, right? Countries have IP blocks, etc. and so you can get pretty granular with the level of security once you kind of understand those same kind of concepts here.

01:24:48:16 - 01:25:11:13
Joey
Now the caveat here, I would say, especially if you're building a dedicated work network, is be very, very, very cautious with what you allow in. Because, you know, Robbie said that, you know, you punch a small hole through your firewall. Let's say, for example, in my example, it's I can get to the web management page of my nest so I can see the dashboard.

01:25:11:15 - 01:25:39:08
Joey
But as it has been said, no crack in a fortress may be accounted small. So it's not a small hole. And you should think about it. The reason I say that is don't do things, for example, like open up remote desktop with a weak password to something on your work network. Because guess what? Now that you've opened that up, something on your less secure network can figure out, oh, I've got a weak password remote desktop.

01:25:39:10 - 01:26:06:17
Joey
Now that I'm on a desktop on the other network, guess what? I've now got access to everything. I've opened up the entire world. So it's good practice to be very judicious about what you do let into that private work network. And I on the side of almost zero to the point of it makes life inconvenient, right? You need to go to a different machine to get to certain things, whereas I can't just dial it up on my phone or on my iPad.

01:26:06:19 - 01:26:11:16
Joey
You know, the cost of security is often convenience.

01:26:11:17 - 01:26:29:06
Robbie
Yeah, that's all good stuff. And just say, just to be clear about that, there's a lot of nuance to those kind of rules. Like, we're not going to dive into things like, you know, opening specific ports based on protocol or those kind of stuff, like there is another a little bit of level on that, but that's that's kind of a the 50,000ft view of it.

01:26:29:08 - 01:26:54:18
Robbie
The other thing, you know, I think oftentimes about and this is kind of a hardware thing and and a network thing like a virtual network thing is like I have different how should I say this different performance needs for different types of systems. Right. So for example, like my iPad or laptop, the regular, you know, network Wi-Fi or whatever is, you know, fine, like a one gigabit speed is more than enough that I need for my iPad sitting on the couch.

01:26:54:18 - 01:27:14:19
Robbie
Right. But I might need for my workstations. I might want a ten gig per second or a 25 gig, or even a 100 gig network connection. Right. And so that might mean at the top level with gear, it might mean that I have to get an additional switch or a piece of gear that can operate at whatever speeds that I need to operate on.

01:27:14:19 - 01:27:36:02
Robbie
So, for example, in my setup, I have a regular one gigabit switch that almost all my house is wired into, but then I have a ten gigabit switch where things like my NAS and workstations, etc. are plug in. So I needed a physical, different physical piece of hardware that supported those speeds. But also I have a different network for those kind of things, right?

01:27:36:02 - 01:27:56:19
Robbie
So my work network, for example, is defaults like everywhere it is on all the ports that it's on, that work networks on all those ports. There are ten gigabit ports because I'm doing things on that network at ten gigabit speeds. Right. So the sort of so when you think about network segments, segmentation, it's not just about who can talk to who.

01:27:56:23 - 01:28:01:22
Robbie
It also is a little bit about the performance needs that you have for those specific devices.

01:28:02:00 - 01:28:23:23
Joey
Yeah. And all of the components kind of come together at this point because let's say you have your work network, it's all ten gig. All the work machines are talking ten gig to each other. But when they need to go out to the internet, let's say your internet connection is only one gig. That router is going to broker your ten gig connection through to a one gig connection to the internet.

01:28:24:03 - 01:28:46:02
Joey
Now, the next kind of level of performance segmentation that I want to talk about is what's called. You may have heard of jumbo frames, you may have heard of MTU sizes, things like that. This is where that segmented ten gig work network really comes into its own, because we need to change the way the individual clients are actually talking.

01:28:46:04 - 01:29:11:05
Joey
And we do that by changing what's called the MTU. Now, in Ethernet, the MTU is the maximum transmission unit. It is for every packet of data a packet is a it's a it's a chunk of data. Yeah. The the MTU is how big that chunk of data is allowed to be. And the reason there's a limit for this is because networks aren't perfect.

01:29:11:10 - 01:29:37:08
Joey
Right? Right. So the default Ethernet standard MTU is 1500 bytes okay. So when you send things out to the internet or on your local network, it's all broken into 1500 byte chunks. The reason is those are error corrected on each one. And when the receiving end gets it, if it says, hey, the math on this packet doesn't add up, can you send it again?

01:29:37:10 - 01:30:02:00
Joey
It will send it again. Now if those packets are huge, guess what? You just brought your whole network to a crawl. Because any time there's any error, you're sending gigantic packets as opposed to sending small packets. This matters a lot for the internet or for Wi-Fi. Yeah, or for crappy consumer devices like IoT stuff that might not be very reliable.

01:30:02:05 - 01:30:30:05
Joey
This matters much less on dedicated ten gig, 25 gig or higher high end equipment like your Mac Pro, your Mac studio, your network attached storage, your servers that are all on this work network. So the way to get better performance on that isolated network is to set that MTU to a higher number. Now, the standard that's basically come out over the years is 9000.

01:30:30:08 - 01:30:56:03
Joey
So we go from a 1500 byte chunk to a 9000 byte chunk. This means each one of those packets that gets received again, they still get error checked and asked to be reset. If there's a problem. So we're doing I guess one fifth is is less often error checking. And we're doing one fifth as less often headers and other little metadata associated with the packet.

01:30:56:03 - 01:31:21:07
Joey
So we're taking the overhead of the network and drastically reducing it and letting it focus on raw throughput. This is great for storage. It's great for video. But again, it doesn't work on the wider internet or with normal consumer devices. So again, we have all of these jumbo frames, devices on their own switch. The switch has to be configured for jumbo frames for this to work.

01:31:21:07 - 01:31:24:13
Joey
Otherwise the switch is going to say, hey, you just sent me 9000 bytes. I was only.

01:31:24:13 - 01:31:25:15
Robbie
Expecting it to do that.

01:31:25:17 - 01:31:47:09
Joey
100. I don't know what to do with it. So then the question becomes, okay, how did these machines get out to the internet with their 9000 byte packets? That's where the router comes in. The router now understands jumbo frames because it's connected to a switch that understands jumbo frames. So when you send your jumbo frame packet to the router, the router says, oh, the MTU on this network is 9000.

01:31:47:11 - 01:32:14:03
Joey
The MTU on my internet is 1500. I'm going to take this packet, split it up into 4 or 5 1500 wide packets. Send those out to the internet on the way back. It does. Yeah. The the opposite. But the point is you can by segmenting your network like this, you can focus parts of it on performance by doing things like jumbo frames that would break normal, networks that you would need for the internet.

01:32:14:05 - 01:32:26:12
Robbie
And you said this, but just to reiterate this, this we're not this is not like hello, if I go to jumbo frames on improving my, you know, my browser speed to browse, you know, whatever a website. That's not this. This is more about data chips.

01:32:26:12 - 01:32:27:21
Joey
Anything that can get slower.

01:32:27:23 - 01:32:55:09
Robbie
Right. This is about data transmission within that LAN. Right. So if I'm moving files from one system to another system, I'm playing back something off of a, a network attached storage and the important part about this too, as you go, I think that this is a little bit of a mind job for some people, too. Is that, different performance networking requires, as we said, maybe possibly different switches, but also generally is going to require different cabling too.

01:32:55:09 - 01:33:17:23
Robbie
Right? So for example, to achieve ten gig speeds you probably need to have it probably at a minimum. Cat5 E cables six and six AA would be preferred, right? If you start going into, you know, 25 gig and 40 gig and 100 gig, you actually get out of the world of copper based cables altogether and you're going into, you know, fiber optic cables, right?

01:33:17:23 - 01:33:41:20
Robbie
With, you know, specialized connectors on them, SFP, which are modules for optical cables and so on. Right? So it does you do have to match cabling also, to performance when it comes to networking. And just like we've talked about before with SDI cables and stuff like it's pretty straightforward. It's just generations of stuff. They have some funky names like QP plus and Nonplused and all sorts of stuff for six a like.

01:33:42:01 - 01:33:43:20
Robbie
It's not all that confusing, just go to Wikipedia.

01:33:43:20 - 01:33:52:11
Joey
But the point is, you don't need to spend the money on the highest power stuff for if every not right, exactly. You only need to spend it for where you need it. Yeah.

01:33:52:13 - 01:34:12:05
Robbie
And then the last thing I think we should say, so sort of in this overview, episode is just the role of Wi-Fi, because I think this, this idea of, like, I'm the first one to admit, like, I hate cables. I mean, I just rewired my entire basement down here, and I like I will never I hopefully I never have to do it again for a long, long time.

01:34:12:05 - 01:34:40:14
Robbie
Right. But, I think, you know, in a wired world, wireless is attractive. And wireless, to be fair, has gotten considerably better. I mean, like, I just actually upgraded on my wireless, access points, and I'm basically doing the same speed as a wired speed now. But there is some trade offs. There's interference, there's added latency, etc.. So, you know, in a professional environment, I think of Wi-Fi as, okay, well, that's going to be for my IoT type stuff, right?

01:34:40:14 - 01:35:05:17
Robbie
Like, right. That probably doesn't have wires. It's going to be for things like client access. Right. But all of my main workstations and whatnot, I am striving to get that stuff wired. Not only is it going to be more consistent in terms of its performance, but it also provides a layer of security, right? Everybody's heard horror stories of somebody getting eavesdropped with an insecure Wi-Fi password or something like that.

01:35:05:23 - 01:35:30:09
Robbie
And next thing you know, somebody is on their network, right? So I try I tend to keep mission critical stuff off of Wi-Fi networks and on wired networks. But just like anything else, even if you, if you are using Wi-Fi networks, takes data security seriously, there are encryption methods, obviously, that are in use on Wi-Fi. Systems like WPA and two, three, etc..

01:35:30:11 - 01:35:54:04
Robbie
And also like some lot of systems, like the ubiquity stuff that Joey and I use, allow for things like guest portals. Right. So we can really limit and lock somebody down when they log on to our Wi-Fi, what they're doing. So I think Wi-Fi has a role. I would just urge that in a post-production, environment, depending on Wi-Fi for your main kind of backbone, it's probably a bad idea, right?

01:35:54:04 - 01:35:54:18
Robbie
For a lot. Yeah.

01:35:54:22 - 01:36:24:18
Joey
And I would take it to the next level and say, don't let Wi-Fi anywhere near your work network for any reason, because not only is the security, an issue, it's also troubleshooting. It's diagnostic, right? It's variables. We want our work network to be simple, purpose built, doing exactly what it needs to do. Because when there's an issue for troubleshooting a performance problem, you know, having Wi-Fi in the mix makes that troubleshooting much, much, much.

01:36:24:18 - 01:36:41:07
Robbie
Like three ups. For example, if I know if I do a data transfer from my NAS, you know, let's say it's ten gigabyte, I'm getting about 1000MB a second a gig, a second of playback on that every time I test it and try to transfer something. Right. Versus Wi-Fi. Okay. Well, I'm sitting here five feet from the router.

01:36:41:07 - 01:36:47:13
Robbie
I might be getting that speed, but then I take my laptop and I go over to the next room and I'm getting half of that speed. Right.

01:36:47:13 - 01:37:10:14
Joey
So like and here's the other thing, right. Because the Wi-Fi is going to be one interface. You're wired is going to be another interface that the the computer is not always going to tell you what interface is being used for what. So let's look at the look at the example of a network attached storage. Let's say you did what I don't recommend which is having you've got your sometimes your wired, sometimes your Wi-Fi.

01:37:10:16 - 01:37:22:12
Joey
You know you might have multiple paths. Well the protocols that do file sharing that we use like SMB for mounting file systems, we'll say, hey, I've got two paths to get to.

01:37:22:12 - 01:37:23:21
Robbie
This, right. Using both.

01:37:23:23 - 01:37:40:07
Joey
I'm going to use both because that'll be faster. Well, if one is Wi-Fi and one is ten gig, it's going to be really slow because it's always going to be waiting on the Wi-Fi. You're gonna be like, wait, I'm plugged in. Why is this going so slow? You've got a whole new layer that you need to diagnose and troubleshoot.

01:37:40:13 - 01:37:48:05
Joey
It's just not worth the hassle. Wi-Fi is for Internet of Things toys that don't matter and for your client's laptops.

01:37:48:07 - 01:38:06:17
Robbie
Yeah, I mean, I I'm not as hardcore about my hatred of of Wi-Fi as you are, but I, I get the I get the sentiment. So watch a lot of stuff that we covered here. You might have to listen to this one 2 or 3 times to go back. And again, this is you know, if some of you out there are listening, we're like, well, that's not totally the full picture.

01:38:06:19 - 01:38:33:11
Robbie
Of course, we skipped over a lot of some of the nuance, some of some of this stuff to kind of explain the bigger, you know, higher level picture. I, I will just say one thing, in in reference to the ecosystem and stuff for years I piecemeal, piecemeal this stuff together. I buy, you know, a switch from, you know, TP-Link then I buy another switch from Cisco and then, you know, whatever.

01:38:33:13 - 01:38:53:20
Robbie
I cannot advocate a and I'm not saying strictly ubiquiti either. I'm just saying something in IT infrastructure. That is, you often heard this phrase as an appliance, right? Or this ecosystem where, hey, all these things kind of know what they are. They all talk to each other. There's, you often hear this phrase and it the single, pane of glass.

01:38:53:20 - 01:39:13:05
Robbie
Right? I'm going to one place to control everything and have it all talk to each other. That is a awesome, awesome thing, right? So every time now I need to do anything. I just go to my, you know, my Ubiquiti account, log in to the router, and I'm like, oh, I'm going to adjust the camera here. Oh, and then I need to change this firewall rule all in the same place.

01:39:13:05 - 01:39:32:21
Robbie
Right. So it's definitely something to think about. If you guys have questions about any things that we talked about in this episode. Again, 50,000ft views on this stuff. And we went over a lot of it pretty quickly. Feel free to reach out. You can always head over to the offset podcast.com. We'll have some additional show notes there with some links out to some of these things that we're talking about, like some of the routers and switches and whatnot.

01:39:32:23 - 01:39:48:03
Robbie
Also if you find the show on, YouTube or Spotify or Apple Podcasts, be sure to give it a like and subscribe. Every little like and subscribe helps us out in a big way. So we appreciate, you guys, our audience for for checking out the show. I Joey, I think this was a good one.

01:39:48:03 - 01:39:58:02
Robbie
Fun, fun little, some little concept. And I'm sure we'll, we'll get a lots of, opinions on some of this stuff from, from our audience. But until the next time I am Robbie Carman

01:39:58:04 - 01:39:59:19
Joey
And I'm Joey D’Anna. Thanks for listening.