The IT Guy Show

I've got a Dell PowerEdge R720 in colocation that sounds like a jet engine, it's six to eight years old, and I refuse to pay Dell a thousand dollars just to unlock its IPMI port. So instead of guessing my way into a replacement, I brought in someone who builds this hardware for a living.

Zack Perry is a Solution Specialist at 45Drives and the face of 45HomeLab, the homelab side of a company that's been building open, repairable, enterprise-grade storage since it was making servers for Backblaze. We walk the whole lineup, from the Home Client and Workstation up through the HL8, HL15, HL15 Beast, and the new Unraid X15, and Zack lays out which one actually fits what I'm running. Then he does the thing I needed: he takes my real numbers, 16 virtual machines and about 124 gigs of RAM with room to double, and points me at a specific box, right down to the CPU, the HBA, and how loud it is from three feet away.

We also get into what we both refuse to self-host, a good networking rabbit hole, and moving a whole lab onto an infrastructure-as-code workflow. If you're weighing colocation against bringing it home, this one's for you.

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Special Guest: Zack Perry.

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Most password managers ask you to trust them blindly. Bitwarden opens the hood and shows you the code instead. I sat down with Kasey Babcock, a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Bitwarden, to get into why that openness matters when a tool is holding every credential you own.

We start with the trust argument for open source, then walk through what is new at Bitwarden lately, from the archive feature and fill assist to encrypted file sharing and Access Intelligence reporting. Then we go where most password manager conversations never do, which is your infrastructure. We talk Secrets Manager, the Terraform integration, pulling secrets into automated workflows, and the mistakes teams make when they move secrets out of plaintext.

We close on passkeys, passwordless, and where the whole industry is heading. Whether you are a security nerd, an admin wrangling secrets across environments, or just tired of reusing the same password everywhere, this one has something for you.

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Special Guest: Kasey Babcock.

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Most of us treat our homelabs like a junk drawer. Something breaks, we shrug, we fix it whenever we get around to it. Mathias Palmersheim does not operate that way. He's a Solutions Engineer at VictoriaMetrics, where he spends his days helping companies monitor infrastructure at serious scale, and he's brought that same discipline home. He runs his personal homelab against an actual SLA, the kind of uptime commitment most of us only deal with at work.

Mathias joins me to talk about VictoriaMetrics itself, the time series database built for high cardinality metrics and logs at scale, and why open source observability tooling matters even outside the enterprise. But the real fun is in how he applies that professional rigor to his own gear at home. We get into what it actually takes to hold yourself to an SLA when there's no boss checking in, what breaks the plan, and whether this level of intensity is something the rest of us should aspire to or just admire from a distance.

If you've ever wondered what happens when a monitoring expert points all that expertise at his own home network, this one's for you.

Welcome to The IT Guy Show, your go-to destination for all things tech with Eric, your friendly neighborhood IT guy! Join Eric as he shares his wealth of knowledge, insights, and experiences gained from years of working in the IT industry. From troubleshooting common tech issues to exploring the latest trends and innovations, each episode is packed with practical tips, skilled advice, and engaging discussions.

Connect with me! https://linktr.ee/itguyeric

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Special Guest: Mathias Palmersheim.

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At SouthEast Linux Fest, I did something I've never attempted before: a live, hands-on intro to tabletop role playing games for a packed room of Linux nerds. No idea how many people were showing up. No idea how many had ever touched a d6. Somewhere between 10 and 100, they said. Cool. Cool cool cool.

We covered the basics of TTRPGs, walked through systems like D&D, Savage Worlds, and Dungeon World, and then built a one-shot together live with the audience. The room gave me a 97 year old Elf Wizard named Ethan on a desperate mission to save his favorite tiki bar from burning down. The villain was named Bob. He stole all the turtles. The tacos were at stake. It went exactly as chaotic as you'd expect.

This is the full recording including the slide deck, the worldbuilding exercise, and the one-shot itself. If you've ever been curious about TTRPGs but didn't know where to start, this is the episode for you.

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Home labs have evolved from hobbyist experiments to essential infrastructure for tech professionals, but knowing when to build one…and how…isn't always clear. Josh from Keep It Techie joins Eric to discuss the practical realities of home lab ownership: the cost-benefit calculations, the apartment constraints, and the decisions that actually matter when you're running real workloads. From colocation trade-offs to gigabit fiber potential, we break down Eric's current setup and explore whether it's time to bring the lab home.

Welcome to The IT Guy Show, your go-to destination for all things tech with Eric, your friendly neighborhood IT guy! Join Eric as he shares his wealth of knowledge, insights, and experiences gained from years of working in the IT industry. From troubleshooting common tech issues to exploring the latest trends and innovations, each episode is packed with practical tips, skilled advice, and engaging discussions.

Website: https://keepittechie.com

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Graphics and bumpers by Free Hive Agency

Special Guest: Joshua Lacy.

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AI is everywhere, and so is the fear that it's coming for your job. But what if the real story is more interesting than that?

Eric sits down with returning guest Karl Abbott, tech leader and podcaster, for a conversation sparked by his recent article "AI Didn't Replace My Work. It Changed How I Work." Karl shares how leaning into AI tools didn't make him feel replaced. It made him feel more focused. The mechanics got faster. The judgment, taste, and narrative instinct? Still 100% human.

Welcome to The IT Guy Show, your go-to destination for all things tech with Eric, your friendly neighborhood IT guy! Join Eric as he shares his wealth of knowledge, insights, and experiences gained from years of working in the IT industry. From troubleshooting common tech issues to exploring the latest trends and innovations, each episode is packed with practical tips, skilled advice, and engaging discussions.

Connect with me! https://linktr.ee/itguyeric

Article: AI Didn’t Replace My Work. It Changed How I Work

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Graphics and bumpers by Free Hive Agency

Special Guest: Karl Abbott.

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Teaching a Linux course will humble you fast, especially when your students ask about apt and you realize the last time you logged into an Ubuntu server was when you were still a sysadmin. That embarrassing moment is what sent Eric looking for someone who lives and breathes Ubuntu every single day, and it led him to Nathan, a two-decade Ubuntu community volunteer who has been running booths, moderating Reddit, and serving on the Ubuntu Community Council since the early days of the distro.

This episode is less a technical deep dive and more a conversation about what makes Ubuntu different at a human level. Nathan walks through the early days of the community, the real relationship between Debian and Ubuntu, what it looked like to set up a booth with plastic tablecloths from Party City at SCaLe 6x, and why the "distro wars" online are mostly theater compared to the genuine camaraderie between open source contributors behind the scenes.

If you have ever wondered whether Ubuntu is still the right distro for someone just getting started or coming back after years on other platforms, this episode will give you the honest answer from someone who has watched the community evolve for more than twenty years.

Welcome to The IT Guy Show, your go-to destination for all things tech with Eric, your friendly neighborhood IT guy! Join Eric as he shares his wealth of knowledge, insights, and experiences gained from years of working in the IT industry. From troubleshooting common tech issues to exploring the latest trends and innovations, each episode is packed with practical tips, skilled advice, and engaging discussions.

Connect with me! https://linktr.ee/itguyeric

Special Guest: Nathan Haines.

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In this episode of The IT Guy Show, Eric sits down with Damen Knight, CIQ Sr. Principal Automation Engineer, to talk about something every AI team knows but nobody budgets for: the hidden cost of configuring Linux for GPU workloads.

Welcome to The IT Guy Show, your go-to destination for all things tech with Eric, your friendly neighborhood IT guy! Join Eric as he shares his wealth of knowledge, insights, and experiences gained from years of working in the IT industry. From troubleshooting common tech issues to exploring the latest trends and innovations, each episode is packed with practical tips, skilled advice, and engaging discussions.

Connect with me! https://linktr.ee/itguyeric

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Graphics and bumpers by Free Hive Agency

Sponsored By:

• CIQ

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We’re starting 2026 with a reality check: subscriptions are eating our wallets. From streaming services to password managers, cloud storage to to-do apps — the "monthly drip" is everywhere.

In this solo episode, Eric breaks down why recurring subscription models have become the default, how they impact both consumers and creators, and what it looks like to take back control through self-hosting and open source alternatives.

This episode kicks off a new arc focused on building a personal homelab, reducing reliance on cloud services, and reclaiming your tech stack one app at a time.

Welcome to The IT Guy Show, your go-to destination for all things tech with Eric, your friendly neighborhood IT guy! Join Eric as he shares his wealth of knowledge, insights, and experiences gained from years of working in the IT industry. From troubleshooting common tech issues to exploring the latest trends and innovations, each episode is packed with practical tips, skilled advice, and engaging discussions.

Connect with me! https://linktr.ee/itguyeric

Chapters:

Graphics and bumpers by Free Hive Agency

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In this episode of The IT Guy Show, Eric is joined by Linux content creator Brodie Robertson to dive into the display server drama of the decade: the end of X11 and the rise of Wayland.

Together they explore the history of X11, its weird quirks, and why it stuck around so long, before unpacking what makes Wayland different, better, and sometimes frustrating. From screen tearing and window managers to PipeWire, gaming, and remote desktops, this episode covers the past, present, and future of the Linux desktop experience.

Whether you’re a veteran sysadmin who lived through the xhost + days or a curious distro-hopper wondering why Wayland keeps breaking your screen sharing, this episode has something for you.

Welcome to The IT Guy Show, your go-to destination for all things tech with Eric, your friendly neighborhood IT guy! Join Eric as he shares his wealth of knowledge, insights, and experiences gained from years of working in the IT industry. From troubleshooting common tech issues to exploring the latest trends and innovations, each episode is packed with practical tips, skilled advice, and engaging discussions.

Connect with me! https://linktr.ee/itguyeric

X Window System: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System

Wayland Protocols Table: https://absurdlysuspicious.github.io/wayland-protocols-table

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Graphics and bumpers by Free Hive Agency

Special Guest: Brodie Robertson.

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