If you're anything like me, you are rightfully tired of paying for monthly subscriptions.
It feels like every day there's something new that's demanding a monthly fee,
whether it's a TV show you like, your car's heated seats, or a piece of software that you need for work.
The corporate meta these days is, you own nothing, you pay forever.
And you could just lie there and take it, or you can do what we do and use your hyper-nerd powers to push back.
You can load your media into a private Netflix with Plex.
You can automate your home with Home Assistant. Heck, you can even host your own cloud photo backup with Image.
The problem is, all of those things require at least some storage and, more critically,
some know-how when it comes to setup and maintenance. Now I'm sure that most of you are more than capable of figuring it out, and you might even enjoy the process.
But if you're like me, you probably also enjoy relaxing at the end of the day
without your family complaining that the garage doors won't open and that Plex is buffering.
What if there was a way to take that complexity, wrap it up in a nice little package,
or interface, if you will, and make it so that anyone could be their home's tech hero?
Okay, maybe not anyone, but the truth is, I have no idea exactly how user-friendly it is,
because even though I invested $250,000 into the idea that became HexOS over two years ago,
I have literally never tried it, until today.
Like, right now. Jake, is it any good?
I'm not telling you before our sponsor.
The story of why I decided to invest in this is actually kind of funny.
John from their team reached out to let me know, hey, I'm leaving on RAID,
I'm going to embark on this crazy journey, would you like to be an angel investor?
And I kind of went, yeah, thank you so much for thinking of me, but I'm out.
Then the very next weekend, I burned an entire evening fighting with a new Trunez setup,
and well, one thing led to another, and here it is.
To answer your earlier question, it's still pretty beta, so there is a lot that's missing,
but what's available today in the early access version they're launching,
it's actually pretty promising. Exciting, maybe, but we should probably give everyone
a quick teal the R before we get into that. Cool.
HexOS, what you're seeing on the screen right now, is an operating system, like, say, Windows,
but purpose built for running your own storage and your own apps on your own hardware,
whether that's at home or a small business. Now, none of that is special.
Network attached storage or NAS operating systems have been around for longer than I have,
and we have featured similar software, like Trunez and Unrayed, numerous times over the years.
The special sauce is that HexOS is designed to be easy to use, even if you're not a Jake.
What's that supposed to mean? It means show me how to set it up, nerd.
Well, you've got your USB right here. Okay. Have at her. All right, got it.
Yeah, off the floor. Now, we could have used a fancy pre-built server like we usually do,
but we figured it'd be better to show it off with something from eBay, like this OptiPlex 3050
we got for 45 bucks. It's got solid quad core bones, but it's missing storage and only had
a one gig network port. So we picked up a used 256 gig SSD to boot from, an Intel 10 gig network
card, and a pair of four terabyte C8 NAS hard drives, which fit as long as you're willing to
get a little bit creative with the stubby for meltytstore.com.
That brings our total before accounting for bulk storage to a nice $69. Nice.
We're going to have links to those parts down in the video description if you want to build something similar. Now we've already updated the BIOS and if you're rehabbing an old machine
like this, it is a good idea for you to do the same. Install wise, then it's the same as any other OS.
Plug in a bootable installer USB. You can make one of those with the ISO image and a tool like
Rufus or Etcher. Hold your system setup key, configure to select your USB boot device, restart,
and you should be good to go. Oh, there is one thing. If you want to run virtual machines or
apps, you're also going to want to make sure that virtualization is enabled while you're in the system
setup. Once you're in the installer, hit install, select your desired boot storage, administrative
user, enter a password and hit install. When that's done, remove the USB installer and reboot.
Pretty simple, but it will hopefully get even simpler in the future. How could that be simpler?
You're actually asking? Yeah, I actually do not know that. Just going to remove steps. Oh,
cool. All right. With the system booted, head to the HexOS Cloud dashboard and as long as your
system and you are on the same network, it should automatically detect it and be ready for setup.
Hit claim, enter the password you said earlier, and this is it. I finally get to look at HexOS
and since I know you guys are going to ask, yes, a self-hostable app for the dashboard
will be available in the future. But for now, it's cloud only. Now, you'll probably notice right
away that everything is pretty guided. It does compatibility checks for you to ensure that your
hardware is optimal and it makes it easy to see if everything is working. Click on the hard drives.
Let's see. Okay. What do we got there? Oh, yeah. It's got the USB. We don't need that anymore. Oh,
yeah, we can follow our own instructions. Okay. And here's my storage. Yeah. So it should
automatically set up your drives in the most optimal configuration, which for us,
you can see with only two four terabyte drives is either a RAID Z1 or a mirror. I think it's a mirror.
Yep. Okay. So that allows one of our drives to fail without any data loss, which actually does a
really good job of communicating extremely clearly. Yeah, one drive can fail four terabytes usable.
It's great. What's cool is it'll even create separate pools for SSDs and hard drives if you
have both. So you can put performance sensitive data like virtual disks, for example, on your SSDs,
and then all the rest of it on your cheaper mechanical storage. It is worth noting that
if we had more drives, which we could have if we threw an inexpensive HBA card into our server,
it would configure it differently according to ZFS best practices. So if we had like five or six
drives, yeah, but six drives would probably do a RAID Z2. So we could lose two without losing any
data. Fun fact, by the way, if you're not trying to do anything custom, like setting a non-standard
array layout, which by the way will be supported in future releases, all you have to do is click a
few times. I confirm that these will be deleted. I create a name for the server. Your dad's Dell.
Uh, confirm that you're going to wipe the drives and that's it. You've got your very own network
attached storage server ready to go. That means owning your data in a way that is not annoying to
manage. Kind of awesome in theory, but what can it do? Wait, is it done already? Oh wow, that's pretty
cool. Huh, this is actually surprisingly friendly. All of the features are definitely not there,
but what is there is is polished. So this is the dashboard, right? Hey. You got your processor,
that's doing stuff. You got your memory. That's also doing stuff. Yeah, very clearly labels,
the speed that your networking is operating at. I didn't notice that. That's cute. Yeah. Which
one? Is that the one that's working? Yeah. Oh, look at the little graph right there. Nice. Most
importantly, our storage. Okay, cool. So what do we got here? We can expand this. No, we can't. We
don't have extra drives. Oh, oh, that kind of expansion. Yeah. I thought it meant expand the
look at it. The view drives, you can do that. Okay, cool. I can view drives. Nice. I think I broke
it already. Oh, you changed the networking settings. Oh, dude, dude. This is why I'm such a good beta
tester. Did I click apply? Oh yeah, no, I totally clicked update. Oh, you probably clicked update.
100%. Oh, yeah, that's right. That's why there was an alias there. Cool. All right. Okay, we're
back in the dashboard. What were we trying to do? Storage. We're trying to look at the storage. Yeah, I don't know how we ended up there. View drives. Hey, look at that. We got some drives. Let's go.
Hey, healthy, device ID, temperature. A lot of parts of the dashboard like this have basic
functionality, but there is stuff that's going to be added on later. Like, eventually you'll be able
to go, hey, run a smart test, which is checking the drive's health or see your old smart test or
schedule smart tests. But from a basic standpoint anyway, this is working. However, we can't actually
do anything with it yet. There's another step that we need to go through before we can use
our storage over the network, and that's creating a folder or share. It does take a couple of extra
clicks. Okay. Add a folder, line a share, and then managing permissions. This is incredible.
This is so simple. Yeah, sure. Fine. I'll add a user. And then I go into my folders. Oh, boom,
brother. Dude. I sent some long emails to John. Oh, yeah. Bless his heart, poor guy.
Talking about permissions and what a nightmare it is on other NAS operating systems. Just
drilling in. Guys, it's got to be simple. And this, dude, this is the best I could have possibly
hoped for. Are you telling me you don't want to learn how to do ACLs? No. No, I just, I just want
to get my Linux ISOs onto my network storage and off. Well, right? The idea here is that you can make
users for your kids, your roommate, your spouse, whatever, and everyone can have their own private
place to put files. And you can either have read only access or full access. So I'm going to give
myself full access. I'm just going to make this a public share, which I wouldn't necessarily recommend
doing, but hey, it's there now. So theoretically, I can just access this share immediately. Here,
click on this though. Oh, sure. And then go click browse. There you go. I told you how to do it.
Oh, oh, oh, cute. Yeah. And then you just copy paste and click enter. And you're there.
I mean, you didn't technically follow the instructions. They told you to map it, but
you're there. And there's actually, if you click the drop down, it gives you the Mac instructions,
too. Oh, cute. Yeah. Wasn't that so easy? How long did that take? You could probably have done that
in like three minutes. Look at that. It's done already. Yeah, do another one. Let's go. It's a
mirror. So we're limited to the speed of one hard drive. But I mean, it just works, right?
To be clear, there is nothing groundbreaking about having a network share and being able to copy
some flipping files to it. But if you have ever set up TrueNAS, you will know that it takes a few
more clicks and probably some Google searches. I have no idea what you're talking about. Yeah, sure.
But while simplicity sounds great in theory, when it comes to trusting something that holds your
precious data, you would hope that stability and security would also be priorities. And they are.
And it's kind of the coolest part. See, HexOS is not a ground up project. That would have taken
even more years to pull off. And frankly, would have been a complete waste of time,
which is why the team decided to build off of an already respected storage system, TrueNAS.
For the uninitiated, TrueNAS, formerly known as FreeNAS, has been around in some form or another
for nearly two decades. And while their business focuses on reliable, performant, open source,
enterprise grade storage, something that doesn't really need to be home user friendly,
they also love the idea of making it easier to use, which is why HexSystems is the other
main investor in HexOS, which gives them a financial incentive to ensure that HexOS is a success.
This collaboration is super cool because even though HexOS is built for normies first,
all of that TrueNAS goodness is still under the hood if you know where to look. And where is that?
Literally right here. Settings, TrueNAS, done. So if you want to do something HexOS doesn't do,
but TrueNAS does, you can drop into the TrueNAS interface and override it. No questions asked.
It also means that HexOS works with their existing Docker apps and virtual machine functionality.
It's pretty cool. Until Beta 2 comes out in a few months, you're only going to see support for
apps. And as of shooting a few weeks before this video goes live, only Plex and Image are curated
for HexOS so far. Let's do Plex. And then hit install. Okay. And that's it. That's it. That's
literally it. No configuring storage paths, assigning resources. Negative. Okay. What if
my Plex, I want a GPU acceleration or something like that? Have they got that solved? That is not
there yet. As you can imagine, having only two curated apps, not a huge priority at the moment,
but in the future, the idea would be, you know, like a drop down or a checkbox. Yes,
I want to use my GPU. But if you go back to folders now, you'll see that they're exposed.
So now they're passed through as network shares. And if you click on one of them,
like say media, go to browse, copy the path, you can just copy movies right over.
All right. Because of the design for user friendliness, these are public shares by default,
which I was like, I get it. I hate it, but I get it. HexOS test.
Oh, do we have any media files? Yeah, easy peasy. Dude, this shouldn't be this exciting.
This should just be how it's always worked. This is a $69 computer. Yeah,
just like any random ancient machine. Yeah, just throw this on it and
nas even just having the permissions so that I can just click the one that says movies. And
and that'll like if you do the intuitive thing, yeah, it'll probably be right. Yeah. And that's
it. Okay. So we can see everything here. I'm just going to go to other videos.
Just like that, boys. Hey, nobody can take this content off the platform or take away
your access to it. That compared to the other times I've had to fight with folder permissions
and true nas with Plex. Wow. Okay. Now image. This one's even more challenging. It's actually kind
of mind boggling that these guys have been working away on this after like me giving them some funding
and I have not even like asked for an update. You literally never even looked at it.
They showed me like a really early couple of like screenshots of what they were kind of thinking
for the vibe of the wizard. Yeah. Your email was basically I will only give you this money if you
just don't talk to me about it until it's ready. I don't have time for extra projects. No, I agree.
Okay. Look at that. So that's it. It started. Okay. I mean, we can't do anything about the
setup process of the apps themselves, but well, you might be able to actually. But
right now, not a priority. Well, put it on your phone. No way. Just download the app. There's
absolutely no way that that just works. You have image already. Okay. I need to set a server
and it's just that URL. Oh, perfect. Okay. Allow full access. Oh, oh my God. Are you just gonna
how many photos are on the phone? A few. There's no like the photos we wouldn't want to see in
the reserve. I should certainly hope not. I just go to backup and then I can select any
album that I want to back up from your phone, from my phone. And then I go back and I click
backup and then boom. Hey, look, it's boom. Look at it go. Such a cute photo. Look at the kittens.
I know. Wow. Look at that. It works. So you've uploaded that whole folder and it's done,
which is great as long as you're on the same local network. But to truly replace your
expensive subscription services like Google Photos, you've got to be able to use it when
you're out and about. That'll be covered. They'll be curating apps that allow you to have a reverse
proxy setup with like a domain. You could have photos.Linus.com and that would be a relatively
secure way to do it. And I also pitched John on maybe working with Cloudflare to integrate their
access zero trust setup, which allows you to do that but without port forwarding and you can even
password protect it with your Google account. Oh, that would be super cool. They're also going to
have WireGuard VPN integrated soon for easy remote access. And they also also plan to offer a fully
integrated remote access system by way of an inexpensive subscription, which yes, I know a
subscription, but doing that for free wouldn't be sustainable. And it's not like you're forced to
use it. It reminds me of Home Assistant where the subscription is kind of a more of a convenience
thing. You can 100% have Home Assistant remotely accessible on your own, but it is inconvenient.
I pay for it. And there's even more. The original reason for integrating WireGuard was actually for
a feature that I have been begging John to create for nine years. Well, buddy backup. This is going
to be super cool. The idea is that if you and a paid friend both have HexOS, you'll be able to
easily share storage capacity with each other in a safe, secure manner. That way I could back up
my stuff to a separate geographic location, say for example, your house and you could back up your
stuff to my house and both of the shares would be encrypted. I'm not giving you ****. What?
It's encrypted. I can't even access it. I'm not giving you my bytes. Look, the point is that you
can have a mutually beneficial agreement to give each other offsite backup. Did you hear that word?
You said agreement. What? Jake. Oh, you're being so unhelpful right now.
The point is that you'd be able to share capacity with each other or just file share with each other
without having to manually set up a solution for that, which is very doable today. Yeah.
But a royal pain in the arse. Yeah. The file sharing thing is, I could vibe with that. Man,
I got to tell you the real reason I want to do this is so that I can just build a giant
offsite backup target here and then like it'll be an employment perk because as long as I provide
it for people other than myself, then it's tax free. That means it's free, right? Is it right off?
Now, here's the pitch. HexOS is an awesome concept with real backing and a passionate team,
but unlike TrueNess, which it's based on, it is not free. There are real people behind this
project and as much as I'd love to, it's not something that I can personally fund forever.
So with all of that said, till the end of the day, December 2nd, HexOS's early access is finally
available to try out at the Black Friday only price of $99 for a lifetime license. One payment,
access for life, including any and all future updates. After the Black Friday sale, they plan
to increase the lifetime pricing to $199 during early access and then $299 when it goes retail
with, yes, a cheaper monthly subscription option coming sometime later. To reiterate,
it is very beta. There will be bugs which you can report on the HexOS forums and you shouldn't use
it for anything that you need to work flawlessly. Like, it'll probably be fine in terms of data
integrity since it's mostly just an interface for an existing very stable and reliable product,
but I have to give you guys that warning regardless. It's also not going to be the only NAS software
that we ever use or mention again. It's a focused product that is meant for the homelab, creator,
and tech dad market. So while it would work for a small business once it's ready,
it's not going to replace a dedicated hypervisor like Proxmox for instance. And if you already have
a true NAS system that's working perfectly fine, it doesn't yet support adopting an existing install,
so it'll require reinstalling. But hey, if you, like myself, believe in the idea of owning your
own data and you want great NAS software that is actually user-friendly like I do, and you can
afford to mess around with it on a spare system, the HexOS folks and myself would love for you to
try it out and let them know what you think. If you absolutely hate it during the beta,
you will be able to request a refund within 30 days, and another separate note, if you're a
TypeScript or Nuxt developer who loves the idea, they're hiring and the info will be in the description.
Overall, HexOS takes our $69 NAS up to $368. Not as nice, but what I like is that it's an ecosystem
you're not locked into and that you can upgrade the hardware. If you want, you can get a better
machine or you can beef up your existing one. And worst case, if you don't like HexOS or if the
company somehow implodes, you can just disconnect it from the dashboard and you're essentially
running true NAS. I really hope that doesn't happen, but I just wanted to make it clear here
that there will be options unlike all those users that are running those vulnerable D-Link NASs that
simply will never be updated to fix it. Brutal. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out
my last home NAS build? I cannot wait to try this at my house because I have like some super sick
plans. I am completely out of storage. Dude, me too. I'm like 88% utilized. So many Linux
hard drives are so expensive. Recertified though. They're still expensive.