2.5 Admins

2.5 Admins 317: Need Less Sep 17, 2026 26:29 Some of the ways you can mitigate the ridiculous hardware prices, and designing a small business LAN.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes FreeBSD’s Release Cycle: What It Means for Your Upgrade Schedule   Free consulting We were asked about designing a small business LAN.                

2.5 Admins 316: BGP Clipboard Hijack Sep 10, 2026 27:36 A BGP hijack involved some basic errors, Microsoft teaches people to ignore warnings in Windows, Zoom appears to be reading the clipboard on X11, why a non-US open certificate authority is feasible in theory, and keeping a NAS powered on as little as possible.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Send us an email   News/discussion BGP hijack

2.5 Admins 315: Hot Bus Adapter Sep 3, 2026 27:24 What to read into a study of long-term Backblaze hard drive failure data, why the difference between TB and TiB matters, and what to do about an overheating host bus adapter.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes ZFS vs Ceph: Choosing the Right Storage Architecture   News/discussion Peer-reviewed study of 443,000 Backblaze hard drives ranks HG

2.5 Admins 314: 50 PBS TBS Aug 27, 2026 28:27 A TV station struggles to retrieve its data from the data centre company that a defunct intermediary used, why we don’t want AI to manage our networks (even if Microsoft thinks we should), and understanding vdevs, and datasets in ZFS.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes OpenZFS User and Developer Summit 2026 CfP is open until September 11 F

2.5 Admins 313: Cooking with NVMe Aug 20, 2026 27:56 Microsoft claims that Windows 11 will work well with 8GB of RAM, some of the innovations coming to high end SSDs, the arguments for TP-Link Omada over Ubiquiti UniFi.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes FreeBSD Support: Greatest Hits   Discussion Microsoft says 8 GB of RAM should be enough for anyone running Windows 11 Windows quality: an up

2.5 Admins 312: Bus Factor Aug 13, 2026 26:47 In a world where photos can no longer be trusted, Jim argues that we should move to a default distrust model where images are signed at every stage of the process of creation. We get into some of the potential issues. Plus how to ensure continuity for your clients in the event of your demise, and setting up a system to demonstrate ZFS replication capabilities.   Plugs Support us on patreon an

2.5 Admins 311: Couch Cushions Aug 6, 2026 28:12 Microsoft restored an account including files that it initially claimed wasn’t possible, Apple might lock down phones if people don’t keep up their lease payments, ZFS scrubs shouldn’t be painful, and accessing another network from a locked-down work machine.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes ZFS vs Ceph: Do You Actually Need

2.5 Admins 310: GPLFreeBSD Jul 30, 2026 29:11 Google wants you to use a selfie video for account recovery, LG will stop apps turning their smart TVs into residential proxy nodes, we disagree about how serious OpenAI’s agent hacking Hugging Face is, FreeBSD removes the last bits of GPL software and suffers an embarrassing git flub , and backing up to an encrypted NAS without ZFS.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS f

2.5 Admins 309: Orbital Sauron Jul 23, 2026 24:01 A new HTTP caching standard looks promising but might struggle to get adopted, a terrible space mirror idea is actually happening, cars will spy on us all, and picking a VPN for use with an IP that doesn’t change very often.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes   News/discussion HTTP gets a QUERY method so complex searches can stop prete

2.5 Admins 308: Sloppy Shims Jul 16, 2026 27:37 Microsoft really wants your Windows settings data, secure boot has been useless for a decade, our thoughts on (the idea of) Incus and IncusOS, and configuring ZFS for a Lightning Memory Mapped Database.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Jails, Not Containers: FreeBSD Isolation Done Right   News/discussion Microsoft flips Windows Backup to

2.5 Admins 307: One Big Pool Jul 9, 2026 26:37 Follow-up on rebooting to update, portable power stations, glass storage, and objective news sources. Plus whether to use one ZFS pool per vdev, or just one large pool.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Native inotify in FreeBSD   Feedback Anker SOLIX EV Charger Adapter (For F3000, J1722 only) EcoFlow EV Charger to Portable Power Station A

2.5 Admins 306: WiFi Cable Jul 2, 2026 28:04 Why setting up commercial email and VPN services is incredibly hard, avoiding TrueNAS’s move from FreeBSD to Linux, why we avoid virtualising storage systems, and bridging WiFi to an external building.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Using Object Storage with OpenZFS and SeaweedFS   Discussion Jeff Moss explains why setting up priv

2.5 Admins 305: Short Two Jun 25, 2026 7:17 The one tool in our IT tool belt that we value the most. This is a short episode because Joe is having a summer break.                 See our contact page for ways to get in touch.  

2.5 Admins 304: Wiring a House Jun 18, 2026 30:21 Wiring up a house for networking including cables, access points, connectors, and racks. Plus Google is found liable for what its AI overviews say.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Managing Cache and DirectIO for Databases on ZFS Webinar: June 30th @ 11am EDT: FreeBSD After Hours AMA   News/discussion Landmark German ruling declares Googl

2.5 Admins 303: Denial of Secrets Jun 11, 2026 29:30 People were locked out of their password managers to stop a brute force attack, Coreutils come to Windows, a FreeBSD PR effort backfires, and the best simple consumer WiFi gear.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Why ZFS Is the Ideal Filesystem for Multi-User/Department Media Production Webinar: June 30th @ 11am EDT: FreeBSD After Hours AMA &nbs

2.5 Admins 302: ClawPilot Jun 4, 2026 32:44 Microsoft threatens a security researcher for disclosing vulnerabilities publicly, bricks old versions of Office, and announces their version of OpenClaw. Plus keeping up with the latest technology.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Which ZFS Storage Metrics Matter for Database Performance Webinar: June 25th @ 11am EDT: Understanding AnyRAID wi

2.5 Admins 301: F(OSS) Consulting May 28, 2026 29:17 It looks like Bitlocker had a back door in it, how a listener accidentally broke Gitea for users of the snap version, Google accidentally published an unpatched exploit for Chromium-based browsers, why people are starting to ditch Bitwarden, and moving a tech stack away from large corporations.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes How Klara and Tr

2.5 Admins 300: IPvWot? May 21, 2026 28:24 Why a proposal for an alternative to IPv6 is unlikely to be viable, Microsoft really doesn’t want you to run Exchange Server on-prem, Google will finally stop being a proper search engine, setting up an email server for internal use, and mitigating DDoS attacks without Cloudflare.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Tuning ZFS for Databases

2.5 Admins 299: RMAggravation May 14, 2026 27:41 People trying to return defective hard drives and RAM are finding out why consumer protection laws would be good, GoDaddy accidentally gave someone’s domain name away, and when and how to fix ZFS fragmentation.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Fast Dedup Economics: When Deduplication Beats Buying New Disks   News/discussion Toshiba

2.5 Admins 298: Windows Postdate May 7, 2026 Microsoft is encouraging employees with the most experience to leave the company and letting users pause Windows updates forever, some of the best features you’ll get in the version of ZFS that ships with the new Ubuntu LTS, and backing up data from cloud services.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Extending ZFS Performance Without Hardwa

2.5 Admins 297: Jraphics Apr 30, 2026 32:43 Hitting the limit for hard links, a parent struggles to get back into their teen’s compromised Discord account, the demise of tower PCs and general purpose computing in general, and changing the properties of existing ZFS pools.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Compensating for RAM Constraints with L2ARC on ZFS   News/discussion How

2.5 Admins 296: Beware of the Leopard Apr 23, 2026 30:32 Microsoft locks devs out of important accounts, the foreign router ban exemptions make even less sense, Backblaze shows that “unlimited” never means that, and attempting to avoid software that’s written with AI.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Do More with Less: Cost-Efficient Storage on the New TrueNAS with Enhanced Fast De

2.5 Admins 295: Orbital Meltdown Apr 16, 2026 28:19 Why putting data center satellites in orbit is a terrible idea, Google might show people a made-up version of your website, and ZFS on really old Dell servers.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes   News/discussion Orbital data centers, part 1: There’s no way this is economically viable, right? 11 mins edited Datacenters in space are a terribl

2.5 Admins 294: Oh, R2 Apr 9, 2026 22:24 Arm announces its first CPU, Anthropic accidentally leaks the source for Claude Code and it’s terrible, and setting up a backup for a friend’s photos.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes FreeBSD and OpenZFS in the Quest for Technical Independence: A Storage Architect’s View   News/discussion Arm expands compute platform to silic

2.5 Admins 293: Reduced Flicker Apr 2, 2026 27:20 Microsoft says Windows 11 is getting less rubbish but we are skeptical, vehicles with alcohol interlocks won’t start because the manufacturer’s server is down, and whether you should virtualise a router or a NAS.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Five‑Year Storage Design with OpenZFS: Media Refresh, Rebalancing, and Hardware Indepen

2.5 Admins 292: Trivyally Infected Mar 26, 2026 27:12 The US government is drumming up fear about foreign routers, a pretty serious supply chain attack might be state-sponsored, and the safety of filesystems inside VMs.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes The Real Cost of Technology Dependence: Building Independence with Open-Source Storage   News/discussion US bans any new consumer-grade route

2.5 Admins 291: UPS for LiFePO4 Mar 19, 2026 28:43 Why passkeys aren’t the right solution to everything, Allan tells us why he loves his new Lithium Iron Phosphate UPS, Btrfs vs ZFS on root, and restricting Internet access for IoT devices on your network.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Designing OpenZFS Storage for Independence   News/discussion Please, please, please stop us

2.5 Admins 290: Tired of Tracking Mar 12, 2026 28:33 Microsoft Authenticator will delete Entra credentials on phones that aren’t running stock ROMs, Jim’s nightmare experience trying to get a user back into their MS account, tracking vehicles via tire pressure monitors, using a ZFS pool in a degraded state, and keeping cold ZFS storage dataset snapshots in sync.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early ep

2.5 Admins 289: Hunter2 Mar 5, 2026 27:02 An exciting new cold storage technology seems to be getting closer, Nvidia seemingly wants a slice of the laptop hardware action, why you (and your users) should definitely not use LLMs to “generate” passwords , and whistleblowing when sensitive customer data isn’t being taken seriously.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes

2.5 Admins 288: HDD Tourism Feb 26, 2026 28:38 Hardware scarcity and price hikes spread to hard drives, the Bcachefs dev thinks his AI is ‘fully conscious’, an agent might have gone after a FOSS maintainer, Jim is disappointed with an Ars author, and ZFS and VMs in the homelab.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Piss up at The Shipwrights Arms (just next to London Bridge sta

2.5 Admins 287: Dual Arguators Feb 19, 2026 32:44 Jim and Allan disagree on how new hard drive tech is likely to work, more on storage and compute in the same box, and how we set up disk encryption on laptops.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes OpenZFS Monitoring and Observability   News/discussion Western Digital doubles the performance of hard drives with dual-actuator High-Bandwidt

2.5 Admins 286: Windows Crashed Feb 12, 2026 25:41 Notepad++ falls victim to a state-sponsored attacker, AI agents talk nonsense to each other on an insecure vibe coded social network, and backing up a laptop properly.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes ZFS vs Btrfs: Architecture, Features, and Stability   News/discussion Notepad++ Hijacked by State-Sponsored Hackers AI agents now have

2.5 Admins 285: example.com.oops Feb 5, 2026 27:41 Outlook’s autodiscover feature is leaking data again, our thoughts on the cycle of cloud and on-prem (centralised and local computing), and why you probably shouldn’t use NMVe to SATA adapters.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes ZFS in Production: Real-World Deployment Patterns and Pitfalls Modern VDI on Proxmox: ZFS Reliability

2.5 Admins 284: BooTooth Jan 29, 2026 26:08 Why you might not want your Windows encryption keys to be backed up to Microsoft, some Bluetooth devices are vulnerable to snooping and tracking, a lesson in the need for backups, and the best practices and stack for setting up a mail server.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Klara’s Expert Perspective on OpenZFS in 2026 and What to Expec

2.5 Admins 283: FSOD Jan 22, 2026 25:10 The last method to activate Windows without the Internet has gone away, malware that tricks users with a fake blue screen of death, and recovering from bad RAM with ZFS.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Understanding ZFS Scrubs and Data Integrity   News/discussion Windows activation by phone is seemingly dead How Fake BSODs and Trust

2.5 Admins 282: Fragile DNS Jan 15, 2026 28:51 Cisco network gear fell over when it shouldn’t have, yet another security flaw is found in Microsoft Copilot, the US military is letting Grok into all its networks, and managing LVM snapshots.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Unwrapping ZFS: Gifts from the Open Source Community A New Year, A New ZFS: What 2.4 Brings to the Table &nb

2.5 Admins 281: Lead The Target Jan 8, 2026 26:37 The many reasons why email shouldn’t be trusted. Plus how to stop your kids accessing inappropriate content online, and why the answer probably isn’t a technical one.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes What We Built: Top ZFS Capabilities Delivered by Klara in 2025   Discussion Please STOP trusting email   Free consulti

2.5 Admins 280: Bad Parking Jan 1, 2026 26:25 Why you should probably keep paying for your old domains, the perpetual problem of typo squatting, a machine learning expert’s take on BS from LLMs, and whether to separate compute and storage in a home setup.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Can You Have Too Many VDEVs? A Practical Guide to ZFS Scaling   News/discussion Digita

2.5 Admins 279: Short One Dec 25, 2025 7:21 The one bit of advice we’d give to someone wanting to become a professional sysadmin. This is a short episode because Joe is having a break for the Christmas period.             See our contact page for ways to get in touch.  

2.5 Admins 278: XXXfil Dec 18, 2025 26:06 Apple deletes a person’s entire digital life, PornHub Premium user data is leaked, Mozilla’s new CEO wants to ruin Firefox, Tech Force in the USA is alarming, and fine tuning storage for databases.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Is DWPD Still a Useful SSD Spec?   News/discussion 20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Inst

2.5 Admins 277: Battering RAM Dec 11, 2025 28:34 The Crucial brand of consumer SSDs and RAM is going away, AMD and Intel memory encryption can be bypassed with cheap hardware, more AI buffoonery, and monitoring users’ usage on a network.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes When RAID Isn’t Enough: ZFS Redundancy Done Right   News/discussion Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Cons

2.5 Admins 276: Very Prudish Network Dec 4, 2025 26:16 What a government crackdown on VPNs would look like, malware groups play the long game with browser extensions, a new major version of FreeBSD is released, and using a single database vs one DB per application or VM.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes ZFS Enabled Disaster Recovery for Virtualization   News/discussion The VPN panic is o

2.5 Admins 275: G-word Nov 27, 2025 25:51 Google kept collecting sensor data even after bricking Nest thermostats, FreeBSD’s container support gets serious, and where to find cheap (or even dirt cheap) used hardware.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes How to Set Up a Highly Available ZFS Pool Using Mirroring and iSCSI December Webinar: The 12 Days of ZFS: Tips, Tricks, and Tr

2.5 Admins 274: Go Go Gadget Windows Nov 20, 2025 27:15 Windows is becoming an “agentic OS”, some WD SMR drives are dying prematurely, backing up VMware with ZFS, and separating trusted and non-trusted devices on your network.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Understanding Storage Performance Metrics December Webinar: The 12 Days of ZFS: Tips, Tricks, and Treats   News/discuss

2.5 Admins 273: Reliability Tracking Nov 13, 2025 25:58 Allan tells us about the recent OpenZFS Summit including inconsistent JBODs, more details about mixed disk sizes in ZFS with AnyRaid, an upcoming standard that allows you to keep using partially dead hard drives, Seagate’s roadmap for 50 and 100 TB drives, and NVMe connected mechanical drives. Plus using a separate mini PC for work.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS f

2.5 Admins 272: NVMe Surprise Nov 6, 2025 24:34 Why you should seriously consider buying refurbished hard drives, why drives might be lasting longer than they once did, Jim’s M.2 NVMe drive died at an inopportune moment, using multiple partitions on disks with ZFS.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Advanced ZFS Dataset Management: Snapshots, Clones, and Bookmarks November Webinar:

2.5 Admins 271: Dead Internet Oct 30, 2025 27:54 Why you should keep your Baseboard Management Controller off the network, ZFS is hard to defeat with a zip bomb, how bad the Internet bot problem probably is, and building a small home server cluster.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   Discussion Supermicro server motherboards can be infected with unremovable malware When a decompress

2.5 Admins 270: Storage Shortage Oct 23, 2025 27:46 It looks like the storage companies aren’t betting on the AI bubble lasting much longer, the arguments against self-hosting, and setting up a server for virtualization and containers.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes ZFS Performance Tuning in the Real World: ARC, L2ARC, and SLOG   Discussion Expect HDD, SSD shortages as AI rewr

2.5 Admins 269: End of 10? Oct 16, 2025 25:27 Windows 10 is officially end of life but Microsoft extends free updates for Windows 10 in Europe, it gets even harder to use a local account in Windows 11, and whether repurposing old server hardware is worth it.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes What the Future Brings – ZFS Features, Roadmap, and Innovations   News/discussion Major b

2.5 Admins 268: The Salter Philosophy Oct 9, 2025 23:27 A Red Hat breach leads to a leak of lots of sensitive customer data, Synology backs down on allowing third-party drives but they are removing features, and managing ZFS properties during replication.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Optimizing ZFS for High-Throughput Storage Workloads   News Red Hat fesses up to GitLab breach after a

2.5 Admins 267: Hoarding Cache Oct 2, 2025 26:11 The weird errors you see when your root partition is full, TikTok uses a lot of bandwidth by preloading videos, and dealing with a ZFS pool that won’t import.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Keeping Data Safe with OpenZFS: Security, Encryption, and Delegation   News/discussion Dark patterns killed my wife’s Windows 11 installa

2.5 Admins 266: Jiggawatts of Hallucinations Sep 25, 2025 31:17 Intel and Nvidia are teaming up for multiple reasons, Open AI are planning to build data centers and use a ludicrous amount of power, LLM hallucinations aren’t going away, and how long we keep servers and hard drives in production.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Troubleshooting ZFS – Common Issues and How to Fix Them  

2.5 Admins 265: Storage Lies Sep 18, 2025 27:53 Joe set up a FreeBSD box to serve as a replication target and it was surprisingly straightforward, if rather different from Linux. Plus the lies that storage tells us.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes           See our contact page for ways to get in touch.  

2.5 Admins 264: A Question of Trust Sep 11, 2025 30:27 Matrix shows how painful enormous databases can be to restore, why the certificate authority system doesn’t seem to make sense in 2025, a hosting provider thinks they are better than Cloudflare at blocking malicious traffic, a viral app turns out to be written by an enthusiastic dev who doesn’t understand best practices, and using S3 object storage outside of the cloud. With guest host

2.5 Admins 263: Seagate RAID Sep 4, 2025 28:41 McDonald’s IT systems seem to be riddled with 90s-style coding errors, we finally know where the fraudulent hard drives came from, when IT workers go rogue, and ZFS on root without using FreeBSD or Ubuntu.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News/discussion How I Hacked McDonald’s Seagate Uncovers Global Scheme That Sold 1

2.5 Admins 262: It’s About Control Aug 28, 2025 28:51 Google is planning to assert even more control over which Android apps can be installed, the US government takes a 10% stake in Intel, and minimum networking speeds in homes and offices.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes ZFS Basecamp Launch: A Panel with the People Behind ZFS   News/discussion A new layer of security for certified And

2.5 Admins 261: Worms and Baskets Aug 21, 2025 24:01 Why you can’t rely on a single cloud provider, Jim discovers AI that spreads itself like a worm, and configuring all-flash arrays.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes FreeBSD Summer Roundup: Guide to Lock-In Free Infrastructure   News/discussion AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning AWS Restored My Account: T

2.5 Admins 260: Watery Email Aug 14, 2025 26:36 AMD’s recent mobile-class processors impress us with their power to performance ratio, the UK government suggests a preposterous way to save water, setting up verified boot with snapshots, and the best way to configure ZFS to run VMs.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes ZFS Summer Roundup: Smart Hardware Advice   News AMD Ryzen AI

2.5 Admins 259: New Web? Aug 7, 2025 25:15 The Web is a mess of tracking and AI scraping so do we need a new one, would it even be possible, or is this the wrong question? Plus setting up servers in a garage where dusty woodworking is happening.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   Free consulting We were asked about setting up servers in a garage where dusty woodworking is happ

2.5 Admins 258: Artificial Dirtbag Jul 31, 2025 24:02 Jim is concerned that although over-anthropomorphising LLMs is a mistake, we should be cautious about some of their human-like behaviour. Plus how to maintain old ZFS pools, and accessibility in the BSDs.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   Discussion It’s a mistake to over anthropomorphize LLMs, but it’s equally a mistake

2.5 Admins 257: Outage365 Jul 24, 2025 29:00 Two recent outages were handled very differently but show the dangers of centralisation, Let’s Encrypt is introducing certificates for IP addresses, and the differences between backup and production systems.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News/discussion Microsoft’s 19-hour Outlook outage exposes fragility in cloud infrastru

2.5 Admins 256: Why ZFS Jul 17, 2025 32:16 To celebrate the 256 milestone we devote the whole episode to explaining why we use ZFS. We explain about data safety, data retention, data portability, and ease of administration.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Klara ZFS Basecamp – Central Resource for Everything ZFS Practical ZFS             &nbs

2.5 Admins 255: Copyright Your Face Jul 10, 2025 30:04 Microsoft offers Windows 10 updates in return for your settings data, Denmark wants to protect against deepfakes using copyright, someone is wrong on the Internet about RAID, and getting a sysadmin job in your late 40s.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News/discussion Microsoft’s free updates for Windows 10 draw criticism Denm

2.5 Admins 254: chrudo Jul 3, 2025 28:47 A vulnerability in sudo brings up concerns about feature-creep, and makes us consider alternatives. Plus Broadcom starts auditing VMware customers, and how to decide which outbound ports to open on a large network’s firewall.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Disaster Recovery with ZFS: A Practical Guide   News/discussion Vulner

2.5 Admins 253: ImpossibleFS Jun 26, 2025 27:55 Jim is concerned that we might not see another next-gen filesystem that can compete with ZFS, no matter how much we all want one. Plus whether you should switch to third-party firmware on your router.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes ZFS Performance Tuning – Optimizing for your Workload   Discussion Bcachefs Lands More Improvements F

2.5 Admins 252: Nintendon’t Back Up Jun 19, 2025 29:37 Nintendo cuts off Switches that dare to play backed up games, more Microsoft AI exploits, why you shouldn’t regularly spin down hard drives, and securing applications on a home server.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Reliable ZFS Storage on Commodity Hardware – A Cost-Efficient, Data-Sure Storage Solution Klara co-hosted a webinar

2.5 Admins 251: OversharePoint Jun 12, 2025 31:54 SharePoint is exploitable by Microsoft’s AI, NIST proposes a new metric for exploited vulnerabilities, SBCs that look cool for a mini NAS and a router, and setting up a first NAS with 4 disks.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes The Maintainer’s Dilemma: Strategies for Supporting Legacy Drivers Across Decades of Hardware Evoluti

2.5 Admins 250: Better RAIDz? Jun 5, 2025 32:26 Google bypasses the usual channels to distrust two certificate authorities, Meta’s new escalation in the privacy arms race, Allan gives us the inside details of a new mixed-disk-size ZFS RAID feature, and moving from UniFi gear to TP-Link.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes The Overlooked Complexity of Firmware Security in the IoT Era

2.5 Admins 249: Octopodian Nightmare May 29, 2025 29:21 Locating people with just a phone call, Google forces a change to Let’s Encrypt certificates, yet another example of a “lifetime” subscription being cut short, connecting drives to a small form factor machine, and managing ssh keys with LDAP.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes What We’ve Learned Supporting FreeBSD in Produ

2.5 Admins 248: NASty Pi May 22, 2025 30:38 TrueNAS drops FreeBSD but there’s a community fork, the elusive ZFS send bug that affected encrypted datasets is finally identified and fixed, why the Raspberry Pi doesn’t make a great NAS, and when to use the zpool checkpoint feature.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Maintaining FreeBSD in a Commercial Product – Why Upstream

2.5 Admins 247: MPOF May 15, 2025 33:46 The basic computer science problems that still remain unsolvable, why you shouldn’t trust AI to tune ZFS (or answer any admin questions), and setting up a check-in system for a group of friends.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes   Discussion Why You Can’t Trust AI to Tune ZFS   Free consulting We were asked about setting up

2.5 Admins 246: Perpetual Hotpatch May 8, 2025 30:23 Old passwords work for Windows RDP, Broadcom shows why perpetual software licenses aren’t really forever, Windows Server is getting hotpatching, and preventing changes to archived files.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Owning the Stack: Infrastructure Independence with FreeBSD and ZFS   News/discussion Windows RDP lets you log in u

2.5 Admins 245: IPaaS May 1, 2025 30:16 Crosswalks were comically vulnerable to being hacked, even Google struggles with tiered SSD and HDD storage, some insight into how AI scrapers are using domestic IPs, and creating a ZFS mirror one disk at a time.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Inside FreeBSD Netgraph: Behind the Curtain of Advanced Networking   News/discussion Hack

2.5 Admins 244: Branded and Splintered Apr 24, 2025 31:07 Some Synology NAS products will require drives they sold you, doubt is cast on the CVE program, why some FreeBSD packages didn’t appear when they should have, and backing up the keys for encrypted backups.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Robust & Reliable Backup Solutions with OpenZFS   News Synology confirms that higher-e

2.5 Admins 243: 0.5 Centuries Apr 17, 2025 32:59 IPv4 addresses are worth an awful lot of money, the serious dangers of a seemingly sensible deepfake law, Microsoft is 50 years old, and our thoughts on antivirus on Linux and Windows.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Accurate and Effective Storage Benchmarking   News Your IPv4 stash can now be collateral for $100M loans Congress clo

2.5 Admins 242: Malscraping Apr 10, 2025 33:41 Jim’s server is getting hammered by AI scrapers and he’s big mad about it, why RCS doesn’t work on Android without Google apps, a complex Google account issue, and how Jim and Allan handle their WireGuard configs.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Network Offload and Socket Splicing (SO_SPLICE) in FreeBSD   News Jim

2.5 Admins 241: Anecdatum Apr 3, 2025 30:30 Whether tech debt is inevitable and where the blame lies, how to properly organise ZFS datasets, and selectively managing updates.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes ZFS Orchestration Tools – Part 2: Replication                 SysCloud Over 2,000 IT admins already trust SysCloud to protect their SaaS

2.5 Admins 240: 30 DVI Cables Mar 27, 2025 29:14 The key differences between throughput and latency – and when they matter, the tech that we’d keep if we stopped working in IT, and avoiding bitrot with rsync backups.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Core Infrastructure: Why You Need to Control Your NTP   Free consulting We were asked about avoiding bitrot with rsync bac

2.5 Admins 239: Collective Power Mar 20, 2025 28:55 RISC-V is on the rise in China, why Power CPUs aren’t as promising, the dystopian nightmare of surveillance tech at work, and decrypting ZFS at boot.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Understanding ZFS in the Real World: Mistakes Made, Lessons Learned & Future Plans   News/discussion Alibaba launches server-grade RISC-V CPU

2.5 Admins 238: Hyperbranded Nonsense Mar 13, 2025 28:23 Ten-year-old Chromecasts stop working, movie DVDs start rotting, Skype is finally dying, using ZFS on VM guests and hosts.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes ZFS Space Accounting Explained   News Google apologizes for Chromecast outage in email to users “They curdle like milk”: WB DVDs from 2006–2008 are rotting away in their cases Mic

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