2.5 Admins is a podcast featuring two sysadmins called Allan Jude and Jim Salter, and a producer/editor who can just about configure a Samba share called Joe Ressington. Every two weeks we get together, talk about recent tech news, and answer some of your admin-related questions.
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2.5 Admins 276: Very Prudish Network
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 only getting started Stealthy browser extensions waited years before infecting 4.3M Chrome, Edge users with backdoors and spyware FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE Announcement Free consulting We were asked about using a single database vs one DB per application or VM. See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
2.5 Admins 275: G-word
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 Treats News/discussion Google is collecting troves of data from downgraded Nest thermostats FreeBSD Officially Supported in OCI Runtime Specification v1.3 Free consulting We were asked about where to find cheap (or even dirt cheap) used hardware. Tailscale Tailscale is an easy to deploy, zero-config, no-fuss VPN that allows you to build simple networks across complex infrastructure. Go to tailscale.com/25a and try Tailscale out for free for up to 100 devices and 3 users, with no credit card required. Use code LATENIGHTLINUX for three free months of any Tailscale paid plan. See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
2.5 Admins 274: Go Go Gadget Windows
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, […]
2.5 Admins 273: Reliability Tracking
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. […]
2.5 Admins 272: NVMe Surprise
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: […]
2.5 Admins 271: Dead Internet
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 […]
2.5 Admins 270: Storage Shortage
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 […]
2.5 Admins 269: End of 10?
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 […]
2.5 Admins 268: The Salter Philosophy
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 […]
2.5 Admins 267: Hoarding Cache
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 Troubleshooting ZFS – Common Issues and How to Fix Them […]
2.5 Admins 266: Jiggawatts of Hallucinations
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 […]
2.5 Admins 265: Storage Lies
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 […]
2.5 Admins 264: A Question of Trust
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 […]
2.5 Admins 263: Seagate RAID
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 […]
2.5 Admins 262: It’s About Control
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 […]