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 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 […]
2.5 Admins 261: Worms and Baskets
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 […]
2.5 Admins 260: Watery Email
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 […]
2.5 Admins 259: New Web?
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 […]
2.5 Admins 258: Artificial Dirtbag
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 […]
2.5 Admins 257: Outage365
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 […]
2.5 Admins 256: Why ZFS
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 […]
2.5 Admins 255: Copyright Your Face
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 […]
2.5 Admins 254: chrudo
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 […]