2.5 Admins

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.

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 […]

09-18
27:53

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 […]

09-11
30:27

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 […]

09-04
28:41

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 […]

08-28
28:51

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 […]

08-21
24:01

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 […]

08-14
26:36

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 […]

08-07
25:15

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 […]

07-31
24:02

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 […]

07-24
29:00

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 […]

07-17
32:16

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 […]

07-10
30:04

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 […]

07-03
28:47

2.5 Admins 253: ImpossibleFS

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 – […]

06-26
27:55

2.5 Admins 252: Nintendon’t Back Up

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, […]

06-19
29:37

2.5 Admins 251: OversharePoint

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 […]

06-12
31:54

2.5 Admins 250: Better RAIDz?

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 […]

06-05
32:26

2.5 Admins 249: Octopodian Nightmare

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 […]

05-29
29:21

2.5 Admins 248: NASty Pi

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 […]

05-22
30:38

2.5 Admins 247: MPOF

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 […]

05-15
33:46

2.5 Admins 246: Perpetual Hotpatch

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 […]

05-08
30:23

terrywang

pv by default uses a transfer buffer size, not 'block size'. It defaults to the block size of the input file's filesystem multiplied by 32 (512kb max) or 400 if the block size cannot be determined. Another great episode. Thanks guys.

10-07 Reply

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