2.5 Admins

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...

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...

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...

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.  

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.   Plug s Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS...

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:...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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  ...

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.  

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...