SysAdmin Weekly

Somewhere between a $305 Raspberry Pi board and a used NVMe listing on eBay, the homelab hobby quietly stopped making financial sense. Andy and co-host Eric Siron dig into why memory, NAND, and storage prices went vertical in 2026, who is actually eating the supply, and what practitioners should do about it. They cover the AI buildout swallowing the manufacturing capacity, why prices probably neve...

The hardest part of running a home lab in 2026 is not building it up; it is being honest about what earns its place. Andy is joined by returning guest and member of the SysAdmin Weekly community, Clay Tamam, a working SysAdmin over in the Netherlands, for a real tour of what is actually sitting in their labs: the hardware, the hypervisors, the services they use every day, and the reasoning behind...

A postmortem that ends with a name instead of a root cause wasted everyone's time in the room. Andy and Eric Siron pull from a combined several-decades of incident reviews to break down what a postmortem actually is, what kind of outage earns one, and who really needs to be at the table. The throughline: keep it blameless without making it unaccountable, separate root cause from contributing f...

Ask Claude or ChatGPT to write a phishing email and it politely refuses; pull the right open-weight model onto your own laptop and that refusal layer simply does not exist in many cases. Andy brings his InfoSecurity Europe session to the show, and Eric Siron joins to walk through how threat actors run local LLMs on their own hardware to generate targeted spear phishing at scale, in any language, w...

The AI doom headlines do not line up with what the actual data says, and that gap is doing real damage. Andy and Eric Siron take a practitioner read on the fear stories: the layoff narrative, the data center energy and water panic, and the executive predictions that office workers are gone in 18 months. They put the WEF Future of Jobs numbers, the hyperscaler nuclear and cooling commitments, and t...

Turning on DNS over HTTPS does not make your browsing private. The hostname you are trying to reach still leaks in the TLS handshake through the Server Name Indication field, and that is the part most coverage of DoH quietly skips. Andy and Eric pick up where the DNS deep dive in episode 045 left off, this time focused on the privacy half of the problem. The episode walks through why DoH on its ow...

The skepticism is earned. Most AI demos are built for developers. Most AI hype is vendor noise. And most SysAdmins have better things to do than adopt another tool that solves a problem they may or may not have. That said: this is Andy putting the grumpy SysAdmin argument aside for an hour to make the honest case for Claude Code in SysAdmin workflows. With caveats. With the parts that still fall s...

It's always DNS. Every SysAdmin has said it, usually at the worst possible moment. This episode is the explanation for why that joke is only half a joke. Andy and Eric walk through how DNS actually works from first request to final answer: recursive resolvers, root servers, authoritative name servers, TTLs, and caching. From there they get into Windows Server and Active Directory DNS integrati...

Failover clustering is the part of Hyper-V that trips up the most people, especially anyone arriving from the VMware side. In this episode Andy Syrewicze and Eric Siron pick up directly where episode 043 left off: you have standalone Hyper-V running, now what does it actually take to make it highly available in 2026? The guys start with the "why bother" question: Azure Local versus a tra...

Hyper-V has been around since 2008, runs Azure, runs Xbox, and still gets overlooked by shops fleeing VMware/Broadcom pricing. In this episode Andy Syrewicze and Eric Siron go back to basics: what Hyper-V actually is under the hood, why it is still worth your attention in 2026, and everything you need to know to stand it up and run your first virtual machine without losing your mind in the process...

Andy and Eric Siron tackle one of the most debated questions in IT careers: do you find a company and stay for the long haul, or do you job hop every few years to chase better pay and new challenges? With over four decades of combined industry experience between them, they've lived both sides of the equation and they make the case that the real answer is neither. In News React, Eric calls out...

Andy and Paul Schnackenburg dig into a leadership change at Microsoft that has the security community raising eyebrows. Charlie Bell, the executive vice president of security who championed the Secure Future Initiative, is out and being replaced by a go-to-market sales executive from the Google Cloud. Satya Nadella's announcement focused on selling more security products, with no mention of co...

After a brief hiatus, the crew is back! Andy is joined by both Paul Schnackenburg and Eric Siron to tackle a big question: what happens when access to compute becomes a subscription privilege instead of an owned capability? This week's topic goes deep! Big tech bankrolling elections, Bezos pushing rented cloud PCs over owned hardware, a global RAM shortage driven by AI demand. All the ingredie...

Microsoft reportedly handed over BitLocker recovery keys to the FBI as part of a criminal investigation and that raises some uncomfortable questions. In this episode of SysAdmin Weekly, Andy and Eric unpack what actually happened, how BitLocker key escrow works, and why the default behavior in Windows 11 matters more than most users realize. We dig into: - How BitLocker recovery keys get stored in...

This week on SysAdmin Weekly, we push back hard on one of the most damaging patterns in modern IT security: making decisions based on fear instead of facts. Security headlines love absolutes: “everything is broken,” “encryption is useless,” “the cloud can’t be trusted.”  But in the real world, those claims often fall apart the moment you slow down and examine the actual mechanics behind them. In t...

It’s a new year, which means it’s time for every SysAdmin’s favorite activity...... dusting off the incident response and disaster recovery plans that haven’t been touched since the Apollo moon landing. In this episode of  SysAdmin Weekly , Andy and Eric dig into why incident response, disaster recovery, and business continuity plans so often  exist … but completely fall apart when something actua...

Abstraction has made modern IT faster, easier, and more scalable but it’s also quietly eroding the deep technical understanding that SysAdmins used to rely on. In the first SysAdmin Weekly episode of 2026, Andy and Eric dig into how layers of abstraction stretching from cloud platforms and managed services to Kubernetes and modern software design are changing what it means to be a SysAdmin. The gu...

This week on SysAdmin Weekly , Andy goes on a (fully justified) rant about the current state of browsers and why it feels like there are no good options left for sysadmins. From Chromium monoculture and browser bloat, to AI creeping into the most trusted piece of software we use every day, this episode breaks down what’s changing, why it matters, and why “just turn it off” isn’t a real security st...

Modern IT feels stuck in a vicious cycle: software ships faster than ever, quality keeps slipping, and SysAdmins are left cleaning up the mess. In this episode of SysAdmin Weekly , Andy Syrewicze and Eric Siron dig into the growing disconnect between developers and operations teams and why “good enough” software has become dangerously normalized across the industry. We talk about brittle releases,...

IT job postings have gotten… weird. In this episode of SysAdmin Weekly , Andy flies solo to take a realistic look at modern IT job listings amongst historic industry layoffs and why so many of them feel disconnected from the actual work SysAdmins do every day. We scroll through real-world postings, talk about unrealistic expectations, role creep, and “unicorn” requirements, and break down how vagu...

Microsoft Ignite just wrapped and shockingly, it wasn’t only about AI. (Okay, it was mostly about AI.) In this episode of SysAdmin Weekly, Andy and Paul cut through the marketing noise and walk through what actually matters to SysAdmins from Microsoft Ignite’s Book of News. From AI agents showing up everywhere , to Azure resiliency, security posture management, and why massive cloud outages are st...

This week, Andy and Eric dive into one of the most underrated superpowers in IT: community . Not the cringe corporate “community,” but the real stuff. Think mentors, friends, people who help you level up, and the shared hive-mind that keeps SysAdmins alive during outages, zero-days, and career pivots. From basements full of beige boxes to global open-source conferences, the IT world has evolved in...

Ready to leave password chaos behind? In this episode of SysAdmin Weekly, Andy and Eric break down the latest National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) password and identity-guideline updates and what they mean for you as a SysAdmin. We cover: - What changed and why (goodbye “special characters just because”) - How to align your org with SP 800-63’s new structure and expectations - Rea...

In this episode, Andy and Eric dive deep into one of tech’s ugliest trends, the ULTRA-Corporatization of once-great vendors all for the sake of excessive profit at the expense of the company and customers. From Intel’s fall from grace to Dell’s support horror stories and VMware’s Broadcom-induced meltdown, the guys unpack how innovation-driven companies lose their soul chasing shareholder dollars....

Welcome to the Halloween special of SysAdmin Weekly, where Andy, Eric, Paul, and Mike gather ‘round the flickering glow of their monitors to share true tales from the trenches, the ones that still haunt their uptime dreams. From flooded data centers and cursed SAN swaps to Novell nightmares, rogue backup tapes, and the eternal terror of “it’s always DNS,” this episode dives into the real-life horr...