2.5 Admins

Follow-up on rebooting to update, portable power stations, glass storage, and objective news sources. Plus whether to use one ZFS pool per vdev, or just one large pool.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Native inotify in FreeBSD   Feedback Anker SOLIX EV Charger Adapter (For F3000, J1722 only) EcoFlow EV Charger to Portable Power Station A...

Why setting up commercial email and VPN services is incredibly hard, avoiding TrueNAS’s move from FreeBSD to Linux, why we avoid virtualising storage systems, and bridging WiFi to an external building.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Using Object Storage with OpenZFS and SeaweedFS   Discussion Jeff Moss explains why setting up priv...

The one tool in our IT tool belt that we value the most. This is a short episode because Joe is having a summer break.                 See our contact page for ways to get in touch.  

Wiring up a house for networking including cables, access points, connectors, and racks. Plus Google is found liable for what its AI overviews say.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Managing Cache and DirectIO for Databases on ZFS Webinar: June 30th @ 11am EDT: FreeBSD After Hours AMA   News/discussion Landmark German ruling declares Googl...

People were locked out of their password managers to stop a brute force attack, Coreutils come to Windows, a FreeBSD PR effort backfires, and the best simple consumer WiFi gear.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Why ZFS Is the Ideal Filesystem for Multi-User/Department Media Production Webinar: June 30th @ 11am EDT: FreeBSD After Hours AMA &nbs...

Microsoft threatens a security researcher for disclosing vulnerabilities publicly, bricks old versions of Office, and announces their version of OpenClaw. Plus keeping up with the latest technology.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Which ZFS Storage Metrics Matter for Database Performance Webinar: June 25th @ 11am EDT: Understanding AnyRAID wi...

It looks like Bitlocker had a back door in it, how a listener accidentally broke Gitea for users of the snap version, Google accidentally published an unpatched exploit for Chromium-based browsers, why people are starting to ditch Bitwarden, and moving a tech stack away from large corporations.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes How Klara and Tr...

Why a proposal for an alternative to IPv6 is unlikely to be viable, Microsoft really doesn’t want you to run Exchange Server on-prem, Google will finally stop being a proper search engine, setting up an email server for internal use, and mitigating DDoS attacks without Cloudflare.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Tuning ZFS for Databases...

People trying to return defective hard drives and RAM are finding out why consumer protection laws would be good, GoDaddy accidentally gave someone’s domain name away, and when and how to fix ZFS fragmentation.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Fast Dedup Economics: When Deduplication Beats Buying New Disks   News/discussion Toshiba...

Microsoft is encouraging employees with the most experience to leave the company and letting users pause Windows updates forever, some of the best features you’ll get in the version of ZFS that ships with the new Ubuntu LTS, and backing up data from cloud services.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Extending ZFS Performance Without Hardwa...

Hitting the limit for hard links, a parent struggles to get back into their teen’s compromised Discord account, the demise of tower PCs and general purpose computing in general, and changing the properties of existing ZFS pools.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Compensating for RAM Constraints with L2ARC on ZFS   News/discussion How...

Microsoft locks devs out of important accounts, the foreign router ban exemptions make even less sense, Backblaze shows that “unlimited” never means that, and attempting to avoid software that’s written with AI.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Do More with Less: Cost-Efficient Storage on the New TrueNAS with Enhanced Fast De...

Why putting data center satellites in orbit is a terrible idea, Google might show people a made-up version of your website, and ZFS on really old Dell servers.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes   News/discussion Orbital data centers, part 1: There’s no way this is economically viable, right? 11 mins edited Datacenters in space are a terribl...

Arm announces its first CPU, Anthropic accidentally leaks the source for Claude Code and it’s terrible, and setting up a backup for a friend’s photos.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes FreeBSD and OpenZFS in the Quest for Technical Independence: A Storage Architect’s View​   News/discussion Arm expands compute platform to silic...

Microsoft says Windows 11 is getting less rubbish but we are skeptical, vehicles with alcohol interlocks won’t start because the manufacturer’s server is down, and whether you should virtualise a router or a NAS.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Five‑Year Storage Design with OpenZFS: Media Refresh, Rebalancing, and Hardware Indepen...

The US government is drumming up fear about foreign routers, a pretty serious supply chain attack might be state-sponsored, and the safety of filesystems inside VMs.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes The Real Cost of Technology Dependence: Building Independence with Open-Source Storage   News/discussion US bans any new consumer-grade route...

Why passkeys aren’t the right solution to everything, Allan tells us why he loves his new Lithium Iron Phosphate UPS, Btrfs vs ZFS on root, and restricting Internet access for IoT devices on your network.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Designing OpenZFS Storage for Independence   News/discussion Please, please, please stop us...

Microsoft Authenticator will delete Entra credentials on phones that aren’t running stock ROMs, Jim’s nightmare experience trying to get a user back into their MS account, tracking vehicles via tire pressure monitors, using a ZFS pool in a degraded state , and keeping cold ZFS storage dataset snapshots in sync.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early e...

An exciting new cold storage technology seems to be getting closer, Nvidia seemingly wants a slice of the laptop hardware action, why you (and your users) should definitely not use LLMs to “generate” passwords , and whistleblowing when sensitive customer data isn’t being taken seriously.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes...

Hardware scarcity and price hikes spread to hard drives, the Bcachefs dev thinks his AI is ‘fully conscious’, an agent might have gone after a FOSS maintainer, Jim is disappointed with an Ars author, and ZFS and VMs in the homelab.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Piss up at The Shipwrights Arms (just next to London Bridge sta...

Jim and Allan disagree on how new hard drive tech is likely to work, more on storage and compute in the same box, and how we set up disk encryption on laptops.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes OpenZFS Monitoring and Observability   News/discussion Western Digital doubles the performance of hard drives with dual-actuator High-Bandwidt...

Notepad++ falls victim to a state-sponsored attacker, AI agents talk nonsense to each other on an insecure vibe coded social network, and backing up a laptop properly.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes ZFS vs Btrfs: Architecture, Features, and Stability   News/discussion Notepad++ Hijacked by State-Sponsored Hackers AI agents now have...

Outlook’s autodiscover feature is leaking data again, our thoughts on the cycle of cloud and on-prem (centralised and local computing), and why you probably shouldn’t use NMVe to SATA adapters.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes ZFS in Production: Real-World Deployment Patterns and Pitfalls Modern VDI on Proxmox: ZFS Reliability...

Why you might not want your Windows encryption keys to be backed up to Microsoft, some Bluetooth devices are vulnerable to snooping and tracking, a lesson in the need for backups,  and the best practices and stack for setting up a mail server.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Klara’s Expert Perspective on OpenZFS in 2026 and What to Expec...

The last method to activate Windows without the Internet has gone away, malware that tricks users with a fake blue screen of death, and recovering from bad RAM with ZFS.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Understanding ZFS Scrubs and Data Integrity   News/discussion Windows activation by phone is seemingly dead How Fake BSODs and Trust...