2.5 Admins

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 infrastru...

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 ZFS              ...

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 free updates for Windows 10 draw criticism Denm...

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 Practical Guide   News/discussion Vulner...

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 – Optimizing for your Workload   Discussion Bcachefs Lands More Improvements F...

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, Data-Sure Storage Solution Klara co-hosted a webinar...

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 Supporting Legacy Drivers Across Decades of Hardware Evoluti...

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 Overlooked Complexity of Firmware Security in the IoT Era...

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 What We’ve Learned Supporting FreeBSD in Produ...

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 Maintaining FreeBSD in a Commercial Product – Why Upstream...

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 AI to Tune ZFS   Free consulting We were asked about setting up...

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 lets you log in u...

Crosswalks were comically vulnerable to being hacked, even Google struggles with tiered SSD and HDD storage, some insight into how AI scrapers are using domestic IPs, and creating a ZFS mirror one disk at a time.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Inside FreeBSD Netgraph: Behind the Curtain of Advanced Networking   News/discussion Hack...

Some Synology NAS products will require drives they sold you, doubt is cast on the CVE program, why some FreeBSD packages didn’t appear when they should have, and backing up the keys for encrypted backups.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Robust & Reliable Backup Solutions with OpenZFS   News Synology confirms that higher-e...

IPv4 addresses are worth an awful lot of money, the serious dangers of a seemingly sensible deepfake law, Microsoft is 50 years old, and our thoughts on antivirus on Linux and Windows.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Accurate and Effective Storage Benchmarking   News Your IPv4 stash can now be collateral for $100M loans Congress clo...

Jim’s server is getting hammered by AI scrapers and he’s big mad about it, why RCS doesn’t work on Android without Google apps, a complex Google account issue, and how Jim and Allan handle their WireGuard configs.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Network Offload and Socket Splicing (SO_SPLICE) in FreeBSD   News Jim...

Whether tech debt is inevitable and where the blame lies, how to properly organise ZFS datasets, and selectively managing updates.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes ZFS Orchestration Tools – Part 2: Replication                 SysCloud Over 2,000 IT admins already trust SysCloud to protect their SaaS...

The key differences between throughput and latency – and when they matter, the tech that we’d keep if we stopped working in IT, and avoiding bitrot with rsync backups.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Core Infrastructure: Why You Need to Control Your NTP   Free consulting We were asked about avoiding bitrot with rsync bac...

RISC-V is on the rise in China, why Power CPUs aren’t as promising, the dystopian nightmare of surveillance tech at work, and  decrypting ZFS at boot.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Understanding ZFS in the Real World: Mistakes Made, Lessons Learned & Future Plans   News/discussion Alibaba launches server-grade RISC-V CPU...

Ten-year-old Chromecasts stop working, movie DVDs start rotting, Skype is finally dying, using ZFS on VM guests and hosts.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes ZFS Space Accounting Explained   News Google apologizes for Chromecast outage in email to users “They curdle like milk”: WB DVDs from 2006–2008 are rotting away in their cases Mic...

HP was forcing people to wait on hold for 15 minutes to get support, the DOGE site was embarrassingly insecure, setting up encrypted offsite backups, and mixing SATA and NVMe in a server.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Why FreeBSD is the Right Choice for Embedded Devices   News/discusison HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due t...

Arm is going to make its own server chips, WordPress is selling “100 year” domain registrations, geo-redundancy for VPSs, and backing up Windows to Backblaze B2.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Isolating Containers with ZFS and Linux Namespaces   News Arm to launch its own chip in move that could upend semiconductor indu...

Google found a way to run unofficial microcode on AMD CPUs, whether software should get a CVE when it goes end of life, LLMs changing Redditors’ minds and self-replicating, and managing SSH keys at scale.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes ZFS Orchestration Tools – Part 1: Snapshots   News/discussion How to make any AMD Zen CPU a...

Used Seagate drives are being sold as “new”, another reminder not to hack Windows 11 onto unsupported hardware, about using ZFS on VPS block storage, picking hardware to run VMs, and delegating datasets to containers.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Controlling Your Core Infrastructure: DNS   News Fraud with Seagate hard...

We appreciate the elegance of subnets as well as the power of custom benchmarking, Xboxes will support large amounts of external storage, why it’s not looking great for bcachefs, malware and remote desktops, and our thoughts on Fortigate network gear.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Key Considerations for Benchmarking Network Stora...