2.5 Admins

An embarrassing typo suggests that MasterCard’s monitoring isn’t as good as it should be, tricky offsite backups, why two-factor authentication over SMS is a bad idea, and keeping two Mac laptops in sync.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Klara Webinar, Feb 13th: RAID is NOT a Backup and Other Hard Truths About Disaster Recover...

Microsoft didn’t control an important domain that it was using and end up red-faced, the dangers of using free VPN apps, a proof of concept exploit is out for last year’s SSH vulnerability, USB is getting slightly less confusing labels, and swapping the motherboard in a TrueNAS SCALE system.   News Edgio bankruptcy results in endpoint change for Microsoft VPN used for VR game chea...

A new version of ZFS is out and we go over the great new features. Plus recovering data after accidentally writing part of an ISO onto a USB drive, how to deal with abuse of your domain, and replacing all the drives in a ZFS pool while keeping the birth date.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Managing and Tracking Storage Performance &nbsp...

Jim and Allan explain the benefits of a lithium iron phosphate “UPS”, whether it’s possible to delete every single copy of a file, and using Bluetooth in a Windows 11 VM.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   Discussion Anker SOLIX C300 Anker SOLIX F3800   Free Consulting We were asked about using Bluetooth in a Wi...

What it would take to reliably store data for a hundred years including Institutional funding and organization, decade-proof redundancy, multiple hot and cold copies,hedging your bets against multiple media, and more. Plus backing up ZFS without normal snapshots.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   Discussion Century-Scale Storage &nbs...

Windows ssh is sending more telemetry than you might think, Let’s Encrypt will offer 6 days certificates, a PSA about domains that don’t send emails, and performance issues in a Synology NAS.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Winter 2024 Roundup: Storage and Network Diagnostics   News/discussion ssh on Windows sends teleme...

Chinese researchers are making progress with quantum computing but they haven’t broken modern RSA or AES encryption, Russian attackers compromised a business via a nearby building’s WiFi, a startup runs out of money and bricks a robot for kids, and hardening Linux systems.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes ZFS Storage Fault Man...

The US government tells people to use encrypted messaging, mandated MFA in healthcare raises a scary geopolitical question, QNAP bungles a firmware update, and securing access to self hosted applications with mTLS.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Deploying pNFS file sharing with FreeBSD   News/discussion FBI Warns iPhone And Android...

Intel’s CEO departs but replacing him won’t magically solve its serious problems, Zipcar wasn’t prepared for an outage and handled it really badly, moving to an email provider that supports DMARC, and picking a NAS distribution.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes ZFS Ask Me Anything – December 12th Applying the ARC A...

Equinix is shutting down its bare metal service, D-Link advises people to dump old vulnerable routers, Google makes changes to how it ranks some affiliate-driven “reviews”, and data caps seem to be sticking around. Plus mixing different brands and types of disks, using other partitions on a ZFS drive, and scaling a fleet of FreeBSD hosts with jails.   Plug Support us on patreon an...

Windows server unexpectedly upgrades major versions, Microsoft reinvents the idea of a thin client, restricting a friend’s access to just their backups, and the importance of warranties when buying hardware.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes DKMS vs kmod: The Essential Guide for ZFS on Linux   News Windows Server 2025 takes admi...

Jim and Allan discover modern charging tech and marvel at what’s possible in the USB-C era, more on IPv6 firewalls, using ZFS like Git, and running your own authoritative DNS server.           Automox Check out the brand new Autonomous IT podcast . Listen in as a variety of experts in the IT Operations space discuss the latest Patch Tuesday releases, mitigation tips,...

How using a copy-on-write filesystem like ZFS can get systems back online within seconds after ransomeware encrypts all your data, and even warn you more quickly that it’s happening. Plus Jim and Allan’s advice on getting a job as a sysadmin.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Klara: 5 Reasons Why Your ZFS Storage Benchmarks Are...

It’s Halloween so Jim and Allan share horrific and spooky stories from their sysadmin careers. Plus picking a UPS for a homelab.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Klara: NAS: Maintenance Best Practices                   See our contact page for ways to get in touch.  

SSL certificates are likely going to last less time, the latest Windows 11 update leaves a huge chunk of data behind and doesn’t play nicely with some SSDs, picking a modern dhcp server on a homebrew router, and storing encrypted backups on a friend’s NAS with ZFS.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Klara Halloween Webinar: ZFS...

The difference between monitoring and metrics analysis, the security pros and cons of cloud vs on-prem, why Jim and Allan don’t use Unraid, and cloud storage and email for a small company.   Feedback Netdata Nagios ZFS and Unraid   Free consulting We were asked about cloud storage and email for a small company.           Automox Check out the brand new Auto...

NIST has finally proposed some sensible password standards, why server CPUs with high core counts make sense in a lot of deployments, the .io TLD is probably sticking around, and the best options for a Linux-based router.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Klara Halloween Webinar: ZFS Horror Stories. Oct 31st 13:00 EDT, 17:00 UTC ZBM 101: I...

Why cold storage is never as good as keeping your data warm and regularly tested, how the American air traffic control system became so outdated, and isolating your devices from a roommate’s shenanigans.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News/discussion Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying  FAA air traff...

A proposed solution to the WHOIS TLS verification problem gets a surprising amount of pushback. Plus isolating IoT devices, our thoughts on Ubiquiti gear, setting up WiFi in a new house, remote access with WireGuard, and our mini PC recommendations.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News Google calls for halting use of WHOIS for TLS...

The Malaysian government’s misguided plan to control its citizens’ DNS, the wrong way to deploy underwater servers, a philosophical question about how long a person’s photos will exist, and how we manage our SSH keys.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News/discussion Malaysia’s plan to block overseas DNS dies...

A surprising way to exploit the WHOIS system, Microsoft will force old versions of Windows 11 to update, and the simple way to set up TP-Link Omada gear.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News Rogue WHOIS server gives researcher superpowers no one should ever have Windows 11 users still living in the past face forced update, like it...

Another example of the downsides of abstraction, whether AI can ever be truly “open source”, and the security benefits and drawbacks of different types of VPN.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News/discussion Hackers infect ISPs with malware that steals customers’ credentials Debate over “open source AI” term brings new...

AMD will patch some old Ryzens against SinkClose now, but their benchmarking methods for newer CPUs didn’t live up to everyday reality. Plus Bcachefs devs annoy Linus Torvalds, the US government sues a college over compliance issues, and Jim disappoints a patron.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News AMD’s Ryzen 3000 CPU...

Insecure SSH implementations and a weak key that let a researcher control 200 MW of electrical capacity reignites the debate about versioned protocols vs pluggable protocols, follow-up on sharing files from your LAN with people on the Internet, and the pros and cons of encrypted backups.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News/discuss...

Forcing Windows to undo updates and a separate IPv6 vulnerability, hardware bugs in AMD and Intel CPUs, and using Samba on Linux with Active Directory.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News Your victim’s Windows PC fully patched? Just force undo its updates and exploit away CVE-2024-38063 – Security Update Guide –...