2.5 Admins

CNET’s SEO attempts once again show that nothing lasts forever, why the reports of the death of the mechanical hard drive are greatly exaggerated, and home-made IPMI on the cheap.   Plugs Support us on Patreon   News/discussion The Internet is not forever after all: CNET deletes old articles to game Google Coughlin: SSDs will not kill disk drives Samsung Announces 256TB SSDs and Un...

Why fully remote work is on the wane as Zoom drags employees back to the office and Bluejeans is shut down, the Sandisk SSDs that keep failing, and how and why you should use ECC RAM in your home server if you can.   Plugs Support us on Patreon   News Zoom has “Zoom fatigue,” requires workers to return to the office BlueJeans, Verizon’s Google Meet competitor you’ve never hea...

Allan and Jim reminisce about the early days of connecting to the Internet, and what inspired them to become sysadmins in the first place. Plus recovering old versions of files, and an exciting announcement about the show.   Plugs 2.5 Admins is now part of the Late Night Linux Family. Support us on Patreon   News/discussion 2.5 Admins in The ‘90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered...

Why the increasing trend of charging for public IPv4 addresses won’t change much, Google trials restricting its employees’ Internet access, and operating systems uploading firmware to devices at boot.   Plugs Support us on patreon Klara 2023 Recommended Summer Reads – FreeBSD and Linux   News New – AWS Public IPv4 Address Charge + Public IP Insights AWS to charge customers fo...

Updating the robots.txt standard for the AI era, the US government implements an IoT certification and labeling system, and the issues with fully encrypting a server.   Plugs Support us on patreon 3 Advantages to Running FreeBSD as Your Server Operating System   News/discussion Google suggests updating the robots.txt standard Robots.txt is not the answer: Proposing a new meta tag for LLM...

Intel is giving up on NUCs and Asus is taking over the line, millions of classified US military emails are going to a Russian ally thanks to a common typo, and monitoring SSDs.   Plugs Support us on patreon Linux and FreeBSD Firewalls – Part 2   News Intel is quitting on its adorable, powerful, and upgradable mini NUC computers Intel and ASUS Agree to Term Sheet to Take Intel NUC Systems...

Setting up a self-hosted alternative, what counts as a “removable” battery, and backing up a Windows machine to ZFS.   News/discussion Practical ZFS Making sense of the EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries (Jim was wrong about AirTags and their batteries. He’ll correct the record next time. No need to email us.)   Free Consulting We were asked about back...

Red Hat wants to limit redistribution of RHEL source code. We discuss their history with CentOS and the likely knock-on effects of taking direct aim at its customers’ GPL rights. Plus browsers doing port scans, and OpenWrt vs OPNsense.   Plugs Support us on patreon Practical ZFS   News Red Hat’s new source code policy and the intense pushback, explained Brave aims to curb practice of web...

WD disks “warning” that they have been running for 3 years, a modern replacement for IMAP that no one seems to be using, the potential issues that arise when PC games require an SSD to run, alternatives to VMware, and verifying your backups.   News/discussion “Clearly predatory”: Western Digital sparks panic, anger for age-shaming HDDs JMAP PC games are starting to require SSDs &n...

Reddit fails to see where its true value lies, Intel makes its consumer CPU lines confusing, and Microsoft’s “next generation” filesystem.   News What Reddit Got Wrong Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout ‘will pass’ Intel has new labels for its next major CPU architecture   Free Consulting We were asked about Microsoft’s “next generation&#8221...

Sloppy practises by Gigabyte reveal one of the problems with UEFI, why Slack refuses to implement end to end encryption, a familiar bug ruins people’s uptime, and XFS vs ext4.   Plugs Support us on patreon FreeBSD or Linux – A Choice Without OS Wars   News/discussion Millions of Gigabyte Motherboards Were Sold With a Firmware Backdoor Millions of Gigabyte PC motherboards backdoored...

We are unimpressed by Apple’s new headset, a particularly bountiful watering hole attack, misdirection from the AI industry, and connecting hard disks via a PCIe card.   Plugs Support us on patreon OpenZFS, Your Data and the Challenge of Ransomware   News Apple Vision Pro Hololens dev Twitter thread ( archived version ) Some Curseforge accounts might be compromised/hacked, and are...

An unfixable bug shines a light on a fundamental issue with Windows, why M.2 is a terrible connector for SSDs, the pros and cons of 2.4Ghz Wi-Fi, and the state of ZFS encryption.   Plugs Support us on patreon OpenZFS For HPC Clusters   News/discussion Windows 11 is so broken that even Microsoft can’t fix it You know M.2 SSDs suck, right? Why 2.4GHz Wi-Fi is both the savior and the scourg...

Google’s new TLDs are silly but not as dangerous as some people think, whether we should cling on to AM radio, Microsoft scans password-protected zip files, and how to assess open source software for its trustworthiness.   Plug Support us on patreon   News Google pushes .zip and .mov domains onto the Internet, and the Internet pushes back Google’s .zip and .mov domains aren’t...

Adobe’s vague threats show why open source is often the pragmatic choice, Russians craft a poor man’s ransomware with WinRAR, Chrome drops the padlock icon, Amazon pulls a Google, and using a keyfile with a password manager.   Plugs Support us on patreon Understanding ZFS vdev Types   News/discussion Adobe Tells Users They Can Get Sued for Using Old Versions of Photoshop Russian hackers...

Google’s attempt to replace passwords with keys, why Jim thinks IBM is dragging Red Hat in the wrong direction, Intel’s rudimentary error that breaks a security feature, and protecting your files from other users on your system.   Plugs Support us on patreon What Makes OpenZFS the Ideal Storage Solution for University Environments   News Google Online Security Blog: So long passwor...

What the challenge of building a web browser from scratch tells us about the state of the modern web, why some people are frying their AMD CPUs, more on basic password managers and regularly powercyling network gear, moving from Mercurial to Git, running old applications on modern Ubuntu, and more.   Plugs Support us on patreon Leveraging OpenZFS to Build Your Own Storage Appliance   New...

How not to practice responsible disclosure, Mulvad proves that its claims stand up, whether to be worried about public phone chargers, an “anti-ransomware” SSD, and monitoring ZFS with Zabbix.   Plugs Support us on patreon Comparing Modern Open-Source Storage Solutions: OpenZFS vs. The Rest   News Vague warning about an Amazon compromise Mullvad VPN was subject to a search warrant. Custo...

The new and up and coming tech that we’re excited about including RISC-V, hard drive innovation, Arm servers, and the Fediverse. Plus whether FreeBSD’s license has held it back, and generating SSL certificates on a router.           Linode Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode’s Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster...

Google Drive’s arbitrary file limit, SMR disks probably die sooner, Western Digital’s My Cloud outage locks some people out of their data, why we don’t talk much about Veeam, and running containers as root.   Plugs Support us on patreon Managing Disk Arrays on FreeBSD and TrueNAS   News Google Drive quietly introduced (then pulled) a file creation limit for all users HDD aver...

Yet another reason not to plug random USB drives into your laptop, how Reddit learned about the importance of testing your backups, and we brainstorm a sysadmin’s version of a minimal password manager.   News/discussion Journalist plugs in unknown USB drive mailed to him—it exploded in his face You Broke Reddit: The Pi-Day Outage   Free Consulting We were asked about rolling your own pas...

Why the RESTRICT Act is about much more than banning Tik Tok, what recent Tesla hacks tell us about the way the security research community is changing, and what server manufacturers we recommend.   Plugs Support us on patreon   News TikTok ban hearing: all the news on the US’s crackdown on the video platform The ‘Insanely Broad’ RESTRICT Act Could Ban Much More Than Just Tik...

Why the death of Reader 10 years ago might come back to haunt Google, Samsung’s AI moon photos raise a philosophical question, Jim’s frustrations with Ubuntu, and connecting a POS system.   Plugs Support us on patreon FreeBSD History: Understanding the origins of DTrace   News/discussion Requiem for Google Reader, gone but not forgotten Samsung’s Moon photos are fake — but so...

Our take on the collapse of Siicon Valley Bank, an odd case of 2 Teslas with the same key, filesystems in VMs, and self-hosted password managers.   Plugs Support us on patreon FreeBSD vs Linux: Tracing and Troubleshooting   News Silicon Valley Bank collapses Common equity capital chart Man accidentally drove away in someone else’s tesla using the car’s app   Free Consulting We were...

Saving millions of dollars by exiting the cloud, GoDaddy is compromised by a sophisticated attacker, why you really shouldn’t use a smart plug to powercycle your router, running SMB and NFS shares on the same host, why private keys should stay private, and using old hardware as a backup server.   Plugs Support us on patreon Klara Webinar: Deploying a Successful Performance Audit  ...