Shows / 2.5 Admins
2.5 Admins
2.5 Admins is a podcast featuring two sysadmins called Allan Jude and Jim Salter, and a producer/editor who can just about configure a Samba share called Joe Ressington. Every week we get together, talk about recent tech news, and answer some of your admin-related questions.
Episodes
- 2.5 Admins
2.5 Admins 263: Seagate RAID
McDonald’s IT systems seem to be riddled with 90s-style coding errors, we finally know where the fraudulent hard drives came from, when IT workers go…
- 2.5 Admins
2.5 Admins 262: It’s About Control
Google is planning to assert even more control over which Android apps can be installed, the US government takes a 10% stake in Intel, and minimum networking…
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2.5 Admins 261: Worms and Baskets
Why you can’t rely on a single cloud provider, Jim discovers AI that spreads itself like a worm, and configuring all-flash arrays. Plugs Support us on…
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2.5 Admins 260: Watery Email
AMD’s recent mobile-class processors impress us with their power to performance ratio, the UK government suggests a preposterous way to save water…
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2.5 Admins 259: New Web?
The Web is a mess of tracking and AI scraping so do we need a new one, would it even be possible, or is this the wrong question? Plus setting up servers in a…
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2.5 Admins 258: Artificial Dirtbag
Jim is concerned that although over-anthropomorphising LLMs is a mistake, we should be cautious about some of their human-like behaviour. Plus how to maintain…
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2.5 Admins 257: Outage365
Two recent outages were handled very differently but show the dangers of centralisation, Let’s Encrypt is introducing certificates for IP addresses, and…
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2.5 Admins 256: Why ZFS
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…
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2.5 Admins 255: Copyright Your Face
Microsoft offers Windows 10 updates in return for your settings data, Denmark wants to protect against deepfakes using copyright, someone is wrong on the…
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2.5 Admins 254: chrudo
A vulnerability in sudo brings up concerns about feature-creep, and makes us consider alternatives. Plus Broadcom starts auditing VMware customers, and how to…
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2.5 Admins 253: ImpossibleFS
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…
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2.5 Admins 252: Nintendon’t Back Up
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…
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2.5 Admins 251: OversharePoint
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…
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2.5 Admins 250: Better RAIDz?
Google bypasses the usual channels to distrust two certificate authorities, Meta’s new escalation in the privacy arms race, Allan gives us the inside…
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2.5 Admins 249: Octopodian Nightmare
Locating people with just a phone call, Google forces a change to Let’s Encrypt certificates, yet another example of a “lifetime”…
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2.5 Admins 248: NASty Pi
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…
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2.5 Admins 247: MPOF
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…
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2.5 Admins 246: Perpetual Hotpatch
Old passwords work for Windows RDP, Broadcom shows why perpetual software licenses aren’t really forever, Windows Server is getting hotpatching, and…
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2.5 Admins 245: IPaaS
Crosswalks were comically vulnerable to being hacked, even Google struggles with tiered SSD and HDD storage, some insight into how AI scrapers are using…
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2.5 Admins 244: Branded and Splintered
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…
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2.5 Admins 243: 0.5 Centuries
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…
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2.5 Admins 242: Malscraping
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…
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2.5 Admins 241: Anecdatum
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…
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2.5 Admins 240: 30 DVI Cables
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…
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2.5 Admins 239: Collective Power
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…
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2.5 Admins 238: Hyperbranded Nonsense
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…
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2.5 Admins 237: Kafkaesque
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…
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2.5 Admins 236: Hybrid Admins Show
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…
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2.5 Admins 235: XKCD221
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…
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2.5 Admins 234: ChiaFraud
Used Seagate drives are being sold as “new”, another reminder not to hack Windows 11 onto unsupported hardware, about using ZFS on VPS block…
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2.5 Admins 233: 2.005 Admins
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…
- 2.5 Admins
2.5 Admins 232: S:
An embarrassing typo suggests that MasterCard’s monitoring isn’t as good as it should be, tricky offsite backups, why two-factor authentication…
- 2.5 Admins
2.5 Admins 231: USB 3.2.2-ubuntu2
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…
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2.5 Admins 230: Pool of Theseus
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…
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2.5 Admins 229: LiFePo4Life
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…
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2.5 Admins 228: Century-Scale Storage
What it would take to reliably store data for a hundred years including Institutional funding and organization, decade-proof redundancy, multiple hot and cold…
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2.5 Admins 227: Six Day Certs
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…
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2.5 Admins 226: Quantum Toddle
Chinese researchers are making progress with quantum computing but they haven’t broken modern RSA or AES encryption, Russian attackers compromised a…
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2.5 Admins 225: Kinetic Response
The US government tells people to use encrypted messaging, mandated MFA in healthcare raises a scary geopolitical question, QNAP bungles a firmware update, and…
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2.5 Admins 224: ZipLocked
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…
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2.5 Admins 223: Google Juice Abuse
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…
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2.5 Admins 222: Surprise Upgrade
Windows server unexpectedly upgrades major versions, Microsoft reinvents the idea of a thin client, restricting a friend’s access to just their backups…
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2.5 Admins 221: Two Firewalls
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…
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2.5 Admins 220: Get a Job
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…
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2.5 Admins 219: Spooky Stories
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…
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2.5 Admins 218: TLS TTL
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…
- 2.5 Admins
2.5 Admins 217: Drive Scavenging
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…
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2.5 Admins 216: Pa55w0rd%
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…
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2.5 Admins 215: Still no VLANs
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…
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2.5 Admins 214: No VLANs
A proposed solution to the WHOIS TLS verification problem gets a surprising amount of pushback. Plus isolating IoT devices, our thoughts on Ubiquiti gear…
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2.5 Admins 213: Photo Philosophy
The Malaysian government’s misguided plan to control its citizens’ DNS, the wrong way to deploy underwater servers, a philosophical question about…
- 2.5 Admins
2.5 Admins 212: WHODIS
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…
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2.5 Admins 211: Open Sourceless
Another example of the downsides of abstraction, whether AI can ever be truly “open source”, and the security benefits and drawbacks of different…
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2.5 Admins 210: Ryzen Up
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…
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2.5 Admins 209: Faulty Defaults
Insecure SSH implementations and a weak key that let a researcher control 200 MW of electrical capacity reignites the debate about versioned protocols vs…
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2.5 Admins 208: All CPUs suck
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…
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2.5 Admins 207: Insecure Boot
Secure boot is compromised on hundreds of devices, Amazon’s desperate attempt to make money from Alexa, and how to decide which open source software on…
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2.5 Admins 206: CrowdStruck
How and why the recent huge Windows outage was caused by a bad CrowdStrike update and how it could have been avoided, a hilariously dumb ESXi vulnerability…
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2.5 Admins 205: Dogs Hate BTC
How a Bitcoin mine made life in a Texas town absolutely miserable, why paying for extended support for end of life Windows versions is just doubling down on…
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2.5 Admins 204: Maybe Don’t 5
A widely-used login system is still using MD5 which is bad news, miscreants took over some domains when they moved from Google to Squarespace, Linksys’…