2.5 Admins 277: Battering RAM
The Crucial brand of consumer SSDs and RAM is going away, AMD and Intel memory encryption can be bypassed with cheap hardware, more AI buffoonery, and monitoring users’ usage on a network.
2.5 Admins
Podcast from Allan Jude, Jim Salter, and Joe Ressington. Tech news and your sysadmin questions answered weekly.
2.5 Admins 276: Very Prudish Network
What a government crackdown on VPNs would look like, malware groups play the long game with browser extensions, a new major version of FreeBSD is released, and using a single database vs one DB per application or VM.
2.5 Admins 275: G-word
Google kept collecting sensor data even after bricking Nest thermostats, FreeBSD’s container support gets serious, and where to find cheap (or even dirt cheap) used hardware.
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2.5 Admins 274: Go Go Gadget Windows
Windows is becoming an “agentic OS”, some WD SMR drives are dying prematurely, backing up VMware with ZFS, and separating trusted and non-trusted devices on your network.
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If you're looking for audio podcasts about Linux, open source software, systems administration, development, and or cloud then check us out!
Our shows are short and to the point, and we don't shy away from politics when the topic inevitably comes up.
2.5 Admins 273: Reliability Tracking
Allan tells us about the recent OpenZFS Summit including inconsistent JBODs, more details about mixed disk sizes in ZFS with AnyRaid, an upcoming standard that allows you to keep using partially dead hard drives, Seagate’s roadmap for 50 and 100 TB drives, and NVMe connected mechanical drives. Plus using a separate mini PC for work.
2.5 Admins 272: NVMe Surprise
Why you should seriously consider buying refurbished hard drives, why drives might be lasting longer than they once did, Jim’s M.2 NVMe drive died at an inopportune moment, using multiple partitions on disks with ZFS.
2.5 Admins 271: Dead Internet
Why you should keep your Baseboard Management Controller off the network, ZFS is hard to defeat with a zip bomb, how bad the Internet bot problem probably is, and building a small home server cluster.
2.5 Admins 270: Storage Shortage
It looks like the storage companies aren’t betting on the AI bubble lasting much longer, the arguments against self-hosting, and setting up a server for virtualization and containers.
2.5 Admins 269: End of 10?
Windows 10 is officially end of life but Microsoft extends free updates for Windows 10 in Europe, it gets even harder to use a local account in Windows 11, and whether repurposing old server hardware is worth it.
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@25admins for the record: this is not an episode I titled. :)
2.5 Admins 268: The Salter Philosophy
A Red Hat breach leads to a leak of lots of sensitive customer data, Synology backs down on allowing third-party drives but they are removing features, and managing ZFS properties during replication.
2.5 Admins 267: Hoarding Cache
The weird errors you see when your root partition is full, TikTok uses a lot of bandwidth by preloading videos, and dealing with a ZFS pool that won’t import.
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2.5 Admins 266: Jiggawatts of Hallucinations
Intel and Nvidia are teaming up for multiple reasons, Open AI are planning to build data centers and use a ludicrous amount of power, LLM hallucinations aren’t going away, and how long we keep servers and hard drives in production.
2.5 Admins 265: Storage Lies
Joe set up a FreeBSD box to serve as a replication target and it was surprisingly straightforward, if rather different from Linux. Plus the lies that storage tells us.
2.5 Admins 264: A Question of Trust
Matrix shows how painful enormous databases can be to restore, why the certificate authority system doesn’t seem to make sense in 2025, a hosting provider thinks they are better than Cloudflare at blocking malicious traffic, a viral app turns out to be written by an enthusiastic dev who doesn’t understand best practices, and using S3 object storage outside of the cloud. With guest host Gary from Linux After Dark and Hybrid Cloud Show.
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 rogue, and ZFS on root without using FreeBSD or Ubuntu.
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 speeds in homes and offices.
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.
Client Info
Server: https://mastodon.social
Version: 2025.07
Repository: https://github.com/cyevgeniy/lmst