2.5 Admins 274: Go Go Gadget Windows
20 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Windows is becoming an “agentic OS”, some WD SMR drives are dying prematurely, backing up VMware...
2.5 Admins 273: Reliability Tracking
13 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Allan tells us about the recent OpenZFS Summit including inconsistent JBODs, more details about mixe...
2.5 Admins 272: NVMe Surprise
06 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why you should seriously consider buying refurbished hard drives, why drives might be lasting longer...
2.5 Admins 271: Dead Internet
30 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why you should keep your Baseboard Management Controller off the network, ZFS is hard to defeat with...
2.5 Admins 270: Storage Shortage
23 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It looks like the storage companies aren’t betting on the AI bubble lasting much longer, the argum...
2.5 Admins 269: End of 10?
16 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Windows 10 is officially end of life but Microsoft extends free updates for Windows 10 in Europe, it...
2.5 Admins 268: The Salter Philosophy
09 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A Red Hat breach leads to a leak of lots of sensitive customer data, Synology backs down on allowing...
2.5 Admins 267: Hoarding Cache
02 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The weird errors you see when your root partition is full, TikTok uses a lot of bandwidth by preload...
2.5 Admins 266: Jiggawatts of Hallucinations
25 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Intel and Nvidia are teaming up for multiple reasons, Open AI are planning to build data centers and...
2.5 Admins 265: Storage Lies
18 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Joe set up a FreeBSD box to serve as a replication target and it was surprisingly straightforward, i...
2.5 Admins 264: A Question of Trust
11 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Matrix shows how painful enormous databases can be to restore, why the certificate authority system ...
2.5 Admins 263: Seagate RAID
04 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
McDonald’s IT systems seem to be riddled with 90s-style coding errors, we finally know where the f...
2.5 Admins 262: It’s About Control
28 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Google is planning to assert even more control over which Android apps can be installed, the US gove...
2.5 Admins 261: Worms and Baskets
21 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why you can’t rely on a single cloud provider, Jim discovers AI that spreads itself like a worm, a...
2.5 Admins 260: Watery Email
14 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
AMD’s recent mobile-class processors impress us with their power to performance ratio, the UK gove...
2.5 Admins 259: New Web?
07 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Web is a mess of tracking and AI scraping so do we need a new one, would it even be possible, or...
2.5 Admins 258: Artificial Dirtbag
31 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Jim is concerned that although over-anthropomorphising LLMs is a mistake, we should be cautious abou...
2.5 Admins 257: Outage365
24 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Two recent outages were handled very differently but show the dangers of centralisation, Let’s Enc...
2.5 Admins 256: Why ZFS
17 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
To celebrate the 256 milestone we devote the whole episode to explaining why we use ZFS. We explain ...
2.5 Admins 255: Copyright Your Face
10 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Microsoft offers Windows 10 updates in return for your settings data, Denmark wants to protect again...
2.5 Admins 254: chrudo
03 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A vulnerability in sudo brings up concerns about feature-creep, and makes us consider alternatives. ...
2.5 Admins 253: ImpossibleFS
26 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Jim is concerned that we might not see another next-gen filesystem that can compete with ZFS, no mat...
2.5 Admins 252: Nintendon’t Back Up
19 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Nintendo cuts off Switches that dare to play backed up games, more Microsoft AI exploits, why you sh...
2.5 Admins 251: OversharePoint
12 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
SharePoint is exploitable by Microsoft’s AI, NIST proposes a new metric for exploited vulnerabilit...
2.5 Admins 250: Better RAIDz?
05 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Google bypasses the usual channels to distrust two certificate authorities, Meta’s new escalation ...
2.5 Admins 249: Octopodian Nightmare
29 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Locating people with just a phone call, Google forces a change to Let’s Encrypt certificates, yet ...
2.5 Admins 248: NASty Pi
22 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
TrueNAS drops FreeBSD but there’s a community fork, the elusive ZFS send bug that affected encrypt...
2.5 Admins 247: MPOF
15 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The basic computer science problems that still remain unsolvable, why you shouldn’t trust AI to tu...
2.5 Admins 246: Perpetual Hotpatch
08 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Old passwords work for Windows RDP, Broadcom shows why perpetual software licenses aren’t really f...
2.5 Admins 245: IPaaS
01 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Crosswalks were comically vulnerable to being hacked, even Google struggles with tiered SSD and HDD ...
2.5 Admins 244: Branded and Splintered
24 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Some Synology NAS products will require drives they sold you, doubt is cast on the CVE program, why ...
2.5 Admins 243: 0.5 Centuries
17 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
IPv4 addresses are worth an awful lot of money, the serious dangers of a seemingly sensible deepfake...
2.5 Admins 242: Malscraping
10 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Jim’s server is getting hammered by AI scrapers and he’s big mad about it, why RCS doesn’t wor...
2.5 Admins 241: Anecdatum
03 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Whether tech debt is inevitable and where the blame lies, how to properly organise ZFS datasets, and...
2.5 Admins 240: 30 DVI Cables
27 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The key differences between throughput and latency – and when they matter, the tech that we’d ke...
2.5 Admins 239: Collective Power
20 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
RISC-V is on the rise in China, why Power CPUs aren’t as promising, the dystopian nightmare of sur...
2.5 Admins 238: Hyperbranded Nonsense
13 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ten-year-old Chromecasts stop working, movie DVDs start rotting, Skype is finally dying, using ZFS o...
2.5 Admins 237: Kafkaesque
06 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
HP was forcing people to wait on hold for 15 minutes to get support, the DOGE site was embarrassingl...
2.5 Admins 236: Hybrid Admins Show
27 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Arm is going to make its own server chips, WordPress is selling “100 year” domain registrations,...
2.5 Admins 235: XKCD221
20 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Google found a way to run unofficial microcode on AMD CPUs, whether software should get a CVE when i...
2.5 Admins 234: ChiaFraud
13 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Used Seagate drives are being sold as “new”, another reminder not to hack Windows 11 onto unsupp...
2.5 Admins 233: 2.005 Admins
06 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We appreciate the elegance of subnets as well as the power of custom benchmarking, Xboxes will suppo...
2.5 Admins 232: S:
30 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
An embarrassing typo suggests that MasterCard’s monitoring isn’t as good as it should be, tricky...
2.5 Admins 231: USB 3.2.2-ubuntu2
23 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Microsoft didn’t control an important domain that it was using and end up red-faced, the dangers o...
2.5 Admins 230: Pool of Theseus
16 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A new version of ZFS is out and we go over the great new features. Plus recovering data after accide...
2.5 Admins 229: LiFePo4Life
09 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Jim and Allan explain the benefits of a lithium iron phosphate “UPS”, whether it’s possible to...
2.5 Admins 228: Century-Scale Storage
02 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What it would take to reliably store data for a hundred years including Institutional funding and or...
2.5 Admins 227: Six Day Certs
26 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Windows ssh is sending more telemetry than you might think, Let’s Encrypt will offer 6 days certif...
2.5 Admins 226: Quantum Toddle
19 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Chinese researchers are making progress with quantum computing but they haven’t broken modern RSA ...
2.5 Admins 225: Kinetic Response
12 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The US government tells people to use encrypted messaging, mandated MFA in healthcare raises a scary...
2.5 Admins 224: ZipLocked
05 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Intel’s CEO departs but replacing him won’t magically solve its serious problems, Zipcar wasn’...
2.5 Admins 223: Google Juice Abuse
28 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Equinix is shutting down its bare metal service, D-Link advises people to dump old vulnerable router...
2.5 Admins 222: Surprise Upgrade
21 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Windows server unexpectedly upgrades major versions, Microsoft reinvents the idea of a thin client, ...
2.5 Admins 221: Two Firewalls
14 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Jim and Allan discover modern charging tech and marvel at what’s possible in the USB-C era, more o...
2.5 Admins 220: Get a Job
07 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How using a copy-on-write filesystem like ZFS can get systems back online within seconds after ranso...
2.5 Admins 219: Spooky Stories
31 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It’s Halloween so Jim and Allan share horrific and spooky stories from their sysadmin careers. Plu...
2.5 Admins 218: TLS TTL
24 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
SSL certificates are likely going to last less time, the latest Windows 11 update leaves a huge chun...
2.5 Admins 217: Drive Scavenging
17 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The difference between monitoring and metrics analysis, the security pros and cons of cloud vs on-pr...
2.5 Admins 216: Pa55w0rd%
10 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
NIST has finally proposed some sensible password standards, why server CPUs with high core counts ma...
2.5 Admins 215: Still no VLANs
03 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why cold storage is never as good as keeping your data warm and regularly tested, how the American a...
2.5 Admins 214: No VLANs
26 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A proposed solution to the WHOIS TLS verification problem gets a surprising amount of pushback. Plus...
2.5 Admins 213: Photo Philosophy
19 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Malaysian government’s misguided plan to control its citizens’ DNS, the wrong way to deploy ...
2.5 Admins 212: WHODIS
12 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A surprising way to exploit the WHOIS system, Microsoft will force old versions of Windows 11 to upd...
2.5 Admins 211: Open Sourceless
05 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Another example of the downsides of abstraction, whether AI can ever be truly “open source”, and...
2.5 Admins 210: Ryzen Up
29 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
AMD will patch some old Ryzens against SinkClose now, but their benchmarking methods for newer CPUs ...
2.5 Admins 209: Faulty Defaults
22 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Insecure SSH implementations and a weak key that let a researcher control 200 MW of electrical capac...
2.5 Admins 208: All CPUs suck
15 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Forcing Windows to undo updates and a separate IPv6 vulnerability, hardware bugs in AMD and Intel CP...
2.5 Admins 207: Insecure Boot
08 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Secure boot is compromised on hundreds of devices, Amazon’s desperate attempt to make money from A...
2.5 Admins 206: CrowdStruck
01 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How and why the recent huge Windows outage was caused by a bad CrowdStrike update and how it could h...
2.5 Admins 205: Dogs Hate BTC
25 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How a Bitcoin mine made life in a Texas town absolutely miserable, why paying for extended support f...
2.5 Admins 204: Maybe Don’t 5
18 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A widely-used login system is still using MD5 which is bad news, miscreants took over some domains w...
2.5 Admins 203: Yet more free consulting
11 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We didn’t get to all of your questions for our Episode 200 free consulting special so here is anot...
2.5 Admins 202: Microsoft’s Underwater Again
04 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why we didn’t mention pocket fluff when we talked about USB-C charging issues, Microsoft abandons ...
2.5 Admins 201: CVEs everywhere
27 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Vulnerabilities in Asus hardware make us think there should be some regulations about what can be so...
2.5 Admins 200: Even more free consulting
20 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It’s our episode 200 free consulting special. Jim and Allan answer your questions about hard drive...
2.5 Admins 199: Rest In Parity
13 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How to prepare for your loved ones to have the access they need if the worst unexpectedly happens, J...
2.5 Admins 198: SMB Pulse
06 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Microsoft is tightening up SMB security in Windows which might break access to your old NAS, a Cogen...
2.5 Admins 197: Exchange Money
30 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Linux kernel developers were infected with malware for 2 years, another nail in the coffin of proper...
2.5 Admins 196: Won’tel
23 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Microsoft’s new Copilot+ feature will record everything you are doing on your computer for some re...
2.5 Admins 195: Execute Option 121
16 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why Windows 10 might be gaining users at Windows 11’s expense, an old DHCP option is a potential r...
2.5 Admins 194: Thundering Mastodon
09 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Mastodon’s link previews are causing downtime for web servers without properly configured caching,...
2.5 Admins 193: TV DoS
02 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How a smart TV broke a Windows machine on the same network by pretending to be hundreds of different...
2.5 Admins 192: ZFS Week
25 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
ZFS on root is back in the Ubuntu installer but there’s a better way to do it, next-generation har...
2.5 Admins 191: Mechanical Turk
18 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why updating iPhones in their sealed boxes might have some downsides, Amazon’s “AI” turned out...
2.5 Admins 190: twitterz
11 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A backdoor has been found in xz-utils, OpenZFS improves ZVOL performance on Linux, Twitter devs fail...
2.5 Admins 189: Too Much Glass
04 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Glassdoor seemingly doesn’t understand its raison d’etre, Telegram wants to cheap out on sending...
2.5 Admins 188: Farewell to Core
28 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The FreeBSD version of TrueNAS is going away, a major Apple antitrust case begins, encrypted LLM cha...
2.5 Admins 187: MDK
21 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Prison officials took away inmate student laptops for no good reason, Warner Bros. ruined gamers’ ...
2.5 Admins 186: Jim Defends the CFAA
14 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Roku stops its users watching TV until they accept a new ToS, the line between journalism and comput...
2.5 Admins 185: 2.5 Gigabits
07 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The boss of Nvidia says kids don’t need to code because they can just use AI, companies sell their...
2.5 Admins 184: Avast, mateys
29 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
More cameras leak footage, Avast is fined for selling user data, a vending machine quietly scans stu...
2.5 Admins 183: Unbootable Quantum Toothbrushes
22 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why it’s not a great idea to install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware, quantum computing hype ha...
2.5 Admins 182: All the Small Things
15 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Nginx is forked, Broadcom/VMware kills ESXi, dedup is finally fixed in ZFS, using multiple network i...
2.5 Admins 181: Triangle Fraud
08 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Trying to report a security issue lands a consultant in trouble, a new take on the drop shipping sca...
2.5 Admins 180: Email 777
01 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Microsoft’s rudimentary error that allowed an attacker access to its executives’ emails, Pixel p...
2.5 Admins 179: Y2K NotOK
25 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Y2K was a pretty serious problem and 2038 is coming soon, work on Arm servers is improving the exper...
2.5 Admins 178: LOTS of Storage
18 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Hard drives are pretty much an enterprise product now, GitHub’s malware problem, and spreading ser...
2.5 Admins 177: Don’t Pay the Dane
11 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why the problems with open source licenses aren’t quite as easy to fix as some people think, the r...
2.5 Admins 176: Sudo Cognito
04 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What does “incognito mode” in Chrome actually mean and whether documenting browser standards in ...
2.5 Admins 175: Guess Who’s Listening
28 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Twitch pulls out of Korea thanks to the opposite of Net Neutrality, it’s not clear to what extent ...