2.5 Admins

2.5 Admins 282: Fragile DNS

15 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Cisco network gear fell over when it shouldn’t have, yet another security flaw is found in Microsoft Copilot, the US military is letting Grok in...

2.5 Admins 281: Lead The Target

08 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The many reasons why email shouldn’t be trusted. Plus how to stop your kids accessing inappropriate content online, and why the answer probably ...

2.5 Admins 280: Bad Parking

01 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Why you should probably keep paying for your old domains, the perpetual problem of typo squatting, a machine learning expert’s take on BS from L...

2.5 Admins 279: Short One

25 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The one bit of advice we’d give to someone wanting to become a professional sysadmin. This is a short episode because Joe is having a break for ...

2.5 Admins 278: XXXfil

18 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Apple deletes a person’s entire digital life, PornHub Premium user data is leaked, Mozilla’s new CEO wants to ruin Firefox, Tech Force in ...

2.5 Admins 277: Battering RAM

11 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...

2.5 Admins 276: Very Prudish Network

04 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 rele...

2.5 Admins 275: G-word

27 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Google kept collecting sensor data even after bricking Nest thermostats, FreeBSD’s container support gets serious, and where to find cheap (or ...

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 with ZFS, and separating trusted and non-trusted ...

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 mixed disk sizes in ZFS with AnyRaid, an upcoming stan...

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 than they once did, Jim’s M.2 NVMe drive died a...

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 a zip bomb, how bad the Internet bot problem prob...

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 arguments against self-hosting, and setting up a server...

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 gets even harder to use a local account in Window...

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 third-party drives but they are removing features...

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 preloading videos, and dealing with a ZFS pool that won’...

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 use a ludicrous amount of power, LLM hallucinatio...

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, if rather different from Linux. Plus the lies that ...

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 doesn’t seem to make sense in 2025, a hosting pr...

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 fraudulent hard drives came from, when IT workers g...

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 government takes a 10% stake in Intel, and minimum net...

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, and configuring all-flash arrays.   Plugs Support ...

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 government suggests a preposterous way to save water, ...

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 is this the wrong question? Plus setting up serve...

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 about some of their human-like behaviour. Plus how to ...

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 Encrypt is introducing certificates for IP addresses,...

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 about data safety, data retention, data portabilit...

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 against deepfakes using copyright, someone is wrong on ...

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. Plus Broadcom starts auditing VMware customers, an...

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 matter how much we all want one. Plus whether you sho...

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 shouldn’t regularly spin down hard drives, and sec...

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 vulnerabilities, SBCs that look cool for a mini NAS and a rout...

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 in the privacy arms race, Allan gives us the insid...

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 another example of a “lifetime” subscription b...

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 encrypted datasets is finally identified and fixed, why t...

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 tune ZFS (or answer any admin questions), and settin...

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 forever, Windows Server is getting hotpatching, and...

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 storage, some insight into how AI scrapers are usi...

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 some FreeBSD packages didn’t appear when they sh...

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 law, Microsoft is 50 years old, and our thoughts ...

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 work on Android without Google apps, a complex Google...

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 selectively managing updates.   Plugs Support us...

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 keep if we stopped working in IT, and avoiding bitro...

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 surveillance tech at work, and  decrypting ZFS at bo...

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 on VM guests and hosts.   Plugs Support us on patr...

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 embarrassingly insecure, setting up encrypted offsite backups, ...

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, geo-redundancy for VPSs, and backing up Windows t...

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 it goes end of life, LLMs changing Redditors’ min...

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 unsupported hardware, about using ZFS on VPS block stora...

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 support large amounts of external storage, why it’s n...

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 offsite backups, why two-factor authentication ov...

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 of using free VPN apps, a proof of concept exploit ...

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 accidentally writing part of an ISO onto a USB drive, ho...

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 delete every single copy of a file, and using Blu...

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 organization, decade-proof redundancy, multiple hot ...

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 certificates, a PSA about domains that don’t send emai...

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 or AES encryption, Russian attackers compromised a...

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 geopolitical question, QNAP bungles a firmware up...

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’t prepared for an outage and handled it really bad...

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 routers, Google makes changes to how it ranks some affil...

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, restricting a friend’s access to just their back...

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 on IPv6 firewalls, using ZFS like Git, and running ...

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 ransomeware encrypts all your data, and even warn you m...

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. Plus picking a UPS for a homelab.   Plugs Support us...

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 chunk of data behind and doesn’t play nicely with so...

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-prem, why Jim and Allan don’t use Unraid, and clou...

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 make sense in a lot of deployments, the .io TLD is p...

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 air traffic control system became so outdated, and ...

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 isolating IoT devices, our thoughts on Ubiquiti g...

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 underwater servers, a philosophical question about...

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 update, and the simple way to set up TP-Link Omada ge...

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 the security benefits and drawbacks of different ...

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 didn’t live up to everyday reality. Plus Bcachef...

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 capacity reignites the debate about versioned protocols...

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 CPUs, and using Samba on Linux with Active Directory...

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 Alexa, and how to decide which open source software...

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 have been avoided, a hilariously dumb ESXi vulnerab...

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 for end of life Windows versions is just doubling d...

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 when they moved from Google to Squarespace, Linksys...

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 another full episode of your questions and our answers...

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 its promising underwater data center experiment an...

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 sold as a router, a VPN feature that we hadn’t hea...

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 availability, USB-C robustness, ZFS performance o...

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, Joe’s weird issues with wireless access points, a...

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 Cogent root-server mysteriously goes out of sync withou...

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 federated email as Exchange Server moves to a sub...

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 reason, but it will only work on new Arm hardware fo...

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 risk for VPN users, we should probably say “renti...

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, locking down DNS inside Windows networks, why usi...

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 TVs, Jim’s alarming theory about AI malware, an...

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 hard drives are proving to be reliable but prices are...

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 to just be people, LLMs hallucinating imaginary d...

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 at regex, and adding SATA ports to a home NAS.  ...

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 verification codes, law enforcement makes YouTube...

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 chat responses are relatively easy to read, and scali...

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’ experiences, Google’s terrible office WiFi, and ...

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 computer fraud and abuse, and when using jumbo frames on...

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 users’ data to train models, and why 2.5Gbps ne...

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 students’ faces, using a small NVMe drive with ZFS,...

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 has been replaced by AI, toothbrushes can’t be par...