2.5 Admins - podcast cover

2.5 Admins

The Late Night Linux Family2.5admins.com
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 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 GitHub to trust. Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes News/discussion Secure Boot is completely broken on 200+ models from […]

Aug 08, 202430 min

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, and using SAS drives with a PCIe card. Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes News A closer […]

Aug 01, 202431 min

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 technical debt, and the best way to manage router redundancy. Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes […]

Jul 25, 202430 min

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’ sloppy app isn’t a huge problem but is a bad sign, and why backing up an Android phone in one go is pretty much impossible without root. Plug Support […]

Jul 18, 202429 min

2.5 Admins 203: Yet more free consulting

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. Our thoughts on a new UK smart devices law, backing up 30TB off-site, how to learn ZFS, SMB vs other ways to share files, and backing up secrets. […]

Jul 11, 202432 min

2.5 Admins 202: Microsoft’s Underwater Again

Why we didn’t mention pocket fluff when we talked about USB-C charging issues, Microsoft abandons its promising underwater data center experiment and didn’t monitor it’s SSL certs, why you should be careful which WordPress plugins and themes you install,an Australian ISP’s tech debt comes due, and remoting into desktop Linux. Plug Support us on […]

Jul 04, 202433 min

2.5 Admins 201: CVEs everywhere

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 heard of is removed from Windows, and why we don’t believe that Microsoft will ever take security as seriously as they claim. Plug Support us on patreon and […]

Jun 27, 202432 min

2.5 Admins 200: Even more free consulting

It’s our episode 200 free consulting special. Jim and Allan answer your questions about hard drive availability, USB-C robustness, ZFS performance on a VPS, cold storage with a 2.5″ form factor, how we gained our level of knowledge, disk enclosure issues, and monitoring Windows servers. Tailscale Tailscale is an […]

Jun 20, 202433 min

2.5 Admins 199: Rest In Parity

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, and dealing with email accounts that shouldn’t exist. Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes News/discussion After you die, your […]

Jun 13, 2024

2.5 Admins 198: SMB Pulse

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 without them spotting it, and protecting hard drives from electromagnetic pulses. Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes News Installing Windows […]

Jun 06, 2024

2.5 Admins 197: Exchange Money

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 subscription model, followup on zfsbootmenu and IPv6, and learning unfamiliar topics. Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes News/discussion Linux […]

May 30, 2024

2.5 Admins 196: Won’tel

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 for now. Plus Apple’s weird iOS bug that restored deleted files and photos, and sharing files over the Internet from a NAS on your LAN. Plugs Support us on […]

May 23, 2024

2.5 Admins 195: Execute Option 121

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 “renting” rather than “buying”domains, and avoiding tracking when using IPv6. Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Jim was on […]

May 16, 202431 min

2.5 Admins 194: Thundering Mastodon

Mastodon’s link previews are causing downtime for web servers without properly configured caching, locking down DNS inside Windows networks, why using write-once backup media is a bad idea, and increasing the performance of a Microsoft SQL Server with SSDs and ZFS. Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early […]

May 09, 202430 min

2.5 Admins 193: TV DoS

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, and encrypting offsite backups. Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes News/discussion Is your PC having trouble? Your smart […]

May 02, 202431 min

2.5 Admins 192: ZFS Week

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 going up thanks to storage-hungry AI, why getting started with ZFS is really easy, and the best filesystem for a single SSD (take a guess). Plugs […]

Apr 25, 202431 min

2.5 Admins 191: Mechanical Turk

Why updating iPhones in their sealed boxes might have some downsides, Amazon’s “AI” turned out to just be people, LLMs hallucinating imaginary dependencies is potentially a security risk, Aruba backs up its government data to the Internet Archive, and disk queue schedulers in Linux. Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS […]

Apr 18, 202429 min

2.5 Admins 190: twitterz

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. Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Hybrid Cloud Show is a new show that’s part of the Late Night […]

Apr 11, 202430 min

2.5 Admins 189: Too Much Glass

Glassdoor seemingly doesn’t understand its raison d’etre, Telegram wants to cheap out on sending verification codes, law enforcement makes YouTube give them details of everyone who watched certain videos, and tuning a low end VPS to host a blog. Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes […]

Apr 04, 202432 min

2.5 Admins 188: Farewell to Core

The FreeBSD version of TrueNAS is going away, a major Apple antitrust case begins, encrypted LLM chat responses are relatively easy to read, and scaling a fleet of FreeBSD hosts with jails. Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes News TrueNAS CORE 13 is the […]

Mar 28, 202429 min

2.5 Admins 187: MDK

Prison officials took away inmate student laptops for no good reason, Warner Bros. ruined gamers’ experiences, Google’s terrible office WiFi, and managing gold images. Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes News/discussion An engineer bought a prison laptop on eBay. Then 1,200 incarcerated students lost […]

Mar 21, 202431 min

2.5 Admins 186: Jim Defends the CFAA

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 a network makes sense. Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes News Roku disables players and TVs with […]

Mar 14, 202430 min

2.5 Admins 185: 2.5 Gigabits

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 networking probably isn’t worth bothering with. Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes News/discussion Jensen Huang says kids […]

Mar 07, 202429 min

2.5 Admins 184: Avast, mateys

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, and taking snapshots of VMs. Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes News “So violated”: Wyze cameras leak footage to […]

Feb 29, 202432 min

2.5 Admins 183: Unbootable Quantum Toothbrushes

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 part of a botnet, Google has killed cached search results, and testing your backups. Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes […]

Feb 22, 202431 min

2.5 Admins 182: All the Small Things

Nginx is forked, Broadcom/VMware kills ESXi, dedup is finally fixed in ZFS, using multiple network interfaces on a NAS, and more. Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes News announcing freenginx.org Broadcom-owned VMware kills the free version of ESXi virtualization software OpenZFS Native Encryption Use […]

Feb 15, 202430 min

2.5 Admins 181: Triangle Fraud

Trying to report a security issue lands a consultant in trouble, a new take on the drop shipping scam, setting up your first NAS – including the benefits of RAID, picking a distro, choosing the right disk size, and more. Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes […]

Feb 08, 202429 min

2.5 Admins 180: Email 777

Microsoft’s rudimentary error that allowed an attacker access to its executives’ emails, Pixel phones have another serious storage bug, hidden malware payload found at Ars Technica, and when to upgrade your hardware for Windows 11. Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes BSDCan 2024 – Call […]

Feb 01, 202433 min

2.5 Admins 179: Y2K NotOK

Y2K was a pretty serious problem and 2038 is coming soon, work on Arm servers is improving the experience on the desktop, and what to do with an old unsupported Synology NAS. Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes OpenZFS Best Practices: Part 2: File Serving […]

Jan 25, 202432 min

2.5 Admins 178: LOTS of Storage

Hard drives are pretty much an enterprise product now, GitHub’s malware problem, and spreading services across different machines and VMs to keep downtime to a minimum. Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes OpenZFS Storage Best Practices and Use Cases Part 1: Snapshots and Backups […]

Jan 18, 202431 min