mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Podcast from Allan Jude, Jim Salter, and Joe Ressington. Tech news and your sysadmin questions answered weekly.
2.5 Admins 299: RMAggravation
People trying to return defective hard drives and RAM are finding out why consumer protection laws would be good, GoDaddy accidentally gave someone’s domain name away, and when and how to fix ZFS fragmentation.
2.5 Admins 295: Orbital Meltdown
Why putting data center satellites in orbit is a terrible idea, Google might show people a made-up version of your website, and ZFS on really old Dell servers.
2.5 Admins 297: Jraphics
Hitting the limit for hard links, a parent struggles to get back into their teen’s compromised Discord account, the demise of tower PCs and general purpose computing in general, and changing the properties of existing ZFS pools.
2.5 Admins 293: Reduced Flicker
Microsoft says Windows 11 is getting less rubbish but we are skeptical, vehicles with alcohol interlocks won’t start because the manufacturer’s server is down, and whether you should virtualise a router or a NAS.
2.5 Admins 290: Tired of Tracking
Microsoft Authenticator will delete Entra credentials on phones that aren’t running stock ROMs, Jim’s nightmare experience trying to get a user back into their MS account, tracking vehicles via tire pressure monitors, using a ZFS pool in a degraded state, and keeping cold ZFS storage dataset snapshots in sync.
https://2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-290/
2.5 Admins 296: Beware of the Leopard
Microsoft locks devs out of important accounts, the foreign router ban exemptions make even less sense, Backblaze shows that “unlimited” never means that, and attempting to avoid software that’s written with AI.
2.5 Admins 291: UPS for LiFePO4
Why passkeys aren’t the right solution to everything, Allan tells us why he loves his new Lithium Iron Phosphate UPS, Btrfs vs ZFS on root, and restricting Internet access for IoT devices on your network.
2.5 Admins 292: Trivyally Infected
The US government is drumming up fear about foreign routers, a pretty serious supply chain attack might be state-sponsored, and the safety of filesystems inside VMs.
2.5 Admins 288: HDD Tourism
Hardware scarcity and price hikes spread to hard drives, the Bcachefs dev thinks his AI is ‘fully conscious’, an agent might have gone after a FOSS maintainer, Jim is disappointed with an Ars author, and ZFS and VMs in the homelab.
2.5 Admins 289: Hunter2
An exciting new cold storage technology seems to be getting closer, Nvidia seemingly wants a slice of the laptop hardware action, why you (and your users) should definitely not use LLMs to “generate” passwords , and whistleblowing when sensitive customer data isn’t being taken seriously.
2.5 Admins 294: Oh, R2
Arm announces its first CPU, Anthropic accidentally leaks the source for Claude Code and it’s terrible, and setting up a backup for a friend’s photos.
