2.5 Admins 256: Why ZFS

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 […]

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.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News/discussion How I […]

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.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes ZFS Basecamp Launch: A Panel with the […]

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 us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes FreeBSD Summer Roundup: Guide to Lock-In Free Infrastructure   News/discussion AWS deleted my 10-year account and all […]

AMD’s recent mobile-class processors impress us with their power to performance ratio, the UK government suggests a preposterous way to save water, setting up verified boot with snapshots, and the best way to configure ZFS to run VMs.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes ZFS […]

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 servers in a garage where dusty woodworking is happening.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes […]

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 maintain old ZFS pools, and accessibility in the BSDs.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   Discussion It’s a mistake to over […]

Two recent outages were handled very differently but show the dangers of centralisation, Let’s Encrypt is introducing certificates for IP addresses, and the differences between backup and production systems.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News/discussion Microsoft’s 19-hour Outlook outage exposes fragility in cloud […]

To celebrate the 256 milestone we devote the whole episode to explaining why we use ZFS. We explain about data safety, data retention, data portability, and ease of administration.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Klara ZFS Basecamp – Central Resource for Everything ZFS Practical […]

Microsoft offers Windows 10 updates in return for your settings data, Denmark wants to protect against deepfakes using copyright, someone is wrong on the Internet about RAID, and getting a sysadmin job in your late 40s.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   News/discussion Microsoft’s […]