2.5 Admins 295: Orbital Meltdown

Aaron and Shane share some thoughts about attending Kubecon, including the push for European sovereign cloud, how platform engineering might mitigate some of the problems AI is causing, the sense that Kubernetes is mature and boring in a good way now, and our concerns about scope creep.   Announcing the AI Gateway Working Group             Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes           Subscribe to the RSS feed.

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.   Plug Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes   News/discussion Orbital data centers, part 1: There’s no way this is economically viable, right? 11 mins edited Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea Google Just Patented The End Of Your Website   Free consulting We were asked about ZFS on really old Dell servers.               See our contact page for ways to get in touch.  

Raspberry Pi prices have gone up yet again, more drama in the exciting world of open source office suites, Red Hat looks to be going all in on “AI”, Cloudflare vibe codes a WordPress rip off, and GIMP shares some interesting download numbers.   News/discussion A new 3GB Raspberry Pi 4 for $83.75, and more memory-driven price increases Forking frenzy ensues after Euro-Office launch sparks OnlyOffice backlash TDF ejects its core developers Let’s put an end to the speculation Memo: Red Hat Global Engineering plans to lean in to AI If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem – you have bigger problems Introducing EmDash — the spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security Interesting GIMP numbers                   Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes   See our contact page for ways to get in touch. RSS: Subscribe to the RSS feeds here

May wants to make a space heater out of an old computer, and Joe is thinking about buying a new (used) laptop. The heater will be pretty straightforward but finding the right laptop will be much harder.             Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes         See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the RSS feed.

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.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes FreeBSD and OpenZFS in the Quest for Technical Independence: A Storage Architect’s View​   News/discussion Arm expands compute platform to silicon products in historic company first Anthropic exposes Claude Code source by accident   Free consulting We were asked about setting up a backup for a friend’s photos.               See our contact page for ways to get in touch.  

What we do when we get stressed, cinema vs theatre, our mentors, and if we’ve tried being vegetarian. With Gary from Linux After Dark, Andy from Linux Dev Time, and Shane from Hybrid Cloud Show. Patrons got this this in their feed two weeks ago.          

Steam stats suggest that gaming on Linux is more popular than ever, Wine improvements might entice even more gamers, Ubuntu might break things when it tightens up GRUB security and makes 6GB of RAM the minimum requirement for the desktop edition, and Ubuntu MATE is looking for new maintainers.   News LAS 2026 Call for proposals extended till the 10th April Linux smashes past 5% on the Steam Survey for the first time Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at the kernel level, and the speed gains are massive Ubuntu 26.10 could drop btrfs, ZFS and LUKS support from GRUB Ubuntu quietly raises its minimum system requirements Windows 11 has lower requirements Ubuntu MATE – seeking maintainers                   Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes   See our contact page for ways to get in touch. RSS: Subscribe to the RSS feeds here

It’s another hot questions episode. Whether we think better on our own or with other people, our non-standard debugging habits, favourite interview questions, coding at night, character encoding, and abolishing time zones.             Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the RSS feed

The ugliest and jankiest hacks we’ve put into prod, and a few of the worst things we’ve seen other people get away with.           Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes           Subscribe to the RSS feed.

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.   Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes Five‑Year Storage Design with OpenZFS: Media Refresh, Rebalancing, and Hardware Independence   News/discussion Our commitment to Windows quality Microsoft fixes broken Windows update days after vowing fewer broken updates Cyberattack on vehicle breathalyzer company leaves drivers stranded across the US   Free consulting We were asked about whether you should virtualise a router or a NAS.             See our contact page for ways to get in touch.