2.5 Admins 276: Very Prudish Network 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 released, and using a single database vs one DB per application or VM. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2...

2.5 Admins 273: Reliability Tracking Allan tells us about the OpenZFS Summit, mixed disk sizes in ZFS with AnyRaid, an upcoming standard keeps partially dead drives usable, upcoming 50 and 100 TB drives, and NVMe rust drives. Plus using a separate mini PC for work. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2...

2.5 Admins 272: NVMe Surprise 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 at an inopportune moment, using multiple partitions on disks with ZFS. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2...

Even if you don't need me to tell you "stop trusting email," you might find it handy to have the reasons why not to trust email written out and easy to refer *other* folks to, instead of having to make the argument from scratch every damn time. jrs-s.net/2025/10/30/p...

2.5 Admins 271: Dead Internet 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 probably is, and building a small home server cluster. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2...

2.5 Admins 270: Storage Shortage 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 for virtualization and containers. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2...

2.5 Admins 269: End of 10? 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 Windows 11, and whether repurposing old server hardware is worth it. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2...

POLITICO: “.. They referred to Black people as monkeys and ‘the watermelon people’ and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies .. and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery. @politico.com www.politico.com/news/2025/10...

2.5 Admins 268: The Salter Philosophy 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, and managing ZFS properties during replication. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2...

2.5 Admins 267: Hoarding Cache 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’t import. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2...

2.5 Admins 266: Jiggawatts of Hallucinations Intel and Nvidia are teaming up for multiple reasons, Open AI are planning to use a ludicrous amount of power, LLM hallucinations aren’t going away, and how long we keep servers and hard drives in production. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2...

2.5 Admins 264: A Question of Trust Matrix shows how painful DBs can be to restore, the TLS cert system doesn’t make sense in 2025, using S3 object storage outside of the cloud, and more. With guest host Gary from Linux After Dark and Hybrid Cloud Show. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2...

2.5 Admins 262: It’s About Control 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. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2...

2.5 Admins 261: Worms and Baskets Why you can’t rely on a single cloud provider, Jim discovers AI that spreads itself like a worm, and configuring all-flash arrays. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2...

2.5 Admins 260: Watery Email 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. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2...

2.5 Admins 259: New Web? 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. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-259/

An open letter to a billionaire:

2.5 Admins 258: Artificial Dirtbag 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. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2...

2.5 Admins 257: Outage365 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. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2...

2.5 Admins 256: Why ZFS 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. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2...

2.5 Admins 255: Copyright Your Face 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. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2...

2.5 Admins 254: chrudo A vulnerability in sudo brings up concerns about feature-creep, and makes us consider alternatives. Plus Broadcom starts auditing VMware customers, and how to decide which outbound ports to open on a large network’s firewall. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2...

Came across an obviously "AI"-made article of "Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novels of 2025" where every one of the books doesn't actually exist, including one purported to be by me. The internet's filling up with slop, y'all. Here's a canonical list of my work, btw: whatever.scalzi.com/about/books-...

2.5 Admins 253: ImpossibleFS 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 should switch to third-party firmware on your router. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2...

I just have to say, as a historian of the Reconstruction-era Klan, that masked paramilitaries are very bad and masked vigilantes are even worse and there are causal links between the two and none of this is good for democracy.

2.5 Admins 252: Nintendon’t Back Up 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 securing applications on a home server. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2...

It's way down on the list of horrors, but National Parks having to post signs asking visitors to report anything there that provides "information that [is] negative about either past or living Americans" is utterly pathetic. The past isn't all positive, kids. I'm sorry if that hurts your feelings.

If we can't get these shit heels out of office, it really will not take that long to permanently destroy the version of America I enlisted at 17 to serve. MAYBE twenty years. Maybe less. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Honestly I still can’t stop laughing 😂😅🤣

Smart analysis of the No Kings protests estimates roughly 4-6 million people protested Trump across America yesterday. The anti-Trump resistance is unprecedented, and exceeds his first term. www.gelliottmorris.com/p/no-kings-d...

Just want to take a moment to shout out the international reporters helping us get the real story out. When an 80-year-old veteran with a walker is hauled off with his hands zip-tied behind his back, and the media spins it as a “threatening breach” of a police barricade

US Veterans peacefully protesting Trump’s military birthday parade arrested at Capitol Hill. This is the moment a 80+ year old US veteran is taken away in handcuffs for practicing his 1st Amendment right. #3E #NoKings #NoKingsProtests (🎥 @gregjstoker.bsky.social )

I guess it was a good day: not one single counter-protester in sight at today's #NOKINGS protest in Columbia, SC.

2.5 Admins 251: OversharePoint 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 router, and setting up a first NAS with 4 disks. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2...

do it!!! the physical paper is so good and funny

Trump, who recently paid Ashli Babbitt's family $5 million and has floated the idea of reparations for January 6 rioters, calls protesters in Los Angeles "paid insurrectionists."

I spent so many years covering propaganda anticipating this exact moment and so many of my peers bought the paid-for contrarian line that even covering disinformation was somehow, itself, censorship. Now we're at the event horizon. Celebration is protest is riot is justification for a police state.

2.5 Admins 250: Better RAIDz? Google bypasses the usual channels to distrust two certificate authorities, Meta’s new escalation in the privacy arms race, Allan gives us inside details of a new mixed-disk-size ZFS RAID feature, and moving from UniFi gear to TP-Link. 2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-2...

The Polish foreign minister, a writer and journalist who covered the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, clearly knows a thing or two about a patiently-timed response.

The Onion does not use AI in any way. Our newspaper is proudly made by actual living people. AI makes bad, boring shit, and people make art. Subscribe to us instead: membership.theonion.com

I made a new friend while kayaking in one of the creeks feeding the Congaree National Swamp today.

me: do i have ADHD? doctor: no you don’t me: i don’t what doctor: you have AD240p

Rarely have I felt so brutally and directly attacked.

@jimsalter.bsky.social and I out on scooty puffs jr and snooty puffs jr

State Department Plans to Launch ‘Office of Remigration.’ The idea of “remigration” has a troubling history; it originally comes from far-right, neo-Nazi circles in Europe and is typically used to advocate for the forced removal of migrants. www.thehandbasket.co/p/state-depa...

Um. 🤔Who could have known these citations were fake…🤷‍♀️ Kennedy R. Brain worms: Unlocking creativity and spontaneous bad ideas. Inst Fake Neurol 2024;42(3):123-124. Prasad M. COVID-19: Panic shopping and other pandemic benefits. Pandemics J. 2023;15(2):45-46. www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

I have been sick for a week and I just read about "something going around" in a subreddit, which I guess is how I get my information now that the CDC is officially spending the next four years determining when and how microscopes became gay.

I think this one's about due for a re-watch. I don't expect Falling Down to be any more comfortable to watch now than it was thirty years ago... but, sadly, I expect to UNDERSTAND it rather better now than I did then.

I just love getting desktop pop-up notifications from "Suggested," which is not clearly labeled but is a #Microsoft run low-tier ad placement service, directly on the desktops of business workstations running Windows Pro.