2.5 Admins

Intel’s 7nm woes, hosts files, Mozilla’s VPN service, and automating ssh between remote hosts.

News

Heads roll at Intel after 7nm delay

Intel’s 7nm is busted, chips delayed, may have to use rival foundries to get GPUs out for US govt exascale super

AMD is now following Moore’s Law: More chips, more money, more pressure on Intel, more competition in the x86 space

AMD Says Zen 3 Consumer CPUs Will Launch This Year

Windows 10: HOSTS file blocking telemetry is now flagged as a risk

We test Mozilla’s new Wireguard-based $5/mo VPN service

Free consulting

We were asked about automating ssh between remote hosts. Allan mentioned SSH Mastery.

See our contact page for ways to get in touch.

New types of hard disks, recovering data from dying drives, AMD makes Jim reach for the calculator, and what to do with obscure software that you need.

Plugs

FreeBSD Fridays: A Series of 101 Classes

Joe’s podcast consulting

News

Western Digital releases new 18TB, 20TB EAMR drives

Tales From The Sysadmin: Impending Hard Drive Doom

AMD Ryzen 4000 desktop CPUs will be here in Q3 2020

Free consulting

We were asked how to deal with updates for software that isn’t in repos and needs to be compiled.

See our contact page for ways to get in touch.

Initial Arm Mac benchmarks are out and they aren’t terrible, getting the best transfer speeds over USB, and rolling our own home routers.

Plugs

FreeBSD Bug Squash

Support the podcast on Patreon

News

First benchmarks surface for Apple’s ARM-based Developer Transition Kit

UASP makes Raspberry Pi 4 disk IO 50% faster

Free Consulting

We were asked about our home network setups.

See our contact page for ways to get in touch.

Jim bought the worst laptop in the world, a quick update on SMR drives, learning the basics of ZFS, and updating air-gapped servers.

Plug

Support the podcast on Patreon

News

We bought Walmart’s $140 laptop so you wouldn’t have to

Lawsuit vs. Western Digital wants to end any use of SMR in NAS drives

Western Digital adds “Red Plus” branding for non-SMR hard drives

Free Consulting

We were asked about the best ways to start with ZFS, and Shlomi asked about updating air-gapped Ubuntu machines with various VMs.

See our contact page for ways to get in touch.

When the world will move to IPv6, WD SMR drives put to the test, raw vs qcow2 on ZFS, and erasing SSDs.

Plug

Support the podcast on Patreon

News

It could be ‘five to ten years’ before the world finally drags itself away from IPv4

We put Western Digital’s dreaded SMR Red drive to the test

Free consulting

Michael asked for advice about whether to use raw or qcow2 on ZFS, and Joe had a question about giving SSDs away.

See our contact page for ways to get in touch.

Zoom’s new encryption, podcasts in walled gardens, and servers as pets vs cattle.

Plug

Support the podcast on Patreon

News

Zoom to require users to upgrade to 5.0 after May 30th

Zoom bought Keybase in early May

Joe Rogan will move his podcast to Spotify

Free consulting

Eduardo asked us to dive a little deeper into how to move from being an admin who treats their servers like pets to being an admin who treats their servers like cattle.

See our contact page for ways to get in touch.

Why Apache is still relevant in 2020, and the differences between ZFS and Btrfs.

Plugs

Allan’s BSDCan Homelab panel

Allan on setns.live

Support the podcast on Patreon

Apache vs Nginx

Apache 101

Free Consulting

Several people including Emil have asked us to discuss the differences between ZFS and Btrfs. Jim recently wrote a ZFS 101 article.

See our contact page for ways to get in touch.

Our thoughts on DNS-over-HTTPS, whether Arm is about to take over, HDD advice, and automatic updates and reboots.

Plugs

Help us keep the lights on by supporting us on Patreon.

Watch Allan’s Homelab panel recording for BSDCan 2020 on May 5th, 2pm EDT (18:00 UTC)

Check out Joe’s light-hearted podcast The New Show

Jim will be speaking at Open Source 101 At Home

News

Surreptitiously Swapping SMR into Hard Drive Lines Must Stop

Canada’s .ca overlord rolls out free privacy-protecting DNS-over-HTTPS service for folks in Great White North

Paul Vixie on DoH @ vBSDCon 2019

Paul Vixie: DNS Wars: Episode IV: A New Bypass @ EuroBSDCon 2019

The rumor that just won’t die: Apple to keep Intel at Arm’s length in 2021 with launch of ‘A14-powered laptops’

Making macOS run well on ARM processors isn’t the hard part

What is ARM Morello

ARM backs the CHERI project

Free Consulting

Frank wrote in to ask advice on which HDDs to buy, and Jake was curious about automatic updates and reboots.

In our first episode, Allan Jude, Jim Salter, and Joe Ressington discuss Amazon cutting affiliate rates, SMR hard drives, and setting up off-site backups on the cheap.

News

Amazon reportedly planning drastic cuts to affiliate commission rates

Buyer beware—that 2TB-6TB “NAS” drive you’ve been eyeing might be SMR

Seagate says Network Attached Storage and SMR don’t mix

Western Digital admits 2TB-6TB WD Red NAS drives use shingled magnetic recording

Seagate ‘submarines’ SMR into 3 Barracuda drives and a Desktop HDD

Toshiba desktop disk drives have shingles too

Western Digital implies WD Red NAS SMR drive users are responsible for overuse problems

Free Consulting

Joe has ~2TB of data that should be backed up off-site. Jim and Allan discuss the best ways to do that on a low budget.

Send your questions for Jim and Allan to show@ the show website domain: 2.5admins.com