2.5 Admins

Jim and Allan disagree on how new hard drive tech is likely to work, more on storage and compute in the same box, and how we set up disk encryption on laptops.



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OpenZFS Monitoring and Observability



News/discussion

Western Digital doubles the performance of hard drives with dual-actuator High-Bandwidth, with path to 8X performance increase — Power-Optimized HDDs will reduce power by 20 percent



Free consulting

We were asked about how we set up disk encryption on laptops.

A quick-start guide to OpenZFS native encryption – Ars Technica

Keeping Data Safe with OpenZFS: Security, Encryption, and Delegation





















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Notepad++ falls victim to a state-sponsored attacker, AI agents talk nonsense to each other on an insecure vibe coded social network, and backing up a laptop properly.



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ZFS vs Btrfs: Architecture, Features, and Stability



News/discussion

Notepad++ Hijacked by State-Sponsored Hackers

AI agents now have their own Reddit-style social network, and it’s getting weird fas

Hacking Moltbook: AI Social Network Reveals 1.5M API Keys



Free consulting

We were asked about backing up a laptop properly.



















See our contact page for ways to get in touch.

Outlook’s autodiscover feature is leaking data again, our thoughts on the cycle of cloud and on-prem (centralised and local computing), and why you probably shouldn’t use NMVe to SATA adapters.



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ZFS in Production: Real-World Deployment Patterns and Pitfalls

Modern VDI on Proxmox: ZFS Reliability and GPU Acceleration at Lower Cost



News/discussion

Why has Microsoft been routing example.com traffic to a company in Japan?





Free consulting

We were asked about SATA to PCIe adapters.



















See our contact page for ways to get in touch.

Why you might not want your Windows encryption keys to be backed up to Microsoft, some Bluetooth devices are vulnerable to snooping and tracking, a lesson in the need for backups,  and the best practices and stack for setting up a mail server.



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Klara’s Expert Perspective on OpenZFS in 2026 and What to Expect Next

Modern VDI on Proxmox: ZFS Reliability and GPU Acceleration at Lower Cost



News/discussion

Microsoft Gave FBI Keys To Unlock Encrypted Data, Exposing Major Privacy Flaw

How to encrypt your PC’s disk without giving the keys to Microsoft

WhisperPair: Hijacking Bluetooth Accessories Using Google Fast Pair

When two years of academic work vanished with a single click



Free consulting

We were asked about the best practices and stack for setting up a mail server.



















See our contact page for ways to get in touch.

The last method to activate Windows without the Internet has gone away, malware that tricks users with a fake blue screen of death, and recovering from bad RAM with ZFS.



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Understanding ZFS Scrubs and Data Integrity



News/discussion

Windows activation by phone is seemingly dead

How Fake BSODs and Trusted Build Tools Are Used to Construct a Malware Infection



Free consulting

We were asked about recovering from bad RAM with ZFS.

















See our contact page for ways to get in touch.