AJ
Allan Jude
X (Twitter) ↗ LinkedIn ↗

Allan Jude

Things Allan Says on Podcasts

Works on FreeBSD and ZFS storage systems and has co-written books on ZFS administration, including FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS. Hosts BSD Now and 2.5 Admins, two long-running technical podcasts on BSD systems administration, storage, and networking.

“if you have to replace the certificate every 64 days or something, you're definitely going to want to automate that. You're not doing that by hand every 60 days or you're going to screw up frequently.” — Allan Jude, 2.5 Admins “people's reaction of just disable IPv6 is exactly why IPv6 has not gotten very far. I had hoped that it was getting better when everybody's phone was kind of depending on it to avoid carrier grade NAT, but it seems like we only care about it on the phone and we've not applied any of those lessons to the rest of the internet.” — Allan Jude, 2.5 Admins “For so long, my policy has been it is cheaper to just buy more hard drives than to figure out what it is safe to delete, but the math may have flipped on that one.” — Allan Jude, 2.5 Admins

Where to Find Them

Allan Jude hosts BSD Now and hosts 2.5 Admins . They have also been a guest on The Changelog .

Recently: “2.5 Admins 323: No /boot For You” on 2.5 Admins (October 2026); “2.5 Admins 322: Internet Defrigeration” on 2.5 Admins (October 2026); “2.5 Admins 321: Backup Strategy” on 2.5 Admins (October 2026); “2.5 Admins 320: Dining on Goose” on 2.5 Admins (October 2026); “684: Nerds 2.0” on BSD Now (October 2026); “2.5 Admins 319: Funding Open Source” on 2.5 Admins (October 2026).

What They Said

“if you have to replace the certificate every 64 days or something, you're definitely going to want to automate that. You're not doing that by hand every 60 days or you're going to screw up frequently.” — Allan Jude, 2.5 Admins

The hosts were discussing Let's Encrypt cutting maximum certificate lifetimes from 90 to 64 days in February 2027. Allan notes the protocol already allows even shorter ones and says automation is no longer optional.

2.5 Admins · 2026-10-29 Permalink → Listen →
2.5 Admins Around 07:20 into the episode
Allan Jude

…if you have to go and change because you lost your Acme account or whatever, then your site's going to be going through an outage until the DNS change propagates. So definitely don't jack it up too long, but there may be value in that actually being a day or two instead of only minutes or hours.

Joe Ressington

Well, something related that I saw was 64-day certificate lifetimes coming in February 2027 for Let's Encrypt.

Allan Jude

…I think they're currently limited to 270 days now. You can't actually get even a whole year, even though they tend to sell the certificates to you in years. You have to go get them reissued after a while. And I've started to see some of those providers offering support via the Acme protocol to keep getting reissued versions of certificates you've paid for via the ACME protocol. Because if you have to replace the certificate every 64 days or something, you're definitely going to want to automate that. You're not doing that by hand every 60 days or you're going to screw up frequently.

Jim Salter

For most people using Let's Encrypt, this change isn't something that you're really going to need to do anything to accommodate. If you're using CertBot with its standard installation and it's automatically installed cron jobs or systemd timers, you're all set. It's checking to see if there's a new…

Allan Jude

They also mentioned they are reducing the authorization reuse period from 30 days down to 10. And in 2028, it will shrink to just seven hours to comply with the new 2029 rules, reducing the maximum validation reuse period and to remove the need for CAA rechecking, where we have to repeat part of…

Joe Ressington

Ubuntu 2610 is dropping support for a bunch of file systems, including ZFS, for the boot partition if you're using secure boot.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“people's reaction of just disable IPv6 is exactly why IPv6 has not gotten very far. I had hoped that it was getting better when everybody's phone was kind of depending on it to avoid carrier grade NAT, but it seems like we only care about it on the phone and we've not applied any of those lessons to the rest of the internet.” — Allan Jude, 2.5 Admins

The hosts were discussing a report that a pre-installed Intel driver rewrites the IPv6 flow label to zero, breaking Microsoft 365 and Azure services behind load balancers, and that many people respond by disabling IPv6. Allan says that reflex is part of why IPv6 adoption has stalled.

2.5 Admins · 2026-10-29 Permalink → Listen →
2.5 Admins Around 16:38 into the episode
Allan Jude

…wouldn't be as obviously, it's just broken as this. So yeah, this is a very terrible driver feature, which is almost certainly a bug. I don't think there's much value in ever setting that flow label to zero. It's probably trying to do more with it and screwing it up. But that's pretty terrible.

Jim Salter

…major network interface manufacturers doing something as bloody Johnson stupid as resetting flow labels to zero. Like Alan said, that's got to be a bug. There's no valid reason for it. And frankly, it strikes me as a very much romper room bug that really never should have made it out of the shop.

Allan Jude

…catch this in the lab with iperf and TCP dump. It would probably take somebody a long time to figure out this is what was happening. But once you knew what to look for, it's obvious what is happening. And it does seem that they should fix it. And also, if Microsoft has known for a while that it's the problem, why does it keep reinstalling the broken version? But to Jim's point about adoption, people's reaction of just disable IPv6 is exactly why IPv6 has not gotten very far. I had hoped that it was getting better when everybody's phone was kind of depending on it to avoid carrier grade NAT, but it seems like we only care about it on the phone and we've not applied any of those lessons to the rest of the internet. You

Jim Salter

know, Alan, you also perhaps accidentally raised another really good question, which is when you've got one tech giant like Intel that's delivering software and software updates via the Windows catalog, which Microsoft controls, at what point does Microsoft step in and take ownership and say, no…

Allan Jude

Yeah. And I also wonder how tempted Azure and Amazon and so are to change their load balancer to patch around this problem so that people can at least still use their computers that have this broken software on it, but at the same time, not have to ruin all their load balancing and run around with…

Jim Salter

I'm going to guess they weren't very tempted at all to patch around this issue because since it was only IPv6, it was probably only affecting about the third or fourth nine of their traffic.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“For so long, my policy has been it is cheaper to just buy more hard drives than to figure out what it is safe to delete, but the math may have flipped on that one.” — Allan Jude, 2.5 Admins

The hosts were working through the current spike in RAM and drive prices, and Jude had just joked that the real tip for saving space is figuring out which files you do not need. Here he gives up a rule he has run his own storage on for years. Co-host Joe Ressington agrees straight away that your time may no longer be worth more than the hardware.

2.5 Admins · 2026-09-17 Permalink → Listen →
2.5 Admins Around 13:43 into the episode
Allan Jude

Yeah, there's a great tip for saving hardware space. Figure out the files you don't need to be keeping all the time.

Joe Ressington

Yeah, exactly.

Allan Jude

For so long, my policy has been it is cheaper to just buy more hard drives than to figure out what it is safe to delete, but the math may have flipped on that one.

Joe Ressington

Yeah, your time maybe isn't quite more valuable than hard drives anymore.

Jim Salter

Well, it's certainly not more valuable than enterprise-grade solid-state drives. I can promise you that. Rust, I haven't seen go up so much that I'm like, oh no, this is just intolerable. But good lord, you go to buy, you know, like a 3.8 terabyte DC600M solid-state drive, and you're going to feel…

Allan Jude

We did a quote for a company last summer, and then they actually bought it this summer. And over the course of that, basically one year, the price of a 15.36 terabyte enterprise NVMe that does like a million IOPS, so like a really fancy, good drive, went from like $2,600 to $10,000 a piece.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

Collections They Appear In

Hands-On Engineering Podcasts Software Engineering & Infra