Podcast Plug - 2.5 Admins

2.5 Admins

… is an excellent podcast for systems administrators and technology lovers of all experience levels. As of this writing it’s run around 275 episodes. A Late Night Linux family podcast, 2.5A is hosted by Jim Salter, Joe Ressington and Allan Jude.

Hosts

Jim Salter

Mercenary sysadmin Jim Salter (Ars Technica) is a veteran (US Navy, I think) and a veteran (systems administrator). There’s a non-zero chance he’s related to novelist and writer James Arnold Horowitz but that’s pure speculation on my part.

I’ve grown particularly fond of Mr. Salter’s “been there, done that” attitude: firm, confident, sometimes snarky, rarely condescending. At the root of the snark is passion and a preference for spending his body’s finite energy on addressing new and novel challenges.

Jim has spent much of his career solving and hedging against problems and failures. He has a practiced methodology for mitigating risk. I’ve found his insights to be invaluable in my personal and professional development.

Joe Ressington

Joe runs the Late Night Linux operation and is the half-admin in the 2.5 Admins crew.

On other Late Night Linux shows his role is more prominent; here he plays something of an everyman foil and a stand-in for the audience. As Allan and Jim exchange hyper-specific technical banter on then nuances of, say, ZFS deduplication or errors related to unexpected wrong-endian byte strings, Joe grounds the conversation with less esoteric lines of questioning.

Allan Jude

Allan Jude is a FreeBSD and OpenZFS developer, and co-founder of Klara Systems.

Klara supports 3rd party organizations with design, implementation and support services. While I’m sure he’d proffer a shortlist of those more qualified than himself, I view Allan as a member of the upper-echelon set of developers and maintainers with deep knowledge and surprising influence. Lofty accolades aside those folks tend to be strongly dedicated and grounded, and having worked with him directly I can confirm that Allan is both. He provides a soothing combination of technical aptitude, laid-back presence and thorough professionalism.