2.5 Admins 2.5 Admins 264: A Question of Trust
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Sep 11, 2025 The hosts dive into the chaos caused by a RAID meltdown while managing a massive 55 terabyte database, revealing the challenges of restoration. They question the reliability of DNS certification with an alarming rise in misissued certificates. A hosting provider's ethics comes under scrutiny for avoiding Cloudflare due to traffic management concerns. They also dissect a viral app with questionable practices in activism. Lastly, alternatives for S3 object storage, including MinIO, are discussed for on-premises solutions.
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Nightmare Restoring A 55TB Database
- Gary recalls restoring a partially corrupt 55TB Postgres database and how verification slowed recovery.
- He highlights that cleaning and validating such massive data can take an extremely long time.
Cache Warmup Tricks For Large Databases
- Gary and Jim share past experiences warming caches on multi-terabyte databases to avoid lockups.
- They describe using warmup queries and Selenium traffic emulation to bring DBs to a usable state under load.
The Root CA Model Is Fundamentally Fragile
- Gary argues CA mis-issuance problems are systemic and not new, undermining the Web PKI's trust model.
- He points out browsers trusting many CAs weakens any single CA's authority and creates recurring risks.
