Bob Plankers

Bob Plankers is a man who wears many hats. In his professional career he has spent three decades leading teams that design, build, operate, and talk about reliable, secure, and compliant IT infrastructures, both in the public sector and in the high tech industry. He currently focuses on applied security, compliance, and operational resilience for virtualization and cloud platforms.

@%$&# Comment Spammers

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I find it interesting that my post entitled “F’in Comment Spammers” is the #1 post targeted by comment spammers. Morons. In reading that old post I realize I’ve fallen way behind on my project to script the finding and killing of comment spammers. As I said, “not just a quick death, but a long, painful one involving cucumbers, grizzly bears, and sandstone. And not the nice cucumbers, either, but the homegrown ones with all the little spiky things on them.” I still feel that way, though I may replace the sandstone with sporks.

6 Tips for Technical Presentations

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Technical presentations are very Darwinian. Do a good one and you get invited to do another. Do one badly and you won’t get any more practice. I’ve survived a number of them now, likely because the audiences got such good sleep during the talk that they tell their friends. 🙂 Joking aside, I think these six things I do for each presentation have helped a lot. I share them with you. 1. Know your audience and talk at their level. Before I give a presentation I ask the folks who are coordinating the event about the people I’ll be talking to. Are they advanced users or newbies? Windows, Mac, or UNIX people? Application developers or system administrators? All these help …

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Paying Billions To Never See The Stars Again

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(this post is in support of Blog Action Day, with 15,000+ bloggers all writing about the environment. Learn more at their web site, blogactionday.org) Where I live we pay lots of money every year so we never have to see the stars. Our grand plan to mask the sky completely isn’t 100% complete. Looking up from my backyard I can see one or two bright stars and a planet or two through the orangish sodium vapor haze. It’s a shame, too. With that handful of celestial bodies I still remember that we are adrift in the heavens, one planet in one solar system in one galaxy among thousands. I still remember the pesky, unanswerable questions of scientists about where the …

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THIS is Infrastructure

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Our data center guys are putting in new power feeds. As part of this they need to step the incoming three-phase AC power down to 208 V, so they need a transformer. Four of them, actually. People rarely get a chance to see and appreciate these sorts of things, so I snapped a couple of photos. Note the different terminals on the windings (the yellow part). That determines the output voltage of the transformer. They build a one-size-fits-all transformer and make the connection based on your needs. Now if these transformers would change into big alien robotic helpers in the data center we’d be in business. 🙂

links for 2007-10-09

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The Journal of Joe The Peacock. Yay.: An unordered list of thoughts I had during a conference call with a potential client today

How to Play Podcasts Back to Back on The iPod/iPhone

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I love the Scientific American podcasts “60-Second Science” and “60-Second Psych.” I queue them up and listen to them in batches. However, my iPhone won’t play all of them continuously. Since they’re all about a minute long that means a lot of extra clicking to find the next one, which just won’t do. I am not very good at walking in a straight line and controlling my iPod, and very bad at driving and doing so. What I’ve started to do is instead of using the podcast sync feature I create a smart playlist and sync that instead. The podcasts won’t appear as podcasts on the iPod/iPhone, but they will appear in a playlist that will play continuously. My smart …

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How Things Get Built

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Just ran into this again. Hits home for me; I’ve been running around trying to reconcile people’s views of projects and work to be done.

CIHost Sucks and I Need Another Host

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If you’re thinking about hosting with CIHost: don’t. Not colocation, not hosted services, nothing. Their Chicago data center has been completely offline all yesterday, and their ETA for resolution is basically indefinite now. Every hour it moves another hour out. This began yesterday as a mysterious power outage. Right now I suspect won’t be resolved until I go get my server, dispute the credit card charge to get my money back, and find a new colocation facility. This is the worst outage yet, but every couple of months the data center loses power, the network dies, etc. Lame but tolerable, until now. Now it looks like this is a lame way of saying “going out of business.” Or, maybe I’ll …

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Even Sysadmin Blogs Have Outages

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Apparently the colocation provider I’m with is having some router trouble… Sorry for the sporadic ups and downs today (or constant downs, more like it). In the “do as I say, not as I do” category I took the opportunity to change my DNS hosting back to GoDaddy’s servers, too[0]. Normally I wouldn’t think of changing something during an outage but since my TTLs were an hour anyhow it seemed to be a good opportunity. I would hate to deprive someone of their Lone Sysadmin news feed. 🙂 Thanks all! I haven’t said it recently but thanks for reading, commenting, and generally keeping me on my toes. FeedBurner tells me there are more of you out there now, and I …

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