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.

esxcfg-nics & esxcfg-vswitch

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One of my ESX Servers’ management NICs died today, right as I was to start upgrading to ESX 3.0.2. I don’t have the admin NICs in a redundant configuration yet, and it’s fairly inconvenient to lose management capabilities as you’re about to need VMotion. Luckily[0] I had an extra, unused NIC, esxcfg-nics, and esxcfg-vswitch. With these commands you can display and alter the settings for the NICs and virtual switches from the console. So, you find out what you have available with “esxcfg-nics -l” Then you look at the relationships between the virtual switches and the NICs using “esxcfg-vswitch -l” Since vmnic3 isn’t being used I ran: esxcfg-vswitch –unlink=vmnic0 vSwitch0 esxcfg-vswitch –link=vmnic3 vSwitch0 And back up it came. [0] Not …

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links for 2007-08-23

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Alaska man gets ‘mauled’ into marriage – Boston.com Comcast Throttles BitTorrent Traffic, Seeding Impossible | TorrentFreak ISPs 20, BitTorrent Users 20. The BitTorrent users will be winning again shortly, no worries. BookSwim Online Book Rental Library Club I already subscribe to a book rental facility. It’s my local public library, paid for with my tax money.

VMworld 2007 Here I Come

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I finally got registered for VMworld 2007 today. I am looking forward to it. It does look like I’ll have to sneak into a lab or two on the 10th, though (engage my l33t stealth ninja skillz). Late registration does take a toll that way. I’ll be out there from September 8th until the 15th. Anybody else going? Want to go out one night and have a beer? I want to hit Jack’s Cannery Bar at least once while I’m out there, and with 100 beers on tap I think we could find something we like… 🙂 (there’s always SFBC, too)

links for 2007-08-22

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Coding Horror: Thirteen Blog Clichés I violate #9 once in a while. Oh well. » The Not-To-Do List: 9 Habits to Stop Now

I Hate "k"

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Email and instant messages that consist solely of the letter “k” drive me nuts. Why? A) You couldn’t be bothered to type “Okay” or even “OK” in full. It’s hard, I know, especially with a full keyboard at your disposal. B) You added no value to the conversation. Why even send the message? It is different if I was asking your opinion about something, where “OK” might be an acceptable and desirable answer. I wasn’t, though. C) You made me open my IM client again, to read ‘k’. I wish I could build a filter in Psi so that any messages that consisted of the phrases “k” or “thanks” or “np” could be silently acknowledged. D) This makes me think …

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links for 2007-08-21

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Even the Office 2007 box has a learning curve – Joel on Software Yeah. Vista is trash. Office 2007 is okay, enough new good things to offset them messing with everything.

links for 2007-08-20

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The software awards scam « Successful Software ROFL ‘We have broken speed of light’ – Telegraph Bill de hÓra: Phat Data Management Methods | Management Models | Management Theories OMFG. Griffin Technology: PowerMate – USB Multimedia Controller Had one of these. Gave it away to a friend who built cool things using it for a control. Now I want another one. Ubuntu Servers Hijacked, Used to Launch Attack Happens to everybody eventually, but it’s unfortunate. xkcd – A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language – By Randall Munroe At least they didn’t say Children of the Mind was the best. Ugh! The Fishbowl: You have got to be kidding… You know, I bet world leaders like conferences for the …

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How To Get The Open Apple Back On The Mac Keyboard

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The new Macintosh keyboards are missing the Open Apple. There are various movements to save the Open Apple, including a petition to have Apple put it back. Given Apple’s history of taking design advice from the masses I suggest taking matters into your own hands: Order a new keyboard from Apple. Order a pack of Sharpie Metallic Markers. Order an X-Acto knife. Print out an image of the Open Apple. You’re resourceful, you can find one yourself. Do this on card stock. Use the X-Acto knife and cut the image out to form a stencil. Put the stencil on your new keyboard, and using your new, cool Sharpies trace around the edge. Keep it uniform so it looks good. If …

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Airport Security

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Matt Mullenweg posted that he discovered a 2 inch knife in his carry-on luggage. That is, after he’s cleared security a number of times. I know the feeling. I had a screwdriver in my carry-on backpack after flying at least three full round trips last year. One of those interchangeable bit types, with the removable shaft in the middle. Didn’t mean to have it, but you’d think that it would have been caught. Every time I stand in the hour-long checkpoint line, shoes in hand, I think of that screwdriver, and how ridiculous this all really is.

Use dir_index for your new ext3 filesystems

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Directories in ext2 and ext3 used to be simple linked lists. These had scalability problems. When you put a lot of files in a directory programs like ‘ls’ took non-linear (O^2) amounts of time to complete. To resolve this the ext3 folks added a new directory indexing feature, which replaces the linked lists with an “HTree.” I’d never heard of an HTree before, either, and Daniel Phillips, the inventor, explains in a paper presented at USENIX ALS 2001: …I went on to discard the BTree approach, and invented a new type of indexing structure whose characteristics lie somewhere between those of a tree and a hash table. Since I was unable to find anything similar mentioned in the literature I …

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