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.

VMware vCenter Server Appliance & NTP

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If you’re trying to configure NTP on the VMware vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) 5.1 builds 799730, 880472, or 947940 according to the official documentation you might be seeing what I’m seeing: vcenter:~ # yast2 ntp-client add server=0.us.pool.ntp.org Error: Cannot update the dynamic configuration policy. vcenter:~ # yast2 ntp-client enable Error: Cannot update the dynamic configuration policy. This appears to be a SuSE bug. Seems serious but it isn’t, the commands actually do complete correctly. If you want to check the work just use the command: cat /etc/ntp.conf to check for lines starting with “server” near the bottom. /sbin/chkconfig ntp on will enable the service at boot, and /etc/rc.d/ntp start will start it immediately if it isn’t started. /usr/sbin/ntpq -p will …

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Why Your April Fools Post Isn’t Funny

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Ah yes, April 1. The day I wipe all my news feeds and wait for April 2. “Why?” you ask. Here are the general problems with the posts I’ve seen so far this morning. A corporate prank post announces a feature in a product that would actually solve a problem for people. But ha ha, you’re kidding. A corporate prank post announces a feature that wouldn’t solve a problem for anybody. What made the early April 1 RFCs a little amusing was that they relied on deep insider knowledge of networking topics and were decent original parodies in their own right. Imitation might be the highest form of flattery, but you’re ripping them off, not imitating them. Please stop. Besides, very …

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Preparing Linux Template VMs

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Dan over at Bashing Linux has a good post on what he does to prep his template VMs for use with Puppet. He’s inspired me to share how I prepare my Linux VMs to become a template. He’s got a few steps I don’t have, mainly to prep for Puppet, and I have a few steps he doesn’t have. One big difference is that I don’t prepare my template images for a particular configuration management system, but instead bootstrap them once they’re deployed. Why? I use my templates for a variety of things, and sometimes the people who end up with the VMs don’t want my management systems on them. It also means I have to handle some of what …

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RSS & Punctuated Equilibrium

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All this talk about RSS & the social media ecosystem evolving now that Google Reader is end-of-life has me thinking of Niles Eldredge & Stephen Jay Gould’s 1972 groundbreaking work, Punctuated Equilibrium. Wikipedia explains it better than I can: Punctuated equilibrium (also called punctuated equilibria) is a hypothesis in evolutionary biology which proposes that most species will exhibit little net evolutionary change for most of their geological history, remaining in an extended state called stasis. When significant evolutionary change occurs, the hypothesis proposes that it is generally restricted to rare and geologically rapid events of branching speciation called cladogenesis. Cladogenesis is the process by which a species splits into two distinct species, rather than one species gradually transforming into another. Punctuated equilibrium is commonly contrasted against the theory of phyletic …

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Uptime Is Not Something To Be Revered

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Slashdot has a link to a tribute video to a Sun that was up continuously for 3737 days. That’s 10.23 years. It’s like a sequoia tree seeing the passage of civilization around it: My thoughts on this: The data center and infrastructure powering this machine was built in such a way as to keep this thing powered continuously for 10 years. Whoever built and ran that infrastructure was doing a good job. It’s a generalization but I bet there are very few cloud providers that can boast anything like that. That version of Sun Solaris is reliable enough to keep operating for years without disruption. Most OSes are, by the way, even Microsoft Windows. That particular hardware is reliable enough …

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What Content Creators and Consumers Should Do Now That Google Reader Is Dead

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So the tech world is freaking out about the announcement that Google Reader will go offline on July 1, 2013. There’s been talk about this for a while now, along with talk that RSS is dead. This feels like the biggest blow to 141+ character social media in history. And why did it happen? I think Dave Winer and Bruce Schneier sum it up: Dave Winer: “Next time, please pay a fair price for the services you depend on.” Bruce Schneier: “Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re Facebook’s customer, you’re not – you’re the product,” Schneier said [at the RSA Conference]. “Its customers are the advertisers.” Google Reader’s biggest problem was its API. A good API leads to a …

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My Kind of March Madness

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I’m not much for basketball but I laughed when my friends at Solarwinds emailed me about their version of March Madness. They’ve got a Sci-Fi Bracket going on which is totally my style.

For the people that have voted already, I do believe you’re smoking crack in at least five instances:

Last Chance: 2013 Top VMware & Virtualization Blog Voting

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It’s getting to be the end of the week, and voting closes on the 2013 Top VMware & Virtualization Blogs tonight at midnight. Why don’t you take a moment to go over there and vote? I’d be honored if you’d vote for me, but happy if you just went and showed appreciation for all the hard work the virtualization blogger community does to provide lots of free information to the IT world. You can spend a minute saying thank you, right? 🙂

VMware vSphere Web Client & Internet Explorer 10

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Being adventuresome and/or an idiot, I upgraded Internet Explorer to version 10. I can report two things: 1. I like it as a speedy web browser, and the vSphere Web Client performance feels vastly improved over IE 9. That’s actually been one of my complaints about the web client, that it’s pokey. 2. The remote console plugins don’t work. I have tried fidgeting with a bunch of the security controls and reinstalling the Console Helper, but it continues to report “Remote Console plugin is not properly installed.” For now, IE 10 joins the ranks of Apple Mac OS X users with no console access. I’ll post more information as I mess with it… I’m not really a Windows guy so …

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Make Your Blog Easy To Subscribe To

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A quick hint: if you want people to read your writings on a regular basis make the link to your RSS or Atom feed dead simple to find. Somewhere that doesn’t require the user to scroll to see, uses the well known, industry-standard RSS icon that is freely available, and has the word “feed” in the link. I run into this problem often, especially with blogs hosted on Blogger or Blogspot and overly fancy WordPress themes that emphasize good looks (and mouseover events) instead of usability. For example, I just was reading a post from a blogger who has a really nice personal website, with a blog integrated into it. There’s absolutely no link to the feed anywhere. I searched the page …

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