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.

Site Bug Fixes

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My spare time today has been spent chasing down problems with my WordPress theme. Ugh. I remember why I don’t redo the theme very often. Thanks to Coeus for the suggestion that I add a “Comments” link at the bottom of an article. Done! The links to the feeds aren’t broken anymore. I’m a dummy and pasted PHP into the widgets. Oops. The archive pages display content, especially links, correctly now. That was kind of a bummer for the del.icio.us posts, and a bug in the original theme. I fixed the site search box, so people (namely me) can search for content here. Nothing sucks more than when I’m looking for my panang recipe and cannot find it. Finally, I …

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Why I Like Virtualization (And Why Hardware Sucks)

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I was asked why I like virtualization and why chroot jails aren’t a better way to do things, at least on UNIX-like OSes. To figure out why I like virtualization, let’s start with what I don’t like about hardware: Failures. Something is always going wrong, whether it’s a fan, disk, power supply, etc. More servers means more failures. We buy warranties to help with this, but warranties cost money. It takes time to deal with failed components, too. Firmware. It is hard to update firmware levels. Every device is different, and a bunch of update methods end up requiring you to go out to the box with a USB stick or a floppy disk. That takes a lot of time, …

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links for 2007-06-18

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Adium – Blog – 10.5 Issues & NDAs Ugh. Beta releases of OSes are for resolving problems like this, but the NDA prevents it. Grrr.

links for 2007-06-16

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xkcd – Long Light On the other hand, a lot of places (including medium-sized cities) have done absolutely no simulation and synchronization of their lights.

New Look, Same Great Taste

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Some of you have noted already I’ve changed the theme of this site. Don’t be alarmed, I’m not happy with it yet, either! 🙂 The things I wanted out of a new theme: good blockquote and code tag handling. The old theme didn’t do them right, which sucks when you’re a sysadmin. 🙂 better readability. The old theme was gray on white, I wanted to go more black & white, higher contrast. I want the visually impaired friends of mine to be able to read my blog more easily. 100% widget compatible. Widgets are cool. a decent layout where I can experiment with ads. Most of my readers come in via a feed, but I get a lot of Google …

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ESX Lite?

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Alex Barrett over at SearchServerVirtualization.com has written about VMware’s “ESX Lite,” an unannounced product so far. My take: very interesting. The default ESX install creates about 8 GB of partitions on a host. Of that 8 GB, only about 4 GB are used, the rest being overflow for logs, etc. Even 8 GB is well within the reach of a flash drive. So you have an ESX server that doesn’t need local disk. That saves you $300 for a RAID controller and about $300 per 15K RPM 146 GB disk. For my RAID 1 + hot spare configurations that’s $1200. No moving parts equals theoretical better reliability, though flash drives have a limit to the number of read/write operations they …

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links for 2007-06-15

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Cool Hunting: Magic House Pencils Add these to my list, too. Problem with cool pencils impersonating boring pencils is that people will treat them like boring pencils and lose/break/steal/chew/mangle them. Cool Tool: Fiskars Pro Chopping Axe Axes are so underrated these days. The Boy Scouts don’t even teach axe safety and use anymore. It’s sad, axes are so cool, especially high-tech ones. Fiskars® – Ultimate Craft Scissors – Product Detail I have a pair of these in the office, I love them. TorrentSpy ruling a ‘weapon of mass discovery’ | Tech News on ZDNet Dear people, learn what acronyms mean before you use them. This goes double for judges. ClassicGaming.com – Oregon Trail Awwww yeah, that bustedtees.com Oregon Trail shirt …

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Exploding Whale

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Last night, after celebrating my softball team’s win (we now have a career record of 2-23-2), it was discovered that many people hadn’t seen the video about the way the Oregon State Highway Division dealt with a dead whale back in November, 1970. If you haven’t, well, here’s a two-and-a-half minute treat.

Thanks LOPSA Madison

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A big thank you goes out to the LOPSA Madison folks for letting me talk last night. There was a variety of expertise in virtualization in the room, and the crowd was incredibly friendly, which made for a good experience. I tried a different approach to my slides this time. I usually try using the 10/20/30 rule for my slides, but my slides become useless later on for notes. So this time I have some slides with a lot of data on them. Sorry! PDF version is online.

links for 2007-06-13

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Micro Persuasion: Writing is Part of Almost Everyone’s Job Yes, yes it is. Being good at it takes practice. How to Be a Good Boss – wikiHow Busted Tees – Jokes you can wear! Funny T-Shirts! A shirt that says “You Have Died of Dysentery” — ROFL Oregon Trail. Kitchen Soap » Blog Archive » Lack of a *real* Web Operations Conference Amen! It’s always about the creation process and never about how to get the creation to work. Manage Your Sports Team Website with TeamSnap They don’t have stats yet, but this looks really promising. Hell of a niche.

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