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.

I Heart Small Teams

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Why do I like small teams? Metcalfe’s Law, for starters, which is something that Frederick Brooks writes about in The Mythical Man Month. Basically, the amount of communication necessary in a group equals approximately the square of the number of people in the group. As you add people to the group you start needing larger meetings, wikis, politics, etc. All of that takes time and energy, and that time and energy isn’t going directly towards the end result. Second, the more people on the team the harder it is to manage roles. It is likely that two members will have overlapping skill sets. When people have similar skill sets sometimes they end up in competition with each other. The other …

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Spreadsheets As System Administration Tools

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I think spreadsheet software is an oft-overlooked system administration tool. You can do simple lists of things, do budgets, graph performance, and most of all you can use the autofill features as a substitute for one-off, run-once scripts. Sure, I think everybody should know how to use Perl and the various shell utilities like awk to do things, but why pull out the big guns when you need to do something once? Besides, a lot of folks have trouble with recursion, and it’s easier to see exactly what will happen (or at least the commands you’re about to run) with a spreadsheet. I might be a heretic to some, but I’d rather folks, especially junior admins, feel comfortable with their …

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Credits For Sysadmins In Shrek 3

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Dear Dreamworks, I saw Shrek 3 tonight. It was funny as always. Good work! I’m the sort that watches an animated movie not only for the plot but for the way you rendered the water, sky, grass, hair, and shadows, and I was really impressed. I really liked the thought that was put into the light color, direction, and intensity for the different times of day. I also liked the the way light was cast on the “actors” and “set,” and some of the theatrical moments (like the panning to the light coming in the window when Shrek was in irons). I do theatrical lighting design as a hobby and those sorts of details really help tell the story and …

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Water Usage

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My local water utility has software that detects substantial drops in water usage. It is a symptom of a failing meter, and they send you a little card saying they want to come check it out. I started getting these cards when I first moved into my house. They don’t actually say anything other than “you need a service call.” Turns out it’s because of the drastic drop in water usage from the old owner to the new one. They use 15 ccf per person per house per six months as the benchmark for usage. Each ccf is 100 cubic feet of water, which is 748 gallons. 15 ccf is then 11,220 gallons, or 1,870 gallons per month, or 93.5 …

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links for 2007-06-02

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Read a Water Meter and Water Bill Revealing hidden assumptions in estimation – Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals) Doublewide Sleeping Bags By Big Agnes Couples are nice, but I think this would be the bomb for singles, too. SPORKK

So Long, Nick Mancini, and Thanks.

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I grew up in Saint Paul, MN. For a special occasion my parents would take my brother and I to Mancini’s Char House, a steak house on West 7th Street. My father was a firefighter at nearby Station 10 and knew Nick Mancini, probably through the course of his duties. Mancini’s Char House is where I first learned that it’s neat to go somewhere for dinner and drinks and have the owner know your name. To this day we still enjoy going there for dinner. My mother called me yesterday with the news that Nick Mancini passed away. He will be missed. Wherever you are, Mr. Mancini, thank you and take care.

.forward file is group writable…

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Okay folks, I just discovered that I broke my the email forward that was giving me my lonesysadmin.net email (I hadn’t chmoded my .forward file to 600). So now that I’ve found it I can comment on your comments! Normally I’d reply in email but I’m going to do it in public here, something different for a Friday afternoon. Jeff, about my IPMI how-to: I’m glad you found it useful. Sorry it hasn’t been updated recently, I have just figured out how to get Dell PowerEdge x950s to work right so hopefully that can get posted next week. Be careful about what you tell the server to do. Any “chassis off” commands seem to shut the BMC off, too, which …

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Meetings Cost You Money

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Number of staff from my group in your meeting: 2 Number of meetings you have per year: 50 Scheduled length of meeting (what you get billed for): 1 hour Average actionable/discussable agenda items per meeting: 0.25 (once a month) Total cost to you for us to attend: 2 * 50 * $80 = $8000 Total cost to you for monthly meetings: $2000 Savings: $6000. Your team’s budget shortfall (which started this whole discussion): $3000 Amount you still save after the shortfall is removed: $3000.

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