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.

System Administration/DevOps/Cloud and Developer Positions Open @ UW – Madison

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If you’ve ever thought about working with the people & organization who basically eliminated rickets by discovering how to boost and synthesize vitamin D, who took a bunch of spoiled sweet clover hay and turned it into the most popular blood thinner ever (and the most popular rat poison ever, ha!), or who isolated human embryonic stem cells so that research could happen without destroying embryos in the process, here’s your chance. The Morgridge Institute for Research on the University of Wisconsin – Madison campus is looking to hire: two build & test workflow system developers, one database developer, one software security specialist, and two system administrators, among some other positions, as part of the Software Assurance Marketplace, or SWAMP. …

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Hey Readers, Please Vote For Me

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The inimitable Eric Siebert has the voting open for the 2013 Top VMware/Virtualization Blogs. Last year I was pleasantly surprised to find myself voted into the top 50 virtualization bloggers, at #31. Voting closes soon so you should go over there right now and vote, for me and all the other people who put so much time into writing throughout the year. It’s one of the few ways you can show appreciation for all the work people put into blogging. All that information is worth a minute of your time, right? Besides, I want to hit #30 this year! 🙂 J And, as always, thank you all for reading, commenting, and introducing yourselves to me at conferences. I wouldn’t do this …

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Error While Loading Shared Libraries, Cannot Open Shared Object File

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In the “I wish the Internet had an actual correct answer” category comes a question from a Windows colleague trying to build software on Linux. He asks “I’m trying to do some web performance testing and I compiled weighttp and the libev libraries, which worked fine, but when I try to run the program it gives me the following error.” weighttp: error while loading shared libraries: libev.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory “I checked /usr/local/lib and the files are there. Do you have a suggestion?” Ah yes, a classic problem when building software. The problem here is that libev installed itself into /usr/local/lib: $ ls -l /usr/local/lib/libev* -rw-r–r–. 1 root root 435770 Feb 22 15:20 …

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VMware & Virsto

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Howard Marks has a great piece on VMware buying Virsto over at Network Computing (link is below): Some of my fellow analysts have lumped Virsto into the flash acceleration category along with caching solutions like Proximal Data, Sandisk’s Flashsoft and Intel’s CAS. While Virsto can use flash to accelerate some storage I/O, it’s not primarily a flash acceleration product. In fact, Virsto is a log-based, clustered file system that uses a dedicated log device, which can be a shared SSD, to accelerate virtual machine I/O. I saw Virsto for the first time at VMworld 2012, and it looked interesting as something that tries to turn a lot of the random I/O from a virtualization environment back into sequential I/O that arrays can better handle, while adding a …

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Happy Mardi Gras!

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I just want to wish you all a happy & safe Mardi Gras. Thanks for reading & commenting, retweeting and #FFing, and all the fun. I look forward to a lot more. Laissez les bons temps rouler!

Changing vCenter Operations Manager vApp IP Addresses

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I needed to renumber one of my VMware vCenter Operations Manager 5.6 instances and it’s not immediately clear how to do it. It isn’t like the other virtual appliances VMware delivers. Here’s how I got it done, with some encouragement from Matt H. in VMware Support. It also seems to me someone wrote this up recently, but I could not find it. If that was you please leave me a comment with a link to your work. 1. Shut it all down. Take a snapshot of the individual VMs. I ended up having to revert to the snapshot, so that was nice. Remember that if you revert it reverts the VM config, too. 2. Edit the properties of the vC …

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VMware vSphere, LLDP, and Juniper EX Switches

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One of the vSphere environments I support uses Juniper EX4200 switches for networking. Juniper switches don’t support Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP). I love CDP because I can tell exactly what switch & port I’m attached to, and see other information like VLANs, etc. CDP removes a lot of human error from our operations, too. I love it for situations like when two cables are mysteriously labeled as heading to the same switch port or I’m sitting at my desk and I need to refer to a physical port 200 miles north of me. It also means that I don’t need to maintain a document of the switch ports, I can script a dump of the information if I need an …

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"Because awesome things sometimes look a lot less awesome from the inside"

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Alasdair Allen hits it right on the head: We’ve built a culture where it’s hard to acknowledge that you don’t know something, because knowing things is intricately linked with the doing of awesome things — which in turn is linked to our stature with our peers. Something I’ve noted, talked about, and tried to work on for years: being able to say “I don’t know.” I work with some folks that just cannot say those words. There’s stuff you know you know, there’s stuff you know you don’t know, and there’s stuff you don’t know you don’t know. The last category is dangerous. The last category is where people who always have an answer, right or wrong, put you and …

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OpenStack, Lock-In, Support Costs, and Open Source Free Lunches

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Since I posted my missive about OpenStack not being our savior from lock-in or support costs I’ve had a number of comments and discussions about it. The discussions generally start from the point of view that I’m wrong. Let’s take a look at a few of these. Also, it might seem like I’m picking on Randy Bias and Greg Ferro a little here but Randy seems like a good guy, and Greg is a friend, so there’s no animosity. Just point/counterpoint. TL;DR version: OpenStack is cool but isn’t some magic tech that prints money, open source doesn’t mean you don’t have to pay someone to support a service built on it, customized open source and custom solutions using open source don’t …

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"A Stronger Team, Not a Weaker You"

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Greg Ferro has Ethan Banks’ “Five Things About Mentoring” in in his link post today, from which I’ve stolen the title of my post (sorry Ethan, too good to pass up).  Mentoring is a big part of being a successful system administrator, and Ethan is dead-on in his points. Go read it quick because I’m going to comment: “Not everybody wants to be mentored” — time management & prioritization of tasks are probably the biggest things IT staff should work on. Properly identifying a coworker as a waste of time seems harsh, but you’ve got better things to do. I suggest heavy automation as an appropriate answer to a coworker that has given up. A script can learn new things. …

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