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.

What? Maintenance Windows?

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“I’d like to talk with you about the outage you scheduled for server X.” “Sure thing,” I reply. “What’s up?” “You scheduled it during our maintenance window.” “Yeah. I need to reboot the server to apply the latest patches, so there will be an outage.” “Maybe we could investigate another time to do this work.” “You don’t want me to do the work during your outage period?” I ask incredulously. Two months ago these guys were all about only changing things during scheduled outage times. Like, I’d die instantly if I even thought of making any changes to anything. Even adding a user was to be done in the maintenance window. “Well, that’s our maintenance window.” “Okay, well, I need …

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links for 2007-05-10

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Queueing Theory Basics Icons – Lifehacker (tags: revisit) Fonts: The top 500 fonts on the Web – Lifehacker (tags: revisit) Bug 191336: Netfilter TCP retransmission bug causes connection tracking problems A Giraffe, an Elephant, and a Refrigerator (by Jeremy Zawodny) (tags: funny)

A Giraffe, an Elephant, and a Refrigerator

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Jeremy Zawodny posted “A Giraffe, an Elephant, and a Refrigerator“. Funny. My replies are: 1. Open the refrigerator, put in the giraffe, and close the door. 2. Open the refrigerator, put in the elephant, and close the refrigerator. I’ve anticipated my animal storage needs properly and sized my refrigerator well. 3. If only one does not attend that implies the conference is being held in the refrigerator, given my answer to #2. My coworker Jon suggests it’s Mufasa that is not in attendance, as he is dead. 4. Though the crocodiles are attending the conference if the Lion King cannot keep them entertained it is likely they have left the conference and gone drinking. You may swim across but avoid …

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links for 2007-05-09

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Google Code – Updates: Google releases patches that enhance the manageability and reliability of MySQL 33 Rules to Boost Your Productivity » From Geek to Freak: How I Gained 34 lbs. of Muscle in 4 Weeks phil ringnalda : What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content « Lorelle on WordPress SmugBlog: Don MacAskill » Blog Archive » The Perfect DB Storage Array LAMP Capacity Planning grepmail homepage Dennis Hurst’s Blog : PCI v1.1 Section 6.6 (a bit of clarification please)

links for 2007-05-08

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Ext3cow is an open-source, versioning file system based on ext3 BoredStop.com – Brutal Soft Toys (tags: funny) Active Shooter Safety Tips (from UCLA) “If they do start shooting people, you need to make a choice, (at this point it is your choice) stay still and hope they don’t shoot you, run for an exit while zigzaging, or even attack the shooter.” – Good advice here.

Fastest Bug Resolution Ever

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17:12 CDT: I file a bug with Zimbra about version 4.5.5 detecting RHEL 4 Update 5 as RHEL 5. 18:17 CDT: Resolved, bug closed. That’s the fastest I’ve ever had a vendor respond to a bug report, much less fix the problem (which includes a documentation update). Go Zimbra!

Use Group Permissions

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Use group permissions wherever possible. Why? 1. Managing individuals is a lot easier when all you have to do is make them a group member. When people change roles you just plop them in a different group. 2. In three years you aren’t going to remember what specific privilege gives a person the right to do something, and it will cost you at least two hours of messing around. 3. The group name can be descriptive so you can tell exactly what it is for, not just that Susie Q. Person has a particular privilege. And if you start using a group for more than one thing, update the description so it’s obvious.

Google's SMS Sports Scores Not Working

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Dear Google, I cannot figure out how to tell you that the sports scores feeds into Google SMS aren’t working. People are posting in the help groups about this issue. Basically the only scores you get are from April 22nd, 2007. It is reproduceable using the Google SMS web page, so it isn’t a carrier problem. I hope someone sees this post and fixes it! Having to look up the scores somewhere else is so 1998. 🙂 …Bob

Dalai Lama

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I took the opportunity to see the Dalai Lama speak yesterday in the Kohl Center in Madison, WI. I know very little about Buddhism and my knowledge of Tibet mainly comes from movies, so I found His Holiness to be absolutely amazing. He’s funny, he’s humble, he’s pragmatic. He is so unlike any other world religious leaders… every day we see Christianity taking a stand against science, making Christians choose between science and religion. The Dalai Lama explicitly addressed the modern sciences, in that his religion and the findings of scientists are often in agreement, supporting each other. Wow. How refreshing to see someone saying it’s okay to question, okay to be inquisitive, that the faith can lie elsewhere, with …

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