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.

Asking Why

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Seth Godin has a post about answering “why?” sorts of questions, concluding with a great line: “The single most efficient (and lowest cost) technique for improving your operations is answering the why questions! You should embrace these people, not send them away.” Last week I had a customer ask me why my team has a policy to do something a certain way. My response was “you know, I know why we did it in the past, but it doesn’t make any sense now.” The simple question of “why?” prompted a policy change. I always try to answer “why” questions with a truthful answer. If I don’t know why something is the way it is I find out. I hate argument …

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Writin'

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Ah, my blog. I’ve kinda been out of it the last month or so, and for that I apologize. Lots of stuff going on in my life, including meeting a wonderful girl and doing lots of stuff with her, lots of work-related things (new big projects, which is great), and also doing some theater work. I am soooo behind in reading blogs, too. You can tell when I am because the blog stops getting del.icio.us auto-posts. I’ll be running the lights for the Strollers production of Hair at the Bartell Theatre in Madison, WI. If you’re in town, not buried under 20+ inches of snow, and want to see a good show (including a bunch of nudity) come see it. …

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Installing Tivoli Storage Manager Client on Linux x86_64 Hosts

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Are you trying to install the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager client on your 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux box? Are you getting an error like: error: Failed dependencies: libstdc++.so.5()(64bit) is needed by TIVsm-API64-5.4.0-0.x86_64 libstdc++.so.5(CXXABI_1.2)(64bit) is needed by TIVsm-API64-5.4.0-0.x86_64 libstdc++.so.5(GLIBCPP_3.2)(64bit) is needed by TIVsm-API64-5.4.0-0.x86_64 libstdc++.so.5 is needed by TIVsm-API-5.4.0-0.i386 libstdc++.so.5(CXXABI_1.2) is needed by TIVsm-API-5.4.0-0.i386 libstdc++.so.5(GLIBCPP_3.2) is needed by TIVsm-API-5.4.0-0.i386 libstdc++.so.5(GLIBCPP_3.2.2) is needed by TIVsm-API-5.4.0-0.i386 Do you already have compat-libstdc++-33 installed? Yeah, I did, too. Turns out you need the 32-bit compat-libstdc++-33 package. Get it with: up2date compat-libstdc++-33 –arch=i386 If this is mentioned anywhere I didn’t find it. You might end up with both 32- and 64-bit versions of that package. You can get rid of them all if you need to …

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You Know It's Been A Long Day When…

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“Dude, there should be a WOOT SMTP command,” my colleague Dave IMs me. We’d been trying to diagnose why the world’s worst SMTP client doesn’t work with our SMTP server. “Oh, totally. Like instead of HELO,” I reply. “WOOT lonesysadmin.net” “250 mail.server.com Hello lonesysadmin.net [127.0.0.1] Pleased to be 0//n3d by j00”

Understand

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“Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.” – Baruch Spinoza

links for 2007-02-13

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Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive 27 Tips for Teleconferencing « Andy’s Organ Project Homemade Pipe Organ My homebrew pipe organ Photo Matt » PHP5 Issues Amen. I hate, hate, hate it when I can’t move customers forward to newer releases of things like PHP because all the old stuff breaks. Major versions are where you remove things, not .X releases.

Nice To Be Warm Again

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Well, I return from my ice fishing trip happy and warm. It was pretty damn cold 45 minutes south of Superior, WI, but that also means a nice two-foot sheet of ice to drive out on. 🙂 Collectively we did okay fishing, I caught a few things here and there but nothing serious. The one nice fish I did have came off the line as I was pulling him out. It was a big crappie. Big. Residents of the area may have heard the expletives I shouted across the lake in frustration. I did learn one lesson, though: in order for movie quotes to be considered funny (“I caught you a delicious bass!”) others need to have seen the movie …

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Ice Fishing

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It’s been a busy week. As the blog turns I’ve managed to annoy some users of certain text editors, and I’ve ranted a little. Not super productive. For the rest of February I want to do at least one on-topic post a day. My personal life has had some amazingly awesome things happening that have taken some of my free time, so I’ll have to work that out. Work has been super busy lately, with new projects starting that promise to be interesting, if not fun to work on. Many blog posts ahead for those things. But, now I have to head north, for poker, beer, and ice fishing. All this sub-zero weather is good for something: freezing lakes. 🙂

Okay, you can't dupe WriteRoom in 60 seconds

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Okay, okay, I was going to make a comment but I thought a followup full post was a better idea. Jesse Grosjean and xen0cide had good comments, but I’ve been getting some, um, interesting hate email. I don’t have a lot of time to comment right now, but here’s what I’ve got: First, please stop sending me idiotic email. I don’t hate Macs, and I enjoy rational commentary as comments to the post. I think I mentioned there are two excellent ones in the post already, use them as examples. Second, I think it’s cool that Jesse/Hog Bay Software are cool with the duplication. Hopefully he can pull some good ideas back from the other clones. Third, xen0cide, I wouldn’t …

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