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.

Performance of Sophos PureMessage

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We use Sophos PureMessage to scan for spam and viruses. We had eight Dell PowerEdge 2650s with varying CPUs and RAM clustered with a Alteon Layer 4 application switch. Our mail systems (sendmail and Sun Java System Messaging Server) use the PureMessage connector to speak to this cluster. The Layer 4 switch is set to balance the connections with a least-connections weighted algorithm. The amount of spam we’ve had to deal with has tripled in the last 12 months. As a result this cluster was starting to max out. There are two ways to think about mail volumes: peak and overall. When someone says that they handle 15 million messages a day they don’t usually mean 625,000 per hour, or …

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links for 2007-01-24

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Now & Zen – The Zen Alarm Clock Radio & Clock Radio – Alarm Clock Radio – Sony Style Canada Creating SEO Friendly WordPress URLs (tags: blog) WordPress: The Complete Post-Install Checklist – Download Squad (tags: blog) malevole – Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer?

Vista, Twitter, Sysadmin Jobs

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Some quickies that don’t necessarily need their own posts. Most of these are micro-rants. Boy, I’m getting negative these days. I should write about something that makes me happy. Well, the post about Etsy is sorta positive. Sorta. 1. “The 5 Sins of Vista” – amen, brother. I agree with Mr. Kaplan over at blackrimglasses.com that these sins have been around a long time. Making things look better is not the same as fixing the problems. I’m especially annoyed with the network control panels. 2. “Twitter” – “A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?” – Who gives a damn what I’m doing? I’m hard-boiling eggs. I’m talking on the phone with my …

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WordPress 2.1, Theme Tweaks

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Okay, we’re at WordPress 2.1, theme tweaks, Alex King’s Share This, and Google Analytics plugins. We’re on a different server, too, so if DNS is a little wacko for a bit it should settle down. “Share This” is cool, but the Javascript stuff doesn’t work quite right yet with my theme. And before someone comments, the reason I have the icon off isn’t because I’m bitter, just that it doesn’t look right with my theme. Yet.

Testing and Development

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It is really surprising that it took this long for me to build a test environment for my blog. WordPress 2.1 is out now, as most of you are aware. I’ve been looking forward to it. To make sure that it’ll be safe to upgrade I’ve started my own test environment, which I intend to keep around to work on new things for the blog. Upgrading means testing and usually upgrading plugins, tweaking my themes, and tweaking my scripts for changes in the blog. With a growing number of plugins it starts being a chore. As a system administrator I encourage my users to not test things on their production systems. “The first time you do something should never be …

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links for 2007-01-23

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A New Sith, or Revenge of the Hope This makes a hell of a lot of sense. R2D2 and Chewbacca as the Rebellion’s lead field agents. (tags: humor starwars) It’s official. Wii use can cause weight loss – Yahoo! News This is exactly what I said after playing against my brother and sister-in-law on their Wii. Besides, any game console that can be played instantly by my mother is awesome. axiomsun.com – Whirlpool Sucks In Whole Lake! Dude, a whole barge got sucked into a salt mine. Whoops. How We Mass Upgrade Blogs » Technology, Blogging and New Media Standardization, standardization, standardization. SimplePie: Super-fast, easy-to-use, RSS and Atom Parsing. 53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without | Smashing Magazine IntelliAdmin.com: The …

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Sun and Intel

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The announcement today about Sun and Intel getting together is interesting. This looks like them snubbing AMD. I’m an Intel fan myself, so this is good. I’ve had several very bad experiences with AMD hardware, to the point where I won’t use or recommend it to anyone (the jury is still out on ATI, though). Overall, I think it’s good to have options, just like Dell is now adding AMD to their product lines. This also looks like Sun and Intel snubbing Linux, underhandedly deeming it not mission-critical. If this has the effect of rallying the Linux camp to clean up the rough edges then it will be worth the snubbing. I have plenty of mission-critical stuff running on Linux, …

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iTunes Does Not Work On Windows Vista

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Dec. 12, 2007: I just replaced my ATI graphics card with an inexpensive NVidia 8500GT, updated the drivers, and installed the latest DirectX, and that resolved most of my problems. Your mileage may vary. Update: iTunes 7.1 has been released, but does not appears to fix the UI crashing problems. Update 2: None of the iTunes releases, including 7.3, have improved the crashing of iTunes. But, if you want to read the rest of this, feel free: The CD-RW driver in iTunes doesn’t appear to work right, so trying to burn anything will result in an instant crash. Also, letting iTunes stay open for more than about a minute results in Aero freaking out. Microsoft Windows Vista is not supported …

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I Don't Like Microsoft Windows Vista

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I upgraded my home PC and my work desktop PC to Windows Vista today. My first impressions? I have many. And they aren’t good. There is no flow and no logical layout to anything. It’s a hybrid of Windows XP and the new way of doing things, and it shows. There are 50 control panels, for instance, and it takes me two to three steps to find things I could do with a right click before. Some things look new, some look old, some have new parts grafted on the old parts. It was a design by committee, none of whose members were of the same mindset. It’s buggy. I edit the Start menu and a phantom “Start Menu” folder …

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