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.

The Ghost of VMware Patching Says: Depot. Deeeepppoott.

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I spent part of the day patching my VMware servers. My suggestion: if you have more than one VMware ESX Server get a patch depot. Don’t argue with me, just do it. It requires a web server and about 28 seconds of time to read pages 5 and 6 of the VMware “Patch Management for ESX 3” guide. It beats the snot out of copying all those files around. Then you can use whole strings of: esxupdate -noreboot -r http://web.server.you.have.com/esx/ESX-1111111 update esxupdate -noreboot -r http://web.server.you.have.com/esx/ESX-2222222 update esxupdate -noreboot -r http://web.server.you.have.com/esx/ESX-3333333 update reboot Oh, so nice. I chose to apply the patches in chronological order. Plus, I can’t even think of a reason your patch depot couldn’t be a VM, as …

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I Hope My Brain Grows Back

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For the last three weeks I’ve been at home and at work for three days. I’m not complaining, as San Francisco, New Orleans, and the Twin Cities were great. It’s sure nice to be home, though, to sleep in my own bed. One thing I have noticed, though, is I feel dumber. I try to think about things, like spam filtering today, and I find myself drawing blanks, starting over. I hope I didn’t kill too many brain cells while I was off. 🙂 I’ll tell you, though, I am relaxed. It’s nice. Start the timer until it goes away. 🙂 On tap for this week: a nice rousing bout of VMware patching, porting our build process to Red Hat …

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links for 2006-12-28

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Amazon.com: JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank: Everything Else Amazon.com: The Story About Ping: Books: Marjorie Flack,Kurt Wiese (Illustrator) Read the first review. Capn Wacky’s Lists Unusual eBay feedback

Fixing A Furnace

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It’s the eve of Christmas Eve, and when I returned from running a couple of errands this afternoon my mother noted that while the thermostat was set to 68 the temperature was 60. Um, hmm. “Well, it’s 2:30, call someone right now,” I said. The burners in the furnace would light but no main blower activity. A skinny guy named Red rolled up in his van and took a look at it. He mucked with it a bit and it started working fine. “I don’t know why I’m even here,” he said. “It’s all working fine.” I explained what I’d done before he got there, that I could see the burners come on but the fan wouldn’t go. “That makes …

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Warning Phishing Victims?

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We get a lot of phishing spam, and we have to deliver it to our users. Most of it gets classified as spam and moved into the user’s “Junk Mail” folder. However, we’ve got a number of users that have been reporting these scams as “not spam” to us. It’s disturbing, because they don’t trust the spam filters now, and they’re probably clicking the links in the email. Could vendors add a feature to antivirus and spam detection systems (like Sophos’ PureMessage) where we could rewrite the beginning of the email to indicate a scam? Or maybe remove all the URLs from the email message? I see it as an extension of virus detection, only with a different rule set …

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links for 2006-12-21

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Please Let It Be Whale Vomit, Not Just Sea Junk – New York Times Heirloom whale barf! Minnesota Twins : Radke Calls It a Career Sad to see Radke go, but it’s for the right reasons, and it’s a happy thing. Hopefully the Twins can replace him with someone as competent. Learn the DD command – LinuxQuestions.org Good examples of dd, especially doing bootable flash drives. nominal comfort on Flickr – Photo Sharing! “Help is on the way.” Will It Blend? | Presented By Blendtec Nothing like sticking dolls, rakes, golf clubs, etc. into a blender.

Weddings, Holidays

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I’m off to the Twin Cities for Christmas. Before I go some overdue congratulations need to go out. First, to Jon and Maureen. Jon was probably my first reader here, and he’s been a great friend, coworker, and drinking partner for a long time. Maureen is awesome, one of the only women I know that not only tolerates our shenanigans but will routinely one-up us, too. Not unpredictably they are now going to make their relationship official. Yea! 🙂 Congratulations! Second, to Derick and Maitri, for the same reasons. Their last attempt at getting married was foiled by big swirly atmospheric disturbances so I wish them a happy, uneventful wedding ceremony this round. May it go off with only one …

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Carl Sagan, We Miss You

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Today is the tenth anniversary of Carl Sagan’s death. The world needs more people like Carl Sagan, bringing science, skepticism, and critical thinking to the fight against complacency, creationism, and blind faith. I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up does rejoice. Still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they’re gone. – Red, “The Shawshank Redemption”

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