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.

SftpDrive Rules

by

I support a number of developers. These developers all have Windows desktops, but need to edit their code which resides on UNIX hosts (AIX, Solaris, and Linux). I love Samba, but not if it’s installed on 300 UNIX hosts. It’s another software package that needs to be configured, firewalled, monitored, patched, and maintained. The permission model for Samba is somewhat orthogonal to the permission model for UNIX hosts, too, so my tools for handling user accounts won’t work. My developers want to edit their code with local GUI text editors. Getting them to use X11, or even text editors via SecureCRT is not a good solution, mainly because they resist. I’m cool with that. I know what tools I’m most …

Read More

Something Is Fishy

by

“I see they’ve got you doing everything around here now.” I was opening the janitor’s closet outside of my office. They have a nice sink in there that makes cleaning our fish tanks easier. My friend Eric was walking past as I was unpacking the closet. “Yeah. I guess I shouldn’t have been a smartass to my boss,” I said with a grin. “But seriously, why are you in the janitor’s closet?” “It makes maintaining the fish tank easier.” “Oooh, you guys have a fish tank?” “Yeah, come here and take a look.” Our cube farm has two tanks. One is in the middle, just as you walk in the door. It’s 55 gallons and has orange platys, green tiger …

Read More

Dell PERC 5/i Not Caching

by

I noticed this morning that the RAID containers on my new Dell PowerEdge x9xx servers don’t have their caching options enabled. Now, I understand that write caching is potentially risky, and I understand why Dell ships the PERC 5/i controllers without write caching. However, no read caching? That doesn’t make much sense. While I was mucking around I did some benchmarking of the controllers with different cache settings. I used Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Update 4, running on a Dell PowerEdge 2950 with six 146 GB 10K SAS disks. The filesystem is a 20 GB ext3 volume created in LVM, mounted with data=writeback. I used bonnie++ to generate load, which for that tool means sequential writes and reads. Each …

Read More

My Excel Wish List

by

Say what you will of me, I love Microsoft Excel. I don’t think my life as a system administrator would be as easy without it. Basically, I love it for Autofill in combination with it’s text functions, and also for charting. There are three things I’d love to see Excel do better, in these regards: I wish Autofill recognized IP addresses. It will increment them now as numbers, but when I get to x.y.z.256 I have to start over. Not a huge deal, just would be nice to see it say “Hey, this is an IP” and do x.y.z+1.0 or something. I wish Excel in general, and Autofill in particular, could handle hexadecimal numbers. And along with #1, IPv6 addresses …

Read More

Sunlight

by

“Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” – Louis D. Brandeis

OMFG, Commercials Are Sooo Dumb

by

I don’t know what it is tonight, but I find myself watching television commercials more than usual, now that I’ve commented on other premature, white supremacist toilet brush commercials. The last commercial I noticed in the background was one from Glade. The final statement in the commercial is: “…and when the oil runs out the candle goes out.” Really? WOW! Maybe there’s a type of combustion that doesn’t require fuel. Which makes me think that if there is and the folks at Glade know about it they have the energy market cornered. Maybe they aren’t releasing it because it hasn’t passed various government safety tests. It’d suck trying to put out a fire caused by fuel-less combustion. Maybe it’s like …

Read More

Christmas Already? And some KONE racism?

by

I’m sitting on my couch catching up on my reading, and I have the television on in the background for noise. And… …a Christmas Tanqueray advertisement just played. I looked up because I heard the sweet sounds of “Deck the Halls.” WTF? We have — count them — eleven whole days until *Thanksgiving*. Every year we gain a couple more days of the Christmas season. This isn’t a bah-humbug sort of attitude. Similar to locking operations in software or XML tags, I like my holidays atomic. 🙂 I was stunned for a second following the Tanqueray ad, and ended up watching an advertisement for a new designer handheld vacuum, KONE, from Dirt Devil. “It’s beautiful enough to stay on display,” …

Read More

inodes, or "Why is my disk full, but it isn't?"

by

System administrators need a solid background in the fundamentals of operating systems. Unfortunately, good defaults and better tools mask the need for that until something breaks. On top of that there is very little recognition of the theory behind how operating systems work and its use in practical, day-to-day system administration. This morning my team was faced with a puzzling problem. A file system which had 34% free space was no longer allowing new files to be created in it, but pre-existing files were still being appended to? How does that work? The junior admin who was the first responder was puzzled. Could it be a permission problem? Maybe a reboot will fix it… Inodes are one of those things …

Read More

links for 2006-11-10

by

Mastering the Three Worlds of Information Technology Rackable Systems – High-Density Servers Featuring DC Power TrueCrypt – Free Open-Source On-The-Fly Disk Encryption Software for Windows XP/2000 and Linux The Cockpit

+ More Posts +