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.

Jackass Installer of the Week: Vista Upgrade Advisor

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I am trying to figure out if my desktop, currently running Microsoft Windows 2003 SP1, is going to be fine with Vista on it. But no! The Microsoft Vista Upgrade Advisor requires XP or Vista. Why in the flying fuck would it run on Vista and not the other Microsoft OSes? If you are running Vista you already know how compatible it is, right? The proper response would be to display a dialog indicating that there will be no in-place upgrade path from Windows 2003 to Windows Vista. Then it should continue to figure out if your system is compatible. I’d have preferred that over the snubbing I got. But what do I know? I only have to use this …

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Tivoli Storage Manager on ESX Server 3.0

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Okay, I just installed the Tivoli Storage Manager client, version 5.3.4, on my ESX Servers. This is my concise guide to getting it working, because I couldn’t find any documentation describing any of this in any decent order, at least on VMware’s web site. I don’t intend to back my .vmdk files up, just the service console settings and whatnot (I’m doing the VM backups from inside each VM). Obviously that doesn’t stop you from modifying this, I just state it so you know what you’re getting into. 🙂 0. Log into your ESX Server service console via SSH. 1. Install the client. It’ll complain about not having ksh installed. Try using “–nodeps”: rpm -ihv –nodeps TIVsm-API.i386.rpm TIVsm-BA.i386.rpm I don’t …

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Batting Practice

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Ugh, the last two days have not gone anywhere as planned. It’s been a rollercoaster of fires needing to get put out, colleagues being jackasses, and good things, too. Like getting invited to teach a virtualization class at a conference in Phoenix on November 6th. Of course, that’s the day before VMworld, so I’m hoping that I can just drive over to LA and indulge. We’ll see how well that works out. My stress relief lately has been the batting cages. I swam in high school, but never played any sports that required coordination. That was my brother’s domain, and he excelled at it. As we age he and I are swapping lives. He becomes a sysadmin and I become …

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links for 2006-09-26

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wordless pancake recipe (tags: cooking) Camp Chaos – Napster Bad I hate having to look this up all the time. (tags: humor video) All About Hem (tags: music bands) Using digg and Netscape to get traffic (tags: blogs business design) KnowHR Blog » Blog Archive » Top 10 Best Presentations Ever (tags: blogs business management presentations) “Watch my Talk on Business Blogging from the Affiliate Summit” from The Intuitive Life Business Blog (tags: business blog) bbs door games NIST Guidelines for Media Sanitization, September 2006 (tags: security) Bomb Or Not? Training For Government Agents! “While weighing in at only 21 kilotons, the ‘Fat Man’ atomic bomb can cause significant damage to an airplane. It should be permitted on board only …

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Lessons of a VI3 Upgrade

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I am just about finished with my VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 upgrades, and I have made a few observations about the process based on what happened to our clusters. 1. Don’t do an in-place upgrade. Sure, it might work, but it seems unnecessarily complex. What I did was remove a server from a cluster and use it to start a whole new VI3 cluster, including its own VMFS 3 storage. Then I’d scp the disk images from the ESX 2.5.3 cluster to the ESX 3 machine. When I freed enough capacity in the old cluster I’d remove another machine, reinstall it, and tack it into the new VI3 cluster. This plan worked great. It had several benefits, including being able …

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Robotic Caterpillars

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Engadget has a blurb about Caterpillar looking to make their product line robotic. Does anybody else remember the scene in “I, Robot” where the robotic demolition machine tries to kill Sergeant Spooner? Oh, but they don’t have some gigantic positronic AI thing in the lobby to control all their Earth movers, do they? I guess we’re safe. Update: See, I’m not the only one that worries that the future will be like Sci-Fi movies. Though it is a little odd to see Ars Technica posting about this at nearly the same time.

Kidding Me

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You have got to be kidding me. Somebody wrote a half-assed tutorial on setting up a DHCP server and it made the front page of Digg? I crap better example dhcpd.conf files. You know damn well what I’m doing tomorrow. I am going to fight back with my own tutorial. Speaking of which, I need to update my IPMI tutorial. Thankfully Red Hat obsoleted most of it. But for now, sleep! P.S. No, I am not linking to digg or the tutorial. I don’t want to encourage them.

Modern, Cool Nerd

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Sometimes I’m just a sucker for stupid tests on the web. I just took the “Are you a nerd, geek, or dork?” test, and I am a: Modern, Cool Nerd 52 % Nerd, 52% Geek, 34% Dork I guess that’s good. I wish I knew what the opposite ends of nerd, geek, and dork are. If I’m 34% dork that means I’m 66% something else, right?

Plumbing 0, Me 1

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I’ve been working balls-out all week, so I took today off to do some stuff around the house. Last weekend my mother showed up and suggested some new plants for outside my house. We worked out a three stage plan for redoing my plants, but to implement that I need to water the new flora, lest it die. Last winter my outside faucet’s pipe burst when it was -20 degrees out, and I still hadn’t fixed it. I’ve wanted to learn some plumbing techniques (while not paying big $$$ to a plumber) and had been putting it off, but I couldn’t do so anymore since I’ve got stuff I need to get into the ground. So, off I went to …

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Tool is a Bunch of Scurvy Dogs

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The Tool concert scheduled for tonight at the Kohl Center has been canceled due to an illness in the band. There will be no make-up date scheduled for this show. Fans who purchased tickets through the University of Wisconsin Athletic Ticket Office will receive a full refund for the concert. Fans who purchased tickets through uwbadgers.com or over the phone through the Athletic Ticket Office will receive refunds directly on their credit cards within the next ten business days. Crap! I was looking forward to this concert. I saw them out at Coachella in April and they were great.

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