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.

My Week So Far

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Moron: “Our mail server is blacklisted in SpamCop. I need you to fix it. I’m trying to send an important email out.” Me: “Didn’t you tell me last week that you were going to start doing your part to end spam by sending all of your spam to SpamCop?” Moron: “Yeah. What does that have to do with this?” Me: “Did you teach SpamCop your mail server IPs? Did you read the instructions?” Moron: “Sure I read them. Didn’t see how I’d tell them my mail server IPs. Why would our mail server be blacklisted now? This is really inconvenient — this mail has to go out right now. You need to do a better job of securing our mail …

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links for 2006-08-29

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SSRN-Porn Up, Rape Down by Anthony D’Amato Go pr0n go. (tags: politics statistics pornography) Spraygraphic Apparel – thought provoking style – cool clothes (tags: shirts) Agile Design Session for minnēbar 2006

Hi Crazy Nazis

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On Saturday I attended my first protest. As of this week I have lived in Madison, WI for eleven years. I had not attended a single event even remotely like a protest until this. I wasn’t going to go. I wanted to go home and mow my lawn, having spent the morning working on Stroller’s production of “Sylvia.” However, two of my crew employed drastic coercion methods to get me to go (they pointed out that it was raining and I couldn’t mow my lawn, and that they’d probably go for beer afterwards). The result was that I had a blast, which may be an odd thing to say about a Nazi rally. On arrival we walked past Genna’s bar, …

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F'in Comment Spammers

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Okay, I don’t know what it is but in the last two days I have had to delete about seventy different spam comments. WTF. I don’t know if Akismet is just not up to the task anymore or what, but this is crazy. I think it said about 3750 spam comments blocked when I clicked the “Delete All” button for the latest batch of 100 or so. They come in waves, too. No idea if it’s an indication of the popularity of my site, but I doubt it. I think tomorrow I will write two new utilities for my blog: 1) A script to automatically close comments for certain types of articles after a certain number of days. For instance, …

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Alt-248

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Alt-248 is the first thing that I discovered on my own on the IBM PC. At least, the first thing I discovered that I still use today. I was messing around one day with the keypad one day after I discovered that the bell was Ctrl-G. It was shortly after my parents bought me my first PC. An Epson Apex 80. 10 MHz of 8088 goodness, 640 KB of RAM, and dual 5.25″ 360K floppies. Some days I get nostalgic for B:. It was 1989. I was 12. Four color CGA was fine. I was absolutely distraught that BASIC wasn’t included. The first productive thing I did with that PC was fire up the bundled copy of PFS: First Choice …

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No. We can't stop here. This is bat country.

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“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers. Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.” “How long could we maintain? I wondered. How long until one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This same lonely desert was the last known home of the …

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Size Matters: Use The Right Tool

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Once upon a time there was a man who was a sysadmin. He took care of twenty IBM AIX boxes. These machines were built by his predecessors, and they were built over time, each different, each with a personality. This man’s customers didn’t like the different personalities. They wanted each server to be the same so they could write scripts that had the same results on all the servers. They wanted to compile and not have to worry about differences between compilers on the machines. This man asked around and discovered that IBM’s Network Installation Manager, or NIM, was a tool he could use to manage the machines. He took an older AIX box and made it a NIM master. …

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links for 2006-08-17

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AOL Stalker – The leading resource in anti-privacy OMFG Something Awful: The Internet Makes You Stupid If I were an AOL user right now I’d be searching for “class action lawsuit.”

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