Bob Plankers, Author at The Lone Sysadmin

VMware Engineering, Are You Fixing Anything?

August 19, 2012 by Bob Plankers

I was just reading Josh Andrews’ account of a serious bug still present in the latest releases of VMware vCenter 5.0 (5.0b): This bug has been known for a while and while U1 contained some mentions about fixing it – we now have U1b and the problem still exists…. Make sure you have a cluster with HA and/or DRS turned on…. Enable VM Storage Profiles… Now return to your cluster summary to verify HA and DRS have been turned off and all settings have been lost. This is epic bad stuff here, because if there’s one good way to mess a lot of things up it’s to disable DRS. Especially if you have a vCloud Director setup, since if you shut DRS off …

Should You Install Development Tools on Production Hosts?

August 1, 2012 by Bob Plankers

Every once in a while I get sucked back into the age-old system administrator religious argument: should you install development tools on a production host? There are basically two schools of thought: Yes, if you need them. Despite the production nature of the host there are times where you might want to build software, perhaps something like the VMware Tools kernel modules on a Linux server, and having them helps a lot. They don’t take up much space and it’s nice to keep all your hosts identical. No, absolutely not. “Development” tools should only be on hosts that are for “development.” Build a software lifecycle management system to move everything from development to test to production. The presence of compilers …

How To Find Your iPad/iPod/iPhone's UDID Without The Device

July 31, 2012 by Bob Plankers

Sometimes you need the UDID for your iPad, iPod, or iPhone and you don’t have the device. Or you do have the device but it’s b0rked, like from installing development iOS and forgetting to add the device to your account. And you’ve got a Windows desktop, so all the Mac instructions out there don’t help a ton. It’s simple. Start->Run, then: %appdata%Apple ComputerMobileSyncBackup The folders there are named according to your device UDIDs. You can probably use the folder dates & times to figure out which is which, or if you need to get more detailed open Info.plist or Manifest.plist and look at the applications that were installed. If you need your device’s serial number check this post. Good luck!

Chinwag With Mike Laverick

June 26, 2012 by Bob Plankers

If you work with VMware software you probably are familiar with Mike Laverick and his RTFM Education site. He’s an accomplished, brilliant, and funny guy, he’s written what is essentially the missing manual for Site Recovery Manager, and he also does a ton of “chinwags” where he talks to various people in the tech industry on camera. They’re great, and I have watched many of them. Shortly before I took some time off here Mike and I recorded a session where we talked about why I think virtual appliances are built poorly, the realities of single panes of glass, Rackspace & cloud maintenance “strategies,” and the convoluted system I built to back up and secure my personal data. He posted …

How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Automate

June 25, 2012 by Bob Plankers

My wife and I had a daughter, almost two months ago now. Going into it, I completely underestimated how single-tasking kids are. My grand plans of blogging (at all) and writing and doing all sorts of big cool things while I had time off were suborned by a lot of seemingly simple tasks. Feed her. Feed myself. Change her diaper. Rock her. Clean up the house. Try to get some sleep. As a result, the only big thing I’ve been able to do is read a couple of novels, a few pages at a time. Well, that and keep a kid and a wife healthy and relatively happy. I see a lot of parallels between my last two months and …

Phrases We Can All Stop Using

April 27, 2012 by Bob Plankers

I don’t like the idea of new year’s resolutions much, but I do like setting goals for myself. One of my goals this year has been to stop saying certain pointless phrases, like “to be honest.” In the process I’ve found myself becoming very aware of the other dumb things people say, too. Here are my top five. “To be honest.” You’ve been dishonest with me in the past and am only starting to be honest now? Is that what you wanted to have me think? The Urban Dictionary advises that it “can be used in any sentence as long as you agree with yourself” and that it is “the crutch of a idiot who uses it to append declarative …

Thoughts on the VMware Code Leak

April 25, 2012 by Bob Plankers

VMware has confirmed that there was a theft of the ESX source code around April 8th, 2012. I have some non-linear thoughts on this whole thing. First, the code is from 2003 & 2004, and for ESX. ESX was the big, bloated hypervisor that shipped with whole Linux installs, and the purported 300 MB of source code sounds like they might have code for a lot of the Linux utilities that shipped with. So what? The newer version is ESXi which forgoes the Linux install in favor of being very small. That said, I’m going to assume they have the source code for the base hypervisor itself. I’m also going to assume that some of the hypervisor code from then …

Upcoming Virtualization & Sysadmin Events in Wisconsin

April 23, 2012 by Bob Plankers

There are a number of virtualization & sysadmin events coming up in Wisconsin in the next two months. Here are the ones that I know of, if you know of more please comment and I’ll add them. Madison’s first ever #vBeers is Thursday, April 26, 2012 at the UW-Madison Memorial Union. I’m putting it together, if you’re in the area please stop by. It’s supposed to be in the upper 50° F range outside so we’ll probably be inside in the Rathskeller. No signup needed. Please come and keep me company. Stephen Foskett is setting up Milwaukee’s first #vBeers for May 1, 2012, at the Miller Time Pub, 7 to 10 PM. You can sign up via Eventbrite. So far …

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