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.

That Which Does Not Kill Me

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When playing a strategy game like Civilization 4 you learn quite rapidly that when you attack but don’t succeed in killing your enemy, the enemy gains experience and is harder to kill in the future. The same is true of bacteria. If you have an infection, you attack it with antibiotics. If you don’t kill all of the bacteria you end up with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which are quite troublesome. It is no surprise that these lessons are lost on the MPAA. They attacked The Pirate Bay but didn’t kill it. Now, all manner of people who didn’t know about TPB beforehand know about it now. Not only are they not dead, they’re stronger. BitTorrent networks are better when they are …

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links for 2006-06-04

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Intel Activates Xeon Virtualization Tech Interesting quote in here about spending $40K per 100 servers for power and cooling ROFLCOPTER!!!1 (tags: flash games)

Over and Over and Over and Over

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What is it when you listen to Jimmy Eat World‘s “Kill” on repeat for two hours? Well, you’re just across the street. Looks a mile to my feet. I want to go to you. Funny how I’m nervous still I’ve always been the easy kill. I guess I always will. Could it be that everything goes round by chance? Or only one way that it was always meant to be? You kill me, you always know the perfect thing to say. I know what I should do, but I just can’t walk away. I can picture your face well from the bar in my hotel. I wish I’d go to you. I pick up put down the phone. Like your …

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links for 2006-06-01

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Aharef: Websites as graphs (tags: web visualization design) Richard K Miller dot coooooooooom ยป Password protecting MediaWiki with mod_auth_mysql (tags: wiki password sysadmin)

Apple PCI Express Fibre Channel Card

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Apple’s PCI Express Fibre Channel HBA works great under RHEL AS 4, at least Update 3. So does the PCI-X Fibre Channel HBA, now that I think about it. I thought I’d mention this since Apple hasn’t updated their knowledge base article in some time. These cards continue to use the standard mptbase/mptscsih modules, so if you add one to an existing host you have to stick something like: alias scsi_hostadapter1 mptbase alias scsi_hostadapter2 mptscsih in /etc/modprobe.conf. This is pretty much the standard operating procedure for these cards, so no surprises. I’ve been using an Apple Xserve RAID under Linux for about four years now, and I love it. Dave over at alienraid.org has more information about running Apple’s storage …

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Cell Phones Suck, We Know

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I’m trying to find a new phone. My LG VX6000 is getting old. It’s interesting that everybody has picked up on the AP article about how cell phones are too complex, etc. etc. I’ve been saying that for a while. The guys over at 37signals have said it, too. All I need is a phone. I don’t want a camera. I don’t want an MP3 player. Like, what is it with companies making everything a damn MP3 player? Like the Garmin GPS units they’re advertising now. I don’t want to listen to MP3s on my GPS. Seriously. Anyhow, I digress. What I need is a good phone. It needs to have: a very usable phone directory. excellent reception — a …

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links for 2006-05-29

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Visitors – fast web log analyzer Holly Brook (on MySpace) Damn. Also catch her work with Fort Minor (“Where’d You Go?”) (tags: music) Travel-time Maps and their Uses Neat maps of travel times. The Paradox of the Best Network (tags: network politics Internet) YouTube – Fort Minor ft. Holly Brook & Jonah Matranga – Where’d You Go (tags: music) WeatherMole (tags: weather google mashup) …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead Best band name ever. Good music, too. (tags: music) 2006 Sasquatch! Music Festival (tags: music travel festival) ABC News: Some Cell Phone Owners Spurn Gadgetry I’ve been saying this for a while. (tags: phones design) 40ozMaltLiquor.com :: The 40oz Archive (tags: funny humor)

Uncertainty

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“Hey, do you have a second to look at this thing I wrote?” No. Not really. A “second” is at least 15 minutes by the time I get back to what I was doing. I do respect that people want to use me as a sounding board so I make time. Besides, I’m sitting here waiting for a data conversion between PostgreSQL and Oracle to fail, just watching it. “What is it?” “It’s a system to graph the performance of our servers.” “Um, we have one of those already.” “Yeah, this one is cool, though.” “Oh, what does it do differently that’s nicer?” “It polls every 10 seconds.” “It’s really interesting seeing graphs of performance that aren’t averaged over five …

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