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.

Thanks VMTN

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Thanks for the links, VMTN! For those of you not familiar, the VMTN is the VMware Technology Network. VMware is a pretty cool company, all things considered, and the VMTN is their umbrella for all the community stuff. They’ve really done a great job fostering user groups and whatnot around their products. I know the Wisconsin VMUG is pretty sweet, and much of that is because of the excellent sales/support guys we’ve had over the last couple of years that really helped pull it all together. They mention searching the forums for LBA, and finding a lot of data about the problem. For me, I’m not a big forum guy, and in talking with a number of other VMware admins …

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VMware Workload, Environment, and I/O

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If there is one thing about the intarweb that really, really sets me off it’s when people reply privately to public inquiries. I usually see this in list archives where someone posted “Hey, I’m seeing a certain problem, has anyone else? Email me off the list.” Hell no. You posted your question publicly, let the response be public, too. Now I have the problem and I have no idea what the solution was, because you kept it private. Why the person replying to you replied privately is beyond me, too. The internet is a big conversation, you idiots, and you’re whispering. If you comment on a post here there are three things that might happen: 1) Nothing. I don’t have …

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Code of the Day: malloc()

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Today’s nugget of machine-trashing goodness is brought to you by malloc(). #include <unistd.h> int main() { while (1) { malloc(2000); } return 1; } I originally wanted it to stop when it ran out of RAM but you know, it just wasn’t worth the time to fix it. Yes, I’m testing per-user limits on machines. No, I didn’t get them right the first time. Yes, that’s why I love VMware. 🙂

12 shots, 1.73 seconds

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I’m gonna get me one of these here shotguns ter kill the runnin’ deer gone past me. Now if I can just get the deer to line up in groups of 12… Yup, I’m definitely part redneck. Hell yeah. Pass me another Old Milwaukee. Update: My friend Rich points out that this is why the U.S. of A will never get invaded. Heh. Update 2: Some RSS readers apparently don’t parse object tags, so I’ll remember to link to the video next time.

Code of the Day: Fork

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It’s amazing that a good ol’ fork bomb can still provide hours of fun: #include <unistd.h> int main() { while (fork()) { fork(); } return 1; } Add a sleep() in there somewhere for additional enjoyment/bewilderment, depending on who you are and who runs the machines you’re on.

VMware I/O Problems

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I had previously mentioned I/O problems I was having with my VMware ESX Servers. I didn’t really elaborate on the problems I was having, but having been asked, I will. This was happening to me using ESX Server 2.x against EMC CLARiiON CX700s. It also appears to be a problem under ESX Server 3. The problems I was having were caused by logical block addressing (LBA), a feature of the PC BIOS that reworks the disk geometry so that a disk always appears to have 1024 tracks/cylinders and 63 sectors per track/cylinder. It’s a hack around some old limits on PC hardware. On storage attached to PCs the first cylinder is the master boot record (MBR), partition tables, etc. Because …

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