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.

How To Increase Your "% Virtualized" Rates

by

The #VirtualizeDell tweet chat today got me thinking about what stops most virtualization implementations around 50-75%. These are just some thoughts on ways to kick things loose. @LethaW commented “[that some of them are] sneaky and underhanded, and I love it.” I took that as encouragement. Needless to say, your mileage may vary. Problem: Physical hardware is required or requested by vendors. Solutions: Actually check to make sure that a vendor does require physical hardware. For example, Oracle doesn’t require it for many things, but there’s this misconception out there that they do, and I hear it from DBAs a lot. Consultants will also tell you a wide variety of things, too. Check the facts. Get it in writing. Don’t …

Read More

Technical Debt

by

This week I’m paying off technical debt. If you’re not familiar with the term it’s from the world of software developers, and Martin Fowler describes it better than I would: Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this problem. In this metaphor, doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a financial debt. Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the …

Read More

Links for April 3rd, 2012

by

(Editor’s note: I’m going to fire up the Delicious autoposter again. Those of you that are long-time subscribers (thank you!) may remember a time when I did this as a type of short-take post. Twitter and the death of del.icio.us ended it for a couple of years, but enough things are fixed up now that I think I’ll bring it back. Plus, I’m hoping that it’ll encourage me to keep up more with my blog reading. Thanks y’all. – Bob) Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young – chicagotribune.com This is the original text that Baz Luhrmann put into his spoken word song “Everybody’s Free (to Wear Sunscreen)”. My favorite quote from it is: “Don’t worry about the …

Read More

Backing Myself Up Using CrashPlan, TrueCrypt, and Hamachi

by

For a long while now I’ve been looking for a decent & automatic way to protect the data on the multitude of computers I support in my personal life. I’ve been using a hodgepodge of external disks and synchronization software to keep a spare copy of my data, photos, and media, but with the impending birth of my daughter I figure I’m not going to have time or the willingness to mess around with kludgy solutions anymore. I also don’t want to run the risk of data loss when it comes to things my relatives would judge me on. “What do you mean you don’t have the video of her <doing some activity>?” I stumbled upon CrashPlan a few weeks …

Read More

Digital IRS W-9 Forms

by

The more consulting work I do the more I end up scanning and FAXing forms back & forth. The United States’ Internal Revenue Service has done us a big favor and created PDF versions of commonly used forms like the W-9. However, there’s no provision to sign and date them electronically. Here’s what I’ve been doing to avoid having to FAX or scan printed copies: 1. Grab the form you need from the IRS’ “Forms and Publications” index. 2. Sign a blank white piece of paper with a black pen or Sharpie. Take a photo of your signature with your smartphone so you can only see the white background and get it to your PC (mail it to yourself or …

Read More

Wisconsin VMUG in Green Bay – April 5, 2012

by

Just a reminder that there’s a Wisconsin VMUG gathering in Green Bay, WI this coming Thursday, April 5, 2012. Rod Gabriel (@ThatFridgeGuy) says that 80 people are registered so far, so the turnout will be excellent. Scott Herold of VKernel/Quest will be there to talk about performance & capacity planning (ostensibly with the VKernel tools). Mike Chudzik from Pure Storage will be there to talk about smashing performance bottlenecks, ostensibly by using their storage devices which are all-flash storage arrays and pretty sweet. I’ve seen both of these vendors via Tech Field Day, and they have some interesting things going on. Last in my list (may not be last in the presentation order), Jeremy Gruenke of Johnsonville Sausage will be …

Read More

Madison, WI vBeers – April 26th, 2012

by

I greatly enjoyed the three or four Twin Cities vBeers I attended last summer, and one of the things on my list for 2012 was to start a regular vBeers in my hometown of Madison, WI. So I’m going to. If you are in the area on April 26th, 2012 please stop by and join us on the UW-Madison Memorial Union Terrace (Rathskeller if it’s raining/snowing), sometime after 4 PM. If you know someone who can do something about the weather, we’d like some sun & warmth! As I said in the invite (linked above) RSVP isn’t necessary, though if I know you’re coming we’ll save you a seat. Or flee the area… 🙂

vSphere 5 Update 1 and vCenter Agent Upgrades

by

We applied vCenter 5 Update 1 on Sunday in my environment, which is earlier than we often do because there’s some bugs we needed fixed (namely the issues with Fault Domain Manager/HA and SSL certificate replacement). We’ve been running Update 1 in our test environment since its release, and it looked solid. But as any experienced IT person will tell you, production isn’t test. Ever. After the upgrade none of the hosts were connected to vCenter, and there was a task for each cluster entitled “Upgrade vCenter agents on cluster hosts” that did not proceed, did not terminate, and was uncancellable. The hosts themselves had a warning message on the summary tab indicating that a manual upgrade of the agent …

Read More

Why Is It Called "Resilvering?"

by

Q: Why do some people refer to the process of remirroring or rebuilding a RAID 1 drive set as “resilvering?” A: Antique mirrors (the reflective kind you hang on a wall, or are in your bathroom) used silver (Ag) for the reflective coating, below the glass. Over time that silver would get tarnished and/or damaged, so you’d restore them by re-silvering them. I’m sure you’ve all seen this, where an old mirror has streaks in it but they’re below the glass. When your RAID 1 mirror set gets “tarnished” you resilver it and it’s shiny & new again. You can rebuild a RAID 5 array but you resilver a mirror. 🙂

Good Uses For Old Technology

by

I was just telling Alex Barrett of TechTarget that I’ve been feeling very grumpy lately, and a few of you have poked fun at me over the last week for being kinda negative. Sorry about that. To make it up to you let me share with you 42 seconds of what I spent my lunchtime watching: people making music with 3.5″ floppy drives: He’s got a bunch of songs on his YouTube channel and is actively adding more. There’s another guy, MrSolidSnake745, that’s got some songs posted, too, using the same code, and appears to be collaborating with Sammy1AM. I think my favorite floppy-song of his is “What is Love?” I hope the rest of your day is as enjoyable as …

Read More

+ More Posts +