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.

Shut Yer Trap

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The last couple of weeks have been pretty hectic. My coworkers have been on vacation and generally AWOL, leaving me alone with all our customers. I’m accustomed to being the only guy doing work around the office, but when other emergencies come up it throws a wrench into my normally scheduled insanity. Given the way I work, as a human, it’s hard for me to write creatively when I’m stressed out. So I usually end up drinking more, playing more Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, and bitching at my boss. Always productive. 🙂 One of the emergencies that ate about 20 hours of my life was the realization of what was causing I/O problems on our VMware ESX Servers. In short, because …

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Apache 2.2.0

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Given that it’s been out for a while I thought I should spring for the latest Apache httpd, version 2.2.0 I really like the cleanups that the httpd team has done with the configuration files, the modules, etc. I usually set bigger web servers up with separate include files for virtual hosts, especially if there is change control on the files. That way I can build a process for people to muck with the virtual hosts and leave the main server settings alone (and secure). I also appreciate the level of default security the server has. I don’t really tax Apache much anymore. A long time ago I had a few web servers that ran on underpowered hardware, but nowadays …

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links for 2006-02-21

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lost camera: camera unlost, but not quite found. Find a camera, offer it’s return, reneg, and then reneg again. (tags: theft canada travel) Beware the ‘pod slurping’ employee | CNET News.com I guess you’ll just have to epoxy the USB ports shut. Oh, wait, you have USB keyboards and mice… crap! (tags: security usb ipod privacy) VisionPRO at ThermostatShop.com For a hardware product demo, this is cool. Honeywell, you’ve sold a new thermostat (unless I find a similar one with X10 capabilities). 🙂 (tags: thermostat energy hardware demo)

Beating People Up

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Guy Kawasaki links to a post about the “Spread Firefox but don’t be a fanatic” article. Amen. Want to guarantee that I never do what you ask? Beat me over the head with it. As a sysadmin I see this a lot from coworkers and vendors, where someone will walk up to me and tell me that I should be doing something in a specific way. I shouldn’t use Windows on my desktop, I should use Mac OS X, or BeOS, or Linux, or OS/2. I should really install Konfabulator (now the Yahoo! Widget Engine). “I can’t believe you’re not using Opera,” or Firefox 1.0.7, or Flickr, or OpenOffice, or Java 1.5. It isn’t that they’re suggesting it, it’s that …

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links for 2006-02-20

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Spread Firefox, but don’t be a fanatic. | Spread Firefox (tags: firefox popularity web) Google_Oppo_to_Motion.pdf (application/pdf Object) (tags: google government privacy search)

ACLU & Google

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I just read Ars Technica’s analysis of the whole Google, ACLU, and federal government COPA thing. I really try to not get too political, here or anywhere, but in this case I don’t like where Peter Pollack leaves his analysis of: Because the government has refused to divulge any details about what it plans to do with the information requested from Google, it is impossible for Plaintiffs to ascertain if they need to conduct their own follow-up discovery from Google. If the motion is granted, however, Plaintiffs will very likely need to obtain further information from Google to understand what Google’s response actually signifies. In my opinion the ACLU is helping Google. Google is the darling of the tech industry …

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Brandi Carlile

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Country and folk music is something I’ve developed an increasing taste for over the past few years. There’s just something about acoustic guitars that I fall for, that I can sit and listen to them forever. It’s really not a surprise, then, that I like Brandi Carlile’s music. What was a surprise was the range of people that showed up to see her and the twins play last night in Madison. Older folks, lots of younger people. It was encouraging. She played a bunch of stuff from her album, but also a number of songs that weren’t on the album. Excellent stuff. I always sit as close as I can to the sound board, as the sound will be good …

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links for 2006-02-19

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UUUHHHGGG-rrrr! Chewbacca’s Blog. Nice! (tags: chewbacca blogs humor) LED Throwies (tags: led graffiti art)

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