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.

Cargo Cult System Administration

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The term “cargo cult” comes from World War II, where the USA and Japan created small airstrips and bases on islands in the Pacific Ocean, and the locals mistook the cause & effect in relation to why goods and cargo appeared on the island. It’s absolutely fascinating, and the Wikipedia entry for cargo cults indicates some of these cults are still operating. The excellent book Code Complete, by Steve McConnell, introduced me to the idea of cargo cult software engineering. Turns out, a guy by the name of Eric Lippert coined the phrase “cargo cult programming,” and explains the whole thing well: During the Second World War, the Americans set up airstrips on various tiny islands in the Pacific.  After …

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iOS 5: Promise Good Despite Some Rough Edges

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I have been running iOS 5 on my iPhone 3GS since the developer release of the GM seed. I upgraded my first generation iPad today. To summarize my experiences: iOS 5 on my 3GS seems to be decent, though I’ve noticed reduced battery life even with most of the over-the-air stuff off. iOS 5 on my iPad has been a process, with the upgrade failing, the sync taking hours, and iTunes claiming that the device is full of “other” data. When I’m done with this post I’m going to go nuclear on it. I do major iOS upgrades on my devices with a particular routine. First, I make sure I get a good backup, and I go into the iTunes …

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How To Power Your Stuff While You're in Copenhagen

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Denmark’s power is 230 Volts and 50 Hz, which means that if you are traveling from a country with another power specification (like the United States, at 110 Volts and 60 Hz) you have some considerations to make. Last year when I was there for the VMworld conference I had my Dell laptop, my iPad, my iPhone, and my Nikon D80 digital SLR camera. I left my electric razor at home; devices with motors in them need step-down transformers so they don’t catch fire. Step-down transformers are heavy and annoying and have fuses that blow. I can shave with a disposable razor for a week, no big deal. I planned to charge my iPhone off my laptop’s USB, thereby saving …

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"When in Rome, be a Roman candle"

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“Never be afraid to change the circumstances in which you find yourself.” – Maitri Erwin, in her eulogy for her friend Michael S. Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg and ostensibly the father of eBooks. The title quote appears to be from Mr. Hart himself. It meshes well with what Guy Kawasaki wrote over the weekend, in “What I Learned From Steve Jobs.” Particularly the part about “changing your mind is a sign of intelligence.” I like that, perhaps because I’ve never been apologetic for changing my mind. Or for occasionally being the Roman candle. 🙂

Just Ask

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“Ask. What’s the worst that’ll happen? They’ll say no.” – Lynn Plankers

Who Cares About Time Zones Anyway?

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If you think you have a thankless job you should think about Arthur David Olson and Paul Eggert. Heck, it’s not even a paying job for them. They’re volunteers. Perhaps even masochists. What do they do? They maintain the time zone database (“zoneinfo”) for all of the computing world. And while residents of a particular country have to put up with just the general stupidity of their own politicians, these guys have to put up with all the stupidity of all politicians, across the Earth. Every time a politician in Russia, or Cameroon, or Indiana thinks it’d be a good idea to screw with the clocks these guys update and redistribute their database[0]. Vendors pick up the update and send …

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How to Install Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 for VMware vCenter 5

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My venerable post on installing MS SQL Server 2008 for vCenter 4 was getting old, so I thought I’d update it, if only because I have a new admin helping me and I’m going to stick him with doing a bunch of installs. Ha! I thank the VMware folks who have incorporated a lot of the tweaks from my original document into the defaults for vCenter 5. They were probably obvious, and not taken from my work, but it’s content I don’t need anymore. Awesome. While I don’t mean this page to become a general support site for vCenter SQL Server installations please leave a comment if something needs to be clarified or corrected, or if I’m doing something dumb …

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Bleeding Seven Colors

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My first meaningful computing experience was on an Apple IIe in grade school. From the moment I first used the machine I was hooked. I’d find ways to stay in from recess, and stay after school, to play the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium’s “Oregon Trail” or “Number Munchers.” I even had a subscription to ENTER Magazine, for as long as it ran. Friends and I, on their IIgs’ and IIcs, would dutifully type in the BASIC programs that they printed, just to see a moire pattern or explore a very limited dungeon. And oh. my. god. Print Shop. I would have borne Brøderbund’s children, if I’d only known where babies came from. The summer before my seventh grade year my …

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Yak Shaving

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One of my favorite terms for my day-to-day work life is “yak shaving,” and I’m saddened that so many people have not heard of it when I say it. “What are you doing today?” I’m asked. “Shaving yaks,” I reply. Coined at MIT as part of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), it’s described well in Jeremy Brown’s archived email: You see, yak shaving is what you are doing when you’re doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you’re supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relations links what you’re doing to the original meta-task. Similarly, the Jargon File has it as: Any seemingly pointless activity which …

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Why I Don't Use Third-Party Binary Packages

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There are a number of third-party package repositories out there for Linux distributions. For example, Fedora runs the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository, which contains builds of open source software that isn’t supplied with Fedora or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Similarly, a lot of projects have their own repositories that supply builds of software for OpenSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, etc. Maybe it’s just because I’m old-school, and maybe it’s because I enjoy compiling things, but I really don’t like the idea of using binaries found on the Internet. I never have. As an aside, I really tried hard to make the rest of this post not be critical, or seem like criticism, but instead just be a reflection of …

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