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.

Links for May 31, 2011

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Stolen Camera Finder – find your photos, find your camera Hey, this is pretty cool. I installed their Chrome plugin, as I support efforts like this. Of course, if you sell your camera it’ll probably find that, too, but that would also be interesting… Pentagon: Online Cyber Attacks Can Count as Acts of War – WSJ.com Via @acesage, I’m glad we’re finally starting to treat computer criminality as something with actual effects on humans and our well-being. Why Johnnie Walker Blue Is $200 and Other Marketing Tricks to Make You Spend – Asylum.com “In 1983, two marketing researchers at Duke University published some incredible experiments,” says Poundstone. “They showed that when people were given a choice between a cheaper, lower-quality …

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Links for April 23rd, 2011

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Firewall settings for a VMware View environment (That’s my View – Christoph Harding) I love docs like this — exactly what I need for my new VDI environment. 3 Free E-Books on Java for Beginners Very cool — it’s been a long time since I’ve done any non-Perl, non-PHP programming and I sort of miss it. Never did a lot with Java, I was mainly a Windows C/C++ developer. AWS Developer Forums: Life of our patients is at stake – I am … This is the sort of thing that is considered “gross negligence” and makes people personally liable in lawsuits. It’s got nothing to do with the cloud, and everything to do with terrible architecture. Michigan: Police Search Cell …

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UNIX Utility of the Day: watch

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Not a lot of people know about the ‘watch’ command, part of the standard complement of GNU tools available on most Linux distributions, as well as many Linux-like OSes such as VMware ESX and the VMware vMA. Simply put, it runs a command at a specific interval for you. So if you want to continually see the number of httpd processes running on a host you could use: watch ‘ps -ef | grep httpd | wc -l” Or maybe you want to watch the temperature on a remote physical host using IPMI. The -n flag changes the number of seconds between the commands: watch -n 60 -d ‘ipmitool -I lan -U username -P password -H host-bmc.address sdr type “Temperature”‘ The …

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How To Disable Teredo IPv6 Tunneling in Microsoft Windows

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Greg Ferro’s post about how Microsoft Teredo is a suboptimal networking solution made me think it’s time to update my old post on how to disable Teredo in Windows 7 and in Windows 8. For the record, I agree — I’ve had serious problems with it conflicting with my native IPv6 connectivity. 1. Open a command prompt with administrator privileges (Start->Accessories->right click on Command Prompt, choose Run as Administrator): 2. Issue the command: netsh interface teredo set state disabled 3. You may need to reboot, depending on your version of Windows. If you wish to re-enable Teredo at some point you can issue the command: netsh interface teredo set state type=default  

VMware Fault Tolerance, Determinism, and SMP

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We’re all at least roughly familiar with Fault Tolerance, a feature VMware added to vSphere 4 to establish a mirrored VM on a secondary host. It’s kind of like RAID 1 for VMs. To do this, Fault Tolerance records the inputs to a primary VM, and then replays it on the secondary VM to achieve the same results. There are two important and somewhat subtle points here that help us understand why Fault Tolerance is limited to one CPU. First, the process records the inputs, not the state of the PC after the inputs happen. If you moved the mouse on the primary it moves the mouse on the secondary VM in exactly the same fashion. If you ping the …

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The Truce

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I wish that all of the things that like to stand between me and my work would take as kindly to a folded-up blanket.

34 Thoughts For 34 Years

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“Ask. What’s the worst thing that’ll happen? They’ll say no.” – Lynn Plankers You don’t learn anything until you have to fix something. Technology doesn’t fix “people” problems. Don’t look at the camera. “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” – Voltaire Many greetings are questions. Answer them. A true expert admits when he doesn’t know something. Swing for the fences, unless you like wasting time. “Bad decisions make good stories.” – Unknown People who want to be in charge probably shouldn’t be. It’s good to be alone from time to time. Always give credit. “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” – Edison If a tool doesn’t save you …

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Links for April 7th, 2011

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Facebook Open Sources Its Servers and Data Centers: Cloud Computing News « Facebook has basically given away the key to being as green as possible right now, which is a very nice thing of them to do. They obviously believe their competitive advantage is not their infrastructure, whereas Google does think that. The Kermit Project – Columbia University “Unfortunately, Columbia has determined it can no longer continue to support the Kermit Project going forward. As of July 1st, 2011, development of any new Kermit software enhancements at Columbia University will cease, as will any ability of Columbia to provide ongoing maintenance and technical support for Kermit.” I’ve needed Kermit twice in my life: transfers to my HP-48s and to transfer …

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Why Internet Explorer 9's Power Consumption Matters

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Microsoft blogged about how they worked to reduce the power consumption for Internet Explorer 9: Power consumption is an important consideration in building a modern browser and one objective of Internet Explorer 9 is to responsibly lead the industry in power requirements. The more efficiently a browser uses power the longer the battery will last in a mobile device, the lower the electricity costs, and the smaller the environment impact. While power might seem like a minor concern, with nearly two billion people now using the Internet the worldwide implications of browser power consumption are significant. As a virtualization guy I watch power consumption & battery life work closely. Almost universally, their work to extend battery life also means lower utilization …

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