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.

vCenter 6.5b Resets Root Password Expiration Settings

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I’m starting to update all my 6.x vCenters and vROPS, pending patches being released. You should be doing this, too, since they’re vulnerable to the Apache Struts 2 critical security holes. One thing I noted in my testing is that after patching the 6.5 appliances, their root password expiration settings go back to the defaults. In this case I’d set them to not expire, but it’s clearly not that way anymore: Depending on your security requirements this might not be what you want. It’s bad form on VMware’s part, changing something that had been explicitly set. I also didn’t test to see if it resets the actual password age, or just the expiry. You might have far less than 365 …

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How Not To Quit Your Job

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I’ve thought a lot lately about Michael Thomas, a moron who caused criminal amounts of damage to his former employer in the process of quitting. From The Register[0]: As well as deleting ClickMotive’s backups and notification systems for network problems, he cut off people’s VPN access and “tinkered” with the Texas company’s email servers. He deleted internal wiki pages, and removed contact details for the organization’s outside tech support, leaving the automotive software developer scrambling. The real-life BOFH then left his keys, laptop, and entry badge behind with a letter of resignation and an offer to stay on as a consultant. More than a decade ago I did some consulting for a company that had this happen. They fired their sysadmin and …

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Standards, to and with Resolve

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As the holiday season has progressed I’ve spent a bunch of time in the car, traveling three hours at a crack to see friends and family in various parts of Midwestern USA. Much of that travel has been alone, my family having decided to ensconce themselves with my in-laws for the full duration of the week. That has left me ample time to sing aloud in the car, take unplanned detours to collect growlers of beer from esteemed breweries, and to think. I don’t do New Year’s resolutions. I’m not against them, per se, but I just think they’re too conveniently abandoned. I like the noun form of “resolve” better — a firm determination to do something. I aspire to …

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esxupdate Error Code 99

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So I’ve got a VMware ESXi 6.0 host that’s been causing me pain lately. It had some storage issues, and now it won’t let VMware Update Manager scan it, throwing the error: The host returns esxupdate error code:99. An unhandled exception was encountered. Check the Update Manager log files and esxupdate log files for more details. A little Google action later and it’s clear there isn’t a lot of documentation, recent or otherwise, about this out there. People suggest rebuilding Update Manager, or copying files from other hosts to repair them. The VMware KB has documentation of the particular error but only in context of the Cisco Nexus 1000V, and only for ESXi 5.0 and 5.1. Here’s another thought, if you’re …

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Use Microsoft Excel For Your Text Manipulation Needs

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I’m just going to lay it out there: sysadmins should use Microsoft Excel more. I probably will be labeled a traitor and a heathen for this post. It’s okay, I have years of practice having blasphemous opinions on various IT religious beliefs. Do I know how to use the UNIX text tools like sed, awk, xargs, find, cut, and so on? Yes. Do I know how to use regular expressions? Yes. Do I know how to use Perl and Python to manipulate text, and do poor-man’s extract-transform-load sorts of things? Absolutely. It’s just that I rarely need such complicated tools in my daily work. I often just have a short list of something that I need to turn into a bunch of …

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Big Trouble in Little Changes

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I was making a few changes today when I ran across this snippet of code. It bothers me. /bin/mkdir /var/lib/docker /bin/mount /dev/Volume00/docker_lv /var/lib/docker echo “/dev/Volume00/docker_lv /var/lib/docker ext4 defaults 1 2″ >> /etc/fstab “Why does it bother you, Bob?” you might ask. “They’re just mounting a filesystem.” My problem is that any change that affects booting is high risk, because fixing startup problems is a real pain. And until the system reboots the person who executes this won’t know that it works. If it doesn’t work it’ll stop during the boot, sitting there waiting for someone with a root password to come fix it. So you’ll have to get a console on the machine and dig up the root password. Then …

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Interesting Dell iDRAC Tricks

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Deploying a bunch of machines all at once? Know your way around for loops in shell scripts, or Excel enough to do some basic text functions & autofill? You, too, can set up a few hundred servers in one shot. Here’s some interesting things I’ve done in the recent past using the Dell iDRAC out-of-band hardware management controllers. You need to install the racadm utility on your Windows or Linux host. I’ll leave this up to you, but you probably want to look in the Dell Downloads for your server, under “Systems Management.” I recently found it as “Dell OpenManage DRAC Tools, includes Racadm” in 32- and 64-bit flavors. Basic Command The basic racadm command I’ll represent with $racadm from …

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10 Years

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Ten years ago I wrote the first post on this blog. 3:43 AM. I’m a late night kinda guy, I guess. Actually, I probably came home from a bar, installed WordPress 1.5.1, and started writing. Ten years seems like an awfully long time ago. So much has changed in my life. I like my job, most days. That wasn’t true back then. That’s part of why this started, as a way to vent. I have a wife and a kid now… almost two kids, just a couple days more until it is man-to-man coverage around Chez Plankers. I’ve been a little burnt out lately, with work and kids and life, and slacked off on writing in almost every way. As …

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Three Thoughts on the Nutanix & StorageReview Situation

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I’ve watched the recent dustup between VMware and Nutanix carefully. It’s very instructive to watch how companies war with each other in public, and as a potential customer in the hyperconverged market it’s nice to see companies go through a public opinion shakedown. Certainly both VMware and Nutanix tell stories that seem too good to be true about their technology. On the VMware side VSAN is new-ish, and VMware doesn’t have the greatest track record for stability in new tech, though vSphere 6 seems to be a major improvement. On the Nutanix side I have always had a guarded opinion of technologies that introduce complexity and dependency loops, especially where storage systems are competing with workloads for resources. I’ve argued …

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When Should I Upgrade to VMware vSphere 6?

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I’ve been asked a few times about when I’m planning to upgrade to VMware vSphere 6. Truth is, I don’t know. A Magic 8 Ball would say “reply hazy, try again.” Some people say that you should wait until the first major update, like the first update pack or first service pack. I’ve always thought that approach is crap. Software is a rolling collection of bugs. Some are old, some are new, and while vendors try to make the number of bugs go down the truth is that isn’t the case all the time. Especially with large releases, like service packs. The real bug fixing gains are, to borrow a baseball term, in the “small ball” between the big plays. …

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