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.

April Fools

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…and so begins the onslaught of April Fools’ Day pranks and jokes, most of which won’t be funny, amusing, or even jokes. And the pranks, well, ugh. Good pranks are so uncommon. Back in the day when I was an Assistant Scoutmaster I happened upon a group of Scouts planning midnight raids on other campsites at summer camp. The ideas they had! Tripwires, dumping the other Troop’s 55 gallon water drum (for fire suppression) over, burying fireworks in their fire pit. Terrible. It’s a real challenge to come up with a funny but harmless prank. I was lucky that as a Scout my Troop had a good prank culture, especially when we were camping, and the pranks were mostly safe …

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Intel Xeon 5500 Release

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I’ve spent the morning looking at the new server models from Dell, based on the Intel Xeon 5500 series of CPUs (Nehalem-EP). These things look sweet, but there are some interesting caveats. A few of my observations so far: 1. Intel has killed the front-side bus and in its place implemented QuickPath Interconnect (QPI), a competitor to AMD’s HyperTransport. It’s speed is measured in GigaTransfers per second (GT/s), and is 4.86 GT/s, 5.86 GT/s, or 6.40 GT/s per direction, which according to the Wikipedia article I linked to is 12 to 16 GB/s per direction per link. Cool, but most people are going to pick a CPU based on price point rather than link speed, given that everything in the …

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links for 2009-03-30

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Crabs 'feel and remember pain' suggests new study – CNN.com Lots of stuff feels and remembers pain, including lots of stuff we eat. Doesn't mean we should stop eating it, just means we should stop killing it slowly.

links for 2009-03-28

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Noah Stokes – Front End Developer and Other Crap "I'll pull your data asynchronously from every orifice of your server." OMFG, funny. Props to Jeremy Zawodny for the link.

"Meet The Engineer"

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Okay, so I work at a University, and occasionally I use a bathroom frequented by students who still believe in writing creative stuff on the walls. Today I see a quote: “I have yet to meet the person who can outsmart a bullet.” and figuring that it isn’t an original work I go looking for the source. It turns out to be the Heavy Weapons guy in Team Fortress 2, during their “Meet the Team” videos. Whoever had the idea for that is a genius. You don’t need much character development in a first person shooter, but these are just the right length, and funny as hell. If you haven’t watched them and are looking for something to kill a …

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Not Running VMware Capacity Planner as root on Linux

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I’ve recently been working with VMware Capacity Planner project in my organization. It’s a useful tool in proving what I already know: that the physical hosts in my data center don’t do anything. 🙂 The Capacity Planner Data Manager is a software component that you install at your site on a Windows host (in my case a virtual machine). It gathers data from your hosts, sanitizes it, and relays it or stores it for relaying to VMware’s data warehouse (where it’s analyzed). One of Data Manager’s features is that it’s agentless, and will just SSH into my Linux hosts and gather what it needs. Problem with that, though, is that it wants to log in as root. All the documentation …

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links for 2009-03-19

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AT&T To Offer No-Contract iPhones to Existing Customers Starting March 26th? – Mac Rumors $699 for an iPhone? Ugh. I'm guessing this is AT&T and Apple realizing that they are losing a lot of money by not selling to unlockers. I.B.M. Said to Be in Talks to Buy Sun for $7 Billion – NYTimes.com I don't think this is going to make it past the antitrust guys. And if it does I'm not sure this is good for projects like MySQL. Maybe it's different now but as of just a couple years ago IBM didn't seem to understand open-source.

Keys

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“A man’s troubles can be measured by the number of keys in his pocket.” – David Plankers

4 AM

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The 11307th photo I’ve taken with my Nikon D80. I kinda like it.

Useful Error Messages

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The Dell Server Update Utility script on Linux is really helpful when it can’t run: The Software Update Utility was unable to collect inventory on this system. [/mnt/suu/./bin/Linux/invcol] which: no lockfile in (/usr/local/sbin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin) invcol Error: Cannot find utilities on the system to execute Inventory Collector. Make sure the following utilities are in the path: tar gzip tail rm mkdir chmod ls basename wc lockfile stat exiting SUU application … This is exactly how errors should be: informative. Instead of quitting suddenly and quietly it’s nice that it tells you what utilities should be installed and in the path, and the “which” error tells you exactly what isn’t there. Excellent.

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