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.

How To Grow Linux Virtual Disks in VMware

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There is plenty of documentation for how to grow a VMware virtual disk file (VMDK), but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of documentation for Linux users who A) are using LVM and B) have aligned their partitions for performance reasons. I was asked how to do this and I thought I’d post it here for everybody. I basically have two suggestions. One is straightforward but you end up with two partitions in your volume group. The other is a little scarier but you’ll have only one partition in the end. This last method is what I was asked about, and what I’ll go into detail explaining. Obligatory, seemingly obvious statement: have a backup of your system. This is …

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In Summary

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After reading what seem like hundreds of blog posts wrapping up 2008 by advertising traffic stats, best posts, New Year’s resolutions, and predictions for 2009, I’ve decided to write one myself. Traffic Stats: People visit my blog. Some days thousands. Some days a few. I also have an RSS feed that some people use. Observations indicate that when I write useful things more people visit. Weird, I know. I wish my readers would all gather in the same place so I could buy them a drink. Best Posts: All of my posts rock. Except those that don’t. And I’m not going to point those out. 🙂 I do have to say, though, that in thinking about “best posts” lists I …

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A Glitch in the Matrix

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That leap second in action, as seen in by a Linux box observing Central Standard Time (-0600): According to my friend Jon the BBC had advertised that it would have six pips at the top of the hour, instead of the standard five, but instead chose to play Big Ben (which had been properly calibrated earlier). It’s interesting that some things so abstract, like the precise speed of the rotation of the Earth and relativity, now directly affect our daily lives… even if only a few people actually notice. Wired ran an article last year about amateur time hackers who pick up surplus atomic clocks (“frequency references”) and use them to run NTP servers and prove relativity (by taking them …

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Leap Second

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Dave Jones’ post reminded me that tonight we have a leap second. 23:59:59 will be followed by 23:59:60. Wikipedia saves me the trouble of explaining why: Leap seconds are necessary because time is measured using stable atomic clocks (TAI or International Atomic Time), whereas the rotation of Earth slows down continually, though at a slightly variable rate. Originally, the second was defined as 1/86400 of a mean solar day (see solar time) as determined by the rotation of the Earth around its axis. By the middle of the 20th century it was apparent that the rotation of the Earth did not provide a sufficiently uniform time standard and in 1956 the second was redefined in terms of the annual orbital …

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I'm Gonna Virtualize You Fools

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This is probably real old news, but I just saw the Mr. T “I am the T in I.T.” video from Hitachi today. Corny, no doubt, but lines like “intelligence in the network is for suckas” make me laugh. My goal for next week is to use “I’m gonna virtualize you fools” in conversation at least once.

links for 2008-12-30

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For the first time in years, western part of Lake Superior freezes over |  River Falls Journal  | River Falls, Wisconsin This is pretty neat. The animals will be able to move around between the Apostle Islands and the mainland (which basically just means the wolves will shuffle around some). Blow into the iBreath and your iPod plays a blood-alcohol alert – Los Angeles Times "Advocacy groups working to combat drunk driving worry that the iBreath might promote binge drinking and create a false sense of security." As my friend Bob points out we should ban speedometers, because knowledge of one's speed might lead to people seeing how fast they can go. I'm not an advocate of drunk driving but …

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links for 2008-12-29

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Is This The New Mac Mini? No (AAPL) If a new Mac Mini can drive two monitors I'm buying one. Ice storm tests mettle of Harvard residents "Sweeney ran his refrigerator, freezer, TV, woodstove fan, and several lights through his Prius, for three days, on roughly five gallons of gas." Priuses are pretty cool like that, rolling generators and battery packs.

LOL Butter

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I wish all it took was butter to make people LOL. 🙂 I wonder if there’s a LOL Margarine, too. (click on the photo for a bigger version)

links for 2008-12-27

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Chris's Wiki :: blog/solaris/SparcLifetime "Sun should be prepared to give up on SPARC." Yes. Ditch SPARC and start making good decisions, about a lot of things. Sun is adrift and before they have to make really tough choices later they should make some pretty hard ones now. Dell 30″ Monitor vs. Apple 30″ Monitor | alexking.org Alex King blogs about his choice of a Dell monitor vs. an Apple one. It's interesting, and I think it's something Apple is going to have to watch closely. People aren't going to go for Apple gear when it's twice the price and fewer features, no matter what it looks like. Server virtualization: Is it worth the risk? | IT Security | TechRepublic.com Why …

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How To Reassemble Your Faucet’s Aerator

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Took your faucet’s aerator apart to clean it? Trying to figure out how to put it back together again? Internet absolutely no help because it tells you that you should have noted how it came out in the first place? Yeah, I’m with you, pal, and you’ve come to the right place. This is how. Click on the photos for larger versions. First, I numbered everything so I could refer to them (this is also the order they go back into #1): The part I got hung up on was where you put part #3 into part #2 first, because it seems like it’d block all the water. It goes in like this: Then stick that in part #1: Top …

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