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.

The Beauty of Logs

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I’m not sure how many times I’ve been asked by coworkers, friends, and random people if I know how to fix a problem. The conversation always goes something like: “Hi Bob. I am getting error XYZ when I try to use scp with public keys to copy a VMDK file from one ESX host to another. Can you tell me what I’m doing wrong?” “Hi Joe. It could be one of thousands of things. You might try looking at /var/log/messages or /var/log/secure to see what SSH thinks the problem is.” “Bob, thanks! It was a permission problem for my authorized_hosts file.” Neato. The nice thing about logs is that they often give you information that helps you solve a problem[0]. …

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links for 2008-10-02

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U.S. Voter Info Map This is super cool. Mad props to Google for setting this up. Microsoft will soon release 'Windows Cloud' OS, Ballmer says "The operating system, which will likely have a different name…" Maybe it's just me, but I have a few ideas for what they could call this thing. Microsoft Windows Smog, Fog, Gas… Standalone Sysadmin: Introduction to LVM in Linux Good intro. I'm going to go so far as to say that if you aren't using LVM under Linux you're way behind and should get your act together. 15 Tips to Properly Setup Your Own Hosting Racks | The Matchbox Good information here, even if some of it seems pretty obvious. Do it right and keep …

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Solutions to Match Your Problems

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One of the big things I like about virtualization is that you can find or build solutions that match the size of the problem you have. Need live workload migration? Buy VMotion. Need dynamic load balancing? Buy DRS. But if you only need to move your workloads around once in a while maybe you can get by with something like Mike DiPetrillo’s quick migration script. Cheap, easy, right-sized, and it has a well-known path for growth when you decide you really do need VMotion or DRS. Which, by the way, is why I’ve been telling folks to skip VMware Server and go straight to the free ESXi. That way, when they decide that virtualization is cool and want more of …

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Failure Modes I Haven't Seen Before

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It’s a rare day when I get to see operating systems fail in ways I’ve never seen before. I’ve been having the strangest problems with a virtual machine I’m trying to deploy. It boots but won’t come up properly on the network. Services will start but complain about the network, or just be unresponsive. I can’t ping it, either. I’ve deployed several other virtual machines today from this same image, so it isn’t the image. Regardless, I redeployed it. Still messed up. I double-checked the network settings, /etc/hosts, /etc/resolv.conf, gateway devices, netstat, route, everything. Nothing is wrong. I changed the IP address to something else, and it works great. I checked with my NOC to see if the IP I’d …

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Disabling iPhone Photo Import under Windows Vista

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In hindsight this seems obvious, but several Google searches did not reveal the answer so I am documenting it now in the hopes that others who are stymied by this can do something about it, too. As always if there’s a better way to do this leave me a comment. Thanks! I was being annoyed by Windows importing and tagging the photos on my iPhone, often several times per sync. I want to be able to plug my iPhone in, have it sync, and then leave. Instead I’d get “No new pictures or videos were found on this device” dialogs, requiring that I click OK. If I didn’t click OK fast enough I’d get “This device is already being used …

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Continuous OS Releases

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Gentoo Linux Cancels Distribution: Instead, Gentoo developers said they are pushing a new model for their distribution — one that eschews the conventional release wisdom used by Red Hat, Novell, Debian and others. Instead of fixed releases, Gentoo is promoting its vision of a live, continuously updating distribution. In practice, that effort revolves around its weekly minimal images, which are then supplemented with customized installed packages. Continuous OS releases are an interesting idea. One of the annoying aspects of OSes is that every few years you have to go through a big upgrade cycle, as a vendor stops support for version X and forces you to version X+2. For my organization these upgrades haven’t been a problem because you can …

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links for 2008-09-29

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Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? | InfoWorld | Analysis | 2008-09-24 | By Paul Krill Frankly it's getting hard to find a workload that Linux can't handle. ChangeThis :: Presenting to Small Audiences: Turn Off the Projector! "There is ample research evidence that projecting lots of text and speaking at the same time is so distracting to your audience that it is less effective than projecting your slides and asking your audience to read them while you remain silent, or speaking with no slides at all!" How Much Does Lying On MySpace Cost? $320,000 Hmm, turns out the OK Tax Commission knows how to use the Internet. DOH. Service Untitled ยป Offering to follow up with (additional) answers. – …

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The Matrix Creeping Towards Us

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I had a very Matrix-esque moment with my iPhone yesterday: “Hey, do you know what time sunrise is tomorrow?” “Not yet.” Still quite a ways from being able to download the know-how for flying a helicopter, though. Luckily Apple does let copious numbers of weather apps into the App Store, despite duplicating existing functionality.

links for 2008-09-27

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High Performance Enabled SSH/SCP [PSC] "SCP and the underlying SSH2 protocol implementation in OpenSSH is network performance limited by statically defined internal flow control buffers. These buffers often end up acting as a bottleneck for network throughput of SCP, especially on long and high bandwith network links."

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