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 2008-09-03

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Lawson CEO thinks SaaS is going nowhere, from Brian Madden on BrianMadden.com If you've ever tried to run Lawson software A) I'm sorry and B) you'll realize that they can't do it as SaaS because it's so bloated and horrible. Ugh. Giveaway of the Day – free licensed software daily. RoboTask 3.1 – Automate any series of tasks on your computer! RoboTask is pretty cool and free today. Windows only, but there's a lot of Windows admins out there. 🙂 UW alum Maitri Venkat-Ramani comments on the passage of Hurricane Gustav – Isthmus | The Daily Page Go Maitri! And screw Gustav! Cool Tool: Pilot's Flashlight Another device I should get. Has both red and white LEDs. rc3.org — Sarah …

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links for 2008-09-02

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Solaris 10 with ZFS as NFS target for VMware ESX : Thomas Weyell´s Blog Might have to give this a shot. I'm looking for cheap storage options lately.

Germany and Austria Rock

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“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” – Robert Louis Stevenson Bamberg, Regensburg, Salzburg, Berchtesgaden, and finally Munich were wonderful. I’m very grateful to the hundreds of folks that helped all six of us out, translated my terrible, broken German and hand waving, and generally made everything enjoyable. In 12 days I took 2718 photos with my Nikon D80 and my little Panasonic FX-01. I drank 43.5 liters of excellent beer in numerous beer gardens, usually a Helles or Pils, a MaĂź at a time. I ate like a king, probably several pigs worth of pork, a bunch of roasted chickens a half at a time, roasted fish, pretzels, and those amazing huge radishes, …

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Vacation!

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It’s going to be even slower than usual around here for the next couple of weeks.[0] I’m out of here for Munich and surrounding cities! I look forward to adventuring in the land of my ancestors, while drinking their beer. I thought about scheduling some posts for when I’m gone, but nothing I want to post is completely free of controversy. 🙂 Since I like the discussion that’s been happening here and want to be part of it I’m just going to let it be a little quiet for a while. ————– [0] It’s been slow recently because, as much as I love vacation, I hate going on vacation. I get incredibly busy ramping up to leave. Ugh.

links for 2008-08-17

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Dell introduces ten new laptops – The INQUIRER "On is a flash-based barebones Linux install that gets you up and running, on the Net, and with much of what you need to run the computer in instantly. " That's pretty cool, have your whole OS in flash.

links for 2008-08-15

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Dell Latitude Laptops – E6400 Holy crap, Dell has a high capacity battery and is advertising 19 hours of life on their new Latitude E6400s. Might have to find a way to get a new laptop a few years before the normal replacement cycle.

VI 3.5 Update 2 Hardware Status

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I had seen this in the release notes for Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 Update 2: Display of System Health Information – More system health information is displayed in the VI Client for both ESX Server 3.5 and VMware ESX Server 3i. but only today noticed that my Dell PowerEdge 1950s now have health information listed (and that I lost a drive this morning in one of my test machines… DOH). My PowerEdge 2950s do not, though. Hopefully they’ll make the cut next time. I like the trend of integrating all the elements of server management back into the VirtualCenter server. Now if I could just have Update Manager update the BIOS, RAID, management controller, and HBA firmware when it updates ESX …

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Why This VMware Time Bomb Issue is a Big Deal

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Why is this VMware time bomb issue such a big deal? You can’t fix it without breaking some of your environment, in that you have to set the physical hosts’ time back to get it to work. Then the VMs pick up the time change. You can’t uncheck the “Synchronize guest time with host” option from VirtualCenter while a VM is running, basically condemning you to going to each host to uncheck that option, or letting the time get unsynchronized briefly. [kb,kb2].vmware.com had been mostly unavailable all morning, preventing people from actually getting to see the articles on the problem. In my environment, Windows VMs with Tuesday/Wednesday maintenance windows to pick up Microsoft Patch Tuesday updates had problems where the …

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links for 2008-08-13 [delicious.com]

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Last In – First Out: Patch Now – What Does it Mean? "A failed system or application has known, documented consequences. It is not a game of probability or chance. An unpatched security vulnerability is a game of chance where in most cases the odds against you are not known. " Amen.

Bad Day For People Who Actually Patch

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Let’s just say that if you’re running VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 Update 2 you probably can’t power your VMs on anymore. DOH. Unfortunately, that’s me. I updated everything on Sunday after testing for two weeks, and I can’t even imagine how I’d test for this. The whole idea of patching sucks. There are always bugs, and you always trade one set of bugs for another when you upgrade. Of course, you use testing to try to figure out if there are more bugs or less, but things like this always show up. I’ve been meaning to write a longer post about patching, especially in the wake of this DNS debacle, but Michael Janke’s post “Patch Now – What Does It …

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