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.

Not Virtualizing Everything, or Know Your Dependencies

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I’ve commented before on how I generally object to plans to virtualize absolutely everything in a data center. It looks like Eric Siebert agrees with me in his article on recovering servers after power failures: Virtual servers can be even more problematic. If you have all your DNS servers virtualized which cannot be started because of network or shared storage issues, you can run into problems starting other servers and services that rely on DNS. Consider having at least one physical DNS server or having one or two DNS servers running on local storage instead of shared storage. Running services from VMs might be a great idea, especially if you’re using techniques like anycast DNS. It’s also pretty useful for …

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links for 2008-07-31

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Dear Diary: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen | Good Morning Silicon Valley This is pretty cool — they’re going to post Orwell’s diary entries day by day exactly 70 years after he wrote them.

Should vs. Going To

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“Going to” means you know. ‘Should’ means you know nothing. “Those servers should come up cleanly after a reboot.” “That storage array upgrade should not cause an outage.” “The customer should be fine with this.” Right. If you can’t say “going to” then you need to do more work. Update: if you think I’m wrong don’t take it personally, join the comments where the beatdown is already happening. Please, no nails in the 2x4s, though. 🙂

VMworld 2008

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As of 10:50 AM CDT I have a flight to Las Vegas for VMworld 2008. This means I’m completely registered and ready to go, waiting only for the course reservations to open up and the date to arrive. This should be fun, especially since I’ve never been to Vegas before. I’m not really a gambler, so I’ll have to find other ways of amusing myself. Anybody have any suggestions for things I shouldn’t miss? And what else are people up to during the week?

links for 2008-07-28

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The Fishbowl: A Public Service for the FSF Charles Miller being a lot nicer than I would have been in addressing the FSF vs. Apple debate. Good points & links, too. Angry man shoots lawn mower for not starting – Yahoo! News “A woman who lives at Walendowski’s house reported the incident. She said he was intoxicated.” From the state that just figured out it is illegal to have sex with a corpse because the corpse didn’t give consent. Apparently we have nothing better to do.

links for 2008-07-24

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Ext2 On Singularity UW-Madison’s CS department representing itself with a graduate project porting ext2 to MS Singularity. Cool. Apple’s Year Ahead: Slashing Mac Prices To Boost Market Share? (AAPL) I would buy a Mac if it were price-competitive with PC hardware.

links for 2008-07-23

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Howto: Check if a LUN is being locked by the host? » Yellow Bricks This is very useful if you are running a number of ESX servers, clustered.

First Decent Shot With My D80

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I just bought a Nikon D80. I’ve wanted a digital SLR for ages, and with the help of my good friend Jon I finally sucked it up and bought one. Now I just have to figure out how to use it. Which means that, for a while, I’m going to take a photo of everything I see. Lesson here: autofocus doesn’t work very well on fires.

links for 2008-07-22

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Cranberry juice creates energy barrier that keeps bacteria away from cells | Science Blog I like it when science proves folk medicine observations. In this case, cranberry juice vs. UTIs. Schneier on Security: Cost/Benefit Analysis of Airline Security I like looking at the ROI of things, including the ROI for all this extra security.

Some Trivia

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I can’t remember what I had for dinner last night but I can remember this stuff. Can you? I’ll post the answers in the comments later today if you folks don’t beat me to it. Which you will, I’m sure. 1. The only optional field in /etc/passwd, its name is an acronym for what? 2. A double-sided, double-density 5.25″ floppy disk holds how much data? 3. What is the name of the computing “law” which states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system? 4. The acronym “SCSI” is pronounced “scuzzy” but it was originally intended to be pronounced in what way? 5. How many pins did the …

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