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.

What's a Good Workflow/Request Tool?

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Dear readers, You folks are full of good ideas, so here’s my latest question. I’m rethinking workflow for my group of 20+ admins, so the customers we interact with have a nice single point of contact and the admins have a good idea of what’s in the queue for work. I’m looking for tools to help us. How we’ve lived this long without something to help us is a real wonder. The tool needs to be able to accept email and web-based requests. It would be nice if it could have some logic in it so that the customer could help direct who gets the request by choosing the OS and (perceived) priority. It should be fairly lightweight overall. I …

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Accountability and Signatures

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One of my favorite tricks lately to make people understand how serious I am about things is to get them to sign a form. You want to run your server without backups? I don’t recommend it at all, but I’ll do whatever you say. Just sign this form acknowledging that you know the risks, you know you could lose all your data at any time for any reason (including things I might do), and regardless of cause you don’t hold me accountable for anything. You want to let your employee take a machine out of the building without following our procedures for wiping the drives? We have a policy against that and it’s a terrible idea, but no big deal. …

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Building NRPE on Solaris 10 with SSL Support

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Solaris 10 ships OpenSSL as part of the OS distribution, in /usr/sfw. It appears that they have removed some of the ciphers in order to be compliant with export restrictions. Unfortunately, that throws a wrench in things when you want your Solaris Nagios server to use the Nagios Remote Plugin Executor (NRPE) to securely talk to other hosts. In my case, my Nagios server is a Sun T2000 and I’m referring to NRPE version 2.12. Newer versions may fix these issues. First, I built NRPE 2.12 with: ./configure –with-ssl-lib=/usr/sfw/lib –with-ssl-inc=/usr/sfw/include –with-ssl=/usr/sfw –prefix=/opt/whatever Once that was done the error I was getting on the target Linux host (in /var/log/messages) was the ultra-informative: Error: Could not complete SSL handshake. 5 I checked …

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Whose Fault Is It?

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Whose fault is it? It doesn’t matter. Get the problem fixed. You can figure out who is at fault when you’re discussing how to prevent the problem in the future.

Dear WWDC Keynote

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Dear WWDC keynote people, Just shut up and tell me about the new iPhone hardware. I don’t care if the AP has an app to show me news. Boooorrring — I have that already. It’s called Mobile Safari. And MLB.com, why don’t you make your main web site less of a pile of crap, instead of making an app for the iPhone? And why isn’t it free? You are still losing to totallyscored.com, as far as I can tell. Also, anyone want to start a pool on when the first marriage ends because of Loopt? …Bob

Jargon

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Overheard at the grocery store yesterday: “Oh my God, Doug, there you are. We’ve been trying to find you. They need the M-O-D at the service counter, there’s a lady there going absolutely nuts.” I’d been listening to them page the M-O-D for ten minutes, and I’d been watching this guy help bag groceries for five. “What’s the M-O-D?” he asked. “Manager on Duty,” said in the snottiest voice she’d talk to her boss in. “That’s you.” I bet if they’d paged a MANAGER he would have responded. Which makes me think about all the jargon I use on a daily basis. Given that people won’t generally ask for clarification when they don’t understand something because they don’t want to …

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links for 2008-06-06

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Billionaire Broadcom (BCOM) Founder Indicted For Drugging Customers and “Warehousing” Ecstasy, Meth, and Cocaine. And Stock-Option Backdating – Silicon Alley Insider What a tool.

Second Coming of Jesus?

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How do I know that it’s time for Apple to give birth to the 3G iPhone? Because my officemate has started to refer to it as “the second coming of Jesus.” I wrote the new phone a haiku: Dear 3G iPhone Wish you were here already So people shut it. Not that I’m tired of hearing about it. Nope. I hear it will have infinite battery life. And it will read your mind. And it will have 1 TB of storage. And it will find your keys when you lose them. And it will feed your cats. I can has 3G iPhone. Arggh.

links for 2008-06-04

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Microsoft Extends XP Deadline for Low-Cost PCs – NYTimes.com Yet another nail in Vista’s coffin. Inventor of Pringles chip can, Fredric Baur, to be buried in one LOL. Schneier on Security: Filming in DC’s Union Station “As the Amtrak spokesperson is explaining that there is no policy against photography, a guard comes up and tries to stop them from filming, saying it is against the rules.” Beautiful. McCain: I’d Spy on Americans Secretly, Too | Threat Level from Wired.com “If elected president, Senator John McCain would reserve the right to run his own warrantless wiretapping program against Americans…” Anybody who votes for this guy doesn’t deserve freedom, which will be good since there won’t be much left.

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