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.

Just Because You Deleted A File Doesn't Mean It's Gone

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I ran into a case the other day where someone was reporting an operating system bug. A filesystem was 98% full, but an examination of that filesystem showed that it should only be 25% full. It isn’t a bug. In order to understand why it isn’t, we need to know something about how files are stored, and then how they are deleted. A good place to start is the basic structure behind a UNIX-style filesystem, the inode. According to Wikipedia: an inode is a data structure on a traditional Unix-style file system such as UFS. An inode stores basic information about a regular file, directory, or other file system object… Each file has an inode and is identified by an …

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links for 2008-05-22

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American Airlines adds fees for all checked bags – Travel News – Orbitz Travel Blog These people suck. Now I won’t be able to bring anything on board because everybody is going to bring their huge freaking bags. Idiots. Just raise airfares.

UNIX Practical Jokes

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Robert Crawford has a post over at Server Specs about practical jokes for mainframe programmers. That got me thinking about all the stuff that I’ve been witness to: The ever-classic snapshot of my desktop as my desktop background. Yawn. Tape over the laser emitter on my mouse. Double yawn. Setting a user’s shell to a copy of Eliza. Setting a user’s shell to an emulator of another OS. Setting a user’s home directory to a floppy disk. Setting the shell prompt creatively, or very long, or very short. Setting the shell prompt with bell/^G characters in it. I currently don’t remember how this was done, probably echoing something into a .profile. Setting the resource limits for a user to very …

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links for 2008-05-21

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Using a Lot of Disk Space to Scale | High Scalability Sometimes you need to think about things “irrationally” in order to get a solution to a problem.

Java SE for Business, Software Longevity

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I noticed Sun’s “Java SE for Business” today. You pay money and you get 15 years of support for each release family, plus some advanced tools for updating desktops. Dealing with old versions of the JDK/JRE now has another option, instead of the two classics: paying staff to upgrade everything, or doing nothing and risking security & support problems. 15 years boggles my mind, though. I often joke that technology years are worse than dog years, as far as obsolescence. 15 years for a technology is 105 years in some other industries. As I think about it, though, this is pretty cool. Especially since technologies like virtualization remove reasons to upgrade. I have always used hardware replacement cycles to push …

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One Part at a Time

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Once upon a time in my parents’ garage I learned that the best way to change a distributor cap[0] is to take a spark plug wire off the old one and immediately plug it into the right socket on the new cap. That way you don’t get wires mixed up and cause problems. As it turns out, that method works great for computers, too. I had to swap system boards in one of my servers the other day, and setting them up next to each other was great. Take a part off the old board and immediately place it on the new one, which avoids damage and confusion. Since I’ve been digging around in the guts of machines for years …

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links for 2008-05-20

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blog.richardmcdougall.com » FileBench has a twin… I am going to start benchmarking my environments proactively. This looks promising. The Old New Thing : The Big Red Switch really was big and red “We were all in awe that he got to push the big red button for a legitimate reason. An opportunity like that comes only once in a lifetime.” I’ve had my lifetime opportunity to push an EPO button… somewhat anticlimactic it was. vmprofessional – Comparison of VI3 Backup Tools Good comparison for folks just getting into consolidated backups. Cool Tool: Mistake-Proofing “In reality, mistake-proofing is more like a structured form of common sense.” Sounds like something I should read. (tags: books) 12 Signs That The Recession Has Hit …

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Stop Signs vs. Stop Lights

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Sitting in traffic today I realized that teams of people are either like stop lights or four-way stop signs. Stop lights are nice because everybody knows the rules, and they aren’t flexible. Everybody knows what everybody else should be doing, which is either sitting there idling, burning expensive fuel, or driving forward full-blast. Big queues build up sometimes behind a stop light, blocking other streets. When the stop lights aren’t timed perfectly (and they rarely are) you get these gobs of cars hurrying, then waiting, then hurrying again. One thing is true, though: that clueless guy talking on his cell phone doesn’t mess things up too much. Even they can figure out when to go. Stop signs are different, especially …

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Happy 150th, Minnesota

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Minnesota, the land of my youth, is 150 years old today, having been admitted to the Union as the 32nd state on May 11, 1858. Happy birthday!

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