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.

VC 2.5 & ESX 3.5 Update 1

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What, did everybody go to sleep?[0] You should be up patching! ESX 3.5 Update 1 and VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 1 are out! Looks like ESX 3i gets HA capabilities, and everything gets support for 10G Ethernet, support for Microsoft Clustering Services, and a general update of backup agent, guest OS, and management agent support. ESX is 5429 builds newer and VirtualCenter is 20590 builds newer, so I’m guessing at least a couple bugfixes made it in, too. Awesome! —————————- [0] If you are sleeping, good for you. Me, I’m a late night guy, though probably not much longer after the last two glasses of that Washington Cabernet I opened last night. Mmm.

links for 2008-04-10

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Measuring the Color of Light – James Duncan Davidson Got this from Daring Fireball — good explanation of color temperature.

I Still Use Zmodem

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On average I create a new Zmodem user every month. Yes, that Zmodem. The protocol you used on BBSes in the 1990s. The thing is that my SSH client, SecureCRT, supports Zmodem. So when I want to retrieve a file I type “sz” followed by a filename and it shows up on my desktop. How easy is that? A number of people I support need easy ways to move a file from their desktop to various Linux hosts. They always ask for Samba, but running Samba to copy a couple of files every once in a while seems like overkill. Zmodem comes to the rescue again. No sftp clients to explain to people, no worries about security since it’s over …

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links for 2008-04-09

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Google App Engine Launched! – snarfed.org Every Gmail account is now an OpenID account, too. Hot damn, this is cool. AMD lays out new multi-corpse roadmap : Good Morning Silicon Valley “The late discovery of a design flaw in the quad-core Barcelona chip derailed its planned launch almost a year ago…” This is the sort of BS that keeps me away from AMD. I have *never* had a good experience with them on the desktop, server, you name it. The Vulcan Project | Home Vulcan maps CO2 emissions. Interesting visualizations… if only anybody did anything about it. HuddleChat: Did Google Just Rip Off 37Signals? – ReadWriteWeb Well, I was pretty sure that the Don’t Be Evil thing was always total …

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Goodbye Kitty

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Hello Kitty? I don’t think so! Thanks to my friend Bob my refrigerator door will never be the same: A friend (who had several awesome cats) used to have a sign I really liked, too: “Cat, the other white meat.”

Unity

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I just read Scott Lowe’s post about VMware Workstation 6.5 having Unity, the seamless windowing technology. This is going to be a killer feature for a lot of people, especially Linux folks. Many enterprise software packages require Internet Explorer, or have a Windows-based client, or have a client that requires a specific (read: ancient) version of Windows, IE, or both. It sucks being locked into a certain OS for everything just because of one application. A way around that is very welcome, and I’ve been envious of the Macintosh folks for some time now because of it. I guess I’m going to have to fire up a copy of the beta now, given my piqued interest. I see a desktop …

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Upgraded My Mail Client… To Alpine

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A few months ago it was revealed here that I used Pine as my email client. I was mocked by all, especially since the problem I was complaining about ultimately turned out to be a problem with Pine itself. I would like to report that I have seen the light: I have upgraded to Alpine. It looks just as sexy in green-on-black terminals as Pine did. Props to the UW for releasing it under an open source license, as well as retrofitting it with the autoconf system. To preempt this round of mocking I say that as a sysadmin I spend a lot of time using SSH, and Alpine fits nicely into that. I use VanDyke’s SecureCRT for all my …

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links for 2008-04-06

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Adapx Product Store – Capturx for MS Office OneNote 2007 Kit A pen which records notes written with it. Might have to try this one. Fossilized human feces rewrite ancient history – SiliconValley.com My friend Katie was telling me about this yesterday — this is big. Humans were in North America 1200 years earlier than previously thought.

links for 2008-04-05

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Writing without typos is totally outdated ยป Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk Interesting rant. Personally, typos bother me a lot. Having them in your document distracts me from your point. Enough of them and I stop reading. Many other people are like me. Do you want to run the risk of me being the guy you submit your resume to?

QLogic scli For VMware ESX 3.5

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With the arrival of a few more physical hosts for my VMware clusters I’ve been on a quest to automate the patching and maintenance of my servers’ firmware. I noticed a few days ago that QLogic has a version of their standalone SANsurfer HBA tool, scli, for VMware ESX 3.5. This is nice because it means I can script both firmware updates and HBA parameter settings, guaranteeing that they are identical among all my hosts and making it easy to update when necessary. For example, my storage vendor recommends certain parameters for my QLE2462 HBAs, which I can script as: /opt/QLogic_Corporation/SANsurferCLI/scli -n 0 FR 2048 RD 5 HL 0 HD 125 CO 1 EF 0 ET 256 ML 256 FL …

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