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.

lostcreations "Add Port Groups" Plugin Rocks

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I just used the lostcreations “Add Port Groups” plugin to add 15 VLANs to six new ESX servers. Holy crap, that’s slick. Adding port groups is the thing I dread the most about new ESX hosts since it’s typo-prone and generally annoying. This is the sort of thing I want to see built into management consoles like VirtualCenter: cluster configuration options. Beyond adding port groups, it’s rescanning HBAs, or configuring NTP, firewalls, licensing, DNS, advanced settings, everything. If I can do it to one machine I want to be able to do it to ten of them simultaneously. It’d even be nice if I could add a host and tell it to pick up the configuration from the rest of …

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links for 2008-03-25

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Rick Rolled to child porn = you’re a pedophile, says FBI This is total BS. I’m not arguing for child porn or anything, I’m just arguing for common sense. We have too many cops in the U.S. and they’re all trained to see everybody as a criminal. jwz – new lampshadey robot overlords will smother you in your sleep. This is art I like — a lamp that knits its own lampshade. Reminds me of the AI in Gibson’s “Count Zero” that built Cornell-like boxes. John Sequeira’s Weblog “I saw some married people in the cafe the other day and something seemed wrong.” If you read Paul Graham’s essay “You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss” this is a great …

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When Version Numbers Are Our Biggest Problems…

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I just read this post over at SearchServerVirtualization.com[0]. All I have to say is that I will rejoice when version numbering is the biggest issue facing us in the virtualization community. I was going to say more[1] but isn’t there some rule that if you can’t say something nice don’t say anything at all? ———— [0] I didn’t want to link to it, but I couldn’t see a way around it. [1] Those that know me should feel free to speculate. 🙂

links for 2008-03-24

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YouTube – Danny Boy If you haven’t seen this it’s worth the two minutes, IMHO. It’s the Swedish Chef, Animal, and Beaker singing “Danny Boy.” LOL. TidBITS Networking: AirPort Update Adds Archive for Time Capsule, External Mounted Drives for AirPort Extreme Yay! You can now mirror the Airport disks over USB. Well, archive, not mirror, per se. But still good. Simplicity Good cartoon that pretty much sums up why people hate most apps and web sites. Inspectd.com – Training Tools for Traders This is addicting — they show you a stock chart and you guess if it goes up or down. inessential.com: ‘Page-in-a-page design’ More discussion about the size of web pages, as it pertains to blogs. rc3.org — The …

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Memory Overcommitment

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There’s a lot of discussion going on lately about memory overcommitment in virtual environments. All I have to say is that memory overcommitment is great when you have to treat a VM like you’re buying a physical server. When I buy a physical server (or twenty) I often look for the “sweet spots” in pricing. I might know that the app that will run on a server will need 4 GB of RAM, but for $100 more I can get 8 GB and not have to worry about being short on RAM when something changes two years later. Worth it? Yes, and my customers think so, too, because the cost of me adding RAM later is much more than $100. …

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Hey Apple, MS Does It Right

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Most of you have probably seen the controversy over Apple automatically pushing Safari 3.1 to unsuspecting Apple Software Update users. You have to opt out of it, which is a real shady way to get something on people’s computers. Next thing we know Apple will be claiming a huge boost in market share. I don’t want Safari on my desktop, because it just isn’t as nice as Firefox. I resent having to actively defend myself from Apple’s software, which I intentionally didn’t install. Microsoft has added Silverlight to Windows Update, but in contrast, it’s an optional update. Microsoft 1, Apple 0. Apple, it’s called “opt-in.” Check it out sometime.

links for 2008-03-23

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Night Sky Friendly Outdoor Lighting Specialists » Italian Waste
 in Utah? Italian nuclear waste? No thanks, we have enough already. Gotta love the profiteers at EnergySolutions. furbo.org · Vote for virtualization Mac OS virtualization would be pretty cool. Top 5 reasons why “The customer is Always Right” is wrong Good stuff here. Bad customers piss me off, too, and as someone who tries hard to be a good customer I enjoy seeing a company deal with the bad customers appropriately.

links for 2008-03-20

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How a German wartime flying ace discovered he shot down his hero | the Mail on Sunday “If I had known it was Saint-Exupery, I would never have shot him down. I loved his books.” War sucks.

iPhone Enterprise Beta

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I don’t know about all you developer types out there that got the iPhone rejection letters but I got my iPhone Enterprise Beta invite today. w00t! I’d say “In yo face developers!” except it isn’t the same. Plus I’m a nice guy and would never say something like that.[0] It should be interesting. I normally dislike NDAs, and now I’m under one, but then many of the details are already public. Means I have to stop letting people play with my phone, which might be a good thing. Not for Apple, though — most people who play with my phone for more than five minutes end up buying one. I’d say I’d keep you posted, but, well, um, yeah. Frickin’ …

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links for 2008-03-19

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Peep Show LOL, I love “I Can Has Cheezburger?” (totally safe for work BTW). Turnip that stirred panic was message to attorney | The Journal Gazette A. This is ridiculous. B. Screw them for naming their bomb robot ‘Bob.’ Bobs are not your slaves, people. Find a new name to beat up on. Royal Pingdom » Apache dominates the top 100 websites, IIS still far behind Are we still so bored that we care about the top web servers? My advice: quit being a lemming and run the web server that is sufficiently reliable and feature-rich for your needs. TPM Election Central | Obama’s Speech Also An Indictment Of Our Political Discourse The fact that Obama just gave a speech …

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