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.

links for 2008-03-08

by

CeBIT 2008: Ciprico offers Raidcore High-End-RAID for Everyone – For only $49 | Tom’s Hardware A buddy of mine works on this stuff, and it’s awesome to see Ciprico getting good press. Congratulations guys! best of craigslist : to the guy doing my wife Heh. Royal Pingdom » The “top secret” room where 260 Internet Service Providers connect “If this facility went down, most of California and parts of the rest of the world would not be able to connect to the internet.” Yeah, most of teh intertubes doesn’t have much redundancy, because it costs money and ISPs are cheap.

Inadvertent LOLcats

by

I was using the Identifont web site and one of identification questions struck me as decidedly LOLcat: I has serifs or bars too!

links for 2008-03-05

by

Packers.com, the Official Web site of the Green Bay Packers. “Brett Favre has informed us of his intention to retire from the Green Bay Packers and the NFL.” Good for him, walk away while you can. Thanks for all the years of great play!

links for 2008-03-04

by

virtualization.info: Tech: How to enable passhrough authentication in VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 This is pretty cool.

links for 2008-03-03

by

The kind of emails I get | Eric Cheng’s Journal Yeah, I love rude “tell me stuff” email messages I get, too. And, by love I mean hate. Ditto for those same types of blog comments. “I noticed you blogged about disks. Tell me how to recover my data from my dead disk.” Grrrr. A Card-Carrying Civil Libertarian – New York Times Obama a civil libertarian? There is no way I’m not voting for this guy. Why I’m Fed Up with TED They might be a bunch of snobs, but if I was invited I’d go in a second. I’m glad they put some of the video up on the web. Typical Mac User Podcast » Time Capsules’ Server-Grade Hard …

Read More

links for 2008-02-29

by

Amazon.com: Playmobil Security Check Point The comments here are amazing. “My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger’s shoes cannot be removed. Then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger’s scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up.” SportingNews.com – Packers: Favre retirement page a mistake “The people who handle our website set up mock pages. It’s as simple as that. A third party was preparing something in case (Favre’s retirement) happened. They’ve done that the last five years.” Your web site folks are idiots and should have a test site. Googirl | San Francisco online I didn’t know Marissa Mayer is from Wisconsin. Yet another person I’d love to talk …

Read More

Misspellings Are Bad

by

I just read “Engage Your Readers With Typos and Misquotes” over at Copyblogger. Given that the post is the single worst post I’ve ever seen on Copyblogger I was going to refuse to be engaged, but then I thought that I don’t want people to be encouraged to be idiots. Hence this post, combating stupid advice. 1. Typos are errors. Errors are things you didn’t want to happen. I argue that if you intend to misspell something it cannot be a typo, for it is not an error. 2. Misspellings make you look stupid. Taking a few seconds to check your work with a spell checker helps you avoid looking stupid. 3. The attention you will get from misspellings and …

Read More

Get To Know Your Systems, But Not Too Well

by

To me, it seems that a system administrator’s knowledge of a system, application, or technology follows a curve similar to the 80/20 rule. 80% of what you need to know comes in the first 20% of the time you spend on the problem: “So what?” you ask. Well, I think about this when I see folks spend hundreds of hours to design the perfect system. Or when they absolutely must tune a server to its peak performance. Or lay out LUNs on storage arrays. The list of examples is enormous, but I only ever have one question: was all that time best spent on that one system, that one task, that one goal? The inverse of this is when I …

Read More

links for 2008-02-28

by

Senator Clinton’s “Million Little Pieces” moment. – Here Comes Everybody Clinton is trying to steal the Democratic nomination by convincing delegates to vote for her against the public will, and against the automatic delegate provisions. Is this supposed to make us think of her as something other than a dirty politician? garfield minus garfield “Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?” OMFG, awesome, I hate that cat anyhow.

Don't Store Things You Care About In /tmp

by

“Hey guys,” he says, stepping into our office. “I have a problem.” “What is it?” we reply. “Now that I’m back from vacation I find all the data for a project I was doing is missing.” “Restore it from backup.” “It doesn’t seem to have been backed up, either.” “Where was the data?” “/tmp.” “Ever heard of tmpwatch?” It’s now obvious why it’s missing and why it didn’t get backed up. “No…” Moral of the story: /tmp is for temporary stuff, not your big project’s data.

+ More Posts +