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.

Underpromise, Overdeliver

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“What are you? Mr. Scott?” “Excuse me?” I reply. Did he just compare me to Scotty? “You scheduled your last few changes for way more time than you needed.” “Yeah, I guess so.” So what? I’m busy here. “Didn’t you ever watch Star Trek, where Scotty would tell Kirk that a fix would take a day and he’d do it in an hour?” “Yeah, underpromise and overdeliver…” “Wouldn’t it just be easier to get a 30 minute outage instead of always asking for two hours?” “Sure, but if things go wrong I’ll need that whole two hours to fix them again. If you want to compare me to Mr. Scott that’s fine, but the difference is that Mr. Scott was …

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links for 2008-02-26

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Hostages? Guns? No, just theater troupe’s rehearsal As Bruce Schneier would put it, continued wars on the unexpected. Problem is, this was my theater company, and as someone who has mistakenly been held at gunpoint by the cops I don’t find this funny at all.

Book Smart vs. Street Smart

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Book Smart: Knowing that separate development, test, and production environments should be as identical as possible. Street Smart: Realizing that depending on the purpose & goals of the development and test environments, “identical” may only refer to the OS, and you might only need physical hardware for production, if even that. Book Smart: A vendor says a software upgrade on a storage array will take two hours. Street Smart: The vendor is only talking about successful, optimal upgrades, and you schedule additional time for handling whatever goes wrong. Book Smart: Operating system patches don’t change functionality. Street Smart: The people that put OS updates together are human and make mistakes, like overwriting configuration files, messing permissions up, or omitting a …

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links for 2008-02-25

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Howls of protest as America declares open season on grey wolves | Environment | The Observer I’m all for this, provided good management of the pack and incredibly stiff fines for poaching, to make ranchers think twice about shooting them on sight. Reintroducing a species that was missing is tricky, and having management options is a good thing. Researchers Find Way to Steal Encrypted Data – New York Times The RAM-freezing attack is fairly impractical for most, but it needs to be fixed, and the community at large seems to have really started thinking about how, which is cool. Nader to run, but this time he may be run-of-the-mill — chicagotribune.com I can hear Republican cheers! When will this guy …

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links for 2008-02-24

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Eugenia’s Rants and Thoughts » Blog Archive » Create Blu-Ray video in plain DVDs for free “The funny thing is that 80% of both these methods are identical for both HD architectures…” Comment of the Day: “Google Docs is Chock Full of Fail” – ReadWriteWeb “Open a Google doc. Paste an image. That’s right, you can’t.” Props to the commenter for laying smack down on that post. MS Office, in my opinion, is hands-down the best office suite out there. It’s just that cheapskates don’t like to pay for anything. Cognitive Daily: The anatomy of an illusion — and what it tells us about the visual system “It appears that the holes are changing in an opposite pattern — when …

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Ambiguity Is Your Enemy

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The sign above has a problem. You might need to have seen the gas station where I took the photo, but the error is that the emergency stop button isn’t in the middle of the store. It’s outside, mounted near the center of the front of the building. When you’re writing directions for others to follow you have to make them clear, concise, and unambiguous. It often helps to have others proofread them to make sure the outcome will be exactly what you want every time. If the outcome isn’t the same they need to be revised. This is especially important for emergency instructions. If the reader is going to have five seconds to read and comprehend your directions will …

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VDI, 1974-style

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The virtualization community, with all their fancy and generally serious talk of things like live migrations, virtual desktops, and thin provisioning, has completely forgotten their emulation roots. “Emulators? Why would we need emulators anymore?” you ask. To play Oregon Trail, of course! You’ll need to snag an Apple II emulator (I’m using AppleWin) and the Oregon Trail disk images. You may want to turn the sound off if you don’t want folks to know what you’re up to. 🙂 I just scored 7824, which might actually be my personal best.[0] Beat that! —————– [0] Took me what, 20-some odd years to finally get good at this thing?

elevator=noop

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I’ve also written about elevator=noop as part of my series on Linux performance tuning. The Linux kernel has various ways of optimizing disk I/O. One method it uses to help speed I/O reorders requests to the disk so that when the head moves across the disk it can service those requests in an orderly, sequential manner, rather than going back and forth a lot. This is known as an “elevator,” since it’s basically what an elevator does, too. An elevator doesn’t drop people off at floor 11, then 2, then 5, then 3. Instead, it drops people off in order: 2, 3, 5, 11. Same with I/O to disks. This approach is great, but the fatal flaw is that it …

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links for 2008-02-21

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THE MINIMALIST; Let the Oven Do All the Work – New York Times “IF you buy a big pork shoulder and take your time, as you should, the classic Puerto Rican pork roast called pernil can take you nearly all day. The last time I roasted a large one it was in the oven for seven hours.” Me too! (tags: recipes) Venture Capital Wear » You Know What They Say Funny shirts, I just wish they didn’t charge $100 for them. I’d go for the one that says “Your Mom is not a valid test market.” Lessig ’08 – Change Congress. Oh, hell yes. Politicians that might give a damn about issues the rest of us care about? NO WAY! …

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Where To Go On A Honeymoon

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I love asking you folks stuff, mainly because you’re full of good answers. You’ve helped me find bars in San Francisco, portable KVM dongles, and so on. Now I ask for another favor: help my friend Jon find a place to go on a honeymoon (please, get him out of here!) 🙂 I think I’ve narrowed it down to a few choices: * Hamanasi, in Belize * Tiamo, on South Andros Island in the Bahamas * Manchebo, on Aruba I’m still undecided. I need more information, maybe I need more options. Manchebo seems nice, but mainstream, but easiest. Hamanasi has Mayan ruins and other adventures that don’t exist elsewhere, but getting there will likely be a 19-hour multi-hop adventure. Tiamo …

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