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 2008-01-21

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CarCapsule the Ultimate Car Cover “The CarCapsule is a clear vinyl bubble that seals your car, truck, boat, or motorcycle completely away from the elements. Dust, dirt, condensation, even insects and prying fingers are locked out.” Strange. cybercrime.gov “Internet-related crime, like any other crime, should be reported to appropriate law enforcement investigative authorities at the local, state, federal, or international levels, depending on the scope of the crime.” Internet Safety: Cyber911 Emergency – Cyberstalking and Harassment Startup Developers: Telling Schmucks from Superstars (5 min quiz) “If you answered ‘Yes’ to all of the above, you are probably a startup development superstar.” I need to write one of these for system administrators. VMotion in 3.5 DRS enabled cluster causes guest CPU …

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links for 2008-01-20

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Banana Florist – Better Service, Lower Prices, and a Banana. These folks invented the Broquet, a way to send a man flowers. Current selections include a bowl of cacti, or a pot of venus flytraps. If I were in Atlanta I might order one for myself.

What To Wear During Wisconsin Winters

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I met a fellow yesterday that looked completely out of place in the 10° F weather. Turns out he was from Los Angeles and was absolutely new to the whole snow & cold thing. Having just arrived he didn’t have a proper winter coat. He noted that there isn’t really any advice for what to get for winter clothing unless you are an athlete or planning on spending a lot of time outside. “Sounds like a blog post to me,” I commented. Here’s are my suggestions if you’re new to the upper Midwest winters and don’t want to freeze upon your arrival here. This is also very guy-centric, given my point of view. A good winter coat which goes down …

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Update Manager, VMotion, and Me

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This morning I posted about some problems I was having with VMotion after starting to use Update Manager to scan and remediate my ESX 3.5 hosts. I owe people an update after publishing a potentially alarmist article like that. 🙂 I’d just like to report that after removing and readding the VMotion virtual switch everything, including scanning and remediation, works fine. I haven’t seen the problem since. In fact, Update Manager is pretty cool, fire & forget patching. I am still hopeful that VMware can diagnose the problem, but at least there appears to be a workaround if you have the same problem as me. It may not even turn out to be an Update Manager thing, maybe something else …

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Update Manager & Loss Of VMotion Capabilities

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When I discovered that there were new ESX 3.5.0 updates this morning I was happy, as I could finally try using Update Manager to patch my hosts. After I scanned my ESX 3.5.0 hosts for updates, though, my environment’s ability to VMotion stopped. Migrations would time out, and the vmkernel log showed network errors when the migration started: Connect to <192.168.10.15>:8000 failed: I/O error I could ping my VMotion interfaces via vmkping, though. The fix, for a lack of something more graceful, appears to be to destroy the virtual switch used for VMotion and recreate it. This is documented in SR#1101801771 and the tech I worked with is going to escalate it to be made into a KB article (and …

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links for 2008-01-18

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KARE 11 TV – Police release bomb videotape; suspect’s family says incident ‘blown out of proportion’ Brian Childs is not a terrorist. He didn’t harm anybody, he didn’t harm any property. He detonated an explosive, not a bomb. If the People’s Republic of Minnesota wants to put him in jail they need to ban Mythbusters, too. Fear-mongering Communists. Joyeur: Strongspace and Bingodisk: Update Real hatefest going on in the comments, regarding the ZFS problems at Joyent. Hacking Polish Trams This reminds me a lot of the strobe light system in use for emergency vehicles. violet blue – Steve Jobs calls blogger and podcaster Violet Blue rude Potentially NSFW if you click, she’s a sex blogger. At a conference I basically …

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Cisco NERV

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Recently I had a chance to see the Cisco Network Emergency Response Vehicle. It is a truck put together by Cisco as a technology demonstration, but also is used by teams within Cisco to assist emergency response efforts. These guys and this truck have been to New Orleans after Katrina, to New York City for 9/11, and recently to San Diego to assist with the wildfires. My tour guide was Bob Browning, the senior manager of the Tactical Operations Support team. That guy really knows his stuff when it comes to handling disaster situations, with practical experience gained from every situation he’s worked in. From a technology standpoint the truck is pretty cool. Built on an International Truck DuraStar 4300 …

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links for 2008-01-17

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The Joyent Community / Further Strongspace and BingoDisk Update “We’ve been bit by a massive ZFS bug.” Yeah, ZFS isn’t as stable as it seems. Ouch. Good luck Joyent. AOH :: AOH Sounds :: SIT-VC.WAV The Vacant Circuit error tone. Add this to your answering machine and you will fool bots, at least for a little while (until they spend the extra two seconds to figure out you were just screwing with them). Japanese whalers take custody of Sea Shepherd crew | Eric Cheng’s Journal “Instead, three Japanese whalers attempted to throw Potts overboard while travelling at approximately 17 knots, then finally settled on tying him to the ship.” I’d do the same if someone boarded my ship. It’s called …

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$20 for an iPod update?!? Like Ohmygod!

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“Dude, that’s lame that it costs $20 to get the new iPod Touch apps.” “Yeah, totally. They’re just copying apps from the iPhone, like that costs $20 each.” “You know,” I chime in. “I don’t like subsidizing your iPod with my iPhone.” “Huh?” “I pay a bunch of money a month for my iPhone, some of which gets back to Apple and pays for improvements. You pay nothing except the purchase price for your iPod Touch. Is it fair to me if you get copies of software I paid to develop?” “Your iPhone only exists because of all the iPods sold before it.” “Yeah, but most new iPod features were released along with new hardware. You couldn’t play videos on …

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