Cloud Archives

Shameless Self Promotion – Active System & OpenStack Edition

May 10, 2013 by Bob Plankers

I’m continuing to write over at The Virtualization Practice, and it’s been fun so far. Those of you following what I’ve been doing have probably seen me take a real turn towards converged infrastructures in the last six months, both for TVP and for TechTarget. Not that I don’t think the public cloud is attractive to many, but hardware vendors are doing some real interesting things that are keeping on-site IT fairly attractive. Plus the local telco lobbies and myopic/dirty legislators seem to be keeping inexpensive bandwidth, the Achilles heel of the cloud, to a minimum in most non-urban places. Anyhow, we’ve got: A Look at the Dell Active System 800 wherein I’m trying to figure out if Dell’s converged anything …

SELinux & Return On Time Invested

May 7, 2013 by Bob Plankers

I’m a little behind on my reading, but I wanted to address Major Hayden’s blog posts about disabling Security-Enhanced Linux, or SELinux, which brings mandatory access control to Linux. Mandatory access control is a completely different permission model for UNIX-based hosts, and Mr. Hayden feels it is underutilized: After many discussions with fellow Linux users, I’ve come to realize that most seem to disable SELinux rather than understand why it’s denying access. In an effort to turn the tide, I’ve created a new site as a public service to SELinux cowards everywhere: stopdisablingselinux.com. It’s pretty rare for me to argue against a security technology but in my eyes SELinux isn’t a solution to very many problems. I know how SELinux works, what …

Shameless Self Promotion – VCE, TVP, and 787 Edition

April 12, 2013 by Bob Plankers

My first-ever post as a member of The Virtualization Practice is up. I’m a little slow, I know: Digesting The Latest VCE News: Vblock 100 and Vblock 200 wherein I criticize Vblocks for not having very much RAM, and attract the attention of Kendrick Coleman in the comments (which is cool, Kenny is great). I’m very much looking forward to writing more stuff with Edward & Bernd & Steve & crew. I’ve also been writing for TechTarget’s “Modern Infrastructure” magazine as a regular columnist, which has been pretty darn different & fun. April’s work is: The Benefits of Insourcing Data Center Operations wherein I wonder if moving to the cloud is like the offshoring & outsourcing manufacturing companies in the …

OpenStack, Lock-In, Support Costs, and Open Source Free Lunches

January 31, 2013 by Bob Plankers

Since I posted my missive about OpenStack not being our savior from lock-in or support costs I’ve had a number of comments and discussions about it. The discussions generally start from the point of view that I’m wrong. Let’s take a look at a few of these. Also, it might seem like I’m picking on Randy Bias and Greg Ferro a little here but Randy seems like a good guy, and Greg is a friend, so there’s no animosity. Just point/counterpoint. TL;DR version: OpenStack is cool but isn’t some magic tech that prints money, open source doesn’t mean you don’t have to pay someone to support a service built on it, customized open source and custom solutions using open source don’t …

Cloud Isn't Really About Technology

January 15, 2013 by Bob Plankers

If there was one concept about “the cloud” I wish more people understood it is that the cloud is not a technological revolution. Sure, a faster and more pervasive Internet helps, but we’ve had vendor-hosted applications for years. Virtualization has created better opportunities for server infrastructure, lowering barriers to entry and helping us squeeze blood out of things we once treated as rocks. But, despite being almost continuously conflated with “cloud,” it isn’t the cloud. Not by itself. The cloud is about people and about process. It’s about organizations deciding to talk to each other internally, to collaborate and solve problems together. Cloud is about opening the door to automation and security and scalability, asking computers to do what they …

OpenStack Isn’t Our Savior from Lock-In or Support Costs

December 29, 2012 by Bob Plankers

There is an attitude among some now that OpenStack is, or at least will be, our savior from vendor lock-in in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud space, as well as something that will help corporations save a lot of money in licensing fees from VMware. While I see the potential I think there’s more to the picture. To start with, OpenStack will lock you in just the same as a commercial offering, even though it’ll be “open.” If you want to move from OpenStack to another solution to another there will still be a bunch of hassle to move virtual machines and applications, just the same as if you wanted to move between VMware and Hyper-V, or to a public cloud offering. OpenStack …

How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Automate

June 25, 2012 by Bob Plankers

My wife and I had a daughter, almost two months ago now. Going into it, I completely underestimated how single-tasking kids are. My grand plans of blogging (at all) and writing and doing all sorts of big cool things while I had time off were suborned by a lot of seemingly simple tasks. Feed her. Feed myself. Change her diaper. Rock her. Clean up the house. Try to get some sleep. As a result, the only big thing I’ve been able to do is read a couple of novels, a few pages at a time. Well, that and keep a kid and a wife healthy and relatively happy. I see a lot of parallels between my last two months and …

Backing Myself Up Using CrashPlan, TrueCrypt, and Hamachi

April 3, 2012 by Bob Plankers

For a long while now I’ve been looking for a decent & automatic way to protect the data on the multitude of computers I support in my personal life. I’ve been using a hodgepodge of external disks and synchronization software to keep a spare copy of my data, photos, and media, but with the impending birth of my daughter I figure I’m not going to have time or the willingness to mess around with kludgy solutions anymore. I also don’t want to run the risk of data loss when it comes to things my relatives would judge me on. “What do you mean you don’t have the video of her <doing some activity>?” I stumbled upon CrashPlan a few weeks …

Rackspace's Terrible Maintenance Plan

March 20, 2012 by Bob Plankers

Update, 3/21/12: please read the comments, too — we got a good response from one of Rackspace’s folks. I got a note today from Rackspace, where I have two virtual servers in their Rackspace Cloud. It was opened in the form of a support ticket, waiting for input from me, but with the text of the support ticket labeled as if I entered it, which was weird. As part of our ongoing effort to provide you with the best Cloud Servers service possible, we routinely perform maintenance and upgrades of our underlying systems. The majority of these are performed non-disruptively, however maintenances sometimes arise that impact Cloud Servers instances. At this time, a Cloud Servers host update is required that …

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