The Lone Sysadmin

Free Upgrade to 25 GB for Microsoft SkyDrive Users

Bob Plankers — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 05:40:26 +0000

I don’t know all the details, so it may not apply to everybody, but if you’re a SkyDrive user (or just have an account) you might be eligible for a free upgrade from 7 GB to 25 GB (I haven’t heard of anybody not being eligible, though).

Log in to https://skydrive.live.com/
Click “Manage Storage” on the bottom of the left navigation column.
Click the magic button to upgrade your SkyDrive Free plan from 7 to 25 GB.

It is my understanding that this is a limited-time offer, so get on it. It takes about 20 seconds if you know your password. :)

No related posts.

Did you like this article? Please give me a +1 back at the source: Free Upgrade to 25 GB for Microsoft SkyDrive Users

This post was written by Bob Plankers for The Lone Sysadmin - Virtualization, System Administration, and Technology.. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License and copyrighted © 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

Phrases We Can All Stop Using

Bob Plankers — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 09:36:27 +0000

I don’t like the idea of new year’s resolutions much, but I do like setting goals for myself. One of my goals this year has been to stop saying certain pointless phrases, like “to be honest.” In the process I’ve found myself becoming very aware of the other dumb things people say, too. Here are my top five.

“To be honest.”

You’ve been dishonest with me in the past and am only starting to be honest now? Is that what you wanted to have me think? The Urban Dictionary advises that it “can be used in any sentence as long as you agree with yourself” and that it is “the crutch of a idiot who uses it to append declarative sentences in order to sound more authoritative.”

“Awesomesauce.”

As far as I’m concerned the only thing that will ever be described by me in this way is whatever the goop is that Verti Marte in New Orleans puts on their “All That Jazz” sandwich. Unless you’re describing a delicious sauce you sound like an idiot. I also remind you that you may not have awesome sauce, secret sauce, or other foods in the data center.

“I could care less.”

Did you really mean “you couldn’t care less?” Please care more about the accuracy of the words you speak. You’re probably the type of person who sends me summer meeting invites in CST and writes shell scripts that don’t specify the full path to filesystem objects which, when run from cron, crap all over the wrong filesystem and get me paged at 3 AM.

“My bad.”

I think the Urban Dictionary sums it up nicely here:

“I did something bad, and I recognize that I did something bad, but there is nothing that can be done for it now, and there is technically no reason to apologize for that error, so let’s just assume that I won’t do it again, get over it, and move on with our lives.”

Ruder than apologizing, but with the same meaning: a flippant apology.

Try “oh crap, I’m really sorry” instead, and sound like you mean it. Also, you’re fired for waking me up at 3 AM and using “my bad” as the apology. Not that I’m upset or anything, it’s a business decision. You’ll eventually say something like that to a customer I wanted to keep.

“Uhm.”

I have, um, bailed out on one live presentation, two conference calls, and one webinar so far this year because the, um, presenter, um, cannot stop talking without saying “um.”

The occasional “uhm” is natural, especially when pondering questions from people, but when it gets to be more than once per paragraph of material it is very distracting. It is a sign that the presenter doesn’t know the material. I eventually can only hear the “uhms” and I leave because my time is valuable. Get some notes, or don’t be in a position to talk about things you don’t know much about.

It takes practice to learn to speak and pause without saying anything. It also takes practice to unlearn the habit of saying other stupid things. In most cases we use these phrases because we don’t know what else to say. Try expanding your vocabulary a little by finding a word or two that can be substituted. Or pinch yourself hard every time you catch yourself saying these things. The more you work on it the more you’ll find that people want to listen to you.

Did you like this article? Please give me a +1 back at the source: Phrases We Can All Stop Using

Thoughts on the VMware Code Leak

Bob Plankers — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 20:33:58 +0000

VMware has confirmed that there was a theft of the ESX source code around April 8th, 2012. I have some non-linear thoughts on this whole thing.

First, the code is from 2003 & 2004, and for ESX. ESX was the big, bloated hypervisor that shipped with whole Linux installs, and the purported 300 MB of source code sounds like they might have code for a lot of the Linux utilities that shipped with. So what? The newer version is ESXi which forgoes the Linux install in favor of being very small. That said, I’m going to assume they have the source code for the base hypervisor itself. I’m also going to assume that some of the hypervisor code from then has made it forward into current products, which would make everything vulnerable if there is a bug found.

I can only assume that VMware is doing internal code reviews and using automated security testing tools to find at least the basic problems in their software, like null pointer dereferencing, buffer overflows, SQL injections, etc. Certainly if they are not doing this now would be a good time to start to get ahead of this problem.

I’m also going to assume that if a problem is found that it won’t be made public by the hackers. There’s big money in the sorts of things you can do with a vulnerability in software like this. As such, it’s an arms race now, and whoever finds the problems first wins.

There are all sorts of problems a hacker could cause for an ESX host if a vulnerability is found, but many of them should also be prevented by your “defense in depth.” Defense in depth is the idea of using multiple security controls in layers so that when one fails, like in this case, another will be able to cover it. If a remotely exploitable vulnerability exists in ESX a properly configured firewall should be able to prevent exposure or compromise.

The holy grail, though, is a VM escape, where a VM can be made to interact with the hypervisor outside of the standard APIs. If you can find one of these you can compromise anything you have a VM running on, and potentially access your neighbor VMs, which is bad news for cloud providers and multi-tenant setups. These are very rare, though, and very high-profile when they’re found. Frankly, it’s much more productive & possible to attack infrastructure in other ways.

Beyond security, though, there are also industrial espionage implications, in that you get to see the way the virtualization industry leader is doing proprietary things like vMotion, etc. Hopefully their competitors are already well past 2003 & 2004 levels of code, but who knows.

The biggest and most persistent problem is all the enterprises that just don’t update their software. All OSes & software need updates, and your failure to acknowledge and prepare for that fact is not the vendor’s fault, despite an event like this. A proper configuration for vSphere clusters should allow vMotion, which then allows you to do rolling updates of the underlying infrastructure without affecting the workloads once a patch is made available. Which in turn means you should be doing these updates.

So, in short, this is a serious situation, but it’s no different than using an open source hypervisor where everybody can see the code. If you’ve been using good security & system design practices it isn’t something to freak out about, but I’d be prepared to apply some security-related releases in the near future. And if you aren’t there now I’d be thinking about getting to the latest levels of the major version you’re on pretty soon, because, if nothing else, it’s just a good habit to have.

Did you like this article? Please give me a +1 back at the source: Thoughts on the VMware Code Leak

My New Intro Slide For Cloud Presentations

Bob Plankers — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:00:26 +0000

I think I’m going to start using this slide in presentations on cloud computing. I’ll just cross out “Afghanistan Stability” and write “IT.”

I particularly like the “insurgents” and “narcotics” sections. Seems about right.

Did you like this article? Please give me a +1 back at the source: My New Intro Slide For Cloud Presentations

Upcoming Virtualization & Sysadmin Events in Wisconsin

Bob Plankers — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 04:36:43 +0000

There are a number of virtualization & sysadmin events coming up in Wisconsin in the next two months. Here are the ones that I know of, if you know of more please comment and I’ll add them.

Madison’s first ever #vBeers is Thursday, April 26, 2012 at the UW-Madison Memorial Union. I’m putting it together, if you’re in the area please stop by. It’s supposed to be in the upper 50° F range outside so we’ll probably be inside in the Rathskeller. No signup needed. Please come and keep me company.
Stephen Foskett is setting up Milwaukee’s first #vBeers for May 1, 2012, at the Miller Time Pub, 7 to 10 PM. You can sign up via Eventbrite. So far it’s Stephen, me, and Rod Gabriel of WI VMUG fame. Should be fun. There’s also a Chicago vBeers on April 30th if you’re closer to that.
Stephen and Truth in IT are doing a seminar on Building Virtual Infrastructure on May 2, 2012 in Milwaukee. Stephen is a great presenter, very knowledgable, and the day is in the style of the immensely popular “Backup Central Live!” series that W. Curtis Preston does. The nice thing is that the sponsored parts aren’t overbearing, they’re only 30 minutes each, only about 30% of the total, and all excellent smaller companies doing innovative work. It’s all day, free for end-users, and you can sign up via their form. There are other cities on the tour, too!
The Wisconsin VMUG meets on Tuesday, May 15, 2012 at Promega Corporation in Fitchburg, WI. My friend Chris Miller will be there from F5, talking about scaling View, and my friend Keith Norbie from Nexus Information Systems will be there talking about vCloud Director. Should be a lot of fun. Register at the VMUG web site.
Tech on Tap will be covering SharePoint for their June 9th gathering at the Stone Cellar Brew Pub in Appleton, WI. I was part of their first event on virtualization and databases and it’s nice to have a sponsored beer or four while you’re watching a talk. The problem, of course, is remembering that I live 100 miles away…
The “Yet Another Perl Conference::North America” conference will be in Madison on June 13 through the 15th. If you use Perl and are within 300 miles of Madison you might consider attending. It’s damn cheap, highly relevant, and the sessions are by leaders in the Perl community (or, put another way, the people that invented the stuff you’re coding in, on, and to). Plus, you can stay in the dorms! :)

Be there or be square. :) And let me know what else is going on in Wisconsin, particularly the northern parts.

Did you like this article? Please give me a +1 back at the source: Upcoming Virtualization & Sysadmin Events in Wisconsin

How To Increase Your "% Virtualized" Rates

Bob Plankers — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 19:50:37 +0000

The #VirtualizeDell tweet chat today got me thinking about what stops most virtualization implementations around 50-75%. These are just some thoughts on ways to kick things loose. @LethaW commented “[that some of them are] sneaky and underhanded, and I love it.” I took that as encouragement. Needless to say, your mileage may vary.

Problem: Physical hardware is required or requested by vendors.
Solutions:

Actually check to make sure that a vendor does require physical hardware. For example, Oracle doesn’t require it for many things, but there’s this misconception out there that they do, and I hear it from DBAs a lot. Consultants will also tell you a wide variety of things, too. Check the facts. Get it in writing.
Don’t do business with vendors that require physical hardware. Get your purchasing people to adjust their RFP process so that virtual infrastructure support is a requirement.
Agree, then give them virtual servers anyhow and don’t tell them. Uninstall the VMware Tools if they notice (but put them back on later).*

Problem: App people want physical hardware because “it’s faster” or “it’s just easier.”
Solutions:

Point out that it’ll be three months before they can have physical hardware (considering the ordering process, shipping, racking, installation, OS configuration, etc.) or three days for a VM.
Make your chargeback scheme reflective of the additional costs associated with a physical server. If you’re doing it right a physical box should cost the requestor a lot more to operate than a VM.
Test. Put their stuff in a virtual machine first, then if they can show that they aren’t meeting stated & quantifiable (with numbers) performance goals, and there’s nothing that can be done in the virtual environment to improve performance, then they can have physical hardware. Usually they don’t have quantifiable performance goals so you win.
Agree, then give them virtual servers anyhow and don’t tell them. Refer to it as a “server” without the physical/virtual label.*

Problem: Physical hardware is “needed” because a vendor’s licensing is way more expensive for a virtual implementation.
Solutions:

Call the vendor and educate them on how your brand of virtual machines work. I usually have to tell them that a VMware VM doesn’t have access to more than the configured number of vCPUs, so a 2 CPU license on a 2 vCPU VM would be the same as a 2 CPU physical host. Blow their minds by telling them that you can change the number of CPUs in a physical server, too, either by disabling cores in the BIOS or adding additional socketed CPUs after the fact, so there’s no difference between a VM and a physical host in that regard. Use the term “hard partition.”
Don’t do business with technology vendors who know nothing about technology.
Don’t tell them it’s a virtual machine. Refer to it as a “server” without the physical/virtual label. Ask for a 1/2/4 CPU license for a physical machine, remind them that you can disable cores if they tell you there’s no such thing as a 1 CPU server anymore, and don’t tell them otherwise.*

Problem: Physical hardware is needed because someone wants to use a custom piece of hardware, like a line card or a licensing dongle.
Solutions:

Use DirectPath to assign the hardware directly to a VM.
Use a networked USB hub for dongles, cameras, serial-to-USB adapters, etc.
See if there’s another alternative that doesn’t require custom hardware. For example, do you really need a line card for your VoIP implementation, or can you just get a SIP trunk from someone?
A dongle? Really? 1991 called and wants its licensing scheme back so it can party with MAC-based licenses in FlexLM’s basement.
Custom hardware & DirectPath breaks things like vMotion/HA/etc. Consider just giving them a small physical host so they don’t mess up your whole support & infrastructure patching model. Change your % virtualized numbers to reflect “virtualize-able” apps, so you still have a 100% virtualization rate.*

Feel free to add more stuff in the comments. I always like conversations like this. :)

* Underhanded & sneaky. I take no responsibility for what happens if you use these ideas, but I suggest them wholeheartedly if the right way isn’t working.

Did you like this article? Please give me a +1 back at the source: How To Increase Your "% Virtualized" Rates

Technical Debt

Bob Plankers — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 20:04:29 +0000

This week I’m paying off technical debt. If you’re not familiar with the term it’s from the world of software developers, and Martin Fowler describes it better than I would:

Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this problem. In this metaphor, doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a financial debt. Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by refactoring the quick and dirty design into the better design. Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future.

System administrators and operations folks know this phenomenon very well, since we’re often called to make “temporary” fixes to things. As we all know, nothing is ever temporary, because if it works we move on. And it isn’t like we stopped to consider a proper design for a temporary fix, so we end up with something that helps us greatly in the short term but really stinks in the long term. Steve McConnell, whose “Code Complete” book was the first to introduce this term to me, has a great post where he also outlines the problems with technical debt:

One of the important implications of technical debt is that it must be serviced, i.e., once you incur a debt there will be interest charges. If the debt grows large enough, eventually the company will spend more on servicing its debt than it invests in increasing the value of its other assets.

Soon you find yourself unable to move forward because you’re spending all your time servicing your debt. Sometimes it gets so bad that patching & updating stops, changes are frozen, all because something might tear loose the duct tape, gum, and string holding the infrastructure together. As Jeff Atwood puts it, “accumulated technical debt becomes a major disincentive to work on a project.” He’s totally right. As a result, over time, we end up with systems that are seriously decrepit because nobody wants to touch them. Eventually something comes along to knock the whole thing over.

That’s what I’m doing this week: knocking things over on my own terms. I’ve been keeping a list of all the things I hate about my environment. It’s mainly a series of little things, with just a few big things. I’m writing new monitoring scripts for my VMware environment so that we don’t get paged when we reboot a host that was in maintenance mode, and that we do get paged when DRS isn’t in fully automated mode for more than a certain time. I’m de-kludging the VMware Tools installs on Linux because VMware fixed most of the problems we’ve had with them. I’m going through all the hosts and fixing the firmware levels, because they’re a mess, and converting the last of my oddball hosts to our standard configurations.

This work is at the short-term expense of other projects, but it’ll be worth it because I won’t have to dedicate time, energy, brain cells, and documentation to all the exceptions. I’ll be able to focus on moving forward, not just running frantically to catch up. And it’s very easy to explain what I’m doing. As Steve McConnell puts it, the metaphor has an “incredibly rich ability to explain a critical technical concept to non-technical project stakeholders.” Turns out that most managers understand debt.

What technical debt do you have in your environment? Do you keep a list of things that would be nice if they were fixed? Why not? How much happier would you and your coworkers be if you could block off a few days of time to fix those things?

Did you like this article? Please give me a +1 back at the source: Technical Debt

Links for April 3rd, 2012

delicious — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 23:51:20 +0000

(Editor’s note: I’m going to fire up the Delicious autoposter again. Those of you that are long-time subscribers (thank you!) may remember a time when I did this as a type of short-take post. Twitter and the death of del.icio.us ended it for a couple of years, but enough things are fixed up now that I think I’ll bring it back. Plus, I’m hoping that it’ll encourage me to keep up more with my blog reading. Thanks y’all. – Bob)

Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young – chicagotribune.com

This is the original text that Baz Luhrmann put into his spoken word song “Everybody’s Free (to Wear Sunscreen)”. My favorite quote from it is: “Don’t worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.” Sounds like advice I’d give a junior sysadmin, though people should not conflate or confuse planning with worrying.
Protecting the vCenter Database with SQL Log Shipping « Wahl Network

Been meaning to set something like this up, for some low-cost DR for vCenter. Now I don’t have to actually figure out how. Thanks Chris!
Moxie Marlinspike >> Stories >> Hypothermia

This came through @beaker the other day as a retweet. Scary stuff. “Sailors who are really good, know everything about boats, and have thousands of hours at sea are continually and unshakably terrified while on the ocean. Not because they don’t know what they’re doing, but because they know the ocean so well as to fear it deeply, regardless of how conditions may initially appear. Novices, on the other hand, usually proceed with an affect which is considerably more blithe. As Brian Toss once said, there are only three types of sea-faring sailors — dead, novices, and pessimists. I knew this, but not well enough.”
“Go the Fuck Home” – my Ignite talk – Pam The Webivore

I’ve said in a few of my presentations that you, as a sysadmin or virtualization admin, are a business asset. This is a great, if somewhat NSFW, presentation about that. Good points & short. Go home, get a life, then return to work refreshed and ready to work.
Business versus Basement: the Half-Assing Mediocrity Parade – Server Fault Blog

This deserves more than a mention, and it’s sort of a ramble, but I will say in passing that he touches on a lot of stuff, like technical debt, excuses, and the idea that things are temporary fixes. Nothing is ever a temporary fix.

Did you like this article? Please give me a +1 back at the source: Links for April 3rd, 2012

Backing Myself Up Using CrashPlan, TrueCrypt, and Hamachi

Bob Plankers — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 22:07:08 +0000

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 ?”

I stumbled upon CrashPlan a few weeks ago and instantly took a liking to it. The client is free, works on Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and Solaris, and can back up between computers, to drives, and to friends for free, with full encryption support. The paid side of the service is the cloud backup and some advanced features in the client, like “backup sets.” Backup sets are really just multiple source/target/schedule combinations, that’s all, but it’s handy if you want to back your photos up locally but send your documents up to the cloud.

I really like that they have an unlimited data family plan, up to 10 computers, which is pretty inexpensive (like $6 a month) if you decide to pony up for 4 years of service. The downside to that is that it’s one account that can see all the data backed up into it, so if you think that this would be a good way to back up your brother-in-law’s computer you need to make sure you trust that he’s not going to go trolling through all your data. You can set passwords on the local client, though, and passwords & keys on the uploaded data, which trade ease-of-use for more privacy.

The cloud backup part is a little pokey, though. It’s been getting 500 Kbps from a Linux host I have attached to a decent network connection, which means it’s going to take 19 days or so to back up the 100 GB of data I have there. That’s fine if there’s not a lot of change, but might be a problem if I have big files changing regularly. CrashPlan has a seed option, too, where you can pay for a drive to be sent to you with either a restore archive already on it, or for you to create an archive and mail it back. If you’re active duty U.S. military the service is free, just send them an email from your .mil address. Restores seem to be pretty speedy, which is good. Backing up is really about restoring, after all.

One of the other things I’ve always lusted after in my own personal backup solution is heavy-duty encryption. Cloud backups are neat and all but I don’t trust any providers to not turn over my data to the government or other people. The way I’m thinking about running the cloud backup part of Crashplan is where they escrow the encryption keys, and I just provide a password, which means that my keys are in a subpoena-able position. Not that I’m doing anything illegal, but that’s not the point. With the recent U.S. Appeals Court ruling that memorized encryption keys are protected by the U.S. Constitution’s fifth amendment I see the door opened to protecting myself a little more thoroughly, if there isn’t a cloud provider in the middle to wuss out and turn all my stuff over. So here’s what I’ve done.

1. I set up an older low-profile Dell desktop PC to run Windows 7, and added a USB 3.0 card to it. I bought two 3 TB external USB drives and connected them. Using the disk management functions I created a simple volume on each, did not format it, and did not mount it. With Windows 7 you can’t make anything attached via the USB controller a dynamic disk, so if you dream of RAID sets or mirrors you need to do this with internal drives.

2. I installed LogMeIn’s Hamachi software, which is an excellent & free mesh network VPN solution. I’ve been using this to enable Remote Desktop to all my PCs for years, but you can run other things across it, too. I installed this on all the hosts I intend to back up to the target PC, and on the PC itself. You can only have 5 hosts in a mesh layout with the free version, but for me that’s enough. If you need more it’s $20 a year for 32 hosts in a network.

3. I used TrueCrypt to encrypt both external drives. You have two options when doing this, to create a normally-encrypted volume, or a hidden volume. A hidden volume is a volume within a volume, which can be used to pretend that you’ve decrypted the volume for someone, when really there’s another hidden “compartment” of sorts. There is some trickiness to hidden volumes, and I figure if someone comes looking for my data they’ll be able to figure out what I’ve done, so I stuck with normal encrypted volumes. I mounted one drive as Z: and the other one as O:, labeling them “Local Repository” and “Offline Repository” respectively. I created a folder on Z: called “CrashPlan Remote Backups.”

On reboot these volumes won’t auto-mount, because they require the volume passphrase, but with Hamachi & Remote Desktop enabled I can get in remotely to remount them.

I did not write my encryption passphrase down, since the legal protections don’t extend to that. This presents a bit of a problem, if I were to forget it or die or something. Ideally I’ll find a phrase that my wife can remember, too, without writing it down.

4. I set CrashPlan on the PC to call itself “BACKUP_TARGET” and set the amount of allowed CPU usage to 90% at all times (away & present).

In the Inbound backup settings I set the Listen Bind Address to the Hamachi private IP for the host, and changed the default backup archive location to Z:\CrashPlan Remote Backups.

In the Backup settings tab, I configured the Advanced settings for automatic compression (rather than “On” — I’m assuming the client is smart and in automatic mode won’t blindly compress already-compressed file formats).

On the Security settings tab I checked “Require account password to access…” and set the Archive Encryption to “448-bit encryption + password.” Note that when you do this you will never be able to go back down from that, and you won’t be able to reset it if it’s lost. This option means that CrashPlan will escrow the encryption key for you and you gain access to the key via your password. The higher-security option is where you maintain your own encryption key per computer, which is great for compartmentalization and can keep PCs from being able to see each other’s backup data, but is more of an administrative headache. I thought the middle setting was a good tradeoff.

On the Network settings tab I told it to not bind to anything but the Hamachi network adapter. I want all backup traffic going across the VPN. This way, anybody not on my private network cannot communicate with the backup server, either. I also removed all WAN & LAN throughput limits.

5. I installed CrashPlan on all the PCs, set them to have a client password, and disabled inbound backups. I chose the folders I want to back up on each host (usually just the C:\Users directory). On laptops I set it to stop when the battery level reaches 50% (rather than the default 20%, figuring that’ll give us better battery life), and removed the network sending (throughput) limits for the WAN.

In the Backup settings tab, I configured the Advanced settings for automatic compression.

I then went to the Destinations->Computers tab, selected BACKUP_TARGET, and clicked the Start Backup button.

6. When I got a good backup on all the hosts and things were idle I stopped the CrashPlan service on the target PC and synchronized my Z: drive with my O: drive, using Super Flexible File Synchronizer. I then unmounted that and took it to a separate PC where I tested remounting it with TrueCrypt and attaching the archive to the CrashPlan client to make sure I could restore from it. You can do that if you assume the identity of the backup PC when you first install Crashplan. Of course, when I’d assumed the identity on the new PC and wanted to put it back on the backup PC I had to delete the C:\ProgramData\Crashplan\.identity file and restart the client, so it would offer to assume the identity again.

I took the offsite disk to a safe deposit box, along with the power adapter and USB cable.

7. In the medium term I’ll probably purchase another 3 TB external drive and use it to swap out the one in the safe deposit box, reducing the number of trips I need to make. I also intend to measure the amount of changed data every week to see if a monthly remote swapout is okay, or if I should plan to do it more frequently. I am also maintaining a folder with a copy of TrueCrypt and Crashplan software so it’s part of the offline copy, just in case. I may also place a copy of a KeePass archive in there, so my passwords to things are accessible to my wife in case something happens to me.

I also ended up signing up for the 4 year family unlimited plan for CrashPlan Central backups, mainly so I can maintain a backup for my in-laws that way, and if something happens to me my brother knows the password to the accounts. This also gives me some of the advanced features like backup failure notification and backup sets, which I can see myself using in the future.

So far I’ve been pretty happy. Initial backups take forever, even locally, but it’s been pretty solid since. And that’s exactly what I wanted: something I can set & forget. Minus the offsite copy, of course.

Additional links:

StorageMojo’s Robin Harris has a good post, “How to hide files from the law,” up on ZDNet that goes through the recent U.S. Appeals Court ruling that divulging an encryption key stored in your own memory is protected under the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment. The Fifth Amendment protects a U.S. citizen from incriminating themselves with their own testimony.
CrashPlan is obviously at www.crashplan.com.
TrueCrypt is very cool. Love them, support them.
Hamachi is very cool, though I know they stole someone’s 5.0.0.0/8 to implement their service.
I’ve been using Super Flexible File Synchronizer for years. You can certainly use other solutions, from the built-in copy functions to rsync.

Did you like this article? Please give me a +1 back at the source: Backing Myself Up Using CrashPlan, TrueCrypt, and Hamachi

Digital IRS W-9 Forms

Bob Plankers — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 21:21:00 +0000

The more consulting work I do the more I end up scanning and FAXing forms back & forth. The United States’ Internal Revenue Service has done us a big favor and created PDF versions of commonly used forms like the W-9. However, there’s no provision to sign and date them electronically. Here’s what I’ve been doing to avoid having to FAX or scan printed copies:

1. Grab the form you need from the IRS’ “Forms and Publications” index.

2. Sign a blank white piece of paper with a black pen or Sharpie. Take a photo of your signature with your smartphone so you can only see the white background and get it to your PC (mail it to yourself or something).

3. Open the W-9 form in Acrobat Reader and fill it out. Save it with the text in it.

4. Install LibreOffice if you don’t have it. Open the saved PDF in LibreOffice Draw.

5. “Insert > Picture > From file…” and select the signature photo. Resize it into the “Sign here” area of the W-9.

6. “Insert > Fields > Date (fixed)” and move the date it adds to the Date box in the “Sign here” section of the W-9. Resize or change the font size if you want.

7. Print it back to a PDF using CutePDF Writer (which is free and you can get it from the inimitable ninite.com).

The nice thing about this process is that if you need to sign more stuff you can just keep doing it with the signature photo you already have. The downside is that this process will sometimes do goofy things with fonts, but you know, who cares? I’m not the biggest LibreOffice fan but the ability to open PDF documents is nice, and it disregards the Adobe security mechanisms (the IRS has the forms set to prevent editing).

This process also doesn’t use any of the free online PDF editors, which I distrust enough to not want to upload a copy of my signature into.

Did you like this article? Please give me a +1 back at the source: Digital IRS W-9 Forms

Wisconsin VMUG in Green Bay – April 5, 2012

Bob Plankers — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 16:23:12 +0000

Just a reminder that there’s a Wisconsin VMUG gathering in Green Bay, WI this coming Thursday, April 5, 2012. Rod Gabriel (@ThatFridgeGuy) says that 80 people are registered so far, so the turnout will be excellent.

Scott Herold of VKernel/Quest will be there to talk about performance & capacity planning (ostensibly with the VKernel tools). Mike Chudzik from Pure Storage will be there to talk about smashing performance bottlenecks, ostensibly by using their storage devices which are all-flash storage arrays and pretty sweet. I’ve seen both of these vendors via Tech Field Day, and they have some interesting things going on. Last in my list (may not be last in the presentation order), Jeremy Gruenke of Johnsonville Sausage will be giving a presentation as well, which seems perfect for the sausage making that is IT most of the time. It’s too bad we can’t treat annoying applications like bratwurst: boil them in beer & onions and then stick them on the grill.

You can register on www.vmug.com for the event.

Did you like this article? Please give me a +1 back at the source: Wisconsin VMUG in Green Bay – April 5, 2012

Madison, WI vBeers – April 26th, 2012

Bob Plankers — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 18:51:09 +0000

I greatly enjoyed the three or four Twin Cities vBeers I attended last summer, and one of the things on my list for 2012 was to start a regular vBeers in my hometown of Madison, WI.

So I’m going to.

If you are in the area on April 26th, 2012 please stop by and join us on the UW-Madison Memorial Union Terrace (Rathskeller if it’s raining/snowing), sometime after 4 PM. If you know someone who can do something about the weather, we’d like some sun & warmth!

As I said in the invite (linked above) RSVP isn’t necessary, though if I know you’re coming we’ll save you a seat. Or flee the area… :)

Did you like this article? Please give me a +1 back at the source: Madison, WI vBeers – April 26th, 2012

vSphere 5 Update 1 and vCenter Agent Upgrades

Bob Plankers — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 15:51:04 +0000

We applied vCenter 5 Update 1 on Sunday in my environment, which is earlier than we often do because there’s some bugs we needed fixed (namely the issues with Fault Domain Manager/HA and SSL certificate replacement). We’ve been running Update 1 in our test environment since its release, and it looked solid. But as any experienced IT person will tell you, production isn’t test. Ever.

After the upgrade none of the hosts were connected to vCenter, and there was a task for each cluster entitled “Upgrade vCenter agents on cluster hosts” that did not proceed, did not terminate, and was uncancellable. The hosts themselves had a warning message on the summary tab indicating that a manual upgrade of the agent was necessary. I could manually reconnect the hosts, and it would do its thing with the agents, but if vCenter was restarted the tasks would reappear, with new start times, and everything would be disconnected again.

When I upgraded vSphere from 4.1 U2 to 5.0 I was given a choice to manually upgrade the agents, or do it automatically. At the time the manual upgrade seemed a better choice, since I was having upgrade issues. That choice seems to have flipped the vCenter Server Setting AgentUpgrade.autoUpgradeAgents to false:

Setting that back to true, reconnecting the hosts, and restarting vCenter fixed the problem.

I can’t take credit for this fix myself, as it was my VMware BCS guy Jonathan Proskey that thought of it, working off notes from an already open case/bug filed with VMware Engineering. But it’ll be a while until a KB article appears, and it’s extremely new, so with his permission I thought I’d post it for anybody who encounters the same issue. At least this way Google will return something for the phrase “Upgrade vCenter agents on cluster hosts.” :) If anybody needs it, it’s SR 12157263203.

Did you like this article? Please give me a +1 back at the source: vSphere 5 Update 1 and vCenter Agent Upgrades

More Brains, Fewer Crotches

Bob Plankers — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 19:11:26 +0000

Once again we’re back on the sexism topic in tech, watching people with big social media spotlights shine light on terrible ideas and stupid moves. This latest round has been a double-whammy: Squoot treating “women as party favors” (to borrow great wording from the title of Rachel Balik’s Forbes article, linked below) and Geeklist reacting poorly to an inquiry about an advertisement ostensibly done in their name. Add these to the stack of other companies consistently hiring spandex-body-suit-clad booth bunnies at conferences, GoDaddy, and the numbers at Gina Trapani’s “Narrow the Gapp” and it’s obvious that there’s a problem on many levels.

Why I’m really here, though, is because I got asked via Twitter DM “what does this have anything to do with you? tired of people captializing (sic) on the situation!!”

I don’t make business decisions with my crotch, that’s what, and I’d appreciate not being treated as if I do.

Yes, I am capitalizing on the situation. Strike while the iron is hot. Someone in a position to do something should do something, too. For me, right now, that “something” is pointing out that the business tactics that rely on sex just aren’t a good business decision anymore. Not only are these approaches insulting to women but they’re insulting to men as well, and increasingly likely to get called out in very public ways. Why? Because being a person in technology, male or female, is largely about brains. Just like women, us guys also don’t like having our brains ignored while you focus on our crotch. We’re not asexual by any means, but we see what you’re doing and we are smart enough know that there’s no way we’re going back to our hotel room with a booth bunny. Thing is, now we’re not taking your product demo back there, either.

For every company I can think of doing the wrong thing there’s one appearing to do it right, though, and I don’t like seeing everybody lumped in together. I love walking up to the Compellent or Symantec or HP booths because the “booth babes” are actual employees who know what the heck they’re talking about, and often are the people designing & building & supporting what I’m interested in. Using their enormous brains, answering my questions, having a conversation, showing off their work, creativity, and ideas — that’s hot. These are the women I want to go have a drink with!

As fun as it can be to get into other people’s pants, it’s much more fulfilling to get into their heads. Guy or girl. So, as an industry, let’s have a little less of the body and a lot more of the mind, eh? As The Oatmeal dubs it, a “brobdingnagian brainboner” lasts longer and is probably the conversation you really wanted to have, anyhow.

Here are the links to things I’ve referenced, and I welcome civil & thoughtful comments below. I know I’ve made some generalizations and no two people are alike. This is my opinion about the situation, from my point of view, and others have theirs, which aren’t wrong, either. I tried to stay out of the whole Geeklist thing, because as I told my friend @gallifreyan on Twitter the more I look at the situation the more I see that everybody lost in some way (though I do applaud Basho for their response, which was mainly that it has nothing to do with them). GeekList wasn’t specifically my point here and I think Scott Hanselman properly sums up many of the lessons I took from the event.

Rachel Balik: Women As Party Favors And Eye Candy: The Latest Tech Marketing Meme
Gina Trapani: Narrow the Gapp
Charles Arthur via Storify: OH HAI SEXISM
Scott Hanselman: Why You Should Never Argue in 140 Characters or Less
Matt Simmons: Seriously, stop with the booth babes
Stephen Foskett: (Don’t) Make Your Startup Look Stupid With Booth Babes & Chotchkies!
I realized I am probably stealing the “get into their heads” line from Dan Le Sac Vs. Scroobius Pip’s “Thou Shalt Always Kill.” Love that song, and now it’s not plagiarism.
The Oatmeal is awesome. “Brobdingnagian brainboner” is from “Being in love at age 27.”

Did you like this article? Please give me a +1 back at the source: More Brains, Fewer Crotches

Why Is It Called “Resilvering?”

Bob Plankers — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 16:16:52 +0000

Q: Why do some people refer to the process of remirroring or rebuilding a RAID 1 drive set as “resilvering?”

A: Antique mirrors (the reflective kind you hang on a wall, or are in your bathroom) used silver (Ag) for the reflective coating, below the glass. Over time that silver would get tarnished and/or damaged, so you’d restore them by re-silvering them. I’m sure you’ve all seen this, where an old mirror has streaks in it but they’re below the glass.

When your RAID 1 mirror set gets “tarnished” you resilver it and it’s shiny & new again. You can rebuild a RAID 5 array but you resilver a mirror. :)

Did you like this article? Please give me a +1 back at the source: Why Is It Called “Resilvering?”