Finding the chase and cutting to it

My family may be forgiven for thinking my life revolves around computers.

I like to think it doesn’t but it’s when you talk to other mums in parents evening that you realise just how far down the rabbit hole you have indeed travelled.

Since losing my computer in early October thanks to difficulty mounting an encrypted hard disk on my server, I’ve been doing some home work.

This is not that uncommon-a-problem and it pays to ensure you have a disaster plan in place for when such things happen.

And test it to make sure it works before things become critical.

Unfortunately, that last bit meant I lost my wiki.  The last perfect backup I had to hand is three years old but it is at least better than nothing!

Only issue has been winding the clock back to a time when that backup would work.

Thankfully, I have a couple of Raspberry Pi’s and they are proving to be most useful.  I have mysql 5.4 installed and an older version of apache and a copy of php 5.4.  Just waiting to extract the actual wiki backup (the db is already running) and then I can start to move the backup forward to a much later version of the wiki software that will work on my main server.

For the security minded, thanks to the firewall configured on the network, this Pi though old should not be able to act as a backdoor to the network and the machines behind it.

I have learnt from my lesson too: periodic disaster recovery plan walk throughs once a quarter from now on, no excuses!

You’re talking about security here, what exactly do you mean?

For me, security is about four aspects: integrity, non-repudiation, appropriate confidentiality and immutability.

You should be able to trust what you are seeing and that no-one who shouldn’t see that data has access to it.

There are various mechanisms for achieving this.  I use four key ones: TLS for traffic over the web, PKI for non-repudiation, confidentiality and immutability and I use PKI to ensure no-one has access to my servers who shouldn’t have it.

My base disks are then encrypted too, just encase some gets keen enough to break into my house and take the server.

Suitable passwords are used on top of this to ensure things are protected and I have also use a secure wiping system to ensure deleted files are protected where possible.

I don’t store anyone’s data but my own.

I make use of virus checkers for all my machines and firewalls.

I don’t think that means everything is safe.  I am just doing the basics.