usefulgeek

I was reading this story on lifehacker today and just wanted to drop my comments on the subject.

Quite often, I’ve had this conversation with people..

Me: What’s your backup scheme?
Them: Oh, we have RAID.
Me: Nice.  So what’s your backup scheme?

THe problem with is this, if you havn’t figured it out yet… RAID is NOT a method for backing up data.  Now, sure it is useful for protecting data (in some forms) or speed up access to data (in other forms) but it is not, in any way, a method for protecting data.

If nothing else, the journalspace incident proves this.  They were using RAID for backups.  Well, their RAID did exactly what RAID is meant to do.  Protect the data on the drive.  In their case, the data on the drive was the problem.  Having the mirror simply copied all the bad data across their drives.

During this post, I’ve been trying to think of a funny, sarcastic, or otherwise memoriable way of saying this, but I’ve come up blank, so I’ll just say it… Having a RAID array IS NOT a backup! Taking this furthur, you should never trust one form of technology to fill the role of another.

The next time you’re asked to implement a backup stragety, remember RAID is not your answer.

I assume you’ve had your hands on at least one set of administrative credentials in your life.  I’d also make the assumption that you’ve used that account as your everyday account.  You know, the one we use to check mail, surf the web, update facebook, download porn… you know, that kind of stuff.

That’s a bad idea.

Why, you might ask.  Doing so, opens yourself up for quite a lot of trouble.

Time to take a step back…. Let’s imagine for a moment that you’re just another user.  What kind of access would you have on the network?  Hopefully you’ve just said ‘as little as possible’ or ‘only what you need’ or similar.  Well, why is that?  Security.  The idea of least access says that I can do only what I need to do to complete my job.

Whoa! But I’m the admin! I need access to everything!

This may be true, but probably not.  Think about your average day.  What do you really do?  Occasionally you install some software, create user accounts, update systems… the list can go on.  Now, let’s really think about that… How often do those tasks happen and where do you perform them.  Know that you’ve answered those questions, let’s move on.

Everyone on your network should have a user account.  That is, a limited account with least access to the resources they need.  For an administrator, this means you have an account with very limited access to install software, run updates, make system changes and the like.  Just like everyone else.  This is the account you work with daily.  You log in, surf the web, read the news, send email, check blogs, etc… all that work stuff.

BUT WAIT

You also create an account for yourself with administrative rights.  This account, is used whenever you need to perform an administrative task.

Have this account separate account means that any time you want to do something that requires administrative access you MUST think “Do I really want to do this”?  I bet you find yourself saying “no, not really” quite a lot after this.  Separate accounts also gives you a nice way of monitoring changes on your network.  By having separate logins, you can see when (and who) is making administrative changes on your network.

I’m tired..

Mine didn’t

Luckily Google helped me find a solutation rather quickly, and using information from this site I was able to get things working again.

Basically, I added xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true to /etc/vmware/config and things started working right. Another on the forum suggested remapping the keys, but I didn’t try that.

This is going to (hopefully) be part of a much larger article on moving web sites from one host to another.  Until then, I leave with just a simple command to download almost all of an entire webpage to a local directory…

<code>wget -rnp -nd www.example.com</code>

Or, if we want to download the same files, but store them in a directory created for each host…

<code>wget -rnp www.example.com</code>

Well, that’s all for now.  As this project moves forward for me, you should see more.

Reading the feeds today, and came across todays xkcd comic.  Very funny.

Create a tar archive
tar -c -f archive.tar *

Create a compressed archive with gzip
tar -c -z -f archive.tar.gz *

You can also condense down the commands like so..
tar -czf archive.tar.gz *

It’s that time ago.  Another AsylumLAN is set for the middle of November.   If you’re into gaming I highly recommend this event.  Details below or check out their website for more information.

• Date: Nov 15-16, 2008
• Time: Sat 10am - Sunday 4pm
• Cost: $30 pre-register, $35 walk-in
• Location: Vanderburgh Co. 4H

Registration now open at asylumlan.com

Working with VMware on Ubuntu 8.04 has proved to be much more trouble then in the past.  It appears, that when using VMware with a Windows guest, the CTRL, ALT and Shift keys no longer work.  It gets better though..

Google Search has offered a few solutions, mostly related to resetting keyboard layouts and such.  However, when I try and use any other key, take the ’s’ for example, Ubuntu closes the current active window, and opens the file manager.

So far, the only working solution I’ve found involves two steps.  First, restart the computer then cease using VMware to run Windows guests.

Easy enough, I suppose..

If anyone out there has a fix for this, or knows something I’m missing, please leave details in the comments.

Paul Frields from Fedora posted an message to fedora-announce-list regarding a compermise of some of the Fedora systems.  If you use Fedora, it’s worth reading over and following up with.  I’m not personally a Fedora user, so I can’t provide and user commentary on this issue.

Read the orgional post here.  You can probably followup with this thread, and others from the fedora-announce-list archives

Be careful when using the “I’m Feeling Lucky” search on Google. You do not get to see the result’s discription or what webpage you are about to visit and it could cause you some trouble. For example currently “zune windows theme” visits the download URL. So instead of a webpage you are instantly prompted to download a file.