Category: Security

Using EncFS for safefly storing data

Just wanted to share what i think is a nice solution to encrypting your data. If you have confidential data that you would like to store securely, then have a look at EncFS. According to the man page, EncFS creates a virtual file system which stores encrypted data in one directory (they call this directory the rootdir) and makes it available unencrypted in another directory (mountPoint). The user must supply a password that would be used to encrypt the user’s files and file names. EncFs relies on the underlying file system. Therefore if there are any limitations on the underlying file system, they will be inherited by EncFS.

One of the blogs that i follow (HowtoForge.com)has a nice write-up on using EncFS that I encourage you to check out. Below, I will provide a summary of the key commands that you will need to get up and running. Read more

Create Cisco Switch with IOU [IOS On Unix] Loaded on CentOS

ciscoThe tutorial describes steps required for creating Cisco switch based on IOUl2. The Qemu image with installed CentOS Linux is loaded with IOU image. The IOU (IOS on UNIX) instances are attached to the network using iou2net.pl script written by Jeremy L. Gaddis. The script forwards frames between a IOU instance and a Qemu network adapters. The script is started using tap mode when Qemu interfaces are bridged with virtual tap interfaces.

1. Create Qemu image

/usr/local/bin/qemu-img create -f qcow2 ./centos6.0-ioul2.img 2000M

2. Download CentOS 6.0 minimal install CD

wget http://centos.arcticnetwork.ca/6/isos/i386/CentOS-6.0-i386-minimal.iso

Start Qemu image with attached CentOS minimal CD. Read more

PostgreSQL Backup and Recovery with Barman

dbRecently a friend pointed me in the direction of a rather useful piece of software for doing quite funky things with backing up and restoring PostgreSQL databases.

Most organizations I have seen using PostgreSQL and MySQL have always chosen to perform database backups locally on each server. This is fine and it works, but you need to ensure you take a backup of those backup files. I’ve not come across any piece of software that will do complete database backups remotely… that is, until now. This is where “barman” fits in. You can check out what they are all about on the project’s website. http://www.pgbarman.org/

In this article I’ll be going through a really quick howto on getting up and running with Barman in order to perform remote backups of postgresql servers.

In this example I will be using the below details. Read more

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