ramblinations

more fun with btsync

I've already gushed over the amazingness that is btsync, but it just solved another problem for me, so here I am again.

My new VPS provider (yes, that is an affiliate link; sue me) recently announced that their backup interval would be increasing from weekly to monthly. I'm coming from a daily backup environment, so weekly was already uncomfortable; it was time to set up my own backup system. But my primary machine (and therefore backup host) is Windows--am I supposed to set up some kind of rsync service? Muck about with Scheduled Tasks? Ugh. Headaches all around.

But wait! btsync to the rescue!

I set up a little cron.weekly job to drop the content I want saved into a bz2 tarball

/bin/tar -cjpf /path/to/vps-backup-folder/backup.tar.bz2 \
    --exclude='skip-this-folder' --exclude='vps-backup-folder' \
    --exclude='.SyncArchive' /home/me /etc /path/to/webroot /var/log
/bin/chown me:me /path/to/vps-backup-folder/backup.tar.bz2

and (wait wait, I bet you can guess) registered /path/to/vps-backup-folder as a btsync source. Now my VPS backups will sync (encrypted!) to any client with the key, whenever they happen to come online. And as a bonus, btsync's own backup system (in .SyncArchive) will hang on to old versions of the backup tarball for as long as I specify.

Really, this stuff is magic.

(I did briefly investigate tar-based incremental backups, but I don't want to store every increment ever from the beginning of backed-up time. It'd be a particularly ridiculous degree of overkill.)

btsync, where have you been all my life

Well, that was easy.

I've been using KeePass for password management for roughly five years, ish. I like that it's free, that it runs on all my devices and that it integrates with any password-protected application (not just my browser). Syncing the database to all said devices, on the other hand, has always been a minor headache. I don't want to rely on free cloud storage providers, so I substitute various incarnations of personal servers, and I sacrifice the nifty auto-syncing clients. I could run something like SparkleShare, but that seems like overkill for one lousy file ...
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pernicious kingdoms
From Seven Pernicious Kingdoms: A Taxonomy of Software Security Errors
One of the first studies of computer security and privacy was the RISOS (Research Into Secure Operating Systems) project [in 1976]. RISOS proposed and described seven categories of operating system security defects...:
- Incomplete Parameter Validation
- Inconsistent Parameter Validation
- Implicit Sharing of Privileges / Confidential Data
- Asynchronous Validation / Inadequate Serialization
- Inadequate Identification / Authentication / Authorization
- Violable Prohibition / Limit
- Exploitable Logic Error
The study shows that there are a small number of fundamental defects that recur in different contexts.
Heh. You could say that, yes. Here we are, 40 years later, dealing (or more ...
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