I love cfengine. There are tons of resources out there for managing all kinds of common and uncommon system administration tasks. Rather than regurgitate all that information I wanted to share how I worked around what has been noted as a short coming of cfengine, clients copying information back to the master server.
Also tagged cfengineThe American Populace is being inconvenienced, spied on, stripped of Constitutional Rights, and taxed without any idea where that money is going. The perpetrator is not some foreign, militant, activist group, it’s our own Government. There’s no outcry. All of these treacheries are being committed to increase security while the fact remains [...]
Also tagged policy, securityAs you may or may not know, I am gainfully employed by the Federal Government in the area of Information Security. Recently the Bush Administration responded to media hype to issue a Federal Mandate requiring all government owned laptops use encryption technologies to encrypt their data.
There are two interpretations of this memo.
Encrypt the ENTIRE [...]
Also tagged dumb, fde, policy, securityBruce Schneier always has spot-on posts. Here’s his editorial on last week’s terror plots.
It’s really that simple. Stop being terrorized. Stop being scared to live. Stop taking life so seriously, you’re never gonna make it out alive. We don’t need billions of dollars of security screening software/hardware. Anyone with [...]
Most of the organizations I’ve been a part of, the IT staff usually has exemptions from IT policies if not significantly escalated privileges. This distances them from their users. I also happen to know and test MANY different ways to circumvent the policies and controls in place on the network. You can’t [...]
Also tagged policy, security, trustAs a programmer, I’ve had the concept of “DON’T EVER TRUST YOUR USERS” beaten into my head. For programmers, this concept is incredibly important. Users almost always exceed your expectations for creativity with your new application. By planning for unexpected input, and properly cleaning all variables you can theoretically account for abuses [...]
Also tagged policy, security, trust