My second mistake was that I didn’t setup enough time aside to troubleshoot, should something go wrong.  I made an assumption that it work just work.

But it broke anyway.

The underlying cause?  A new option in Swift, which allows you to change the primary post size.  I had it set to 0.6.

Doh!  (And yes, the layout still needs work)

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I use the 3-2-1 Backup strategy, which is:

• 3 copies of anything I want to keep
• 2 different backup media types
• 1 (at least) offsite storage location

In practice, it looks like this:

Yes, it’s a bit complicated.  If could be less complicated:

• if I used “the cloud” for my backup.
  Cost / limited bandwidth rules that out.
  (I backup 100’s of GB, so the cloud would get expensive fast).
• if I used Windows Home Server.
  The backup software in WHS is image based.
  Image based backups would use Terabytes of space.
  To save space/cost, I’d need a file based backup.

My ideal solution?  Something like a DROBO-like device, which has built in disk encryption.

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(this picture seen at BitterWallet).

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With more time than sense on my hands, I compiled a list of the 183 unique WordPress Plugins which commenters mentioned:

The Top 10

How I totaled it up.
Pasted the comments into an Excel spreadsheet, and removed all the non-recommendations.
Then I matched the plugin name to the plugin home page (mostly the WordPress plugin sites).
Next I tidied up the various spellings people used.
Finally, I did a pivot table in Excel, and here we are.

The other 173

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I had a 3-2-1 backup fail on me recently."

“21,684 files could not be copied”.

The original files were EFS encrypted.  Here’s a picture of what was going wrong:

In technical terms, the second computer did not have the EFS decryption key.  The easy fix was to remove the EFS encryption via the CIPHER command:

cipher /a /d /s:<directory name>

where:

• /a is all files, including subdirectories
• /d is decrypt
• /s: is the directory name.
  ie. d:\users\wisefaq\downloads

To bulk encrypt, you just need to replace the /d with /e
ie. cipher /a /e /s:<directory name>

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A lot of our customers use VLC Media Player.  I’d put it down to the fact that it plays DVD movies.  Windows Media Player doesn’t*  And our customers do like being able to watch “The Golden Child” on their computers.

The brief?  Deploy the latest version of VLC to 4000+ computers.

Silently.  With some program shortcuts moved & removed.

It was surprisingly hard.  Here’s why:

• the standard VLC .exe only supports the “/S” silent switch.
  No other customisations are possible.
• on the first launch of VLC Player, it has an annoying prompt for
     ”Allow fetching media information from Internet”
     ”Check for updates”
  No, I don’t want 4000+ corporate computers going to the internet for updates, so I needed to turn that off.
• and VLC Cache Generating “DOS Box” appears on first launch.
  Even if you ask for a silent installation, this annoying window pops up:
    
  I couldn’t fix this and that annoys me.  I mean, why have a silent install option if it’s not going to be silent???

So it looked like I had to create a custom installation package.  The choices where either a MSI based installer package, or customise the NSIS installer VLC uses.  Since I was running out of time, I took the quicker way out and modified the NSIS install script.  Those changes were:

vlc.win32.nsi
InstallDir "C:\WISEFAQ\VideoLAN\VLC" 
CreateShortCut "$SMPROGRAMS\VideoLAN\\VLC media player.lnk" \
    "$INSTDIR\vlc.exe" "--no-qt-privacy-ask --no-qt-updates-notif"
 

And it works.  Mostly.  Except for that darn VLC-CACHE-GEN box still appearing.

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The latest-but-last gripe has been with Echo performance.  It adds up to 3 seconds to the blog page load time.  And it can’t be fixed by any tweaks on Wisefaq.com.  Tweaks such as enabling Gzip compression. which I can’t change on their website.

Echo aren’t interested in doing any tweaks, they’re chasing the corporate dollar.  The price is run the Echo plug-in here has gone from $12 USD a year to $10 USD a month.

Chris Saad of Echo sums it up in this support post:

We appreciate your passion about Echo and its pricing – we really do. The reality for Echo is still the same as it’s been for some time now.

As a small startup our considerations are not just the cost of running the service, but the cost of support and the cost of the distraction to build a product for a totally different class of customer (in this case free or nearly free bloggers).

As you can tell from the changes to the Echo home page, Echo is now clearly designed for customers who are in the business of publishing. Business being the operative word.

They have very different needs than smaller bloggers (no more or less important, just different). Particularly in the areas of install, customization, support etc etc.

It’s a different business. One that others in the market are very well suited to execute on. I’m sure there is a provider that suits your needs. One size never fits all.

There are some free choices out there.  Disqus or IntenseDebate are two of them.  I’ve gone back to Disqus for the time being.

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The pictured SIMs are from Telstra.  And no, I don’t know why Telstra decided to use a different SIM for the iPhone 4.

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A single pass wipe, with verify

Personal use 
Active@KillDisk Free.  The free version only does one pass, so there’s not much to configure.  It was a close tie between this product, and my second choice, Darik’s Boot & Nuke.

The feature which won me over?  The utility to create a bootable USB memory stick “kill disk”.

Second choice: Darik’s Boot & Nuke.
DBAN is the choice most computer technicians I know make.  I tripped across the “let’s hang if the laptop has a card reader” bug.  That put me off DBAN.  I’m sure it will be fixed soon.

Business use
BCWipe.  The only commercially targeted product which offers a fully-functional evaluation copy.  That counts for a lot in my opinion.  BCWipe is also being actively developed (another plus).  Go read my test of BCWipe for the rest of the details.

Summary of disk wipe products

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How did you test?

1. Restored a Ghost image of Windows XP to laptop with a 120GB hard drive.
2. Copied 24919 files onto the laptop C: drive.
   (1955MB in total)
3. Shutdown laptop
4. Booted with the ““KillDisk”” and run the utility.

And the restore test?
Booted the laptop with TestDisk & PhotoRec, and ran those to try and restore the data.

How many products did you test?
I tried testing 8 products.  Some were so bad, I didn’t do a full test/write-up.

Why only one pass wipe (with some products)?
Because that is all you need.
"They concluded that, after a single overwrite of the data on a drive, whether it be an old 1-gigabyte disk or a current model (at the time of the study), the likelihood of still being able to reconstruct anything is practically zero. Well, OK, not quite: a single bit whose precise location is known can in fact be correctly reconstructed with 56 per cent probability (in one of the quoted examples). To recover a byte, however, correct head positioning would have to be precisely repeated eight times, and the probability of that is only 0.97 per cent. Recovering anything beyond a single byte is even less likely."

What is ATA Secure Erase?
A command which tells your hard drive to wipe itself.  Most ATA/SATA drives have supported this command since 2001.  Not all Disk Wiping programs support it.
It would seem to be the most secure way to wipe a hard disk.
Further information here.

What are the other wipe (software) techniques?
Peter Gutmann’s
3-pass US DoD 5220-22M
One-pass random
Zero
Test
US DoE
RCMP DSX Method
German VSITR standard
Bruce Schneier’s:
”I recommend overwriting a deleted file seven times: the first time with all ones, the second time with all zeros, and five times with a cryptographically secure pseudo-random sequence." 
"Applied Cryptography" (1996)

What about hardware devices?
Didn’t test any hardware wiping devices, but I’ve got some experience with them, so here are some general comments.

Degaussers – destructive wiping.
These kinds of devices work so well that they bend parts of the hard drive.
Yes, your drive is wiped, but it will never work again.
http://www.eyecote.com/degauss/security.htm

Hardware based wiping devices
These are dedicated hardware based wiping devices.  Available in two flavours, cheap and not cheap.
http://www.wiebetech.com/products/Drive_eRazer.php
https://catalogue.binatek.com/products/42-Data_Destruction/

Hardware drive destroyers
Exactly what the title said, via crushing, shredding or disintegrating. 
http://www.semshred.com/content1532

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Regardless, if you needed to buy a commercial product, this would be the one I’d buy.  For the logging function it has, and the fact that Jetico have been in the market for a long time.

Version tested: BCWipe Total WipeOut 2.30

Plus points:

• I like the amount of detail that BCWipe captures to it’s log file
  
• Built-in disk hex viewer.
• it still is being actively developed.

Things I didn’t like:

• Biggest beef was the create Bootable USB Disk Wizard, with it’s “No disk” error.
   

Test notes:

• Accepted the defaults, which was US DoD 5220-22M
  This meant 7 wipe passes, which took 283 mins.
  A one pass Zero wipe took 39 mins
• Other wipe options are:
  Peter Gutmann’s
  Bruce Schneier’s
  3-pass US DoD 5220-22M
  One-pass random
  Zero
  Test
  US DoE 

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"I use a safety razor."

‘What’s that?’

I was un-successful in my explanation.  If only I could have shared a picture:

It’s said that when Gillette started selling the safety razor, they were sold at a loss.  The money was in the razor blades.  They sold with the speed of a startled gazelle.  The blades are disposed when they became blunt.

The safety razor is far easier to use, and quicker, than the "cut throat" razor* it replaced.  And they give a good shave.

Folklore in our family was that you will always cut yourself on the first shave of a new blade
Hasn’t happened to me yet.  Shaving "well refreshed"# isn’t recommended though.

The safety razor pictured above is a Gillette "Slim" Adjustable Safety Razor.

* The cut throat razor became popular in Sydney during the 1920′s, as the weapon of choice.  Mainly due to the restriction of firearms.
# Drunk.

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Presented this screen when I tried to install it on Windows 7 (64-bit)

Checking the System Requirements again:

So you’ve lied to me then.

FAIL.

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"Please exclude www.acompany.com:6969 from the proxy server.".

Note that it’s the :6969 which is important here.  It tells the web browser to speak with the web site over port 6969 (normally this would be port 80).

"It’ll be blocked by our firewall", was my response to the request.

"but good luck with getting that port open.", I thought.

There are days when I think that when we were assigned the chimpanzees which run our network, we got the ones too dumb to peal their own bananas.

"How to tell though?", I thought
(whether port 6969 was open, not the intelligence of our chimps)

The answer was simple,  firebind.com.

"Firebind provides a straightforward way to verify whether your application will be able to successfully communicate to its respective server via your Internet connection."

Firebind works, unlike port 6969:

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Version tested: CBL Data Shredder v1.0

Plus points:

• it’s free.
• it gives you the option, at the end of the process, to save a report.

Things I didn’t like:

• nothing.  Program worked as advertised. 

Test notes:

• Accepted the defaults, which was 1 pass.
• Other wipe options are:
  Peter Gutmann’s
  Bruce Schneier’s
  3-pass US DoD 5220-22M 
  RCMP DSX Method
  German VSITR standard

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I don’t think Operation Pin Ball refers to the Police Minister’s accident.

By the way, it’s not “his” car.  It’s a company car provided to him by the taxpayers of Victoria.

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That, in itself, isn’t a killer.

Now, I’ve been taking my screenshots for this Disk Wiping series, by using VMware Workstation.  e-Maxx wasn’t able to detect the hard drive under in the VMware machine, so I’m going to mark this as a fail.

Time estimate to wipe 120GB hard disk?  1254 hours.

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After hunting around for the required MS-DOS files, I had the bootable CD.

After navigating though a number of options screens, the disk wipe started wiping.

But my heart wasn’t in it.  I don’t like the program.  Perhaps it was the effort needed to find the MS-DOS files, or the fact that the evaluation copy only does 25% of the disk.

Honestly, I couldn’t recommend this product.  There are FREE products which work as well.  And commercial vendors (Jetico with BCWipe), who offer you a fully functional evaluation copy.

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