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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Yeah, I’d tend to agree on that. Even beyond the security issues, nuclear has the potential to be a safe, but it also has the potential to be disastrous if mis-managed.

    We see plenty of issues like this already, including what occurred here: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/fukushima-daiichi-accident

    Now imagine a plant in Texas, where power companies response to winter outages has basically been “sucks to be you, winterizing is too costly”.

    Or maybe we’d like to go with a long-time trusted company, who totally wouldn’t throw away safety and their reputation for a few extra bucks. Boeing comes to mind.

    I like nuclear as a power source, but the absolutely needs to be immutable rules in place to ensure it is properly managed and that anyone attempting to cut corners to save costs gets slapped down immediately. Corporate culture in North America seems to indicate otherwise.





  • It depends on where the encryption data is stored. If the bootloader and bios/efi are locked down and the data to unlock is stored in an encrypted enclave or one is using a TPM (and not an external chip one that can be sniffed with a pi), that’s a reasonable protection for the OS even if somebody gains physical access.

    You could also store the password in the EFI, or on a USB stick etc. It doesn’t help you much against longer-term physical access but it can help if somebody just grabs the drive. It’s also useful to protect the drive if it’s being disposed of as the crypto is tied to other hardware.

    Even just encrypting the main OS with the keys in the boot/initrd has benefit, as ensuring that part is well-wiped makes asset disposal safe®. Some motherboards have an on-board SDCard or USB slot which your can use for the boot partition. It means I don’t have to take a drill to my drives before I dispose of them



  • Update: Based on some other sources, it sounds like giving another shot at freeIPA might be worth investigating. It’s still got Samba etc and the last time I tried it things weren’t more RedHat exactly friendly to my favored flavor (Debian) but it sounds like it might be better supported now

    Update #2

    OMFG it’s years after I tried and FreeIPA on Debian is even more of a pain. Docker container issues galore, and it basically won’t start without adding a bunch of options that reduce the container security to a smoldering ruin



  • I do actually have a NextCloud instance, which I primarily use for editing Documents (via Collabora) or syncing backups of folders like Pictures etc from the phone.

    SMB/Samba by itself for just sharing folders I’ve had little issue with. Samba as a domain controller with domain-joined clients tied to domain logins is a more complicated beast and - in my experience -prone to breakage in my experience (expired tokens, certificate lifetimes, DNS integration, upgrade issues, etc) BUT it can provide a fairly complete package end-to-end when it works. I just feel that there should be a more Linux-centric/friendly and less bloaty solution that still others decent account-level security.

    When you ask “only on LAN” the answer is yes with the caveat that I do also work through VPN, but that’s often functionally the same thing save that the VPN login occurs after the user-login




  • The upside over Snaps is that they’re not so controlled by a central source

    I’d say they still share a couple downsides: a) use a lot of them and stuff is gonna get bloaty vs native packages

    b) updating a library etc for security on your system can still leave you with vulnerable apps where the packages aren’t updated