completeconfusion

First, here's how to compute safely in the internet age, without ever being unable to do your days work on your computer:

Backup, but don't just backup.

I have more than one hard-drive, as everyone should, and swappable hard drives, as everyone should. No-one can be certain a virus won't take out your system if you are connected to the internet or a network. If nothing else, buffer overflow errors can make any system vulnerable to a complete takeover - yes, even Linux systems, even with hardware firewalls.

The answer is to keep a virgin hard drive that's never on your computer when it's connected to the net and which drive boots itself. This virgin drive, which you put in the swappable drive door (and which is jumper-toggled as a master drive) becomes a hard drive onto which you can copy all your data from your, um, let's say more promiscuous hard drive as a backup, and on which you can work offline. Or if nothing else a second OS so that the latest virus will only take out one of the OSes you could use on a given day on that machine.

Nothing else is safe. NOTHING. This way you have two computers for the price of one - likely only one of which is attached to the internet, ever, in any way, but both of which can swap data via a sort of super-fast sneaker-net, for backups, synchronization, etc; and either of which will let you do your days work, with all your data intact, if something happens to the other OS - like a worm or virus. No matter what hits the internet, period, ever, you have a guarantee you'll still get your day's work done on the virgin disk.

The central idea here is to make the permanent (non-swappable) hard drive in your computer a slave - but a slave with it's own operating system, so that when no swappable HD is inserted, it boots as if it were a master and lets you charge out into the internet or do your business, but will also step back when a swappable HD, toggled to master, is inserted (with the net connection unplugged, in my case) and the computer rebooted. Then it's just a slave from which data can be easily copied - or used.

This is the only gold standard for safety for any networked computer in this remarkable evil age online.


One wee trouble in paradise, however... and a warning.

This system worked wonderfully for me right up until this week. I decided to install Linux on this system.

I never install Linux without it destroying something.

Once upon a time, simply trying to alter your screen resolution could result in a full reinstall wiping out your entire hard drive and every scrap of data. I think they might have fixed that. This time Linux just refused to abandon the installation and spit out the hard disk, scared the hell out of me, then destroyed an entire XP operating system and some Firefox bookmarks... but left the rest of my data intact.

But apparently, the idea of a hard drive that's sometimes dominant and sometimes submissive is new to Linux Fedora 2. Maybe their programmers don't get out to clubs much... So Linux, without any warning, simply destroyed my access to the swappable master's OS entirely and went to the slave on the other drive and appointed it God and master of all things - managing to override the hardware toggles, in effect. #@^$@!! And this AFTER I had told it (the Linux installation on the F: drive) NEVER to boot from the C: drive. NEVER. Apparently never means always to Linux in this special case. *$%^!!! Goodbye to all my safety precautions, my vigin disk, the firefox books there (which aren't stored where they say they are) and of course there's no safe way back - there never is with Linux - there's no such thing as truly uninstalling Linux on a double boot system so you're back where you started and anyway I'm far too frightened to risk any such procedure - this data's vital.

*(#$#*@! Linux is still a little puppy that just goes where it wants (three guesses as to how easy it is to house-train a penguin) - whereas Microsoft is an aging thug who gets into barfights and brings home curious infections on a weekly basis... so there's no hope for us!

Both operating systems have God complexes. Linux won't let you go back, or even abort the install or open the drive door so you can hard boot out of harm's way.... oy veh!

Firefox, of course, compounds the problem. Firefox communicates bookmarks well with Explorer, but doesn't recognize the existence of Firefox. You can't synchronize Firefoxes on two HDs on the same machine, you can't import Firefox bookmarks from one HD into Firefox on another... you can kludge up HTML pages, with some effort and editing in a separate program, and send a bookmark to those pages on your machine, but that's it.

Surely I'm not the only person on earth who has figured out that by far the best option is to make your swappable hard drives masters, and the fixed HD a bootable slave. Surely not. This isn't rocket science. There are only two fundamental arrangements here - drawer masters being the useful arrangement if safety is a concern. Then again, they say it took three hundred years after someone invented a single stirrup on one side of a horse, to help in mounting, before someone else figured out that two stirrups would be a good idea. And we are cheerfully killing off the earth.

It's like I'm back in the bad old days when merely having two hard disks on one machine meant that nearly every software program you purchased would malfunction in bizarre ways, usually on install, because that possibility - two hard drives! - had somehow never entered the designers' wildest dreams, so the programs just couldn't cope.

Now, having a drive that's sometimes master and sometimes slave is somehow utterly beyond even the most drug-crazed dreams of software designers. Caffiene doesn't stimulate the imagination, after all, relaxation does.

So there it is. If you're stupid - you get infected. If you're smart - you'll step one inch out of the standard way of doing things and the designers behind Windows or Linux will trash your OS for you. (Even so your data, bookmarks aside, perhaps, will be intact) You can't win - just limit your losses, in this old world.

Pardon the rant.

DO use the above described method to make sure your life on the computer is a safe one (and backup to CDs or DVDs too - but also to a HD, as I've described, because hard drives are much less volatile. Data on writable CDs disappears - that's not an if , it's only a question of when, and don't count on such written data lasting a decade.)

If you install Linux however, maybe just put it on the central slave - while nothing is in the swappable hard drive door - until Linux catches up with the times.

# posted by Russell @ 2:33 AM