Last night, I finally got all of the pieces together for hosting of this site. Here, I will summarize what solution I ended up going with, and a little about my future plans.
After convincing myself that Markdown is only terrible (instead of utterly terrible), and that it would be ok for short postings like I intend to make here. I got this site set up with Jekyll for static site generation.
This post is going to focus on some particular security issues in the embedded space (the IoT space, if you will). I regularly work with microcontrollers (MCUs) based on variants of the Cortex-M architecture. These are ARM processors that typically have a small amount of ROM (½–1 MiB) and an even smaller amount of RAM (16–128 KiB).
Traditionally, security has not been much of a focus on these types of devices (think toasters, washing machines, and the likes). However, with increased connectivity, we are starting to see more and more security problems with the code in these devices.
Today, I migrated my primary Ubuntu 17.04 development machine to put the root volume onto a thinly provisioned volume. There was a bit of a comedy of errors, so I want to outline what I should have done, vs what actually happened.
As in anything like this, it is important to start with known good backups. In my [backup post]({% post_url 2017-09-10-backups %}), I describe how I’m doing that, and even testing it. Then things would roughly following the following steps:
For my first post, I’d like to discuss some of my strategy that I use for backups.
Backups are one of those things that most people realize are important, yet most people don’t really do them consistently. Aside from that, I’ve found that very few people test their backups.
There are two scenarios that backups are important for:
These scenarios place different demands on the backup system. They also combine in interesting ways. For example, if after a disaster recovery, how can an older version of a file be restored.