🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <7l0e4o$kjn$1@news.mathworks.com>,
Chris Hardin  <chardin@mathworks.com> wrote:
>> nwaltham@my-deja.com wrote:
>...
>>> and disabling the floppy in the BIOS. It strikes me that the weakest
>>> point, from a physical point of view is the tape backup. The tapes
>
>If you are giving untrusted people physical access to a machine, you
>can't expect high security.  If people are willing to steal tapes,
>what's stopping them from stealing hard drives?

People are more likely to notice a missing drive, since the machine won't
run properly without the files online.  But taking a tape doesn't have any
operational impact on the system.

>> Another way would be to perform a cpio backup to tape on the linux box (tar
>> is never a very good idea and the only reason it is still around is that
>> there is a lot of legacy support for it) and then share that drive with an
>> NT/Win95/98 box and copy the cpio file to a tape backup with password
>> protection and then erase the tape that has the cpio file.
>
>Is tar really that bad?  I've never had any problems with it, but I
>haven't used cpio much, either.

Tar has some well-known limitations, such as 100-character pathnames (GNU
tar has a workaround for this, but I think it makes the tar files
incompatible with traditional implementations).

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar@bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Burlington, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
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