Over the span of our lives, we accumulate a lot of stuff. Some of this stuff is precious to us so we keep it in a secure place like a safe or strongbox. Some of this precious stuff can also be digital and therefore must be secured into digital strongboxes and safes but what happens when you lose the key? When your work in IT, you have a minimum of two employers: the company you work for and your family. I am the designated IT support and data custodian at home. It’s my job to keep all family pictures and other important files complete and available. And after going through the experience of losing my pictures of our vacation trip to Paris years ago, I am next to paranoid when it comes to making backups. ...

Have you ever had the desire to improve the security of your systems but had no idea how to do it? You might have read all kinds of articles on the web about hacked companies that needed to pay large sums of money to get access to their data again. But what can you do, when you are just a system administrator of a small company with a non-existent security budget? Well, you can start reading the OpSec blog series in order to acquire the knowledge you need to make your environment more secure and give hackers a hard time. ...

As someone who works in the IT sector and does all kinds of tech stuff in his free time, having a proper working environment is of the utmost importance. The term “Working environment” is a broad term with can be anything from the people you work with to the desk you sit at, but I am focusing on the thing I spend my time looking at for most of the day. ...

Typing your password at every system bootup might get you annoyed at times. Especially when you are used to Windows and macOS systems which store the disk decryption password in the TPM. But what if I told you that you can also achieve this on your Linux setup. We can use an application called ‘Clevis’ to get the job done. I will describe the installation and configuration steps for Ubuntu and Fedora, but the steps should be about the same for other Linux distro’s. ...