At work I have been setting up a back up system for all three of our offices as the current system wasn’t working well or flexible for our needs, so I have deployed Cobian (which I really like as its free, open source and easy to configure with support for compression and encryption and reporting) and its crucially important as an IT administrator to be well rehearsed for a worse case scenario.   I am also thinking my job has some different slants, in terms of do IT people prepare for possible war.   One example is if our staff have to go into a bomb shelter (most houses, businesses and public places have one)   how we get announcements of what is happening.   I don’t think mobile phones work in heavy concrete shelters, and neither do laptops or smart phones using wireless internet either.   I have been told the government uses radio announcements for this kind of scenario, but then again I am not sure if they have these repeated in Hebrew, Arabic, English and Russian languages, all widely used here.   I thought one theory would be to put a wireless router (in a locked enclosure, so no unauthorised person can plug in a network cable or tamper with it)  in the shelter in one office, but then again that particular office has a shelter shared between 3 other businesses, so it doesn’t belong to us nor is it possible to drill holes or wire cables through a wall.

This week, there are announcements that significant numbers of Israelis have had details hacked by Turkish hackers see this news story.   Seems to be more common people deface web sites or illegally get personal information as a political statement.   I think I need to think about making sure all our servers and critical systems are fully patched.  Last year I saw a public presentation by the IDF who had an IBM Thinkpad laptop still with XP SP1 (I can tell as Service Pack 2 and later no longer shows the words ‘home’ or ‘professional’ upon booting up.) Microsoft stopped supporting XP without service pack 3 sometime ago now and the update isn’t that difficult, and apart from needing new wireless drivers for sometime laptops there is little possibility for this update to cause a problem, testing would need to be done with specialised apps but I have not seen any real issues.   I merged Service Pack 3 with our CD of our volume licence version of XP (do a google search for ‘slipstreaming’ if you want to learn to do this) so this is done transparently when I do rebuilds of PCs at work, saving me a lot of time.   I don’t think complacent in IT security is any worse here in Israel, as many of my previous employers were years behind on installing service packs, using an outdated web browser or had cut corners on inadequate antivirus apps that were not upto scratch.

If you have done IT administration or know articles for places where people may face danger, do feel free to comment.   I am not interested in anything political, just ideals for sensible practical plans for technology to keep people safe and work in times of uncertainty.

I have tidied up my blog and should get my original domain name back soon, I have removed some people from the links on the side, hope no one is offended, but I got rid of some dead links and blogs that had not been updated in a while.