For some time I've wanted to setup encryption on my laptop and thumb drive.  It would feel good knowing that if my laptop fell into the wrong hands, my private data would be secure.  Though I must admit much of my desire to set this up is simply because I'm a nerd.

So the other night I worked with Jaisen to setup partition based encryption using dm-crypt and luks.  I was really impressed how easy it was, and how robust the features seem to be.  It didn't take long before we had a 15g partition encrypted and working like a charm.

The unfortunate part is that the documentation available wasn't exactly straight forward.  This weekend I am going to write up some documentation on how we set things up.  I'll place it in the usual location.

I've been slacking lately, as there's been a lot to do around the house and things.  I've only managed to update a few things:

1. Added stats tracking to this blog (forgot I had turned on this one flag in Feb)
2. Added stats tracking to the howto documents, curious how that will look
3. Initial import of a Git howto (since I'm starting to love it)
4. Added drop down style navigation to the howto index
5. Cleaned up the keychain howto just a bit

I also ordered a good regex book as I'm still not near good enough at them.  Sometimes it takes a book, a comfortable chair, and some coffee before I really learn something.  I think I'm also going to order the recently released PostgreSQL Reference Manual Volume 1.

I've also been slacking on the 4 HP DL145's I bought for a much needed upgrade.  The first one is build and imaged, just need to deploy it to the other three and begin migrating services.  Being able to start from a hardened stage3 was really nice.  Way to go Gentoo devs!

Man it seems like there just aren't enough hours in the day  :)

This week has been full of all sorts of interesting things.  I added the Urchin javascript to my blog and howto pages last week.  The results have been pretty interesting.  I was hoping that my howto documents were providing value to someone, and the stats seem to indicate this is true.

I have also been reading my shiney new Postgresql book.  It's really good and I can't wait till the other two become available.  I'm learning all sorts of little things I never knew before about Postgresql.

Probably the most interesting thing this week was the start of Kirby's new treatment.  She has a very bad mouth infection, but the vet is unable to properly treat it because her renal (kidney) values are not good.  It seems the recommended treatment is to give her fluids under the skin.  So today we gave her the first 100cc dose of normal saline via IV tubing and a needle inserted under the skin between her shoulders.  The fact that I'm a nurse has come in handy as I feel pretty comfortable working with needles.  The part that's odd is to intentionally let fluid go under the skin - this is something you completely avoid with humans (infiltration).  I'll have to post some pictures of the process as it's pretty interesting.


John M.