daemon.child

Providing a user with a secured laptop, but still allowing flexibility of use can be a costly and frustrating experience. Remote workers bring unique demands. Unlike the desk bound employee, they have requirements which mean that maintaining acceptable levels of security is a additional challenge. Administrators must work at arms length, while keeping control of data which is at risk simply by being beyond the corporate perimeter. The Assured Computing Environment (ACE) provided by VMWare allows an administrator to overcome some of the challenges, while improving security to boot.

Over the last few months, I've implemented a number of instances of RSA SecurID Authentication Manager for several clients. This is nothing new for me - in fact, I've been working with SecurID since version 2.1, which is way before RSA bought the product from Security Dynamics. What is new is my disappointment with the latest incarnation of the product in version 7.1. It's too heavy and doesn't work properly in a virtual environment.

I've been using Asterisk as our home PBX for a couple of months now. It's been sitting natively on an old PC up until now. Now that I have got my ESX server back up and running, I've moved it to a VM based implementation. This blog post documents the process used to install on Fedora Core 8.

I've been a user of services since I was born. Strictly speaking, it was my parents who paid out for services for the family to use. We had electricity and a telephone. To begin with, we had monthly coal deliveries, but these were replaced with piped natural gas heating when I was about nine or ten. We also had television, although I am unsure whether the BBC Television License is strictly a service.