Gallery security
Posted: Sun Sep 12, 2010 11:12 pm
You may not have had access the Gallery for half an hour as it was undergoing a security update.
The update is now complete; so please tell me if you have any problems.
The Gallery is backed up every day to jowett.org from jowett.net which are with different hosting companies.
I have done a manual restore to jowett.org from the back-up. This was so I could test an error removal program on the database without doing it on the live database. This worked and was then applied to the live (jowett.net) database. This error has been on the Gallery for a few months and had some experts scratching their heads. It only affected the Gallery administrator.
This manual restore is a fully operational copy of the Gallery and could be made live should Jowett.net go down. The copy and restore was not quite as easy as you might think and took some tweaking due to different software versions and directory structures. The back-up does not update the warm standby so as to protect the warm standby from replication of a problem on the live system. Some data could be lost in a worst case scenario.
The ideal system is one where all versions of data are available for restore (you just need to decide which one you want to restore); but that is often not easy if there is a complex corruption. However, such a system uses a lot of storage space. You may delete an item(document or image) and this will remove it from the store. Comments and descriptions in the database might be lost or incorrect editing done. They might be recovered from a previous back-up; but currently the daily back-up updates the previous back-up. Thus you have to be quick to stop that overwrite. However, the warm standby is not updated so recovery might be possible by copying docs or images and such text from the jowett.org Gallery back into the Jowett.net Gallery. I hope we never have to do it.
We can and should apply a different scheme to legacy docs and data which should be well protected from deletion.
The update is now complete; so please tell me if you have any problems.
The Gallery is backed up every day to jowett.org from jowett.net which are with different hosting companies.
I have done a manual restore to jowett.org from the back-up. This was so I could test an error removal program on the database without doing it on the live database. This worked and was then applied to the live (jowett.net) database. This error has been on the Gallery for a few months and had some experts scratching their heads. It only affected the Gallery administrator.
This manual restore is a fully operational copy of the Gallery and could be made live should Jowett.net go down. The copy and restore was not quite as easy as you might think and took some tweaking due to different software versions and directory structures. The back-up does not update the warm standby so as to protect the warm standby from replication of a problem on the live system. Some data could be lost in a worst case scenario.
The ideal system is one where all versions of data are available for restore (you just need to decide which one you want to restore); but that is often not easy if there is a complex corruption. However, such a system uses a lot of storage space. You may delete an item(document or image) and this will remove it from the store. Comments and descriptions in the database might be lost or incorrect editing done. They might be recovered from a previous back-up; but currently the daily back-up updates the previous back-up. Thus you have to be quick to stop that overwrite. However, the warm standby is not updated so recovery might be possible by copying docs or images and such text from the jowett.org Gallery back into the Jowett.net Gallery. I hope we never have to do it.
We can and should apply a different scheme to legacy docs and data which should be well protected from deletion.