It depends what you want to do with it. If it’s just for storing files/backups then encrypt them before uploading and make sure the key never goes anywhere near the VPS. If it’s for serving up something like a simple website, you probably care more about data integrity than exfiltration, so make sure you have the security, including selinux or equivalent, locked down, and regularly run integrity checks. If it’s for running something interactive, or where data will be generated or downloaded to the machine, you’re out of luck, there’s no even theoretical way of securing that against an adversary with that much access.

It’s a non-starter for me because I sync my notes, and sometimes a subset of my notes, to multiple devices and multiple programs. For instance, I might use Obsidian, Vim and tasks.md to access the same repository, with all the documents synced between my desktop and server, and a subset synced to my phone. I also have various scripts to capture data from other sources and write it out as markdown files. Trying to sync all of this to a database that is then further synced around seems overly complicated to say the least, and would basically just be using Trillium as a file store, which I’ve already got.

I’ve also be burnt by various export/import systems either losing information or storing it in a incompatible way.

Thank you!

If you could, I’d appreciate HackADay. I’ve found a community for it on lemmy.ml, but it only seems to have one post from a year ago.

It’s been years since I had to admin Windows servers, but I was quite impressed with the number of MS products where the install and configuration tools would output the Powershell commands to carry out the changes you’d asked for. It made it quite a lot easier to automate. I’d love to see that paradigm catch on more widely, with the GUI and CLI having the same functionality and the GUI giving you the commands to run.

I like it, this is clearly very enterprisey and solution focused, but I would like to suggest a couple of amendments if I may?

• Namespaces We should make full use of namespaces. Make the structural tags be in a language specific namespace (to be referenced in every function spec, obviously) but change the in an out params to use the parameter name as the tag, namespaced to the function they’re for, with a type attribute.

• In memory message queues Have all function invocations be marshaled as xml documents posted to an in memory message queue. Said documents should use a schema that validates the structure and a function specific schema to validate the types of arguments being passed. Namespace everything.

I reckon we could power a medium sided country if we could generate energy from the programmers despair.

I’ve found HSBC to be ok using Firefox on Linux. I don’t know if they have integrations with any accounting software, but the web access works well, and you can export your transactions for processing locally.

ETA: I’ve run small business accounting on Gnucash, I found the learning curve a bit steep, but once you ‘get it’ it’s handy.

Sorry for the slow reply, life occurred.

I think I understand where you’re coming from with the desired to be productive and not reinstall. I think I’ve been there too! One thing that I can suggest, if you do have the time, is to learn a system like Ansible and use it to setup and configure your machine. The discipline of keeping all of the config as source rather than making ad-hoc changes reduces the chance of thinking you’ll make just one little change and breaking something, and, if something does go wrong, you can get back to your working configuration quickly.

Bearing in mind that there really isn’t anything you can do to stop yourself if you’re really determined to not lose the data, because if you can read it at any time you can back it up, the closest you are likely to come is something like creating new key with GPG then using the TPM to wrap your secret key and deleting the original. That way the key is only usable on that specific machine. Then use the key-pair to encrypt your ‘guard’ files. You can still decrypt them because you have the wrapped secret keys and you’re on the same machine, but if you wipe the drive and lose those keys the data is gone. The TPM wrapping prevents you from taking the keys to a different machine to decrypt your data.

There’s an article with some examples here,

Having said all of that, this still doesn’t help if you just clone the disk as all of the data, including the wrapped key and the encrypted files will be cloned. The one difference there is that the serial number of the hard drive will be different. Maybe you could use that, combined with a passphrase as the passphrase for your GPG key, but we’re getting into pretty esoteric territory here. So you could generate a secret key with a command like:

( lsblk -dno SERIAL /dev/sdb ; zenity --title "Enter decrypt password" --password) | sha1sum | cut -c1-40

Where /dev/sdb is the device your root partition is on. zenity is a handy utility for displaying dialogs, there are others available. In this use it just prompts for a passsword. We then concatenate the drive serial number from lsblk with the password you entered and hash the result. The hashing is really only a convenient way to mix the two without worrying about the newline lsblk spits out. Don’t record the result of this command, but use it to set the passphrase on your new GPG key. Wrapping the secret key in the manner the article above suggests is a nice extra step to make it harder to move the drive to another machine or mess around in that sort of way, but not strictly necessary as that wasn’t in the scope of your original question.

Now you can encrypt your file with: gpg -e -r <your key name> <your file>'. That will produce an encrypted version of <your file>called<your file>.gpg. To decrypt the file you can get gpg` to use the hashing command from above to get the passphrase with something like:

gpg -d --pinentry-mode=loopback --batch --passphrase-fd 3 <your file>.gpg 3< <( ( lsblk -dno SERIAL /dev/sdb ; zenity --title "Enter decrypt password" --password) | sha1sum | cut -c1-40 )

Once you’ve tested that you can decrypt the file successfully you can remove the original, plaintext, file. Your data is now encrypted with a key that is secured with a passphrase made of a string you know and the serial number of your disk and optionally wrapped with a key from the TPM that is tied to your physical machine. If you change the disk or the machine the data is irretrievable (ignoring the caveats discussed above). I think that’s about as close to your original goal as you can get. It’s rough around the edges, and I’m not sure I’d trust my data to it, but I believe it’ll work. If you do something like this, please test it thoroughly, I can’t guarantee it!

This seems like a very complicated way to achieve your goal! It sounds like sitting yourself down and giving you a stern talking to might be a beter aporoach.

Having said that, if you have these very important files that you don’t want to lose, please make sure they’re backed up somewhere off of your machine. Storage fails, and it’s a horrible feeling losing something important. Unfortunately doing so would defeat the approach you’re thinking of.

This might be a case of needing to reframe the question to get to the cause of the issue, and then solve that. So, why do you want to make it hard to reinstall your machine? Is it the amount of time you spend on it, the chance of screwing it up, needing it working, has it become a compulsion or something else? Maybe if we can get to the root of the issue we can find a solution.

With regard to TPM, it’s basically just a key store, so you can use it fir anything really, althought it’s normally used by generating a TPM key and using it to encrypt the key that’s actually used to encrypt your data, storing the encrypted key with the OS. Just reinstalling won’t wipe the TPM, but unless you made an effort to save the encrypted key it’ll be gone. Given your problem statement above it just adds to the data you’d need to save, which isn’t helpful.

Ok, I’m still not clear on exactly what you’re trying to achieve as I can’t quite see the connection between somehow preventing certain files being duplicated when cloning the disk and preventing yourself from reinstalling the system.

Bear in mind that reinstalling the system would replace all of the OS, so there’s no way to leave counter-measures there, and the disk itself can’t do anything to your data, even if it could detect a clone operation.

If what you’re trying to protect against is someone who knows everything you do accessing your data, you could look to use TPM to store the encryption key for your FDE. That way you don’t know the password, it’s stored encrypted with a secret key that is, in turn, stored and protected by your CPU. That way a disk clone couldn’t be used on any hardware except your specific machine.

Nothing can prevent a disk clone cloning the data, and there’s no way to make something happen when a disk is cloned as you’re not in control of the process.

If you wish to mask the existence of the files, use either full disk encryption, in which case cloning the disk doesn’t reveal the existence of the files without the decrypt password, or use a file based encrypted partition such as veracrypt in which case the cloner would just see a single encrypted blob rather than your file names.

Ultimately encrypting the files with gpg means they have already effectively ‘destroyed or corrupted’ themselves when cloned. If you don’t want to reveal the filenames, just call them something else.

If you could be a bit more specific about your threat model people may have better ideas to help.

It sounds like you’re actually more concerned about the data in the files not being able to ‘pop up’ elsewhere, rather than the files themselves. In thus case I’d suggest simply encrypting them, probably using gpg. That’ll let you set a password that is distinct from the one used for sudo or similar.

You should also be using full disk encryption to reduce the risk of a temporary file being exposed, or even overwritten sectors/pages being available to an attacker.

Putting a simple preseed file on a debian install image is probably going to be your best bet. Assuming you can run a VM on your current machine it shouldn’t be too difficult to test it until you’re happy with it.

I was filing that under ‘mystical fluff’, but it certainly shapes the stories and how they were told.

I don’t know about the shrooms, my reading of the old testament made me think it started with some old guy trying to stop his nomadic desert tribe dying of anything too stupid by telling camp fire stories with some sort of message. The whole ‘god will make the ground open up to swallow you and your family if you screw up’ is a desperate attempt to scare them into not doing stupid things like slaughtering too many of their livestock at once, or eating shellfish whilst wandering around in a desert. The stories get retold, changed and embellished over generations before being written down, and you end up with the weird mess of basic survival tips, animal husbandry, heroic stories and mystic fluff that is the OT.

The new testament is just the story of a fairly chill guy, with a slight messianic complex, wandering around with his mates and suggesting people be nice to each other, put through a similar transformation.

It’s going to be a balance between your time getting an automated approach to work and the cost/effort of getting a monitor. Getting preseed working can be a bit fiddly, but it does mean you’ve learnt a new skill, getting a monitor sounds like it’ll be a pain, and you might only need it once.

Yes, that’ll work too, it does involve adding the disk to your machine temporarily though, so just be carefully which disk you format to do it. Please don’t ask why I say that, it brings back painful memories…

While I agree with most people here that finding a keyboard and screen would be the easiest option, you do have a couple of other options:

• Use a preseed file A preseed lets the installer run completely automatically, without user intervention. Get it to install a basic system with SSH and take it from there. You’ll want to test the install in a VM, where you can see what’s going on before letting it run on the real server. More information here: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed

• Boot from a live image with SSH Take a look at https://wiki.debian.org/LiveCD in particular ‘Debian Live’. It looks like ssh is included, but you’d want to check the service comes up on boot. You can then SSH to the machine and install to the harddrive that way. Again, test on a VM until you know you have the image working, and know how to run the install, then write it to a USB key and boot the tsrget server from that.

This all assumes the target server has USB or CD at the top of its boot order. If it doesn’t you’ll have to change that first, either with a keyboard and screen, or via a remote management interface sych as IPMI.

I haven’t seen any breakage, although you may find documentation assumes SystemD. Debian maintains init freedom, and support for sysVinit was improved in Bullseye, so it’s not being forgotten about.

If you don’t fancy going that route, there are Debian forks that are designed to be SystemD free such as Devuan or MX linux, which defaults to sysVinit. I’ve not tried either, but they seem well regarded, and I’m sure there are others too.

Debian works fine with SysV init currently, there’s even a page on their wiki on setting it up: https://wiki.debian.org/Init#Changing_the_init_system_-_at_installation_time

Source: have been happily using Sysv init on Debian for years. Working on SystemD servers feels incredibly painful in comparison.