Michael Gracie

Laptops are no place for tons of sensitive data records, but no matter. People will leave them lying around, and they will get stolen. Leaving laptops in parked cars has already led to big heists, and I think the folks doing the leaving need good whippings.

But, just when you think stupidity reigns supreme, someone one-ups. This time, its leaving laptops in the trunk of parked cars, booted up with bluetooth on, so thieves can find them with bluetooth phones.

Or is that just a late April Fools joke?

You’ve heard it numerous times (and more than once at Spamroll too) - a laptop full of personal data was just stolen. It is just plain ridiculous.

Laptops are hardly the place to store hundreds of thousands of sensitive records, and leaving said laptop in a parked car, on table in a crowded coffee shop, or on a pedestal in the middle of Penn Station, doesn’t help. Laptop theft is a growing trend. And all the locks and alarms and other security gadgets aren’t going to alleviate the biggest issue with laptop theft - the carelessness stupidity of the laptop owner.

what is it with laptops? Or should I?

I have to pick on our educational institutions for educating our computer science grads, and then losing their data. It is simply ridiculous. Then I read that Boeing has “lost” a laptop full of employee records.

Now I am asking myself, “what is it with UC Berkeley?” They “lost” confidential staff and student data, AND it was on a laptop!
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Its on the laptop, and unencrypted, and now it has been stolen.

In much the same flavor, I say keeping unencrypted data on a laptop is downright stupid. And as long as IT departments, including but not limited to senior management, allows their employees to carry extremely sensitive (and liability prone) data around in their backpacks, this will continue to be a ridiculous issue.

Some months ago, a laptop containing a ton of personal data on students was stolen from an office at UC Berkelely. At the time, I had to wonder what all that sensitive data was doing on a laptop to begin with, but hell, I am just a dummy anyway.

Now, that laptop has been recovered, although it seems the hard drive has been overwritten with a new operating system, and may have passed through several hands before it was finally tracked down. Of course, the data is gone, and forensics specialists admit there is little they can do to determine whether the data was ever accessed.
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The machine is a Dell Latitude C840 with the following general specs:

- Intel Pentium-M 2.2 GHz
- 1 Gb Ram
- 60 Gb 5400 rpm IBM/Hitachi hard drive - primary bay
- 80 Gb 5400 rpm Toshiba hard drive - modular bay
- Nvidia GeForce 440 Go 64mb graphics
- Dell Truemobile 1300 b/g wireless card

Now the primary bay is slated for Windows XP Pro SP2, and the modular bay is for the Fedora Core 3 install. Each has its own master boot record, and I can select the drive to boot from at BIOS.

The Linux is kernel 2.6.10 (and change). It is running the following very convenient module/services:

- NTFS - the primary bay drive mounts on boot in read-only mode

- Wireless - the Dell Truemobile is a Broadcom chip, so Linuxant’s Driverloader was required to get that puppy going. It is also running with WPA, using the wpa-supplicant add-on

- Database server is MySQL 4.1, including the Admin and Query Browser add-ons

- Printer is an HP Deskjet 5150

Note also that I have not messed with installing the aggregious Nvidia graphics drivers - the X does a damn good job on its own.

How It Was Done

Not too difficult, with some time. First, I pulled the primary drive from its bay, and inserted the “soon to be modular” drive in its place. Ran install, and ran user select so I could put my own database install on later. Everything was fine on first try. I then swapped the drives again, and inserted the drive bay module.

Booted to FC3, and ran the NTFS rpm. Edited fstab to mount on boot, and used the umask=0222 tag so users other than root could use the drive. Then did the driverloader installation. Added the wpa-supplicant, then dropped the supplicant config file into the driverloader directory, and renamed it to dldr_wpa_supplicant. This gets the WPA to load along with the driverloader, so you have WPA at the start.

What Works, What Doesn’t

Well, I haven’t found much that doesn’t work. Wireless fine. All drives operate as required. My external NTFS firewire drive even mounts automatically when I turn it on. IR, ok, although I don’t have much use for it. Again, video is fine without the Nvidia updates, although I don’t play games, so I don’t know if 3D works. I am having some issues with getting PHP to access MySQL, but I suspect that is user error. Other than those points, it is a great production machine that draws me away from Windows roughly 50% of the time.

The fstab and config files follow. If you would like to know anything else, just let me know.
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Want to give a bit of kudos to the Linux community, for making so many peoples lives a little better. I performed a nice clean install of FC3 (taken from fedora.redhat.com) on my Dell C840, and although I did a few unorthodox things with it (which I will explain in a moment), I am extremely happy with the way it stuck, and how it runs to this day. And this is despite having very high expectations for the platform from the start.

Nitty gritty after the jump.