Thursday, February 12, 2009

Howto - Disk Wiper, delete private data securely before selling your pc

 

We really seem to live in an online world today and our pcs generally hold a lot of private information, in fact more than we probably realise. The scary thing is that when we get rid of a pc, do we bother to remove the data on the harddrive? If we do, do we use the normal operating system delete, clear it out the recycle bin and hope for the best? Or maybe we are more cautious and we format the disk. Well surprise surprise, the data is still there. Some free tools from the Internet can recover your personal information. This is even more serious for a business that handles sensitive information! So what can one do? Well I found a nifty tool called DBAN that you can write to a CD/DVD. It is a self contained boot disk and will securely delete your data from your disk. It does this by writing random data to the entire disk, you can select the number of times. It’s a great tool to ensure your privacy and that of your business.

Monday, February 2, 2009

Howto install Jira plugins using Jira on JBoss

I must say most of the documentation on Atlassian’s web site refers to the installation of plugins on the Jira standalone installation. So it took some time to determine exactly what to do with when trying to install a plugin with our installation that is running on JBoss. The process is as follows: Download the plugin jar, copy it to: atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.2/webapp/WEB-INF/lib/, this is your jira build directory. Build the war file by executing ./build.sh in the atlassian-jira-enterprise-3.13.2 directory. This will build a new war file. Copy this into your JBoss deploy folder e.g. jboss-4.2.3.GA/server/all/deploy/ and restart JBoss.  The new war will not lose your existing projects that were running with the previous war file.