Cleaning house (and securing it too)

Now that my monitor has come, it’s about time for me to back everything up onto my secondary hard drive and wipe and reinstall. I’m even wiping my SuSE install; I’m going to try Ubuntu on the desktop. However I’m downloading SuSE 9.3 right now, just in case ;) I hear it’s quite stunning.

With reinstalling comes the opportunity to do things right, the first time:

  • A separate partition for /home. Probably hdb will just be /home. That way I can have OSes on hda and just wipe that whenever needs be.
  • Less redundancy. I can install what I need the first time around, now that I know what it is that I need :P This also means keeping my Windows install super-slim, with just some games, Macromedia stuff, and not much else. I’ll boot back into Linux as much as possible.
  • Organization. I’ve kept the same methods of organizing /home since approximately 1998. I need to revamp my thinking to encompass the larger number of things I’m doing, their increased size, and my OS agnosticism.

My current thinking is that it will take about a full day and a half to get everything back and working properly again. I almost wish I’d've kept notes on some of the more arcane stuff I’ve had to do to make something-or-another work.

The other half of cleaning house is changing my old passwords. I think my password right now is very secure; my big problem is that I use it on too many sites. I need to come up with a logical system for generating venue-specific passwords that is not immediately obvious to any would-be h4×0rs. Maybe I’ll post my old password when I’m all done :P

Dewdles by Sam