On Thu, Nov 09, 2000 at 09:21:10AM -0800, W. Curtis Preston spake unto the 
multitudes:
> 
> Ugh.  What a mess this weird requirement is imposing on you.  What you 
> could do is suspend the tapes after a night's backups.  That way, the tapes 
> will not get appended to the next day.  Then you could relabel them.
> 
> The others are right. Relabeling is only minimal protection against a 
> hacker.  Someone who REALLY knew what they were doing could get past your 
> label.  But then they would encounter a multiplexed image from NetBackup 
> that they would need to decipher.  I'd like to see someone read a 
> multiplexed image from NetBackup w/o NetBackup.  Sure -- it's 
> possible.  NetBackup does it when they import tapes.  The chances of a 
> hacker having the knowledge to pull it off?  Pretty small, IMHO.  (If it's 
> that important, you could also encrypt the data going to the tape.)
> 

There is not anything wierd about it in this day-and-age. We have 33mm people's 
e-mail on our hard drives (http://inbox.excite.com), and we don't know if 
Johnny's into warez or not, and we don't want to. We have a business 
requirement to degauss the backups from this product (currently being backed up 
on a SONY petasite, so speed is less of an issue) upon return from off-site in 
order to avoid supoenas. If we degauss all tapes all the time as a rule, they 
can't say we destroyed evidence when theirs was destroyed as point-of-course. 
Sometimes the only winning move is not to play, and a case between the FBI and 
some guy who happens to have some mail through our service is such a time. And 
I _know_ the FBI has those sorts of hackers.

I also know we're not the only ISP by far who does this, or is thinking of 
doing this...
-- 
"Any man page that includes the words "USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. BEWARE OF DOG. 
SLIPPERY WHEN WET" means trouble" - Michael Lucas
Joshua Fielden, Senior Systems Administrator and Backups Team Lead
eXcite@Home, Inc. jfielden AT excitecorp DOT com 650-556-3316