| < February 2009 | Matthew Loar > Blog | April 2009 > |
Methods of transferring funds between banks:
ACH: Takes two to three bank business days.
Wire transfer: Possibly same-day. Both the sending and receiving bank
are likely to charge you an obscene fee.
SneakerWire: Withdraw cash from ATM, walk to teller window.
Instantaneous and free if you do it right.
Methods of fraud prevention:
Rational: When suspicious transactions occur, call the customer and ask
if they are authorized.
Reality: Just start declining transactions at random. Wait for
customer to call from their home phone and deal with your automated phone
system.
In theory, credit unions are supposed to be less obnoxious, as all the depositors have an ownership interest. In reality, the only credit union I've ever been a member of will charge you a dollar "Foreign ATM Fee" if you withdraw cash at any ATM outside their extensive network covering both Champaign and Urbana.
Considering what interest rates are like these days, I just wish my mattress was
FDIC-insured.
Recently I had vos dump start sending the contents of a directory before all of its ancestor directories had been sent. I suppose that a sane ordering of the dump was too much to hope for. This release of afsbak changes tarvol to write orphaned entries into a tempfile. Then once the entire dump has been read, the orphan file is processed to see if ancestors have been found. This repeats until the orphans are eliminated or the orphan file stops shrinking.
This release also adds a new utility called aestar. This is my solution to the problem of how to make an encrypted, rsync-friendly backup of the BackupPC pool. Duplicity won't work because it does not support hard links. Rsyncrypto uses a dubious decision function for resetting the IV in CBC. What aestar does is read a tar file and encrypt the data for each file separately. Thus the size of the change when using CBC is limited to the size of the changed file, not the entire tarball. This utility requires the aespipe utility available in Debian for now; in the future I may rewrite it against a crypto library for better performance.
You can find it on the afsbak page.
This release corrects a couple of problems with the first version of afsbak. Firstly it removes the -omitdirs argument to vos dump. I hadn't realized that only looks at the mtime and ctime on the directory, so it will miss updates to existing files. Secondly I now filter what is written to stderr, since BackupPC doesn't like things it doesn't recognize being written to stderr.
You can find it at the afsbak page.
| < February 2009 | Matthew Loar > Blog | April 2009 > |