Marseglia.org

Welcome to Marseglia.Org! I am Mike Marseglia from Rhode Island. I love this little state and (almost) everything in it, from Lincoln to Block Island. Although I work as a Security Analyst for VeriSign, I have many hobbies outside computers such as: Genealogy, History, Gardening, Cooking and Boy Scouts and Camp Yawgoog.

At VeriSign I support many different types of security technologies including Cisco PIX, Checkpoint and NetScreen, just to name a few. I monitor and support the health of these devices in our Security Operations Center.

I am deeply interested in genealogy and exploring my family's history. I know my Grandfather's family, Marseglia, comes from Italy and obtaining information has been been difficult. My Great Grandpa Vinchenzo Marseglia was a padrone, someone who helped others emigrate, and supposedly was a translator in World War I.

I am currently researching the families Andrews, Ambler, Marseglia, Ruzzano, Sprague, and Carlson.

You can read up on my family's history, maybe we're related!

At 11:48AM today, January 22nd, Amelia Rose was born!

She weighed 8lbs, 12oz and came out with a full head of dark hair.

Like her name sake she is a quiet and gentle baby. Even when taking her Vitamin K shot she did not utter a cry.

Momma, Dad and Amelia will be in the hospital all this week. Feel free to call the cell if you'd like to visit.

Check out the Gallery for pictures!

Should the government have instant access to every single phone call you and millions of other Americans have made in the last few years? That means access to the phone records of political opponents, news reporters, and potential whistle blowers. Calls to friends, family, associates, lovers. Calls to doctors, legal counsel, financial advisors.

It is not up to AT&T, Verizon or any other phone company to decide what the government gets to see, monitoring and intercepting the domestic and international calls of millions of Americans without legally issued orders violates our system of checks and balances.

You can help put a stop to this illegal spying right now.

I just did. It's easy! Add your name to the ACLU’s demand that the Federal Communications Commission and the state public utility commissions launch an immediate investigation. Just go here:

https://secure.aclu.org/site/SPageServer?pagename=DTT_FCC_spies_off_line

Your name will be submitted with the ACLU’s formal demands and will become part of the public record.

Act now, regulators need to hear that the public demands action.

Today we are getting our Christmas tree!

So a friend and I had an idea about doing secure backups to each other's home computers over the Cox network. We came up with the following qualifications:

1) Transmission between computers is secure.
2) Privacy maintained, one can not view contents of the other's backup.
3) Backups should be efficient and take minimal time to complete.

To meet these qualifications we devised the following plan.
1) Utilize OpenVPN to encrypt data traversing the Cox network.
2) Encrypt data using dm-mapper or cryptoloop on the local computer, before transmission over the network.
3) Utilize rdiff-backup, or similar technology, to transmit only differentials when a file changes, not the entire file.

VPN
We created a VPN using OpenVPN and used ip addresses 10.6.0.2 and 10.6.0.1.

Target Media
Bonus: the remote side uses LVM to create a volume which can be expanded to accomodate the backup should it overtake current storage allocation. This requires the use of a filesystem which can grow. The remote side offers an iSCSI target for the local computer to attach to. 10.6.0.1 offers target 10.6.0.2 logs in to target. The target is assigned device sdc.

Encryption
dm-crypt is used to create an encrypted device on the local computer. The local computer then formats this encrypted device with the ext3 filesystem. Ext3 is used for it's ability to grow in response to the backup's space requirements.

Backup
The first backup is peformed using a straight file copy. Subsequent backups are made using rdiff-backup which transmits only differentials.