Dead Man Switch

[Arbadacarba]

Has anyone considered a way to create a dead man switch for shares in unraid?

 

I have a share that is relevant to my work, but if I were to vanish, it should be deleted but my wife, who I presume would be in posession of my homelab, would not know how.

 

Has anyone come up with a tool, or script to accomplish this?

 

I don't need my drives encrypted because everyone needs access to the shares so long as I'm here, and most of the shares in the event that I'm not... Just not the one share. Security is using best practices and is fine... My only concern is after my death. If I lose the files before that I would be greatly inconvenienced but I would be able to recover them from backups that are with other users.

 

Ideally the reset would be something I do regularly, like log into the UI using my account?

 

I've tried searching and failed to come up with anything.

 

Thanks as always,

 

This community is awesome

 

Arbadacarba

[JonathanM]

Script that checks for the existence of a specifically named file. If that file does not exist, create it. If it does exist, rm -rf. Every time the script runs you need to delete the file.

[MrGrey]

9 hours ago, Arbadacarba said:

Ideally the reset would be something I do regularly, like log into the UI using my account?

And if you forget, or fall and end up in the hospital for a day or two?

 

Come on... Make stuff nice for your family. They won't give a crap about your "ghosts" when you're gone.

 

I hope that wasn't too harsh. I meant it in the most thoughtful way.

 

MrGrey.

 

[Michael_P]

Encrypted drive in unassigned devices, remove the key after mounting, and a script to reboot the server akin to what @JonathanM suggested. No file recovery, and no chance that rm gets interrupted. And the bonus that if you're indisposed but not dead, you can just remount the encrypted drive and carry on with your spy shit.

[Arbadacarba]

9 hours ago, MrGrey said:

And if you forget, or fall and end up in the hospital for a day or two?

 

Come on... Make stuff nice for your family. They won't give a crap about your "ghosts" when you're gone.

 

I hope that wasn't too harsh. I meant it in the most thoughtful way.

 

MrGrey.

 

I understand your implication, but I don't understand the "Make stuff nice for your family" bit.

 

Can no-one else see a legitimate reason to have such a system in place?

[Arbadacarba]

I'm a medical systems admin... I work very hard not to bring work home with me, but I'm the guy that gets handed things that are truly f'd up. There's not supposed to be anything on the machines I get handed... But there is ALWAYS something somewhere.

 

I have a system that backs up the drive onto a Backup Share that is part of my array so that it is protected by parity, where I can then clone them and or boot a VM directly from the image... And I delete them when they are no longer relevant.

 

I do want to keep the share on the array if I can.

 

I also do data recovery and of Ransomware'd systems and occasionally I do Negotiation for recovery... The images I have of those drives are moot if I'm gone and I don't want them there for someone to accidently fire them up in the wrong environment.

 

Kill event:

Either Delete the contents of the share or maybe encrypt the contents of the share... I am leaning toward delete because then the system would get the space back. But if it could Encrypt the data then I could get it back if I wanted it... And if I wanted to get really fancy it could be encrypted after a month and Deleted after two months.

 

Trigger:

Ideally it would be very passive... with a fairly long delay... Say a month or even two would be fine. (if I'm out of commission for more than a month chances are the stuff is no longer relevant anyway)

 

I guess I could do it with a simple daily script that checks the trigger and then runs based on the age of the trigger... I just don't know what to use for the trigger?

 

Would it make sense to find a file that is changed by the Admin Login on the gui? I am logged into the gui constantly... But I guess I don't log in every day... IT's usually just already there.

 

Arbadacarba

 

[Michael_P]

Be a lot easier if you just kept all that stuff on an encrypted drive outside of the array

[Mainfrezzer]

Mhmm. Alternatively I could see a solution via virtual hard disks. You could create individual virtual hard disks, or just one giant one that lives on that share. You could mount it on a machine you usually work on and encrypt it and then use that virtual encrypted disk to save the disk images on. All you would have left on that share would be a virtual encrypted hard disk or multiple.

 

 

Otherwise checking the bash history file for events would be an option, trigger the removal after a certain amount of inactivity. Logging events in syslog would work as well I reckon.

 

 

 

 

I just remembered something.

 

Its absolutely not meant for this but, you could use the docker container psitransfer. It's basically meant as file sharing container but it has a feature of automatic file deletion after a certain time. Using it locally to upload the images on that share would work in a way to dispose of the files after a given time.

Edited July 18 by Mainfrezzer