[sdnog] How to work from home

[Philip Paeps]

On 2020-03-24 04:23:35 (+0800), manhal_muhamed at hotmail.com wrote:
>  my question is , for simple offices ,with no great infrastructure , 
> just an internet connection to their edge ,how can they work from home 
> ? Is there any free tools /ways  they can use,  what are the options, 
> with taking along the security concerns

This is a very interesting thread!  Thank you for starting it, Manhal.

I have worked from home (and cafés, and libraries, and hackerspaces, 
and park benches,...) for most of my life.  These are some of the higher 
level things that keep me sane:

- Don't stop talking to people
   - I have weekly conference calls with my teams.
   - Keep conference calls short.  The value of a call is inversely 
proportional to its duration.
   - Pick up the phone when an email discussion gets more than a few 
messages deep.

- Stay visible
   - Report on progress at least weekly.
   - If your work lives in revision control: push regularly, use private 
branches for work in progress.

- Take notes on everything
   - And share your notes regularly by email or revision control.
   - Few things are as annoying as sorting out misunderstandings 
remotely.

On a more technical / security level:

- Use bounce boxes
   - While you can run a DNS server on your laptop, it becomes annoying 
very quickly.
   - Set up a VPN / tunnel / whatever to a machine at the office and 
bounce through it.

- Use two-factor authentication everywhere
   - Seriously.
   - With everyone accessing your stuff remotely, the potential for 
replay goes up.
   - I recommend YubiKeys.  Unfortunately not very easy to get in Sudan.
   - TOTP will work too.  Just set it up already.

- Monitor access logs
   - Regularly run "last" on your bounce machine and double-check that 
the logs make sense.

Philip

-- 
Philip Paeps
Senior Reality Engineer
Alternative Enterprises
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sdnog.sd/pipermail/sdnog/attachments/20200327/babf95df/attachment.html>