Entering edit mode
7.8 years ago
Ronald Rodriguez
▴
20
I have been looking for electronic laboratory notebooks like wikis but locally. I was quite attracted to the Doku Wiki, but I am concerned of the security of my Mac when installing it locally since I have to activate the Apache software and make my computer a server. Does anyone have any suggestions of options for this?
Thank You
As there is no such thing as perfect security, the amount of security your system needs is a balance between what possible attacks you might encounter, and whether it's worth spending time/money to protect yourself from such attacks. We call this the threat model and it's usually the first step in the process of assessing your system's or network's security requirements.
Apache (and other, arguably safer webserver software) is designed to provide enough security out of the box to protect severs from targeted attacks on fairly popular websites such as biostars.org. Your electronic notebook, however, will not have anything like the amount of risk that Biostars has - and some might even say running Apache with SSL on OSX is security over-kill. Why would you possibly need so much security?
So i'm sort of joking around when i say all that, but i'm trying to make a point that when choosing a personal digital lab-book solution, probably your last concern should be security - and this is coming from someone who is obsessed with security. Yes security is important. Yes you should try to be secure where you can. But no, your personal work-blog is not such a big target that you need to consider the implications of your attack-surface when installing new software. If you are really worried about legitimate threats to your security, start by uninstalling your browser. You won't get as much done, but damn you'll be safe.
You can only allow connections from localhost to Apache. That should address your security concerns.