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High praise for “Dodging the bullets, a disaster preparation guide for Joomla! sites”

Posted by vscribe on September 9, 2007

Hi all since I’m known to use the “shameless plug” segment on our podcast, I felt that this was worthy of publication.

The author of this review is Mr. Jon Toigo, one of the TOP Disaster Recovery people in the world. This is from his blog located at drukendata.com

Disaster Recovery for Joomla

dodging-bullets-ad.jpg Just read a book last night written by a fellow who goes by the handle “JoomlaJabber” in the world of open source content management systems. His real name is Tom Canavan and his book on disaster recovery planning and security for websites based on Joomla is outstanding. All of my sites (except this one) use Joomla and I continue to be impressed by this code base.Like me, Canavan has had his share of problems with script kiddies and others who hack exploits in Joomla on an ongoing basis. Making the base code fault tolerant and hacker proof is a major undertaking, but Canavan does a good job of setting out the basics of Joomla site protection and recovery.

I heartily recommend this book as a companion to your Joomla installation. Make your sys admin (assuming it isn’t you) read it from cover to cover.

———–Further, he had this to say in his next blog posting:

Further Thoughts on DR

It feels nice to have something nice to say every now and then. I can’t praise Canavan’s book, Avoiding the Bullets (see previous post) enough – for two reasons. One, because he hits home in my experience with open source CMS, Joomla; the other, he is doing what every sys admin and developer ought to do: when you build a web site, or a piece of application code, or a system, network or storage platform, you should always think about the dark side — what could happen and what you can build into what you are developing to prevent disasters or to expedite recovery from them.

Too often DR provisions are bolted on after the platform has been built. This is a painful and expensive and often inefficacious approach. It is better to build DR in than to bolt DR on.

One minor error in Canavan’s book is worth noting, not because it reflects anything wrong with his thinking, but because it perpetuates a misinterpretation that has been floating around for years. The error is with the attribution of meaning to the Chinese term for disaster (actually for crisis).

The incorrect interpretation, which I used to reference all the time until my error was pointed out to me, is that the two pictograms/ideograms that create the word “disaster” in Chinese mean, literally, ”DANGER + OPPORTUNITY.” This is wrong.

weiji.jpg

The two symbols mean DANGER + A POINT IN TIME. Here is a good explanation from an expert on the language.

I find the correct interpretation much more compelling than the DANGER + OPPORTUNITY interpretation, since it is how we react to a crisis that determines whether it is a momentary inconvenience or a full blown Disaster with a capital “D.”

Don’t worry, Tom. I made the same mistake in the intro to my first book on DR and the misinterpretation seems to have a long cultural history.

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I appreciate the praise and compliments for the book.

If you would like to purchase the book visit this link at Amazon.

Links of interest:

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