Title: 3. Selecting a Basic Forensic Workstation
Course: IN 2005 Digital Forensics > Section: Module 3: Chapter 3 - Planning for Contingencies

Selecting a Basic Forensic Workstation

Workstations should be selected according to your budget and need.  Their use also depends on the tasks you have to do.

Selecting Workstations for Private and Corporate Labs

This process is usually easier than for police labs since you deal with a more homogenous environment where you know exactly what kind of hardware and software platform are being used so you can plan your lab accordingly.

Stocking Hardware Peripherals

1. Other items you should have in your lab besides workstations and software, including:
  - IDE cables
  - Ribbon cables for floppy disks
  - SCSI cards, preferably ultra-wide
  - Graphics cards, both PCI and AGP types
  - Power cords
  - Hard disk drives
  - At least two 2.5-inch Notebook IDE hard drives to standard IDE/ATA or SATA adapter
  - Computer hand tools

Maintaining Operating Systems and Software Inventories

1. A list of operating systems and application software to keep licensed copies of in a forensics lab, including:
  - Microsoft Office 2007, XP, 2003, 2000, 97, and 95
  - Quicken
  - Programming languages
  - Specialized viewers
  - Corel Office Suite
  - StarOffice/OpenOffice
  - Peachtree accounting applications

Using a Disaster Recovery Plan

1. A good disaster recovery plan that includes:
  - Recovering from catastrophic situations
  - Severe virus infection
  - Workstation reconfigurations
  - Backup policies and tools for single disks and RAID servers
  - Configuration management tools to keep track of software updates

Planning for Equipment Updates

1. Risk management involves determining how much risk is acceptable for any process or operation.
2. Identify equipment you depend on so it can be periodically replaced.
3. Remember that computing equipment is meant to last 18 to 36 months under normal conditions, so you should schedule upgrades accordingly.