General :: Encrypting A Common Data Partition Between Distros?
Aug 6, 2010
On my laptop (Dell Studio 1745) w/500GB HD, I have a common data partition shared by openSUSE. Fedora, FreeBSD, and windoze 7 currently. I would like to encrypt this partition (/Common) and have it accessible from all distros either with a passphrase key in /root or on a flash key. I've been researching on the web and there seem to be several possibilities using eCryptfs, Luks, cryptosetup, or any of several methods.
My question is, what have people here used and how well did it work? Also, what was required for setup (I'll probably have to explain/teach it to my wife who is technology challenged-but I still love her anyway) and my daughter who's just getting into linux. I would like to be able to keep the entire directory on the hard drive but also have the ability to copy it to external USB device for transport.
I've got an external hard drive with one large data partition on it. I also have four computers to connect it to (individually, not at the same time). Three machines are running Slackware and one is running Ubuntu 9.10. I need to be able to just plug the drive into whichever machine, mount it (preferably to the same location each time) and not have to worry about user permissions and such. Do I just chmod 777 all the files and folders or is there a better method for different 'users' to access the same partition? And how about mounting to the same location each time?
Now the second part of my question I'm pretty sure I'm not able to do but just in case..... is there any way to encrypt the information safely and make it compatible with a Windows XP machine?
If this is correct [URL] I can expect that it will take more then 16 days to fill my 2TB partition from /dev/urandom. That's not workable for me. dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdxx has been running for 36 hours, and I need to finish setting up the filesystem. But I also need to make a "professional effort" at encrypting the partition. Ok, so I can try
Code: sudo /sbin/badblocks -c 10240 -s -w -t random -v /dev/sdxx So, what is "10240" doing there? Yes, I rtfm, "is the number of blocks which are tested at a time", but is that for the partition size? If so, then I would want to increase it to 204800 for a 2TB partition, right? If not, what should I do?
I want to encrypt Full partition instead of creating a file and encrypting it, and also want to move this disk to another server. do i need some files also (that hold keys) with my self on new server. i am using FC11.
I am running Ubuntu with root on one partition and /home on another. I am proposing adding another distro (probably openSUSE) with its root on a partition which is unused at present, and the same /home partition as Ubuntu. Will using the same /home partition for two distros work? I realise that I will have to use the same usernames and passwords for both.
I have installed php 5.3.6-4 on centOS 5.6. When i try to install some modules of php then it gives an error
php53-common-5.3.3-1.el5_6.1.i386 from updates has depsolving problems --> php53-common conflicts with php-common Error: php53-common conflicts with php-common
[code]....
I have reinstall it twice but each time i get same error.
I have Kubuntu 11.04 64-bit installed (software upgrade from 10.10) and I have a separate /home partition. I want to encrypt my /home partition (and perhaps the swap partition as well) but I don't want to have to reinstall Kubuntu. (Mostly because it was a software upgrade and I don't have an 11.04 disc.) I found a tutorial for Encryptfs via one of the stickies that mentions post-install migration, but it says that using Encryptfs on a separate /home partition is more complicated than if it were part of the root partition and that the CDs don't have any software to preserve and configure existing encrypted /home partitions. (Granted this tutorial is made for 9.04, so things may have changed.)
Also, this tutorial makes it sound like if you have your /home directory encrypted that the encrypted data is stored in a folder on the root partition. Is it done the same way if the /home directory is on its own partition? Because I don't think my root partition is large enough to have all of my /home data. (I purposely kept it small because the root partition doesn't seem to get very large.)
So I was wondering about the dilemma of how to encrypt the password file on a key card to unlock your harddrive without having to enter any password. I came to the conclusion that that the scripts could do this without storing any passwords in plane text them self. Have a few extra steps to the scripts that would:
1. Read the UUID of any disks coming in.
2. Attempt to use that ID to decrypt a password file stored in the initrd.
3. Use the decrypted password file to unlock the the keycard partition.
4. THEN use the password files on the keycard to decrypt the main partition and boot the system.
However, if somebody stole your key card and didn't know what the unencrypted information was, then it's harmless for them to have it anyway. And if they did know, you wouldn't be any better off with it being encrypted because they probably can gain access to your computer anyway; leaving them to just pop the key card in and automatically decrypt the drive.
I suppose encrypting the keycard would give you extra assurance that the information would be much harder to recover if you destroyed the key card in a hurry. So would this extra security step even be worth it?
I guess the most secure thing would be to only have a password and type it in every time... unless you are concerned about the aliens/government stealing that from your brain which would probably mean they wouldn't need your password anyway.
I would like to encrypt my swap partition ...During installation, I tried to select the "encrypt partition" choice, but it needed a passphrase.After installation, I tried to encrypt my partition ... I followed this article: The problem is that my swap partition always changes its path ...When I first booted the system, it was /dev/sda10, next it became /dev/sdc10, now it is /dev/sdb10. This is probably the reason why in fstab all entries are according to UUID.However, the swap partition is not fond of UUIDs ! I tried to mkswap /dev/<current swap partition> -L Swap, I received a UUID, puted it in /etc/crypttab ... it worked for the first time ... but the second time... did not.
I've created a /tmp partition on a server that I would like to encrypt in a fashion that doesn't require a password to be entered on boot because this server is in a remote data center. Storing the password on the server so that it can automatically boot would obviously defeat the purpose of encrypting in the first place. Skipping automounting is another option but I'd really like to avoid that because there are a number of other services that would have to be suspended until the /tmp partition is online.
I found this article designed for centos (HowTos/EncryptTmpSwapHome - CentOS Wiki) which seems perfect since it generates a key randomly on boot and that key is destroyed and regenerated on each successive boot. However, the script doesn't seem to work on openSUSE - it throws errors saying . /etc/init.d/functions doesn't exist, restorecon command not found, action command not found, etc. Is there an openSUSE-ish way to achieve promptless partition encryption?
I've been using Ubuntu 10.10 for just under a week. Recently, a partition called 'Data' has disappeared, and all my music and documents along with it. The folder is not to be seen in Places or on my desktop. My only way of finding it is to go to terminal. But when I try to open it there I get an error saying I don't have permission to read it. In Puppy Linux and SliTaz I can easily find the partition and read it. What should I do to bring it back in Ubuntu?
I was surprised not to find an existing thread on this anywhere, as I would expect this to be a common problem: I have the following partitions on my eee PC 100HE:
10GB Windows XP 5GB Linux Mint 8 5GB Ubuntu 9.10 NBR (awesome distro by the way!) 130GB Home partition shared by Linux Mint and Ubuntu NBR 2GB Swap partition shared by Linux Mint and Ubuntu NBR
I installed Ubuntu NBR after Mint. Immediately after install, the panel layout, menus and colour scheme were slightly messed up - presumeably because they had been "adopted" from the Mint settings in the home folder. I corrected them easily, but now I have the same problem in Mint. Is there any way I can get both distros to use the same /home folder, but different settings (i.e. the /home/username/. folders)? Can I get these settings folders put on a different partition for example?
And is this problem due only to the fact that these are 2 Ubuntu-based distros? Or will I have the same problem if/when I replace Mint with another distro, such as Fedora or Moblin?
Has anyone tried encrypting the boot partition to prevent the kernel from being modified. Iv tried following this but I'm running into issues when building. [URL] Im using the source from bzr checkout [URL] Last time I tried I screwed grub and it wouldnt boot.
Whenever I try to install or remove a program, I get the following error
Code: dpkg: warning: files list file for package `libavahi-common-data' missing, assuming package has no files currently installed.
dpkg: warning: files list file for package `libgtk2.0-common' missing, assuming package has no files currently installed.
dpkg: warning: files list file for package `libxres1' missing, assuming package has no files currently installed. (Reading database ... 55%dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting: files list file for package 'ubuntu-mono' is missing final newline E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)
On my netbook I want to have three linux distros: full desktop ubuntu, a quick loading web oriented netbook OS (maybe UNR or a couple others), and backtrack 4.
To save HD space, I was thinking about having like a 10GB partition for each OS, a 2GB swap partition to be shared, and a /home partition taking up the rest of the drive to be shared between all the OSes. Are there any potential complications here? Should I use a separate user and home folder for each distro or would it be ok to share the same home folder between all of them?
Well i have an 20GB HDD (/dev/sdb) formated with ext4 and has very important files on it .All of sudden something went wrong and the 20GB partition has been lost . Now how do i have to recover that partition and primarily recover those files . Gparted shows no partition on it but unpartitioned space .
I have a 10gb partition I use for data. The /home is there, and I mount any other data partitions (like /music stuff) onto /data. These other mounted partitions add up to something like 60gb of diskspace, but since they're just mounted on /data, I believe they only take up 4096 bytes per mount point.
Some time ago, I found that the /data parition was full. There was only 330mb of data in /home, so I was perplexed. I found a cache dir under .opera that reported itself as having 132TB (yes, that is terrabytes) of files. I thought deleting the offending directory was the answer, so I deleted that cache dir and every file or subdirectory in it, but the /data partition is still like 99% full. I am a wee bit confused.
This very full /data partition is my only jfs partition. The other mounted filesystems are either ext3 or ntfs. Is it possible that the journal of this filesystem is corrupted? Or is hidden somewhere on the /data parition, taking up a bunch of space? (I obviously don't know enough about filesystem to know whether or not this is a likely scenario.) Is it possible to zero out (or delete and re-create) the journal, if so? The only other thing I can think of is to move all the /home data off, delete the partition, then re-create it and move /home back. I will do that if need be, but I'd rather learn something from the experience, weird as it is.
Noobish question on multibooting multiple Linux distros. I have four of the current major Linux distributions. Each has been installed and run individually (no other Linux distribution installed) in a dual-boot configuration with Windoze. No problem.
What I want to do is install all four Linux distributions and multiboot them. Reading the internet it would seem this is a simple task with GRUB. The short version being - install a Linux distro with a separate /boot partition for GRUB and use GRUB to boot the other Linux distros from the GRUB boot menu.
So I installed one of the Linux distros with a separate partition for /boot. The distro installer installed GRUB in /boot and correctly setup a dual-boot configuration with Windoze. GRUB was installed to the MBR. Next I installed a second Linux distro in its own root partition and told the distros installer NOT to install GRUB to the MBR, but rather, to the boot sector of the root partion of the second Linux distro. Installation was uneventful (and I could access the second Linux partition from the first installed Linux distro, things looked ok). Then I added to following to the installed (MBR - /boot) GRUB's menu.lst:
Code: title lixux distro 2 root (hd0,7)
chainloader +1 After which I rebooted the system and the new entry for the second Linux distro now appears in the GRUB boot menu. I selected the second Linux distro from the boot menu and got the following GRUB error: Error 5 : Partition table invalid or corrupt [Code]....
I want to install Ubuntu side by side with Windows. I have a big NTFS partition that has a folder with the same name as my username (let's say "joe"). Inside "joe" I have my personal files. Outside "joe" but still in the partition, there is random stuff that doesn't really belong anywhere, or now useless programs that I had to install there because the main Windows partition ran out of space. If during the Ubuntu installer I choose to use that partition as /home and make a user called "joe", will everything work fine?
While attempting to install FC12, Anaconda took it upon itself to overwrite the partition on my backup disk. Now I need to figure out if there's a way to get at least some of my data back. If there's a better place for this question, please let me know and I will happily move it. Using Linux since 1993, other Unixoid systems since 1986. I bought this machine back in 2004 or so. It was a pretty decent machine back then, but it's showing its age now: 370Mb of RAM, 2 hard disks with 80Gb and 120Gb (I don't think the other specs are relevant, but just let me know if I'm wrong). In a fit of insanity, I decided to install Gentoo on it. Don't get me wrong: I love certain things about Gentoo. But the constant fiddling that's required, while it can be fun at first, gets old kinda quick.
So various and sundry things have been going wrong with it here and there (CD-ROM, sound card, etc ad infinitum), and, finally, it wouldn't even load X any more (almost certainly some final Gentoo update which broke something) and I said "screw it, I'll just put Fedora on it." This is what I use at work, and plus I have a good friend who has far more patience with admin stuff than I do and Fedora is what he knows. So, last night, I pick up an FC12 CD that I have lying around and decide to finally just reinstall the whole thing. I went so far as to buy myself a Passport USB drive, 319Gb, and have been backing up up all my stuff very regularly to that drive. I go through one final cycle of backing up and verifying before I start the reinstall.
So my drive is solid, and contains everything I could possibly need (and probably quite a bit of stuff I don't). After booting into FC12, I used Palimpsest to explore the partitions on the existing hard disks. Not sure which was which, I mounted the Passport, where I have cleverly saved a copy of my fstab. Using this, I can see which of my partitions were /boot, /, /home, etc. Most of my personal data has been put into separate partitions so that I could reinstall without blowing away the data. I hope that I can do that there, but, if I can't, no matter: I have a backup. I find some bits of empty space and delete a few of the partitions and recreate them, consolidating the empty space. Still confident in my backup, of course.
So I run Anaconda. Nothing happens. Eventually, I figure out that it won't run the graphical interface because I don't have enough memory. I can use the text version, no biggie. It gets to the part about the disks. I tell it which hard disk to install itself onto. For some reason I think it's going to pop up and ask me about the existing partitions and whether I want to keep them or rewrite them (maybe that's a previous version of Anaconda? or a different installer altogether, who can remember). It does not. It babbles something at me about LVM (which I've personally never really used before), and then promptly locks up. Obviously standard Fedora on a low-RAM machine like this is doomed to failure.
I poke around on the Internet, and I eventually stumble on the Fedora "spins" and select FC13/LXDE. Hopefully this will have better luck. Reboot with the new CD, take a look at my hard disks. It has completely overwritten the old partitions, replacing them with LVM partitions. But not a big deal: I have a backup. Take a look at the Passport. Its ext2 filesys has also been replaced with an LVM partition. Proceed to beat head against wall. So, obviously what happened is, since I (foolishly) had the backup drive mounted at the time I ran Anaconda, it assumed I wanted it to take over that drive as well, and just formatted everything it could lay hands on as LVM. It certainly never asked me my opinion on the matter.
But, fine, I shouldn't have had it mounted. The question is, what do I do now? My first, panicked instinct, was to just set the partition type back to 83 (I believe LVM is 8E), which I did (using cfdisk). That might have made it worse; I dunno. But I'm pretty sure I haven't written anything else to the disk since then. I've tried testdisk (nothing useful; although it can seemingly find the underlying deleted partition, it won't actually do anything with it), and a bevvy of Windows Linux recovery programs (Stellar Phoenix, DiskInternals, Raise, and R-Linux), all of which were completely useless except for R-Linux, which scanned the disk for eight hours and was still going when I had to interrupt it (I may come back to that one, but so far it doesn't look too promising).
My primary problem is that I can't make an image of the disk because this little Passport is the biggest hard drive in the house. I would certainly feel better if I could image everything off it and then play with the image. But, of course, it doesn't matter that very little of that 319Gb was actually being used: I still need 319Gb worth of space to make an image. I ordered another (larger) Passport, which should be here Wed. Once I have that I believe I can do something like so: Code: dd ifs=/dev/sdX ofs=/mnt/bigpassport/smallpassport.img bs=512 Right? Then I can muck about with that image in some amount of safety.
Of course, I also have the original hard drives, which are not so large. testdisk can identify the original partitions on those too, but, again, won't actually do anything with them. If I could find something that would image just the partitions I care about, I could probably save those as well, but I don't have any other external hard drives with 120Gb of space free. Can I somehow take the info that testdisk is giving me about those original partitions and use dd to get only that part of the image? Are there other recovery tools I haven't considered? I have a Windows (Win7) laptop, a Linux laptop (FC10, I think), although its power cord is flaky so it's not too reliable, a smaller Mac, a really old Windows box (XP on it, I think), and this formerly-Linux box, which I can only boot off CD's at this point. There's nothing on this disk worth the 500 bux that professional data recovery would charge me, but it's worth a day or two of my life to try to get at least some of it back.
A HP Netserver LP2000r, with original SCSI controller and HP NetRaid-2M controller, 3x 36GB Ultra3 HDD in RAID5, Debian (sarge/etch), has crashed after 992 days without reboot. From all that I can see, a hardware failure, most likely with the memory. The HP Diagnostic tools cannot find any problem, but everytime I boot into Knoppix, I get between 2minutes and 2 hours of runtime, and then either a kernel oops or just a complete and sudden halt.
Well, the box has earned its money. However, there is some data on the drives that I need to recover (yes, I have beaten myself up properly about not backing up that data, don't even go there !). There are three partitions: sda1 is /, sda2 is swap and sda3 is a LVM volume with 3 logical volumes on it. As far as I can tell, the hardware defect must have been creeping in and has made a total mess of the inodes in all these partitions.
After booting into Knoppix, I can restore the volumes using pvscan, vgscan, lvscan, vgcfgrestore and vgchange. If I try and mount them: mayhem. So I try and check them, using fsck.ext3. All sorts of interesting nonsense, such as a completely empty inode 11 (the first inode) and then obviously from there on all else is pointless. I tried using debugfs, but the information on what to do with it is somewhat spurious.
P.S.: Tomorrow I will go and get myself a 16GB Flash Drive and then hopefully I will be able to dump the partitions one by one onto that drive and transfer the images onto a different computer for analysis and data recovery.
had trouble viewing partition table using fdisk, now realised i just cudnt view the whole table from Rescue terminal, please remove this thread, i can't find how ))
If I have a partition like /dev/hd1 that is unencrypted and want it to be encrypted, but want to keep everything currently in that partition, how can I do that?
I wanted to migrate from ubuntu karmic to the latest ubuntu 10.10, but i already have a lots of data on my hard disk in home directory. i was thinking if it is possible to transfer all the data to one directory and make a separate partition of it , so tht when i install a fresh copy of ubuntu 10.10 on my system i need not format this new partition ,which contains al my data.is it possible tht this new partition will automatically get mounted on the new system without the need to execute commands from terminal every time i start my system. if there is any other alternative way for solving this problem i would follow tht too.the reason for my migration is that karmic is really troubling me a lot and so many applications including my sound device have failed to work and i am not able to rectify them..
From previous post I have a netbook from work that I have Debian Squeeze running on and did a full disk encryption (minus the minimal boot loader in /boot) in case it gets stolen. However, with a laptop/netbook it has a battery and I believe the encryption protocol (LUKS - correct me if I'm wrong) uses RAM to store the decrypt key. So if someone is quick they can dump RAM and analyze it until they get the key. Or even if the key is not stored there they could dump RAM which would have recent files cached unecrypted.
Is there an easy process of encrypting RAM while still using as RAM? What I mean by that is I know you could make a ramdisk sort of like how Live CDs do and encrypt that, but at best (that I know of) I can only mount it as swap space.
following problem. A friend phoned me in despair. Her Ubuntu didn't start any more - ASUS-Laptop switched on stops at a ramfs-prompt. I started Puppy-Linux from DVD-Drive. Worked fine. But puppy can't mount her /dev/sda1 partition either. At least you can see that the partition is still there. Fsck stops with an error. May be the initial problem is a sort of bad hardware by which bad bytes were written to the hard drive. Hard drive and/or memory could be replaced but not the data.
