On Monday 24 December 2007 02:45:54 pm Kerry Miller wrote:
My company is requiring us to encrypt the hard drive on all laptops.
We've already got some encryption software but it only works with Windows,
not anything set up to dual boot or anything running VMware. Do any of
you guys know of some kind of encryption software (open source or not)
that can handle a dual boot laptop with Windows XP on one partition and
Fedora on the other? He's already told me I need to get rid of my Linux
partition but I need it for network diagnostics, I'm hoping if I can find
an alternative he'll let me and the other network guy use a different
encryption package.
Be careful some of those windows encryptions will make it difficult if not
impossible to have a linux partition that will boot.
That said - if you can boot linux then this may be helpful. I actually went
the other way, i deleted windows when I encrypted my laptop disk!!
I have encrypted /home and swap. To deal with /tmp and /var/tmp leakage of
information I remount (mount --bind) these from the encrypted /home
partitition. Knowing all I do today, I would avoid ancrypting root
partition - it adds little additional security (some yes) but can be
problematic if you run into problems (ie cant boot).
Basically i use /etc/crypttab to encrypt swap but this did not work
correctly for me for /home so I hand scripted it (its trivial to do).
For some info see :
http://marc.info/?l=fedora-list&m=118391945718659&w=2
http://marc.info/?l=fedora-list&m=118384694918234&w=2
Cant speak for F8 but encrypted root on F7 will not work until mkinitd is
updated (see
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=124789 for
some discussion). I believe (k)ubuntu does this out of the box - however as I
said above I'd avoid encrypted root.
good luck.
gene