Dear friends,
I wanted to provide an update with my experience on this (last week).
Recall that I had a few machines with separate /home partitions which needed to be
encrypted without erasing them and writing them from backup. I was not that concerned
about reinstalling because it takes me a few minutes to get going on Fedora using my own
generated LiveCD (which runs OpenBox).
From this forum, I learnt about luksipc. I proceeded to make, with Michael Schwendt's
help, a RPM. Then I stuck that to my LiveCD kickstart and got a new LiveCD generated.
I have four laptops: three were/are ext4 /home partitions but, as ill-luck would have it,
one was xfs,. For some reason, luksipc does not work on xfs (because xfs filesystems can
not be shrunk down, so I will address the xfs partition a bit later).
So, I put on my LiveCD, opened a terminal and went through the steps in:
https://johndoe31415.github.io/luksipc/
which is a detailed and thorough step-by-step documentation.
After I did this encryption on /home for all three machines (successfully), I then
(re-)installed Fedora 23 for each of them. Wow!
The fourth, however presented a major issue. Luksipc needs to shrink the partition, and
the shrinking tools that I know of (or could find) can not handle an xfs file system.
Actually, from what I read, it does not appear to be possible. So, one option was to
convert the filesystem to ext4 and then proceed as above. Reading around, I found a tool
to do that. This tool is fstransform and is available at
https://github.com/cosmos72/fstransform
Though strictly not needed, I rolled a RPM (my first without any help or errors!) and
created a new LiveCD with this new rpm on. Amazingly, it worked in converting the
filesystem from xfs to ext4. (I followed the instructions at that github site.) I then
encrypted this new ext4 filesystem using luksipc and went ahead and installed.
So, in summary, the exercise worked. I guess I could have not installed, but I was a bit
unclear about how to change grub using /etc/defaults/grub to bring in this new encrypted
partition. (I did not quite tell which fields to look at.)
I am considering submitting my luksipc and fstransform RPMs to Fedora. Perhaps, they
could, in the future, be merged with Anaconda to make in situ encryption and filesystem
transformation possible. Perhaps, with a few more scripts to automate the process.
I thought that this update might be helpful for future folk. Thanks again for all the
discussion and for pointing luksipc to me in the first place!
Best wishes,
Ranjan
____________________________________________________________
FREE 3D EARTH SCREENSAVER - Watch the Earth right on your desktop!
Check it out at
http://www.inbox.com/earth