I recently installed Fedora 13 on a dual boot system. This time, however, I opted to have my /home in Fedora encrypted. Anaconda gave this option, I selected it and it asked for a password. Now when I boot into F13, the boot process asks for the password before continuing. So far so good.
However, when boot in to the other OS (Debian), I can mount Fedora's /home partition without any problems and without any password. All files are visible there. What am I missing that F13's /home is not seen as encrypted from another OS?
Thanks.
On 12/07/10 08:35 PM, H.S. wrote:
I recently installed Fedora 13 on a dual boot system. This time, however, I opted to have my /home in Fedora encrypted. Anaconda gave this option, I selected it and it asked for a password. Now when I boot into F13, the boot process asks for the password before continuing. So far so good.
However, when boot in to the other OS (Debian), I can mount Fedora's /home partition without any problems and without any password. All files are visible there. What am I missing that F13's /home is not seen as encrypted from another OS?
Thanks.
It surely was a "doh!" question! While writing down all the UUIDs and mapper devices, I messed up the mounting of older Fedora installation (F9) and the newer one (F13). I was looking at F9's home while mounted on a mountpoint meant for the newer one. Fixed the mount point and now I get the following error when I try to mount F13's encrypted /home partition from my other Linux OS: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/mapper/vg1-lv9, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so
Now I am looking for how to specify the encrypted partition in Debian's fstab so that I can mount it from within Debian.
Regards.
On 07/12/2010 09:12 PM, H.S. wrote:
Now I am looking for how to specify the encrypted partition in Debian's fstab so that I can mount it from within Debian.
You will need to setup /etc/crypttab in your Debian installation and you will still need to input your passphrase upon mount (well, before mount, during cryptsetup luksOpen). If you do not want to use a passphrase then you will need to create a luks key and add it to your encrypted partition. Then you should be able to use the key to mount without being prompted. Defeats the purpose of needing external authentication though unless you have the key on a USB drive or something else that is protected.
On 12/07/10 10:19 PM, Michael Cronenworth wrote:
On 07/12/2010 09:12 PM, H.S. wrote:
Now I am looking for how to specify the encrypted partition in Debian's fstab so that I can mount it from within Debian.
You will need to setup /etc/crypttab in your Debian installation and you will still need to input your passphrase upon mount (well, before mount,
Just did this. Installed cryptsetup package. Created the entry in /etc/cryptab: crypthomefedora UUID=<uuid here> none luks
Created the relevant line in /etc/fstab: /dev/mapper/crypthomefedora /media/homefedora ext4 defaults 1 2
Now when I boot into Debian, it asks for the password. I enter it and it continues to boot. I am able to read F13's home mounted on /media/homefedora when I am in Debian.
during cryptsetup luksOpen). If you do not want to use a passphrase then you will need to create a luks key and add it to your encrypted partition. Then you should be able to use the key to mount without being prompted. Defeats the purpose of needing external authentication though unless you have the key on a USB drive or something else that is protected.
I have started with encrypted partitions only yesterday when I installed F13. So this encrypted hard disk stuff is all new to me. I appreciate your comments. I will look into using a USB flash memory to store my keys. I agree regarding the disadvantage of having the keys on the hard disk itself though.
Thanks, sincerely.
H.S. wrote:
On 12/07/10 10:19 PM, Michael Cronenworth wrote:
On 07/12/2010 09:12 PM, H.S. wrote:
Now I am looking for how to specify the encrypted partition in Debian's fstab so that I can mount it from within Debian.
You will need to setup /etc/crypttab in your Debian installation and you will still need to input your passphrase upon mount (well, before mount,
Just did this. Installed cryptsetup package. Created the entry in /etc/cryptab: crypthomefedora UUID=<uuid here> none luks
Created the relevant line in /etc/fstab: /dev/mapper/crypthomefedora /media/homefedora ext4 defaults 1 2
Now when I boot into Debian, it asks for the password. I enter it and it continues to boot. I am able to read F13's home mounted on /media/homefedora when I am in Debian.
during cryptsetup luksOpen). If you do not want to use a passphrase then you will need to create a luks key and add it to your encrypted partition. Then you should be able to use the key to mount without being prompted. Defeats the purpose of needing external authentication though unless you have the key on a USB drive or something else that is protected.
I have started with encrypted partitions only yesterday when I installed F13. So this encrypted hard disk stuff is all new to me. I appreciate your comments. I will look into using a USB flash memory to store my keys. I agree regarding the disadvantage of having the keys on the hard disk itself though.
So far, my only issue has been that the system doesn't want to boot without the password, not good for a server when the protected filesystem isn't needed to run (such as source or docs, contact info, etc). I attempted to "solve" this by using "noauto,user" so I could hand mount it, or putting it into automount, neither of which worked properly with fc11 where I tried it first.
On 14/07/10 05:18 PM, Bill Davidsen wrote:
So far, my only issue has been that the system doesn't want to boot without the password, not good for a server when the protected filesystem isn't needed to run (such as source or docs, contact info, etc). I attempted to "solve" this by using "noauto,user" so I could hand mount it, or putting it into automount, neither of which worked properly with fc11 where I tried it first.
Yes, exact my views as well. For now I see a laptop as the best place to use this tool, not a server. In my case, I have a server in which I have set the BIOS power option to be what it was before a power failure. That won't work if I have an encrypted partition and I am not around when a power failure occurs (this is at my home, no UPS).
Doesn't mount or fstab help in this in some way in the sense that the password is asked only when the filesystem is mounted? Then the filesystem can be made to not mount on boot (while having a separate partition for private data). Perhaps it is work under progress, or perhaps it can be done and I just don't know about it yet (I have just started to learn and use this tool).