Laptop Hard drive encryption: Was Re: Something for a friday evening

[David A. Bandel]

On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 5:22 PM, James McDonald
<james at jamesmcdonald.id.au> wrote:
> David A. Bandel wrote:
>>
>> My laptop drive is also encrypted for some of the same reasons.  Will
>> probably do this for all my personal systems in the future.
>>
>
> So how much of you laptop drive do you encrypt? Is it just /home/?

No.  /boot holds the kernel and modules (including the encryption
stuff), the rest of the hard drive (partition) is encrypted.  The swap
partition is also encrypted.

>
> Do you have to enter a password to access it or is it `just log on and it's
> available'?

When the system boots, the kernel comes up, and prompts for a
passphrase (not password -- although you could make it only a short
word if you wanted to), and if the correct passphrase is entered, the
drive is decrypted, mounted, and init runs.

All is accessible until the system powers down.

>
> I have been getting increasing nervous about having my work docs on an
> unencrypted laptop.

IIRC, this can now be done as part of a standard Debian install.  I'd
be surprised if other distros didn't offer it as well.

Ciao,

David A. Bandel
-- 
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