Advanced

I'm using the /home encryption feature on my 9.04 laptop

Story: Ubuntu 9.10 Home Encryption PerformanceTotal Replies: 9
Author Content
tracyanne

Sep 16, 2009
7:08 PM EDT 		It seems quite good to me.
azerthoth

Sep 17, 2009
12:44 AM EDT 		holy crud, being able to encrypt your /home ... what will the ubuntoids claim they have revolutionized next? *scoff*
caitlyn

Sep 17, 2009
2:13 AM EDT 		OK, this is hardly new to Linux but it *IS* new to have it working properly in Ubuntu. Considering the popularity of Ubuntu I guess this really is news.
Sander_Marechal

Sep 17, 2009
7:43 AM EDT 		I would never encrypt my entire /home directory. Encryption comes down to a simple choice: If something bad happens, do you prefer to loose access to your data or do you prefer other people gaining access? For most of my /home I prefer the latter. I do encrypt several separate parts of my filesystem selectively but not my entire /home.
gus3

Sep 17, 2009
8:00 AM EDT 		And I go the other way: I would prefer to encrypt separate users' home directories with separate keys. It's possible, I've seen it done, it can be tuned to work very well in a shared/corporate environment, but alas...
tracyanne

Sep 17, 2009
8:41 AM EDT 		gus, it's my home directory not the /home partition that is encrypted, sorry I made it appear otherwise.
tuxchick

Sep 17, 2009
10:03 AM EDT 		never mind, I can't delete this so pretend nothing is here.
tuxchick

Sep 17, 2009
10:23 AM EDT 		The missing piece in articles about encryption is what about the bigger picture? We hear all these horror stories about 'contractors' losing laptops that have the personal data of every human on the globe in them, and dangit they should have been using encryption. Actually they should have been using brains. But I digress.

There are all kinds of holes where our files leak out, like email attachments, USB sticks, and fileservers. What about backups, what's the best way to manage those? What if the user has a weak password, which is the norm? What if someone gets access to your machine while it is on? Encrypting files is easy, it's the larger strategy that doesn't seem to get addressed. Hmm, now that could be an article...
Steven_Rosenber

Sep 17, 2009
2:16 PM EDT 		In my test Debian Lenny install, I went for fully encrypted LVM. Once I get sufficiently motivated to move my files off the Ubuntu laptop (which needs a CMOS battery and could use a new hard drive ... or which needs to be replaced entirely ...) I'll start a longer Debian Lenny test.
azerthoth

Sep 17, 2009
2:25 PM EDT 		My laptop, the whole thing is encrypted sans 100 meg for /boot. The portable hard drive that I carry with it, 10 gig in FAT32 unencrypted, 240 gig ext3 encrypted. Desktop, thats a tricky one, ~200 gig encrypted that has to be manually mounted or a lot of things wont work, their configs and data are symlinked into the encrypted partition.

p.s. the encrypted laptop, that was done via an installer option.

Post a reply to this thread:

A free account is needed to post. Write your comment here first: your text is kept in this browser while you sign up or log in, and is waiting for you when you come back.

Your message:
|||||
10
Markdown: **bold**, *italic*, [text](https://link), - lists, > quotes, $x^2$ for math. Formatting help

Sign up and post (it is free)  or  Log in and post