On Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 09:47:44AM -0000, DSA - JCR wrote: > On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 05:31:23PM -0000, DSA - JCR wrote: > >> Hi all > >> > >> FreeBSD 6.2 > >> > >> I would like to put a password when booting/mounting mi Freebsd box. is > >> it possible? How? > > > >Yes. Use geli(8) encryption. > > > >> is for protecting the system from unauthorized users > > > >Disk encryption also protects your data if the PC or harddrive is stolen. > >Roland > > > > Yes, I had thinking of Geli, but my system is up and running and I don't > know if I can use geli for this without breaking all > I have used geli for unused disks and for swap but not for root, because i > dont know if I will break all.... > > can I use it for root, when it is a live system?
You can encrypt the root filesystem, but in that case /boot must be on a separate unencrypted partition, otherwise the OS cannot boot. So unless you have a spare partition for /boot, you'll have to make backups and re-partition your disk. Note that encrypting the partitions where the OS lives is not particularly usefull; there is nothing secret there. On the contrary, it would potentially make the encrypted partition vulnerable to a known plaintext attack. So what I would recommend it to put all _your_ data (which you want to protect from unauthorized access) on one partition (in case of a desktop, I'd use /home), and encrypt that. To do this you should back up all your data. Then you fill the partition with random noise using 'dd if=/dev/random'. This can take some time depending on the size of the partition. As soon as that is done you can use 'geli init' to initialize a geli-encrypted device, and 'geli attach' to make a device node. Then you can use newfs on the new device, mount it and restore your backup. Now edit /etc/fstab to refer to the geli device. On the next boot, the rc scripts will ask for the password and take care of the mounting of the device. Roland -- R.F.Smith http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/ [plain text _non-HTML_ PGP/GnuPG encrypted/signed email much appreciated] pgp: 1A2B 477F 9970 BA3C 2914 B7CE 1277 EFB0 C321 A725 (KeyID: C321A725)
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