On 09/03/2018 06:03 PM, Guy Frank wrote:
On Friday, August 31, 2018 at 6:31:58 PM UTC-4, Chris Laprise wrote:
On 08/31/2018 01:40 PM, Guy Frank wrote:
On Friday, August 31, 2018 at 12:17:54 PM UTC-5, [email protected] wrote:
Guy Frank:
One question I had is whether there is any way to set an unencrypted (or
encrypted?) external HD as the /home folder for a VM?
Guy
Hi Guy,
I'm not sure about setting it as /home but i think it's possible. But
it's easy to attach an external HD to a vm and save your files to it.
https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/usb/
Also it's pretty easy to encrypt it with luks for security, it just
takes a little longer each time.
--
Jackie
Thanks Jackie for your reply!
I remember it being fairly easy to attach USB devices w/ the right clicks here
& there. So, yes, I'd have access to the files on my external HD.
But it would be more convenient if I could get Qubes to mount the home folder
on the HD as the Home folder for the given virtual machine. I imagine that's
trickier and was wondering if there's a way to do it?
Maybe use a script to mount the attached USB drive home (/home/guyuser) over
the Qubes home directory? But then, if that's possible, some of the setup in
the Qubes home directory might get missed.
The key to using it as /home would be to setup a new storage pool to
hold that VM. Unfortunately the docs could use a rewrite:
https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/storage-pools/
The relevant commands are 'qvm-pool --add' and 'qvm-create --pool'.
--
Chris Laprise, [email protected]
https://github.com/tasket
https://twitter.com/ttaskett
PGP: BEE2 20C5 356E 764A 73EB 4AB3 1DC4 D106 F07F 1886
Hi Chris: Thanks! This looks like a step in the right direction, but I have
some questions. I'm guessing the commands will tell Qubes to treat my
external HD as a potential place to store a VM. But that seems like it
wouldn't take the existing home directory on the external HD as the VM home
directory but instead store a VM file containing the VM's home directory
structure on the disk. That file would, I imagine, be difficult to access on
the Kubuntu I have running on my home desktop and wouldn't contain the files
currently on my external hard disk, which mirror my Kubuntu files.
Is that the case and is there any fix? Am beginning to think the only way to
work this is to simply attach my external HD as a USB device and give up on
trying to make the files my home directory.
You're right that it wouldn't readily treat a bare home directory as the
VM's own, but create a Linux disk image instead.
But if the other systems are Ubuntu or similar Linux, you have options.
First is encryption: Ubuntu should recognize a LUKS-formatted drive when
its inserted and prompt the user for a passphrase automatically to
unlock and mount it. This could make your work flows more secure.
Also, I recall Ubuntu having some way to mount disk image files from the
file explorer. But you can setup the drive with LVM on top of LUKS (use
the LVM Qubes driver), and I think in this case Ubuntu may try to make
the LVM volumes available to the user as soon as its unlocked (if not,
you could use gnome-disks as a GUI to do this, although a script with an
icon would work too).
--
Chris Laprise, [email protected]
https://github.com/tasket
https://twitter.com/ttaskett
PGP: BEE2 20C5 356E 764A 73EB 4AB3 1DC4 D106 F07F 1886
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