GEOM/GELI Boot Disk Encryption

[Roland Smith]

On Wed, Jun 06, 2007 at 07:28:48AM -0500, Eric F Crist wrote:
>  Hey folks,
> 
>  I'm trying to take a system that already has a running freebsd system (or I
>  can start over), and make the entire system encrypted.  I've found
>  instructions (freebsd manual) for creating secondary disks, but not the boot
>  disk in particular.
> 
>  Can anyone point me in the right direction?

The /boot directory must not be encrypted, so you need to put that on a
separate slice.

As for the rest, maybe the following thread will help you;
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-geom/2006-July/001401.html

The thing is that sysinstall doesn't support creating encrypted disks,
so during install, you'd have to initialize and mount the encrypted
slices manually, and then resume sysinstall.

Personally, I wouldn't bother encrypting anything but your own data,
i.e. /home. And for backup purposes it's better to make a seperate slice
for that anyway. Disk encryption is only usefull when your disk is
stolen; as long as the disk is mounted, the data is readable (if
permissions allow) anyway.

If your /home is already a separate slice, back up your data, unmount
/home and encrypt it according to geli(8). Mount your encrypted drive
and restore your backup.

A good idea might be to create a virtual machine with e.g. qemu, and
practice on that before you screw up anything important. :-)

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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