Apr. 29, 2008
Why would anyone want to encrypt theire drives with random keys? Well the whole drive wouldn't be that suitable perhaps but the swap and tmp partitions could. Looking at the man page for crypttab suggests the following setup for a randomly encrypted swap:
cswap /dev/sda6 /dev/random swap
This all looked great until I rebooted the system to find it stopping at "Starting early crytpo disks". Looking into this further revealed a problem in cryptsetup which I have filed as a bug in Launchpad: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cryptsetup/+bug/223072
The work-around is to use a keyfile as for any other partition on the system.
Posted by Patrik in Ubuntu | No Comments
Apr. 29, 2008
One of the first things I noticed in Ubuntu Hardy Heron was that the key agent failed to load any other keys than the first one id_rsa. Having quite a few keys with more or less complex password this was not a pleasant surprise. Somebody obviously found this out before me, however a fix never made it into the main release. BUT there is a workaround documented in launchpad;
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-keyring/+bug/195908
Basically it tells you to run the following commands. I have tested it and it works great.
mkdir ~/.gnome2/keystore; for i in ~/.ssh/*pub; do key=$(basename $i .pub); echo -e "[default]\npurposes=ssh-authentication" > ~/.gnome2/keystore/${key}.keystore; ln -s ~/.ssh/$key ~/.gnome2/keystore/; done
Posted by Patrik in Ubuntu | No Comments
Apr. 29, 2008
I have had a somewhat bumpy start with the Hardy 8.04 LTS release. This is obviously not good for my reputation at the office trying to convince our last user (you know who you are) to migrate over to Ubuntu....
I'll start with some good news though as most of the problems I had in the past with Gutsy, that were directly related to the crappy HP 6910p Notebook I have, are gone. I don't really think the notebook is that bad... just the BIOS which after an upgrade to F.10 can't be downgraded ..... Everything was working so good BEFORE the upgrade. I guess some of us never learn "Don't fix what aint broken". So for any of you experiencing flaky sound, instable wireless interface and non working DVD-burner you might have a better experience with Hardy.
However, I have been noting some problems that I'll document in the next few articles...