Hi,
Sorry for the late reply.
I think that is CPU time … it took about 5 days actually
. It finished during night time I can’t be precise about the actual time it took …
Does it work now? How is the performance?
Oh Yes! it Runs perfectly !
And it mounts very well, in KDE simply plug the usb cable and a pop-up asks for the password … and then it gets mounted!
Simple. (the mount dir still need a chmod a+wr has it mounts as root wr only … I will change this … )
About performance: I did not yet run any of those performance utility commands just to check the actual specs.
What I can say right now is that I am moving some DVD’s (4.4GB/each) from internal hdd to the backup and I get speeds of up to 35MB/s … ususally it is like 20-25MB/s, but this is very much dependent on the file size … It gets to the 35MB/s … I think this is the hdd max transfer limit for SATA2 5400rpm (not sure).
I am also not sure if this is a performance problem, the disk I use is a Western Digital My Book, (essential edition)
I think this device uses a Westen Digital Green disk … it also does not mention any speed specifications.
So quite frankly I really do not know about that specific issue.
[/QUOTE]
Also, it is not very clear to me why you should always boot with that device plugged. The encrypted drive should work at the same way on any computer, right? Any Opensuse (or possibly any Linux) should detect that it is an encrypted partition and ask for the password. Am i wrong on this? (i am not sure as i have never tried myself)
If that is correct, then these computers might not have any fstab entry. So you could just remove the fstab entry on your machine and you would not need the device plugged at boot time.[/QUOTE]
Humm … Right … well I never mentioned the “boot with” the device connected.
That is not necessary … My issue was simply around the fact that the automount process could possibly not kow what to do with a disk whose partition is encrypted.
But that is indeed not the case.
Like you mention, it Should run and be autodetected in Any Linux that contains the Luks tools and apropriate encryption modules (Sha and the like, all current Linux distros have no problem with this).
The problem with fstab was that one …
But has I can assure: I just made a dd comand and then encrypted the partitions and thats it!
Under kde 3.5 and kde 4 OpenSuSE 11.1 64 bits … it simply just works 
The encryption process was simple: I just used the following commands:
First:
- fdisk /dev/sdb … clear all partitions: with d option, then w option.
Exit fdisk
write random data to the disk:
- dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdb (folks /dev/random takes Even longer then urandom … )
this takes the 4.67 days +
When finished create a Linux partition:
created a primary partition, option n, then write, option w.
Then :
- cryptsetup -v --key-size 256 luksFormat /dev/sdb1
Then:
- cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb1 securitybackup
Then Format the new partitions:
I used this advices from the Ubuntu link (for large disks):
- mkfs -t ext3 -m 1 -O dir_index,filetype,sparse_super /dev/mapper/securitybackup
Thats it!
Regards,
Pedro