Hi,
I’ve been away from Opensuse for a long time (prodigal son), driven back by Ubunut’s god-awful Unity interface. I have a machine that had, and still has, Ubuntu installed on it. I encrypted my home directory w/ Ubuntu. Details on that are a little fuzzy, see below.
I have a separate partition, /dev/sda4, where I installed Opensuse 12.1 x86-64. Ubuntu and Opensuse happily coexist, and I can boot from either via Grub. Great success!
The issue is how do I use my encrypted home dir. in Opensuse.
As of now, I can mount /dev/sda3, the partition that contains the encrypted home dir, in Opensuse. I don’t think the entire partition is encrypted. I mounted it via Yast, and didn’t have to enter any password. There are a few non-encrypted dirs in sda3, and I can get at them in Opensuse. But the home dir itself I can’t get at.
I assume I didn’t encrypt the entire sda3 partition, but just the home dir. What exactly I did in Ubuntu is lost in the mists of time. But, there are .ecryptfs and .Private subdirs in a lot of the dirs in sda3. Hopefully this is a strong enough clue for the cognoscenti.
So, what do I need to do to access the encrypted home dir in Opensuse? For now I’d be happy to just get to it, and then get at how to use it as home in Opensuse. This is the main step stopping me from cutting the Ubuntu umbilical cord and returning to green lizard-land.
Thanks for your help,
Dave
I am not sufficiently familiar with ubuntu, though I have heard that they use ecryptfs.
The first step will be to install ecryptfs-utils. After that, you might need:
# chmod u+s /sbin/mount.ecryptfs_private
If you want it to work automatically, then you might also have to edit some files in “/etc/pam.d”.
I described my own experiments with ecryptfs in a blog post, though that was not specifically related to ubuntu.
Why not do it the easy way and boot ubuntu - copy the content of home to
an unencrypted medium and copy it back in openSUSE (newly created home
encrypted or not as you like this time taking notes about the details).
After that you can throw away the old one.
–
PC: oS 11.4 (dual boot 12.1) 64 bit | Intel Core i7-2600@3.40GHz | KDE
4.6.0 | GeForce GT 420 | 16GB Ram
Eee PC 1201n: oS 11.4 64 bit | Intel Atom 330@1.60GHz | KDE 4.8.0 |
nVidia ION | 3GB Ram
On 2012-02-19 23:06, dstrozzi wrote:
> So, what do I need to do to access the encrypted home dir in Opensuse?
> For now I’d be happy to just get to it, and then get at how to use it as
> home in Opensuse. This is the main step stopping me from cutting the
> Ubuntu umbilical cord and returning to green lizard-land.
I don’t know how ubuntu does things, and I have never used an encrypted
home. My guess is that you will find a large file which is the “home”
storage space. If run “file” on it, it will probably say it is a luks
encrypted filesystem. With that info, it should be possible to mount it.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)