Re: encrypting /home partition post-install

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Dear friends,

I wanted to provide an update with my experience on this (last week).

Recall that I had a few machines with separate /home partitions which needed to be encrypted without erasing them and writing them from backup. I was not that concerned about reinstalling because it takes me a few minutes to get going on Fedora using my own generated LiveCD (which runs OpenBox). 

>From this forum, I learnt about luksipc. I proceeded to make, with Michael Schwendt's help, a RPM. Then I stuck that to my LiveCD kickstart and got a new LiveCD generated.

I have four laptops: three were/are ext4 /home partitions but, as ill-luck would have it, one was xfs,. For some reason, luksipc does not work on xfs (because xfs filesystems can not be shrunk down, so I will address the xfs partition a bit later).

So, I put on my LiveCD, opened a terminal and went through the steps in:

https://johndoe31415.github.io/luksipc/

which is a detailed and thorough step-by-step documentation.

After I did this encryption on /home for all three machines (successfully), I then (re-)installed Fedora 23 for each of them. Wow!

The fourth, however presented a major issue. Luksipc needs to shrink the partition, and the shrinking tools that I know of (or could find) can not handle an xfs file system. Actually, from what I read, it does not appear to be possible. So, one option was to convert the filesystem to ext4 and then proceed as above. Reading around, I found a tool to do that. This tool is fstransform and is available at https://github.com/cosmos72/fstransform 

Though strictly not needed, I rolled a RPM (my first without any help or errors!) and created a new LiveCD with this new rpm on. Amazingly, it worked in converting the filesystem from xfs to ext4. (I followed the instructions at that github site.) I then encrypted this new ext4 filesystem using luksipc and went ahead and installed. 

So, in summary, the exercise worked. I guess I could have not installed, but I was a bit unclear about how to change grub using /etc/defaults/grub to bring in this new encrypted partition. (I did not quite tell which fields to look at.)

I am considering submitting my luksipc and fstransform RPMs to Fedora. Perhaps, they could, in the future, be merged with Anaconda to make in situ encryption and filesystem transformation possible. Perhaps, with a few more scripts to automate the process.

I thought that this update might be helpful for future folk. Thanks again for all the discussion and for pointing luksipc to me in the first place!

Best wishes,
Ranjan

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