Hi Stuart, Just joined the list so inline responding is difficult. You wrote: I have decided (for the moment) to standardize on the Mandrake 8.0 distribution of Linux for my installation. I have also read much more about the "International Patch" and its capabilities, and simply having an encrypted filesystem is not enough for me now. While that is the first and foremost issue I wish to tackle at the moment, I am interested in why some people the think the entire International Patch is garbage, and useless. I am told it does work to some extent. I reply: It is not garbage and useless. My advice would be to encrypt a separate partition. Then you don't have to worry about the underlying filesystem (because there won't be any). You wrote: In the Mandrake arena, does anyone know of a site which is keeping patches and such going for Mandrake folks? Does anyone know what Mandrakes position on supporting crypto will be in current and future releases (as Debian is rumored to be supporting crypto now). I reply: It's pretty much irrelevant. You're the one who has to patch the kernel and do whatever else in necessary as set out here: http://encryptionhowto.sourceforge.net/Encryption-HOWTO.html You may want to consider the overall security of your distribution of choice though. I trust Debian or Redhat to provide security patches in a timely manner. >I have gotten a spare HD to use as a "development" HD for this crypto project. Good. Then it will be easy to create a spare partition for testing. You wrote: I started by downloading the 2.4.5 source for Mandrake's kernel, and am going to build it once I get the crypto filesystem stuff working (rebuilding mount, umount, losetup, and loop.o currently). I reply: First mistake. You want to start with the "official" Linus kernel source available from here: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/ And then patch the kernel using the patch available from here: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/crypto/v2.4/ See my next post. I'm sure someone will be able to help with the resulting patching failure. Regards, Adam Linux-crypto: cryptography in and on the Linux system Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-crypto/
