Tommy Back wrote: > I have been experimenting a little bit with loop-AES and a 200GB Maxtor > disk. I have made a partition (formatted with reiserfs 3.6) /dev/hda1 > (200GB) and encrypted it with loop-AES 3.0b (AES256), multi-key. I have > Samba sharing it, so I can use it on my Windows machine over the > network. All this works just fine, but after some time I can get an > error message in Windows saying that there is an I/O error on the > device. Any kernel error messages? Use 'dmesg' command to display them. > I read in the loop-AES README-file that write cache should be disabled. Disabling write cache only helps in unexpected electrical power lost situations. UPS powered boxes with automatic shutdown are better off with write cache enabled. > I have hdparm -W 0 /dev/hda in rc.local (should it be here?), but I'm > not sure how to check if this is actually turned off after booting. hdparm -I /dev/hda > Is this the way to turn off write caching? Yes. > Does anyone have any ideas what might be wrong in my setup? Can you rule out RAM problems? Does memtest86 run ok? Is this on brand new computer? > I can supply you with additional information if you need, because I'm not > sure what might be useful to know. Kernel version? gcc version? ATA chipset info? Some Silicon Image SATA controllers are really bad. > As I have it now, I have a script which automatically sets up the loop, > fscks the partition and mounts it. Is this a good approach or when should > you fsck the partition? I recommend that mount is used to set up the loop by passing loop= encryption= and gpgkey= mount options. That way umount will detach the loop automatically on automatic UPS-battery-running-out-of-juice shutdown. Fsck can be run manually if needed (after unclean shutdown). > What about unmounting the disks, should something special be > done or is umount /mnt/disk1 && losetup -d /dev/loop6 enough? That is enough. -- Jari Ruusu 1024R/3A220F51 5B 4B F9 BB D3 3F 52 E9 DB 1D EB E3 24 0E A9 DD - Linux-crypto: cryptography in and on the Linux system Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-crypto/
