The other day I though I had lost my USB drive, a janky Kingston 1GB stick with no keychain holder that is temporarily replacing my burned out JumpDrive Sport. Deep sets of panic waves overtook me for most of the morning as I wracked my brain and retraced my steps trying to remember where I could have left it or dropped it. The reason that I was panicking was that I carry some quasi-sensitive data on there like the household budget and short stories I’m working on. No bank numbers or SSNs, just stuff that I don’t want people seeing.
Well, I did end up finding the drive wedged in the back seat of Management’s car but I learned an important lesson: if you are going to carry important data with you back it up and encrypt it. I already have the backup part down and have been doing it ever since my first USB drive crapped out on me and I lost piles of data but encryption was something I never got around to until now. The challenge is that I use Ubuntu at home (100% Windows free as of 60 days ago!) and by day I play at being a Windows sysadmin so I need a solution that works cross platform.
My first visit was to the TrueCrypt folks and while they make a fine product that for all intents and purposes worked well on my work box but completely borked the drive for my laptop. So I decided to approach the task from the Linux side looking for native solutions that had counterparts in the Windows world and LUKS plus FreeOTFE did the trick with a minimum of fuss.
On the Ubuntu side:
- Grab cryptsetup and cryptmount: sudo apt-get install cryptsetup cryptmount
- Wipe the disk or make some partitions: sudo cfdisk /dev/sdb [NOTE: check your drive's actual path with dmesg as you don't want to be wiping something like your primary drive]
- Create an encrypted partition: sudo luksformat /dev/sdb [NOTE: pick a passphrase that you can remember because if you forget it kiss your data goodbye]
Now, because I’m plain lazy I rebooted to get the modules running that are related to reading the new encrypted volume but after that when I popped my drive in it asked for my passphrase and then mounted it for me to work on it to my heart’s delight.
On the Windows side:
- Plug in the USB drive and go to Computer Management >> Disk Management, find the drive, and remove the assigned drive letter, FreeOTFE will assign a free letter to the drive when it mounts it
- Get a copy of FreeOTFE
- Unzip it into a directory and start it in Portable Mode
- File >> Linux Volume >> Mount partition and enter your passphrase
- Enjoy!
Pretty straight forward.
Gratefully cribbed from carthik’s post at Ubuntu Blog and from FreeOTFE’s solid documentation.
I’ve been working the Feisty Fawn now for a little over two weeks and after my initial trepidation with regards to Beagle being re-installed and Tracker not playing nice with Deskbar as well as Gimmie giving me nothing but crashes things have worked themselves out. Here’s how I’m working my desktop:
I’ve replaced the Applications | Places | System menu bar with Gimmie as I like how it aggregates favorite applications and most used documents along with data from Tomboy and Gaim, it makes for a simple and elegant way to look at applications and data beyond hierarchical layouts. The crashes with Gimmie just after upgrading were a little baffling but fixed by rolling back from 0.2.6 to 0.2.4.
Deskbar is back and working nicely with Tracker, the catch was that Deskbar would start before Tracker and when it couldn’t see it would try to start it when Trackerd was trying to resulting in Deskbar vapor locking. The fix was simple, uncheck Trackerd in the start up applications under Sessions. Now when Deskbar starts it will fire up Trackerd and everything works just fine.
Now, for the last year or so I have been pounding the ever-loving snot out of the laptop and in the past couple of months have been beating the “I need a new machine” drum so incessantly that Management has been close to terminating my employment. All this time I thought the memory was maxed with a meager 512 MB but the other night I decided to actually pay attention to Top as I watched the laptop crawl through its paces.
The reality? Try 512/2 MB. Yeah. So after I stuck an extra stick in things actually started running better, well enough that I told Management we can push off the new laptop for at least another month. 
At the moment I’m connected to my terminal server with FreeNX and then to my laptop via VNC just so I can monitor the upgrade from Edgy to Feisty. Nerd? Yeah…
Downloading the package upgrades, some 1100 of them, took about an hour and a half which is pretty good considering the servers are getting pummeled. Right now, I’m halfway through installing the newer packages and looking forward to seeing the enhancements and improvements.
While doing a little spring cleaning on the laptop I stumbled on a neat utility in Disk Usage Analyzer that will make an image out of a specified directory. Pretty wild how the directory structure can translate into an eye pleasing piece of art.
My mother-in-law has been fighting the battle of thin pipes for as long as she has been paying for Internet access and every year SNET-SBC-AT&T sends her a letter that gets her hopes up that the DSL fairy set up a repeater to light up her neighborhood. Each and every year she learns that there is no DSL fairy. So I’ve been trying to think of every concievable method to get her broadband for a reasonable price. Comcast wants some $70 a month and the municipal wi-fi in Hartford went dark as soon as it went live all of which leaves her living online at the brutal speed of 50.0 kpbs. Yesterday, though, I might have come up with a slightly workable solution that at least gives her the feeling of faster speeds: a terminal server running on my 6MB pipe.
After looking at various implementations, including LTSP, I settled on the stupid simple setup of FreeNX mainly because it was easy and made use of my OpenSSH server. The Ubuntu wiki had fairly solid instructions and the only challenge I had was adding Seveas’ Packages–most of the mirrors were handing out 404’s. For myself, the benefits are that I do not need to run Putty + TightVNC anymore as the FreeNX runs on top of SSH but the downside is that the FreeNX client needs to be installed on the machine in a Windows environment so I’ll need to look at alternatives including QEMU + Puppy Linux.
In testing I found the performance to be astounding if I am on a broadband connection responding with barely any lag and the same is true for my mother-in-law’s connection except when surfing. Surfing, obviously with all the screen refreshes, is only a minimally faster experience, but possibly with some tweaking we can squeeze a little more performance out of it. The goal is to make little things like online banking and shopping a little less painful with pages timing out because her connection is taking to long to pull data down and with our quick test FreeNX does seem to alleviate this problem a smidgen.
If anything, FreeNX gives me a better tool to hit my server and do work GUI style, like tacking my miserably tagged music collection, with a fast connection it is a blissful way to connect and do a little work.
It has been two years since I made the cut at home over to Ubuntu on our laptops and server (with one lonely box running Media Center under XP–hello, J. River, I’m looking at you!) with absolutely no regrets and when Elwood Heavy Industries finds itself a little more flush with cash that box will go dark and I’ll run Media Center either in Wine or on a rogue Win2k install under Qemu. So anyway, CNET poses the question, “Is the Linux operating system for me?” and the answers are balanced as well as helpful. Worth giving it a read, especially if you have any curiousity about using a better and more secure OS.
