It turns out that the install of R1 pretty much uses up close to 8GB, actually about 7, but who's counting. Thanks to Tim who left a comment to this effect.
Anyway, this doesn't leave enough room to do much of anything, including install future updates. For that reason I have increased the minimum drive size to 16 GB for R1 and change the lvcreate command to use '-l 100%FREE' which makes it a bit easier.
This does not affect the how-to that uses persistence.
Backtrack 4 - Bootable USB Thumb Drive with "Full" Disk Encryption
-Kevin
I made a small update to the Backtrack 4 - Bootable USB Thumb Drive with "Full" Disk Encryption how-to.
Some people are having issues with the xts.ko module not getting copied to the initrd image. This makes the the root and swap partitions unmountable because the encrypted partition can't be opened. Most have been able to correct this by redoing the install, but I wondered if maybe a consistent modules file would help, i.e. don't require the user to edit the file.
To that end, I have modified the how-to. I created a preconfigured modules file like I did for the two pvcrypt scripts and added the wget command to download it. I also added what the contents of that file should look like.
Both the on-line how-to and the pdf have been updated.
Note: The video does not show this step. It still shows the manual method.
-Kevin
I made some minor updates to to my Backtrack 4 – Bootable USB Thumb Drive with “Full” Disk Encryption.
I fixed a few typos and added a section towards the end that shows how to mount your encrypted volume from the Live CD/USB drive in the event you have issues and need to fix things.
I also added a bit that should get rid of the 'can't find modules.dep' warning that appears at boot time.
-Kevin
I have published my latest Backtrack 4 how-to.
Backtrack 4 - Bootable USB Thumb Drive with "Full" Disk Encryption
This is a step-by-step guide showing how to create a encrypted bootable Backtrack 4 USB thumb drive. I put quotes around full in the title because technically the whole disk isn't encrypted.
We use LVM and the native encryption routines included in Ubuntu 8.10 to encrypt all partitions except for a small boot partition that never contains any data.
This how-to is a departure from the persistent install method I have documented in the past. It also means we don't have to mess with Truecrypt or do the home directory shennanigins we were going through. I will be incorporating it into the main how-to in the near future.
As always, I am interested in your thoughts and feedback.
-Kevin
Well folks, I made a rather stupid mistake in my Backtrack 3 how-to. Instead of writing ">>" to append information to a file, I wrote ">" which overwrites the file.
Bad things happen when you overwrite the /etc/ld.so.conf file.
Thank you very much to David who left a comment pointing out my mistake. The how-to has been updated.
Kevin