[ale] password for encrypted home dir

[Michael H. Warfield]

On Wed, 2013-11-20 at 19:38 -0500, Tim Watts wrote: 
> Hi,

> I have an encrypted home dir (Ubuntu 12.04 lts) and I'm 95% sure I
> remember the correct password.  Of course, I don't want to reboot unless
> I'm 100% sure of it.  I think there's a command to check this (or at
> least reset it).  Can anyone give me a pointer?

Encrypted home directories in Ubuntu are eCryptfs (not LUKS).  You can
have all of /home encrypted this way, your entire
individual /home/$LOGIN encrypted this way, or a subdirectory
of /home/$LOGIN/.Private encrypted.  Each has it's only level of
complexity (3rd one being the easiest and the second being pretty groady
with PAM involved).  You can also manually encrypt other directories.

Is it just your private home directory that's individually encrypted or
the entire /home directory encrypted?  If it's your pirvate home
directory that's individually encrypted and all the PAM modules are
correctly in place, it should track your user login password, unless
you've don't something unusual to change it.

Might try some of the commands here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/12.04/serverguide/ecryptfs.html

Try adding a passphrase.  If it works, you have the passphrase and a
backup passphrase.

Just in case...

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/recover-your-encrypted-private-directory-using-ecryptfs-recover-private.html

> Thanks.

Regards,
Mike
-- 
Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 978-7061 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
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