[ale] password for encrypted home dir

Tim Watts tim at cliftonfarm.org
Thu Nov 21 21:33:48 EST 2013


Thanks everybody.

I /thought/ I had only encrypted my home dir but when I saw that
ecryptfs wasn't even installed I figured sumpin' was amiss.  After a
little searching on Ask Ubuntu I found out how to see if there were any
encrypted devices present, blkid, which showed me this:

/dev/sda6: UUID="303613d9-6e3a-4fb5-b27a-2dcd31925509"
TYPE="crypto_LUKS" 

And then it all started coming back to me.  So yes, I did set it up to
encrypt the whole drive.  I then used

$ sudo cryptsetup --dump-master-key luksDump /dev/sda6

which simply gave me a chance to test whether I correctly remembered my
password since it prompts for it.  Yes, I did.  Phew!

Although I like that my laptop has been running stable for 157 straight
days, sometimes its good to reboot just for the practice!

Thanks again all.


On Thu, 2013-11-21 at 09:59 -0500, Michael H. Warfield wrote:
> 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
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