External USB Drives in Linux: Difference between revisions
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Test the (unmounted) disk for bad blocks using | Test the (unmounted) disk for bad blocks and write garbage all over each block using | ||
badblocks -c 10240 -s -w -t random -v /dev/sdb | badblocks -c 10240 -s -w -t random -v /dev/sdb | ||
In order to encrypt the whole disk I used this tutorial [http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/howto-disk-encryption-with-dm-crypt-luks-and-debian | (nb. it's better to use dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdb but takes much much longer...) | ||
In order to encrypt the whole disk I used this tutorial [http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/howto-disk-encryption-with-dm-crypt-luks-and-debian] | |||
apt-get install cryptsetup hashalot | apt-get install cryptsetup hashalot |
Revision as of 14:26, 29 August 2007
Adding external USB drives in Linux is easy. Etch uses hotplug to detect it. Using dmesg you can find out what mountpoint it is (Linux creates a SCSI device to mount to /dev/sdb and the drive will probably be /dev/sdb1).
/proc/bus/usb/devices shows you information about the connected USB device.
Most USB devices are formatted FAT32 which has a file size limit of 4GB. Because I'm using mine for Netvault backups and the virtual library media is created at sizes much larger than that, there are 2 choices:
ntfs-3G (which Etch doesn't support) and ext3 (which etch does).
Format to ext3 using
mke2fs -T ext3 /dev/sdb1
Then create an /etc/fstab entry
and mount
Test the (unmounted) disk for bad blocks and write garbage all over each block using
badblocks -c 10240 -s -w -t random -v /dev/sdb
(nb. it's better to use dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdb but takes much much longer...)
In order to encrypt the whole disk I used this tutorial [1]
apt-get install cryptsetup hashalot
cfdisk /dev/sdb (if you still need to partition the disk, unlikely though)
cryptsetup --verbose --verify-passphrase luksFormat /dev/sdb1
Open the encrypted device and assign it to a virtual /dev/mapper/YOURNAME device:
cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb1 YOURNAME
mkfs.ext3 -m 1 -O dir_index,filetype,sparse_super /dev/mapper/YOURNAME
To mount
mount /dev/mapper/YOURNAME /mnt/
Now it's transparently encrypted
To unmount
umount /mnt/YOURNAME
cryptsetup luksClose /dev/mapper/YOURNAME