not active

[Max Vozeler]

Hi Rodger, Hi James,

sorry for chiming in so late, I hope my reply is still useful
to you. For the past four weeks I've been sitting on a bicycle
riding across Portugal with no email access :-)

On Thu, Jul 12, 2007 at 09:42:31AM +0200, rodger ellis wrote:
> James
> 
> Thanks for your post/mail\
> Here is what I have at the moment 
> your last post/mail has me lost.
> 
> I think that if you might explain again 
> 
> 
> Here is where i am at the moment see below
> and when I save this to disk I am asked for
> root partition/mount point
> 
> 1 primary  501.7mb F ext3  /boot
> 2 primary  1.4gb   K crypto not active
> 3 primary  9.0gb   K crypto not active
> pri/log FREE SPACE 2gb

Encrypting the root partition ("/") in unfortunately not 
yet possible using loop-AES and current versions of the Debian
installer. The support is ready for the most parts, it is just
that I have been lacking time to take care of it and finish
integration of the missing pieces so far, for which I'm a bit
sorry because it leaves good work unused :-( But I will take
care of it soon, promised :-)

Regarding the installer: The screen above shows that you
have configured two encrypted partitions using loop-AES.
The "not active" string shows because those partitions are not
committed to disk yet. This is similar to setting up LVM or 
RAID volumes; You first configure them, them activate them.
The required step is "Configure encrypted volumes" from the
partman menu (it should be somewhere near the top of the screen).
Choosing this item will ask for the respective passphrases and
take care of generating the keyfiles, if required.

After this step, the screen should show another "disk" along
with your physical disk, which is the actual encrypted loop
device. You can create a filesystem in it and configure it
for use on a particular mountpoint, e.g. /home. You can then
finish partitioning and the installer will continue setting up
the required things for configuring the encryption in the
installed system. Just note that this is not yet possible to do
with the root partition; I'm not sure offhand about /usr, but
others should be possible with no problems.

	Max