[dm-devel] unstable devmapper release: 2.6.0-udm1

[Christophe Saout]

Am Fr, den 02.01.2004 schrieb Greg Freemyer um 21:47:

> For now I was just curious if it was likely to become a standard part of
> Linux.
> 
> I do want to start experimenting with 2.6.0/dm-crypt but I doubt I will
> use 2.6.0, or even 2.6.1 in a production box.  For now I just want to
> get familiar with it from a setup/config perspective.

The 2.6 kernel seems really stable. For me it even seems to work better
than most 2.4 kernels did. I'm using it on all my machines, including my
webserver.

Setting up an encryption target is currently done via dmsetup, there is
no special tool available. The situation isn't much better with
cryptoloop, losetup takes a raw key and the caller must do everything
else. And additionally there were a lot of bugs reading and setting the
key in the past and a lot of different patches are floating around.
Every distro does its own thing.

I've written a small shell script wrapper around dmsetup for testers
with you can find at http://www.saout.de/misc/cryptsetup .

It should be self-explanatory, just call it without arguments. It
requires the hashalot tool which is used by most distros to hash the
passphrase (which is then used as key).

The cryptolop maintainers has plans for a key-management tool which will
mostly use plugins to do things.