cryptsetup dm_mod

Rick Stevens ricks at nerd.com
Tue Oct 20 23:41:55 UTC 2009


François Patte wrote:
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> 
> Bonjour,
> 
> I want to use cryptsetup to encrypt partitions and directories.
> 
> When I use cryptsetup:
> 
> cryptsetup --verbose --verify-passphrase luksFormat /home/jd/Documents/
> 
> for instance, the answer is:
> 
> Command failed: Cannot communicate with device-mapper. Is the dm_mod
> module loaded?
> 
> OK! but I cannot find any dm_mod module on my system and I don't know
> what package provides this module....

You can only encrypt entire devices (e.g. partitions), not individual
directories or directory trees.

I'm not sure how your partitioning is set up, but if you used the
default, then you have a "/boot" partition and a "/" partition (which
contains the /home directory).  If that's the case, you can only encrypt
/, not /home or /home/jd or /home/jd/Documents.

In other words, you can only encrypt items starting with "/dev" in the
first column of the output of the "mount" command.  There are exceptions
(encrypted NFS volumes and the like), but for 95% of the world, the
preceeding is true.
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