On Thursday 23 December 2004 07:33, Steve wrote:
Hi, I use my laptop at work and tend to carry a few proprietary documents to keep them handy. I'm interested in encrypting the documents so that they can't be recovered should the laptop be stolen. Since there's a number of files and directories involved I'd like to use something that will encrypt a whole file structure - something like an encrypted tar file. It'd also be nice if it were possible to examine the contents with a GUI and extract a few files at a time. Is there anything like that available?
I'd like to use an encrypted filesystem, but it appears to need to be installed manually outside of the installation of Suse. I'll probably do that the next time I install Suse on the laptop.
Not necessarily. If you have already installed SuSe and all your disk space is allocated to partitions then you can create an encrypted filesystem in a file. Choose Yast->System->Partitioner and you will see a button 'Crypt File' on the displayed dialog. Use that to create the encrypted file and specify that you do 'not' want to mount it on bootup and it should be mountable by a user. Put the following script in your ~/bin directory (I call my encrypted filesystem /vault) =============================== #!/bin/sh MNT=/vault mount | grep ${MNT} >/dev/null 2>&1 if [ $? -eq 0 ] then echo -n "${MNT} already mounted - Do you wish to unmount (Y/N) : " read x if [ "${x}" = "Y" ] then echo -n "Unmounting ${MNT} - " umount ${MNT} else echo -n "${MNT} is not unmounted - " fi else echo -n "${MNT} is not mounted - Do you wish to mount (Y/N) : " read x if [ "${x}" = "Y" ] then echo -n "Mounting ${MNT} - " mount ${MNT} if [ $? -eq 0 ] then df -P ${MNT} fi else echo -n "${MNT} is not mounted - " fi fi echo -n "Enter to continue : " read x exit 0