Author: Olivier Berger

Auto-mounting crypted LUKS partitions to custom mount point

I’ve been strugglig with the Gnome environment of my Debian testing to be able to mount automatically a LUKS crypted partition on my USB key to the same mount point each time, instead of using the next /media/usbdisk-* available (if several USB drives are plugged).

It appears that even if the ext3 filesystem inside the crypted LUKS partition has a label, it won’t be used by the mount tools (here pmount-hal / pmount launched by gnome-volume-manager, in Debian) : see wishlist ticket #379799 (now closed apparently).

Indeed, the volume must be mounted in order to decrypt its content, and be able to read the volume. So the behaviour cannot be the same as for an unencrypted volume.

I think I’ve found the way it should be modified (see a comment on the ticket), but in the meantime, using fdi files, it’s possible to set a desired mount point for a specific volume (see another comment on the ticket).

Hal and its friends are nice tools, but documentation is hard to find 🙁 … I hope this helps a bit.

Hphastos Conference : First International Conference on Open Source Collaborative Development Platforms

I’ve just been informed that the Hphastos Conference will be organized next november in Paris.

Here, you will find more details, including the CFP (first deadline : September 15th, 2006) : http://www.ethiqa.com/hephaistos/

Paper published in International Journal of Information Technology and Web Engineering

We have written last year a paper titled “Integration of Libre Software Applications to Create a Collaborative Work Platform for Researchers at GET“, which has just been published in a special issue of the International Journal of Information Technology and Web Engineering (IJITWE) focused on “Web-based Community Driven Open Source Systems” (Vol. 1, Issue 3, 2006).

Here’s the abstract :

Libre software provides powerful applications ready to be integrated for the build up of platforms for internal use in organisations. We describe the architecture of the collaborative work platform which we have integrated and designed for researchers at GET. We present the elements we have learned during this project in particular, with respect to contribution to external libre projects, in order to better ensure the maintainability of the internal applications, and to phpGroupware as a framework for specific applications development.

You may find more details at : http://www.idea-group.com/articles/details.asp?ID=6313 (and yes, the paper is only accessible for a fee 🙁 ) Meanwhile, you may find a copy of parts of the draft, here.

cryptsetup and LUKS beautifully integrated in Gnome on my Debian (testing)

I’ve blogged in the past on the possibility of using a USB key to store senitive information like passwords. In the post, I was refering to using LUKS. I had not taken time before today to test that setup.

I’ve tested it and it seems to work nicely, beautifully integrated in the Gnome environment (relying on HAL, etc.).
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