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8.10 alternative CD installer amd-64: dm-crypt on software RAID. Fail

Archived thread 1001513 from Security. Markdown source: Security/thread_1001513_8.10_alternative_CD_installer_amd-64_dm-crypt_on_s.md

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#1

Dear all,

I´m migrating from another distribution to Kubuntu and wanted to carry over my splendid and worthwhile software RAID disk partitions (/dev/mdWHATEVER). This seemed to go smoothely.

I also wanted to carry over having one of those RAID as kernel level encryption. I read the many excellent tutorials, and found out that the road was likely to be not so smooth for encryption in general.

I found the hard way that having no swap partition was the only way to get past the partitioner with any kind of encryption.

So, I had no swap partition and I went for encryption on one of my MD partitions. The installer partitioner sort of went along with it, but it never really caught on. The best I got was a new volume (which was encrypted) onto which the partitioner wanted to write a partition table (uh-oh!).

So, in the end I had to give up on the combination of MD and dm-crypt. That is the problem I would like to point out to those who are engaged in making the installer even better.

(Oh, and I fixed my issue by deciding that I did not need MD and encryption at the same time so I went for a plain partition with dm-crypt on it and that installed and survived updates and installing Nvidia restricted kernel and everything, so my tale does have a happy ending.)

Best Regards

Jens

#2

So, in the end I had to give up on the combination of MD and dm-crypt. That is the problem I would like to point out to those who are engaged in making the installer even better.

Developers are rarely here. Launchpad would be the place to report bugs.

#3

(1) the no swap partition during manual install bug has fixed (2) I setup an encrypted raid1 lvm machine on lenny as neither 8.10 nor etch did it right... (a "small" howto will be published soon, but it's only for lenny)

#4

Sef said: Developers are rarely here. Launchpad would be the place to report bugs.

OK, done.

Thanks

Jens

#5

hyper_ch said: (1) the no swap partition during manual install bug has fixed

(2) I setup an encrypted raid1 lvm machine on lenny as neither 8.10 nor etch did it right... (a "small" howto will be published soon, but it's only for lenny)

re (1), is that the bug where the installer hangs, or the thing which irritated me which was the partitioner insisting I must have an encrypted swap partition?

Best Regards

Jens

#6

to (1) if you chose manual partitioning and setup a swap partition and then set the key to be random, then the install hung. That's the bug.

Telling you that "must" have an encrypted partition is not a bug. You can continue. It's just a warning.