a virtual disk is on my kubuntu system that i have never seen in other linux distros.

[SteveRiley]

Yes, impressive.

Now then, Oznola: may I ask why you feel the need to [strike]run with scissors[/strike] encrypt your partitions? Unless you have business requirements for doing so, I generally advise against it. Disk encryption entails the very real risk of complete data loss: if you somehow misplace the keys, then the data is unrecoverable. I've had to tell countless number of folk "Sorry, can't help you" -- many more, in fact, than I know who benefited from the encryption. Seems that forgetfulness/carelessness is a bigger risk than laptop theft.

I don't know you personally -- you could, in fact, be of supremely fastidious and cautious character, for whom the very concept of misplacement is an unknown notion! If so, then I congratulate you. I'm simply passing on a bit of wisdom gained from over 20 years working in infosec.

[oshunluvr]

So it looks like you have LVM on whole disk encryption (this is a standard way of doing whole disk encryption) as well as home directory encryption which is kind of redundant with whole disk encryption.

which totally explains the mysterious "second" partition. Nice piece of detective work James.

[james147]

From that I can tell you have two partitions on your physical disk, one for boot (sda1) and one encrypted partition (sda5 logical, on an extended partition sda2)

The encrypted partition looks to be 30.6GB big

It also looks like the encrypted partition is split into a 1GB swap space and the root file system in the rest of the space (device file of the root is /dev/mapper/kubuntu-root which is 29.5GB)


(you also have a 32GB sd card pluged in )

[B]# This is you boot partition, it is on the physical disk and is unencrypted[/B]
/dev/sda1: UUID="e218a0d4-97d8-4abe-bed3-5344ed533da0" TYPE="ext2"

[B]# This is partition that is encrypted[/B]
/dev/sda5: UUID="d17401b2-b117-4e77-bdc7-6eb4196e05e4" TYPE="crypto_LUKS"

[B]# This is an sdcard[/B]
/dev/mmcblk0p1: UUID="44F4-B5A3" TYPE="vfat"

[B]# This sits on top of the encrypted partition to split the encrypted volume up into more partitions :D[/B]
/dev/mapper/sda5_crypt: UUID="9YQ0xb-qZf3-NmSm-k8z4-7S2d-Htv0-XuOKt0" TYPE="LVM2_member"

[B]# This is your root drive which sits on one of the LVM2 partitions which sits on the encrypted drive[/B]
/dev/mapper/kubuntu-root: UUID="ea3a1e41-827f-420d-b25e-2f592d256fba" TYPE="ext4"

[B]# This is your swap space which also sits on one of the LVM2 partitions which sits on the encrypted drive[/B]
/dev/mapper/cryptswap1: UUID="c3e80d02-9c5b-415b-9a9c-e830b4c23e3d" TYPE="swap"

[B]# And this is your home folder which looks to also be encrypted... and sits on the encrypted root partition[/B]
/home/alonzo/.Private 28G 5.3G 21G 21% /home/alonzo

The last one is an encrypted file which contains the contents of your home directory, it is mounted when you login and is most likely the "virtual" disk you talk about. This looks like ecryptfs's work to me.

So it looks like you have LVM on whole disk encryption (this is a standard way of doing whole disk encryption) as well as home directory encryption which is kind of redundant with whole disk encryption.

[oznola]

alonzo@eartha:~$ sudo parted -l
[sudo] password for alonzo:
Model: ATA STEC PATA 32GB (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 30.8GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 1049kB 256MB 255MB primary ext2 boot
2 257MB 30.8GB 30.6GB extended
5 257MB 30.8GB 30.6GB logical


Model: Linux device-mapper (crypt) (dm)
Disk /dev/mapper/cryptswap1: 1065MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: loop

Number Start End Size File system Flags
1 0.00B 1065MB 1065MB linux-swap(v1)


Error: /dev/mapper/kubuntu-swap_1: unrecognised disk label

Model: Linux device-mapper (linear) (dm)
Disk /dev/mapper/kubuntu-root: 29.5GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: loop

Number Start End Size File system Flags
1 0.00B 29.5GB 29.5GB ext4


Error: /dev/mapper/sda5_crypt: unrecognised disk label

Model: SD SD32G (sd/mmc)
Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 32.3GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 8192B 32.3GB 32.3GB primary fat32 boot, lba


alonzo@eartha:~$

and...

alonzo@eartha:~$ sudo blkid -c /dev/null
/dev/sda1: UUID="e218a0d4-97d8-4abe-bed3-5344ed533da0" TYPE="ext2"
/dev/sda5: UUID="d17401b2-b117-4e77-bdc7-6eb4196e05e4" TYPE="crypto_LUKS"
/dev/mmcblk0p1: UUID="44F4-B5A3" TYPE="vfat"
/dev/mapper/sda5_crypt: UUID="9YQ0xb-qZf3-NmSm-k8z4-7S2d-Htv0-XuOKt0" TYPE="LVM2_member"
/dev/mapper/kubuntu-root: UUID="ea3a1e41-827f-420d-b25e-2f592d256fba" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/mapper/cryptswap1: UUID="c3e80d02-9c5b-415b-9a9c-e830b4c23e3d" TYPE="swap"
alonzo@eartha:~$

and...

alonzo@eartha:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/kubuntu-root 28G 5.3G 21G 21% /
udev 485M 4.0K 485M 1% /dev
tmpfs 199M 820K 198M 1% /run
none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
none 497M 224K 496M 1% /run/shm
none 100M 4.0K 100M 1% /run/user
/dev/sda1 228M 65M 151M 31% /boot
/home/alonzo/.Private 28G 5.3G 21G 21% /home/alonzo
alonzo@eartha:~$

[james147]

Whats the output of

sudo parted -l

and

sudo blkid -c /dev/null

and

df -h

?

28GiB sounds about right for the usable space you get from a 30GB disk

[oznola]

hi,

my dell mini 9 has a 30gb ssd that i am familiar with. but after installing kubuntu 12.10? in addition to my 30gb ssd i now have a 28.5gb "Platform" disk. my speculation is this has something to do with choosing the encryption options during the install.

can anyone fill me in on this new virtual disk please? and also could you point me to some info where i could educate myself about the encryption features that kubuntu offers? these encryption options seem strong.

thank you.