Fedora - what's the easiest solution for the in-place (without data loss) encryption of the (existing) /home partition?

Question

I read that the installer can handle encryption easily, but I don't want to reinstall.

TrueCrypt apparently can't encrypt a partition in-place and will require a format.

I've looked around at some tutorials using dm-crypt and apparently this requires a format as well.

I would prefer to use a built-in (provided by the kernel) system for encryption instead of third party tools (like TrueCrypt).

Thanks!

Answer 1

I've done this as I've detailed in the following thread (not really what I asked, but the closest approximation): http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=259796

I read about the ecryptfs solution and it didn't seem something very desirable or enough low-level. I ultimately used dm-crypt/cryptsetup/luks as described below.

Steps:

• Resized down the existing /home partition

• Created a new encrypted partition

• rsync -a the files to the new partition

• Deleted the old partition

• Made the new partition the new /home

• Then I encrypted the swap partition: http://linux.ioerror.us/2006/09/14/e...n-fedora-core/

Information at the following links also helped:

• http://www.debian-administration.org...ed_Filesystems

• http://fedoraunity.org/Members/zcat/...ome/a-new-home

• http://flakrat.blogspot.com/2009/11/...on-fedora.html

Now one question arises:

Can I do the same thing for the root partition? Will it just work? Do you expect I might encounter some problems?

-> And no, you shouldn't try that for the root partition unless you know what you're doing. But it is entirely possible - though it might result in an unbootable OS (IF you don't know how to avoid that).