On Mon 11 Oct 2021 at 12:43:21 (-0700), David Christensen wrote: > On 10/11/21 05:50, detr...@tuta.io wrote: > > Hello friends, I'm sending this last email to inform you that I have given > > up on trying to recover the contents of my external hard drive and that I > > formatted it. > > I hope you have implemented backups procedures, to prevent losing data > in the future. > > > Thank you to every single one of you who spared their time to try and help > > me.
A pity that it's reformatted; I would have liked to know more about the circumstances of the unlocking attempts. > > On one last note, I should I drag attention to what seemed to be a bug on > > the boot screen that asked for my LUKS password: It considered backspaces > > as a normal character. What do you mean by a "normal character"? AFAIK you can't put backspaces into a passphrase, and it would be ill-advised to type any backspaces when /setting/ a new passphrase: better to Ctrl-C out of setting it, or type some garbage to make it so that the verification deliberately fails and you can start over. When you're typing the /old/ passphrase, then backspace should erase the previous character as usual, and an excessive number of them should be ignored. > > I type my password and it shows an asterisk on the screen for every > > character I type - instead of deleting the asterisk, the backspace key > > created one more asterisk each time I pressed it. There are arguments both ways: reflecting an asterisk indicates that the key was successfully depressed, whereas erasing an asterisk allows you to count how far through the passphrase you have typed. Because of a previous problem¹ I had with stretch on a Lenovo laptop, I haven't configured my encrypted devices to unlock in the manner where asterisks are printed. So I can't tell whether it's possible, as you get asterisks printed, whether there's a possibility that the backspace key is not doing something unexpected under the exact circumstances. (I'm recalling the ambiguity of the Backspace and Delete keys, and whether they emitted ^H, ^?, or escape sequences.) > When I boot my Debian machines with LUKS encrypted root filesystems, I > see a bunch of time-stamped bootloader messages followed by the > prompt: > > Please unlock disk sda3_crypt: > > When I type on the keyboard, nothing is echoed to the screen. IIRC that's the prompt I saw when I recently tried out a root-encrypted installation in order to see how Grub boots it. And I don't recall asterisks. However, it's not clear to me what the OP means by "boot screen". If you specify partitions to be unlocked by passphrase in /etc/crypttab, then part-way through booting, you get a more fullsome prompt: Please enter passphrase for disk PARTLABEL (LABEL) on MOUNTPOINT with relevant substitutions. This dialogue uses asterisks. If it hadn't, I could have suffered similar consequences to the OP, as the asterisks were the only reason I knew that there was a "ghost in the machine". Nowadays, I only use /etc/crypttab to configure my randomly encrypted swap partition, so no prompt at all. I explicitly unlock /home later, mainly because I can then wake machines up and unlock them remotely. As in your case, udisksctl is asterisk-less during typing, and it's also terse enough for me to prefix my own prompt about what exactly I am unlocking. ¹ https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2018/03/msg01030.html Cheers, David.
