Hi,

reading man vnconfig(8) I guess it'd be easy to associate an
encryption key with a vnode... but this way I create an encrypted disk
partition image... it's not like having the partition itself in the
disk and, what's more, I am thinking of some ~6 GB, which is huge, so
that I think this is not the way to do it.

Is there any alternative? Let me describe what I am looking for:

I work at an Institute and I was given a usb disk. As I have my laptop
almost always with me and use it to do all my work (almost, I am using
a cluster somewhere else, but the data analysis, etc is done here, I
"just" have to copy the data). This means that sometimes I am sitting
in a Cafe working with it, or in the office or in the train or
blabla... The laptop itself is small (roughly more than a kilo), so
that I can wear it everywhere.

Now, this way it's very possible that I drop it sometime or that a
coffee cup falls on it. That's why I backup OFTEN. This is where the
usbdisk comes in place:

When I am in my office I would like to just plug the usbdisk and run a
small backup script to copy over the most important things; still this
is some 6 GB; I could not reduce it more. When I go home, the disk
stays here and you therefore would just have to plug in a cable to
read/delete/copy everything you want.

That's why I need encryption. I was using a time ago mcrypt to encrypt
the file itself, which is nice but it'd take some 1-2 hours to encrypt
everything and then I would just forget about backup (you know, the
best backup is the one you do in an easy, quick way; otherwise you
become lazy and forget it)

Any suggestions?

BTW a funny story:
==============

I got the disk yesterday from one of our admin; he took some minutes
to "prepare" the disk before giving it to me. When I got back to the
office I mounted it and noticed that some ~20GB were occupied. I did a
mere ls -lart and saw a .Trash_Name folder (seemingly the previous
user had been working with those fancy nautilus/kde windows which
automatically create that folder when you "remove" something).
Then a nautilus ubuntu window suddenly popped up (I am still using
ubuntu and moving to o'bsd) -which is a feature I hate- with the
contents of .Trash_Name... and guess... it was FULL with p 0rn movies,
personal pictures etc etc and the worst, a backup of what seemed to be
a windows folder with a written-in-capitals "BANK" subfolder!

I made a research in the page of the Institute to figure out whom
belonged that Name from the .Trash_Name to make him/her aware of the
thing... and GUESS... who was it?

Yes, the admin himself!! I talked to him and explained what had
happened and asked whether he needed this hidden trash folder or not.
The answer was a clearly embarrased "no, please, delete everything".
Just imagine what could have happened if it hadn't be me but one of
the directors who asked for a usb disk or, probably worse, if a no so
nice person (ahem) had got the disk with that BANK folder (no idea
what was in there, the poor guy doesn't look like rich :) )

I deleted everything, of course.

That's admin for you!

When I think that this guy is one of the people keeping the file
system "secure" I start sweating...

That's why I have to hurry up with my o'bsd system and my encrypted disk.

Any help?

Thanks,

Pau
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