Calivia

As eCryptfs now has been included into 2.6.19-rc2 I simply had to try it out.

I emerged the necessary (masked) kernel sources sys-kernel/mm-sources-2.6.19_rc2-r2. The eCryptfs kernel configuration depends on Security options - [*] Enable access key retention support. After enabling this, you can enable the ecryptfs module under File systems - Miscellaneous filesystems - <M> eCrypt filesystem layer support (EXPERIMENTAL).

After attending a presentation of Levanta's Intrepid Linux management appliance by Millenux last week I read about MapFS, which is an important part of the appliance. Levanta open-sourced MapFS last fall; it is available under GPL-2. MapFS is a virtual file system that simplifies data sharing between multiple Linux machines connected to a shared storage medium (SAN/NAS/Mainframe DASD). MapFS could be used to PXE-boot diskless Xen machines off the network, among other things.

Ext2 IFS is an installable filesystem that provides Windows with full access to Linux ext2 volumes (read and write access). This may be useful if you have installed both Windows and Linux as a dual boot environment on your computer or if you prefer to format your USB disks with ext2/3 and need to access them from Windows hosts as well.

Related links

• www.fs-driver.org

When doing a standard install of LVM over multipath-tools on SLES9 SP3, the LVM volume groups are not detected reliably by vgscan at boot. This is due to a delay introduced by subfs when new devices are discovered through multipath and vgscan kicking-in too early.

The solution is to either increase the delay of one second (to something like 10 seconds) after loading dm-multipath or to disable subfs altogether.

See multipath-tools-configuration for more details.

My laptop runs Gentoo Linux with encrypted swap, /tmp and my home directory. This morning, however, none of the encrypted filesystems did mount at boot. Maybe I had missed some crucial upgrade task while emerging the new cryptsetup yesterday so I went back and checked the ebuild. Nothing special.