SoloBSD Mastering: GELI

Ok, since I am reading Michael Lucas' FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials I decided to get my hands dirty and learn about GELI and disk encryption. Here are my notes:

First of all, you need a new device to encrypt, you can encrypt existing devices, but you need to backup data first. I assume too that you have GELI up and running.

• Randomizing the device.

          We want our device to be filled by randomness, so we apply three teaspoons of it:

           dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/ada0p1 bs=1m

           I went the easy way and encrypted without a key file, this is NOT RECOMMENDED, so create your key file. (You can find how in the book :) )

• Initializing the provider.

           geli init -s 4096 /dev/ada1p1

          You will receive the next message:

Metadata backup can be found in /var/backups/ad1p1.eli and can be restored with the following command:

# geli restore /var/backups/ada1p1.eli /dev/ada1p1

• Activate the device.

geli attach /dev/ada1p1

Ok now you have your device ready, let's create a new filesystem on it and mount it:

newfs -j /dev/ada1p1.eli

 mount /dev/ada1p1.eli /mnt/

Done? Ok now unmount and detach it.

umount /mnt

 geli detach ada1p1.eli

Groovy!