Unable to install a fully encrypted system with Raid (1)

[hyper_ch]

For business reasons I need to (a) encrypt a full install and (b) setup raid 1 so that in case one harddrive fails it can be replaced without (much) downtime.

Before I attempt this on a real server I tested this with vmware workstation 6.5 in Kubuntu 8.10.

My strategy was to

- install a 8.10 server edition (because of the samba package version)

- manually partition the drives (in the vm both are 5 GB)

- use 200 mb in sda for the /boot partition

- use the rest on sda and the full sdb drive for a / partition which will be on raid 1

- then encrypt that raid 1

On this image you can see, that I selected sda2 and sdb1 partition to be a raid device: http://www.sjau.ch/raid-encryption/1_Selection.png

Here you can see the whole partition layout (incl. the encrypted raid 1): http://www.sjau.ch/raid-encryption/2_Partitions.png

After having been told that I use a weak password (for the test setup I just used "test") and for not having swap (I also tried with swap and with encrypted swap and also with a raided /boot and raided encrypted swap) the rest of the system installed fine.

After reboot I get dropped into busybox: http://www.sjau.ch/raid-encryption/3_Bootfailure.png

After advice from jdong I tried to manually mount the encrypted partition to access the initramfs-tool scripts. So I went to /dev, issued ls to see if the raid device (md0) is there. So I then tried to mount that one, however the password is not accepted: http://www.sjau.ch/raid-encryption/4_Cryptofailure.png

I have no further idea of how to continue and get an encrypted raid1 setup working. Preferrably it would be to add one more level of comlexity: encrypted raid1 lvm setup.

I hope this can be fixed.

hyper_ch

[hyper_ch (bugs-launchpad-net-roleplayer)]

I tested the same thing on Debian Etch. In there it didn't work either.

Then I tried Debian Lenny and on that the raid1 + encryption works fine.

[wuddiwupp (stefan-wuttke)]

I have try to setup a encrypted RAID1, the problem is
that the Installer create a new partitiontable in /dev/mapper/md(X)_crypt.

The system insn't installed in /dev/md(X)_crypt the target is now
/dev/mapper/md(X)_cryptp(X).

Workaround:

1. Setup all partitons.
2. create the crypt_devices
3. configure the crypt_devies (don't make partitons) only setup the Passphrase !!!
4. fomat the crypt_devices: ALT+F2 mkfs.ext2 /dev/mapper/md(X)_crypt ; now ALT+F1
5. select "BACK" and goto the Main-Menu, select "Partiton Disks"
    the freespace is now allocated on md(x)_crypt_devices

this workaround prevent that the Installer create a new Partitontable on the crypted devices.