Truecrypt Tutorial In Issue 161

[pfnorris]

I seem to be having a few problems with this. Briefly the scenario is I want to have an encrypted volume on a USB stick. It needs to be cross platform so I can use it with the Windows machines at work. The article says that this is possible.

However, (and I may be being a bit dim here), if I want to read the stick on a Windows box it needs to be formatted as fat32 doesn't it? If that is the case I can't make the linux truecrypt file executable can I? I'm sure I must be missing something here.

As a by the by I discovered that in order to read the volume once mounted on my Fedora system that I needed to set an option in the main programme preferences on the mount options tab to set the uid and gid to my own, otherwise it was mounted with the owner and group set as root:root. I don't think the article mentions that point.

I would be interested to know if there is any other take on my other point above.

Regards

Phil

[nelz]

Most distros mount Windows partitions with a umask that effectively sets the executable bit on all files (usually 022 or 002). Other alternatives would be to chmod the file before trying to run it or creating a small ext2 partition on the stick to hold any Linux executables.

I haven't experienced the problem with UID being set to root so I can't comment on that, except to say it's worth bearing in mind for future reference, thanks.

[pfnorris]

Thanks very much.

Went with a small ext2 partition. Should have thought of that really, but long day and all that.

Regards

Phil

[pfnorris]

This has been a big fail for me. I sorted out the problem above as described above. That left me with a small (19MB) ext2 partition at the start of the stick. Then the remainder (3.7GB) formatted as fat32.

I created a 3.0 GB encrypted volume on the fat 32 partition leaving about 700 MB open for unencrypted data and the windows executable.

All that was done from within Fedora. When I then launch Windows and plug the stick in it refuses to recognise the fat32 partition, and insists it must be formatted before it can be used, which would of course kill the incumbent encrypted volume within it.

Maybe I'll try creating the encrypted volume from Windows, and make sure that Fedora can read that. I'll post back on how that goes.

[nelz]

I'd put the FAt partition first, Windows is probably trying to mount the wrong one. To be on the safe side, I'd also format it in Windows.

However, you should be able to get away with a lone FAT partition, files are normally left executable when FAT filesystems are mounted in Linux.

[pfnorris]

OK

Putting the FAT partition first worked. I had already tried putting the Linux executable on a lone FAT partition but the excutable attribute did not go across, and would not reset once there.

Anyway looks like the issue such as it was is a Windows limitation...but we all knew that didn't we