Encrypting hard drive?

[ViperChief]

I'm getting ready to install FreeBSD 7 on a laptop and am looking into encrypting the drive. I've seen several different sites regarding this. I wanted to see if I could see what ya'll think. When it comes to encrypting my disk, what is the best course of action? Should I encrypt the whole disk before I install or should I only encrypt partitions, etc? Thanks in advance.

[mfaridi]

Use this link

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO...ncrypting.html

and this link

http://www.violetlan.net/bsd/25/Disk...hgelionFreeBSD

[ViperChief]

Thank you. I had seen the first link but not the second. Is it better to just make part of the hard drive encrypted rather than the whole drive? Would making /home encrypted work well? Both links seem to be just about making a whole new partition and the first even says that encrypting /home would require more complex instructions. I don't do real "secret" stuff, but with identity theft on the rise, among other things, I'd like to protect as much of my info as I can.

[Nightweaver]

I use Geli for encrypting one of my hdd slices. You may encrypt your /home partition without any problems. I always use different slice for /home and encrypt it before I start using it. That partition may be activated and mounted through rc.conf thus no problems with logging and using your /home files at all.

[ViperChief]

I found something about encrypting /home. What I'm planning to do is install then before I do anything else, on the first boot, I'll follow the steps to encrypt /home then create my user account. Does that sound like a good plan of attack? I am planning on using geli. From what I read, it seemed that it was better. I saw some benchmarks and it looked like it was faster than gbde.

[Nightweaver]

The plan sounds just fine. Creating and using geli is pretty easy. You generate the key, create new partition, encrypt it, set it's mount point and that's it. Just remember to add the appropriate lines to /etc/rc.conf after you're done. And add your geli partition to /etc/fstab so it gets mounted at boot.