how do I encrypt my home partition on Mageia 3?

[akbrian]

I plan on taking my laptop traveling with me and would be more comfortable if I could encrypt my home partition data just in case it gets stolen. I do have a separate /home, / , and ' /boot partitions. I'm using ext4. how can I go about encrypting the /home partition? This particular laptop has Mageia 3 64bit installed. Thanks. -AkBrian

[doktor5000]

You want to add encryption via Luks / dm-crypt
Rough guide is http://david.dw-perspective.org.uk/da/i ... with-luks/
General documentation is at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sy ... _with_LUKS

As you cannot do that online, better take a backup and reinstall, and tick the "Encrypted" box during partitioning,
and afterwards copy your data back. Otherwise you probably need to also take care that you will be asked for the
passphrase during boot, if it doesn't happen automatically.

[akbrian]

Thanks!

[jiml8]

If you are really concerned about protecting yourself, you need to watch for data leaks in your unencrypted system partition. Notably, /tmp, /var/tmp, /var/cache, /var/lib/mysql, and possibly /var/www will often contain information you would not want to give away. I personally have all these entities symlinked to other volumes which are encrypted.

Also, make sure you encrypt swap.