I’ve pondered about encrypting my hard disk on my laptop and server for quite some time, but never got around to it since I don’t think I understand how encryption affects my day to day usage and the complication in setup and management. I hope to get some clarifications to my questions before I proceed with the tutorial outlined here.
Is encrypting the LVM equivalent to having a full disk encryption? I'm confused because Ubuntu has the option to do LVM encryption and encrypting the home directory.
Once I boot into the OS, are the files I have access to equivalent to files from an unencrypted LVM? That is, can I copy files to usb disks, transfer them through ssh, rsync folders, etc, and have the data that are transferred make sense on their new location (unencrypted)? Or do I have to do anything special to use those files at the new location?
On my server, I currently have two 1.5tb disks set up using hardware RAID1. This is actually the first time I’m playing with RAID as well. Does using RAID1 with an encrypted LVM complicate things? That is, do these instructions appy?
My server is remote (at school) and I don’t always have physical access to it. However, if I reboot remotely I would have to enter in the passphrase before the OS can boot. Have you dealt with this? This post suggests early-ssh.
I plan to add two 2tb disks to the server via hardware RAID1 in the near future. Of course, I would also want the content of the new disks be encrypted. How complicated would it be to add in the new disks and how would one go about doing so? Would it be possible to keep these two mirror disks as “separate” from the original disks? That is, would it be possible to unplug these disks and mount them on another computer? How would I access the encrypted content?
I look forward to hearing from you! Thanks!
Note that I did ask these same questions on the tutorial's comments, but I figure I'd get more responses and explanations here.