I'm going to be adding a 3TB drive to my fileserver, but I want to use LUKS encryption. The fileserver is kinda long in the tooth, a 2.8GHz P4 with 2GB of RAM.
The machine has two drive slots, currently with an 80GB and a 1.5TB drive. What I was considering am using a 16GB thumb drive for the OS, then encrypting and using the 1.5TB and 3TB for swap, /var, /tmp, and the rest for data. Toward that end, I have a few questions. * Is using a thumb drive for / and /usr a bad idea? Would it be better to set up the 1.5 TB with two VGs, one for the OS and one for data? * Writing random data to the hard drive is going to take a *lot* of time. I built a P4 box a while back with a 500GB drive, and as I recall, it took somewhere around 40 hours to write random data to that drive...A 3TB will take something over a week by my estimation. I was considering processing it on my Quad-core AMD machine, but will that be any faster? I'm guessing it will, since the bus speed is faster. * If you have already randomized the drive and written encrypted data to it (e.g. on the faster machine), is there a way to tell the installer that you want an encrypted partition, but don't write random data to it? Any thoughts would be welcome. Thanks, --b
