Encrypted external HD

5. Automatic mounting
In order to make the mounting of the USB stick and EHD happen automatically we need to resort back to some shell scripting and also to setting up an init script.

Shell script
First, download the usbcrypthd bash script into your home directory.
Then, copy the script to /usr/local/sbin with the following command:

sudo cp usbcrypthd.txt /usr/local/sbin/usbcrypthd

Make the script executable only by the root user:

sudo chmod 700 /usr/local/sbin/usbcrypthd

Note: if you use different device names or a different location for the key file, then you need to adapt this script.

Setup init script
Install sysv-rc-conf, a terminal-based tool for managing the init scripts:

sudo apt-get install sysv-rc-conf

Then, download the usbcrypthd_init script and copy it into /etc/init.d:

sudo cp usbcrypthd_init.txt /etc/init.d/usbcrypthd

And set the correct permissions:

sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/usbcrypthd

Fire up sysv-rc-conf:

sudo sysv-rc-conf

Use the down arrow key to navigate to usbcrypthd and enable it for run-leves 2, 3 and 5. Exit the tool by pressing “q”.

You can now mount the EHD and USB stick as follows:

sudo /etc/init.d/usbcrypthd start

and unmount it like this:

sudo /etc/init.d/usbcrypthd stop

As a final test, reboot your machine. The USB stick and the EHD should be already mounted when you log into your X session (or terminal).

That’s it, folks! 🙂