Remote solution to decrypt disk at boot (jlai.lu)

submitted 7 months ago by Jean_Mich_Much@jlai.lu to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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Hi there ! I have a little box at home, hosting some little services for personal use under freebsd with a full disk encryption (geli). I'm never at home and long power outage often occurs so I always need to come back home to type my passphrase to decrypt the disk.

I was searching this week a solution to do it remotely and found the "poor-guy-kvm" solutions turning a Raspberry like board (beaglebone black in my case) in a hid keyboard. It works fine once the computer has booted but once reboot when the passphrase is asked before it loads the loader menu, nothing. When I plug an ordinary USB keyboard I can type my passphrase so USB module is loaded.

Am I missing something ? Am I trying something impossible ?

(I could've asked on freebsd forum but... Have to suscribe, presentation, etc... Long journey)

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[-] markstos@lemmy.world 3 points 7 months ago

You could buy a remote KVM device. The serial port of your target box connects to that and the KVM connects to the internet. With that, you can watch the device during boot and access the console remotely.

I used to run a web hosting business and we used those. I have not shopped for a personal one, but surely there must be old and used ones for sale.

Bonus: our hosting business ran on FreeBSD so I can confirm there was no problem there. Because it’s a serial connection no OS support is required.

[-] Jean_Mich_Much@jlai.lu 2 points 7 months ago

Hmm I've read it's expensive but never verified I admit it. And no serial port on my box... Will check the price of new and second hand device

this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023

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