Subject: Encrypting Filesystems?
To: NetBSD/Alpha <port-alpha@netbsd.org>
From: Bill Dorsey <dorsey@lila.com>
List: port-alpha
Date: 12/01/2000 04:02:48
Hi,

Has anyone got Matt Blaze's cfs up and running on a recent
version of NetBSD on an Alpha processor?

I got 1.4beta to build on my 1.5 system with a couple of
minor modifications to cfs_adm.c and cfs_nfs.c (rpc function
names in there were missing _svc).  I also modified replaced
truerand.c with code to use /dev/random instead of the
weird random number generation Blaze was using.

After successfully building cfsd, killing mountd and all
my nfs daemons (mount only makes NFS requests over port
2049 and I didn't feel like modifying it), I was able to
run cfsd and according to netstat it was listening for
requests.

I was unsuccessful in mounting the encrypting filesystem
with both the mount command and the mount_nfs command:

# mount -o intr localhost:/null /crypt
mount_nfs: bad MNT RPC: RPC: Timed out

# mount_nfs -2 localhost:/null /crypt
mount_nfs: bad MNT RPC: RPC: Timed out

I tried the -2 option since CFS version 2 of the NFS
protocol, but it still failed.

My guess is that the CFS code is not 64-bit clean, but
I thought I'd check to see if anyone else has got it
working before I jump into the code and try to debug it.

It's really a pity that there isn't a more modern
implementation of an encrypting filesystem that will run
on NetBSD.  I did some web searches and came up with
tcfs and fist as potential alternatives.  Unfortunately,
neither one really supports NetBSD.  Tcfs will build on
NetBSD but it's an alpha version that doesn't encrypt
filenames.  Fist only builds on Solaris and Linux boxes.

--
Bill Dorsey