[wplug] Work anywhere usb HDD?

[Scott F. Kiesling]

Hi all-

I commute by bike, I do lots of work at home, and so most
days I lug my laptop home.  But it is pretty heavy by
bicycling standards. I'm getting a desktop at work, and I
want to leave my laptop at home.  I could rely on rsync, but
I don't necessarily want to rely on the net to get my data
home.

So, I got myself a 120 Gb WD Passport. Very small and light,
and portable. Pretty cheap, too. I plan on just taking this
where I go and using the computer there to do the work.
(Don't worry, I'll back it up.)

Now what I would like to do is make it so I can use it on
almost any computer. Yes I can already do that, but I have
two added requirements: 

1. I want a linux (probably ext2) filesystem 
2. I want security (encryption)

I can imagine losing this drive and then someone has access
to some confidential stuff from work (or personal data, but
I generally leave that at home). I have been using truecrypt
to encrypt important stuff on my laptop, but if I want to be
able to access this new drive from any computer, truecrypt
might be tricky since you have to do some kernel magic to
get it to work.

So I have been looking at dm-crypt. It has a windows port
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeOTFE) for those times when
I have to use a windows computer. Don't know what to do
about Macs - I'd probably just use emulation.

The other option seems to be loop-aes, but it has no windows
support and you still have to modify your kernel (remove
loopback support, which seems limiting).

I think I will have a bootable partition on the drive with
linux (probably DSL-N so I can use all kinds of machines,
but maybe also Ubuntu for when I am on a faster machine - I
can have a grub menu so I can choose, right?)

Finally, I can use qemu or some sort of emulation to run
linux in windows and osx if I am desperate. So I think there
will be 4 partitions on the disk:

* Partition 1 (P1) will have grub and DSL-N ~100Mb (DSL-N is
  about 80Mb) - I need to check if the DSL-N kernel
  has everything set up for dm-crypt.

* Partition 2 (P2) will have Kubuntu (I like KDE if I'm on a
  machine that can handle it), and can be booted from grub.
  Again, check dm-crypt. ~3Gb, in case I want to add some
  stuff.

* Partition 3 (P3) will be vfat with windows stuff -
  emulator (probably qemu, both the win and osx versions),
  program to access ext2 partition from windows, dm-crypt
  stuff, and maybe some useful cross-platform apps or ports
  like openoffice.org. ~5Gb or larger depending on the apps to add.

* Partition 4 (P4) will be the big partition holding most of
  my data. I will either encrypt the whole thing or certain
  directories. ~110 Gb.

I've done a lot of googling and haven't found anything that
is exactly like this, but if you can find anything, please
let me know.

I'd appreciate any advice, problems I haven't thought of, or
experience anyone else has had with something like this.
Once done, I'll try to write up a howto. Thanks!

Scott

-- 
Scott F. Kiesling