From the Canyon Edge: eCryptfs to the Rescue

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

eCryptfs to the Rescue

My Patriot Torqx 128GB SSD bit the dust a couple of weeks ago.

It just disappeared. The kernel simply stopped seeing the device. Poof. And then really weird, nasty things happened, until my OS crumbled like a house of cards. Upon reboot, not even the BIOS could see the drive.

After digging through Patriot's forums, it seems that I'm hardly the first person that this has happened to :-( Actually, it seems that many of these SSD sold in December 2009 and January 2010 are suffering from the problem.

Remarkably, it can be "solved" by a firmware update. And even more remarkably, Microsoft Windows is required to apply said update. Yeah, bummer.

So I had to contact Patriot and RMA my drive. Right--I had to FedEx my drive back to the manufacturer.

Thankfully, my private data was safely locked away in encryption provided by eCryptfs!

:-Dustin

3 comments:

AnonymousApril 7, 2010 at 1:30 AM
Yay embedded non-free software! One day there will be FLOSS in SSDs.
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AnonymousApril 7, 2010 at 2:59 AM
I was wondering, how easy is to reinstall ubuntu from a previous installation with encripted home in a separate partition?
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Darren HartApril 7, 2010 at 10:18 AM
My local git repository recently went poof and disappeared as well. Corrupted pack file. Pack files are read-only. Ecryptfs errors in dmesg. Yikes. I was very happy with my crypttab setup before the whole upstart disaster completely broke the cryptodisks init scripts. I tried ecryptfs with my new karmic install because I was tired of having to hack the init scripts. After losing a git tree to ecryptfs, I'm back to running unencrypted. I'm not sure what it will take to get me to trust ecryptfs again... but it will be something significant.
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Add comment

Please do not use blog comments for support requests! Blog comments do not scale well to this effect.

Instead, please use Launchpad for Bugs and StackExchange for Questions.
* bugs.launchpad.net
* stackexchange.com

Thanks,
:-Dustin

About the Author

Dustin Kirkland (Twitter, LinkedIn) is an engineer at heart, with a penchant for reducing complexity and solving problems at the cross-sections of technology, business, and people.

With a degree in computer engineering from Texas A&M University (2001), his full-time career began as a software engineer at IBM in the Linux Technology Center working on the Linux kernel and security certifications, including a one-year stint as an dedicated engineer-in-residence at Red Hat in Boston (2005). Dustin was awarded the title Master Inventor at IBM, in recognition of his prolific patent work as an inventor and reviewer with IBM's intellectual property attorneys.

Dustin then first joined Canonical (2008) as an engineer (eventually, engineering manager), helping create the Ubuntu Server distribution and establishing Ubuntu as the overwhelming favorite Linux distribution in Amazon, Google, and Microsoft's cloud platforms, as well as authoring and maintaining dozens of new open source packages.

Dustin joined Gazzang (2011), a venture-backed start-up built around an open source project that he co-authored (eCryptFS), as Chief Technology Officer, and helped dozens of enterprise customers encrypt their data at rest and securely manage their keys. Gazzang was acquired by Cloudera (2014).

Having effectively monetized eCryptFS as an open source project at Gazzang, Dustin returned to Canonical (2013) as the VP of Product for Ubuntu and spent the next several years launching a portfolio of products and services (Ubuntu Advantage, Extended Security Maintenance, Canonical Livepatch, MAAS, OpenStack, Kubernetes) that continues to deliver considerable annual recurring revenue. With Canonical based in London, an 800+ work-from-home employee roster and customers spread across 40+ countries, Dustin traveled the world over, connecting with clients and colleagues steeped in rich cultural experiences.

Google Cloud (2018) recruited Dustin from Canonical to product manage Google's entrance into on-premises data centers with its GKE On-Prem (now, Anthos) offering, with a specific focus on the underlying operating system, hypervisor, and container security. This work afforded Dustin a view deep into the back end data center of many financial services companies, where he still sees tremendous opportunities for improvements in security, efficiencies, cost-reduction, and disruptive new technology adoption.

Seeking a growth-mode opportunity in the fintech sector, Dustin joined Apex Clearing (now, Apex Fintech Solutions) as the Chief Product Officer (2019), where he led several organizations including product management, field engineering, data science, and business partnerships. He drastically revamped Apex's product portfolio and product management processes, retooling away from a legacy "clearing house and custodian", and into a "software-as-a-service fintech" offering instant brokerage account opening, real-time fractional stock trading, a secure closed-network crypto solution, and led the acquisition and integration of Silver's tax and cost basis solution.

Drawn back into a large cap, Dustin joined Goldman Sachs (2021) as a Managing Director and Head of Platform Product Management, within the Consumer banking division, which included Marcus, and the Apple and GM credit cards. He built a cross-functional product management community and established numerous documented product management best practices, processes, and anti-patterns.

Dustin lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife Kim and their wonderful two daughters.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

eCryptfs to the Rescue

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