Encryption

Ubuntu: Disk Permissions & Multiple User Profiles

This is probably a no-brainer for advanced Linux users, but for newbies it may strike as awkaward that if you create/partition a disk with one user on your computer, another user won't automatically have "access" to it. This is a good opportunity to revisit the function of permissions in Linux--a quick review of Users and Groups.

TL;DR

When creating a partition, the "Disks" application/utility sets permissions to 700 by default (read/write/execute access for the disk owner only). You'll want to change that if you've got multiple users who need to access the disk on your computer. I'll discuss solutions below.

Tags

Weekly Recap: .htaccess Fun, Ubuntu Encrypted Drive Fun, Xubuntu Password Fun

Just a quick recap of all the fun I had this week. No great revelations here, but sometimes it just feels good to vent.

Don't Try This at Home, Kids

As a general rule I don't like to push changes to a client's .htaccess file during business. If you've ever had the pleasure of working with regular expressions (regex), you'd know why. This is largely a holdover, however, from my earlier days as a developer--when regex seemed about as intuitive as ancient Chinese.

Tags

Ubuntu: Recovering Encrypted Files with Ecryptfs-Util

It's easy to get turned around on this, so here's a little walkthrough. Once you get the hang of it, recovering encrypted files should be more or less easy.

Background

One of my first Linux installs was Xubuntu on a 2008 MacPro (at two 3Ghz processors with 4 cores each, 15.6 Gb RAM, and an upgraded GeForce GTX card, it's still a contender in 2020). I bought the computer, prior to upgrade, for about $350 on eBay as a pet project, hoping it could take the place of my 2012 Mac Mini--a computer Apple was no longer looking to support with OS releases. The idea was to install Xubuntu on the MacPro and let one of Apple's last decent computers shine anew. At the time, it seemed like a pain to get Xubuntu to play nice with Apple's hardware.

Tags

Subscribe to Encryption