Saturday 10 June 2017

installing Ubuntu 17.04 with encrypted home makes boot delays

the problem is when installing Ubuntu with encrypted home, 17.04 creates a swapfile instead of a swap partition like previous versions, then the installer writes a faulty config file.

In particular, ecryptfs-setup-swap puts in /etc/crypttab a line like this:

cryptswap1 UID=XXXXXXXX /dev/urandom swap,offset=1024,cipher=aes-xts-plain64


(like there were a swap partition with UID=XXXXXXXX) while with a swapfile it should put the following line:
 
cryptswap1 /swapfile /dev/urandom swap,offset=1024,cipher=aes-xts-plain64

If you manually change that line and reboot, you get rid of the problem - before rebooting, check also that your /etc/fstab file ends with:
 
/swapfile               none  swap  sw  0  0
/dev/mapper/cryptswap1  none  swap  sw  0  0
 


Because of this error Ubuntu spends a long time waiting for the swap.