After the upgrade to Ubuntu 9 I was unable to use the numeric keypad on my external keyboard that’s connected to my laptop. I’ve switched every possible option in the keyboard preferences on and off and found out that you have to disable the Pointer can be controlled using the keypad option. That’s under System, Preferences, Keyboard and Mouse Keys.

I recently upgraded my laptop to the latest Ubuntu 8. The upgrade process was easy and quick however after the reboot I was unable to access my home-directory. I have a separate partition on which /home is mounted. This partition is encrypted with cryptsetup.

When I start the cryptdisk daemon it returns an error:

/etc/init.d/cryptdisks start
* Starting remaining cryptodisks...
mount: special device /dev/mapper/cryptohome does not exist
Enter passphrase:

Checking the status with cryptdisk doesn’t show any errors:
/dev/mapper/cryptohome is active:
cipher: aes-cbc-plain
keysize: 256 bits
device: /dev/sda3
offset: 0 sectors
size: 40949685 sectors
mode: read/write
And the device is there:
ls -l /dev/mapper/
total 0
crw-rw---- 1 root root 10, 63 2008-07-12 17:20 control
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 254, 0 2008-07-12 17:47 cryptohome

Crypttab is also configured correctly:

#
cryptohome /dev/sda3 none vol_id

Mounting the /home partition on /dev/mapper/cryptohome (as root) returns :

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/mapper/cryptohome,
missing codepage or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so
with these errors in dmesg
[ 1966.915329] VFS: Can't find ext3 filesystem on dev dm-0

Creating new encrypted partitions (with similar settings) works like a charm. The partition worked perfectly for months before the upgrade and currently I don’t have any clue on how to access my encrypted data. Any help would be highly appreciated.

UPDATE

The problem was not tied to cryptsetup but to something entirely different. My passphrase contains a number of special characters. My keyboard layout was changed to something without the “µ ù ç^” characters. I didn’t notice this during the test because then I was using a rather simple passphrase.

I recently upgraded my laptop to the latest Ubuntu 8. The upgrade process was easy and quick however after the reboot I was unable to access my home-directory. I have a separate partition on which /home is mounted. This partition is encrypted with cryptsetup.

When I start the cryptdisk daemon it returns an error:

/etc/init.d/cryptdisks start
* Starting remaining cryptodisks...
mount: special device /dev/mapper/cryptohome does not exist
Enter passphrase:

Checking the status with cryptdisk doesn’t show any errors:
/dev/mapper/cryptohome is active:
cipher: aes-cbc-plain
keysize: 256 bits
device: /dev/sda3
offset: 0 sectors
size: 40949685 sectors
mode: read/write
And the device is there:
ls -l /dev/mapper/
total 0
crw-rw---- 1 root root 10, 63 2008-07-12 17:20 control
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 254, 0 2008-07-12 17:47 cryptohome

Crypttab is also configured correctly:

#
cryptohome /dev/sda3 none vol_id

Mounting the /home partition on /dev/mapper/cryptohome (as root) returns :

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/mapper/cryptohome,
missing codepage or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

with these errors in dmesg
[ 1966.915329] VFS: Can't find ext3 filesystem on dev dm-0

Creating new encrypted partitions (with similar settings) works like a charm. The partition worked perfectly for months before the upgrade and currently I don’t have any clue on how to access my encrypted data. Any help would be highly appreciated.

Screen is a nice little nix-utility that allows you to leave a command running on a remote server even if you have disconnected.

The utility has a site at http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/.

Use is easy. Start screen with screen. You can exit an existing screen by tapping CTRL-A, d. Re-attaching to a screen is done with screen -r id. You can retrieve a list of ids by tapping screen -ls.