My computer just died. I threw the hard drive into another computer. Everything looked good until it tried to fire up X and then I just got a blank screen. You know what that means. Time to reinstall the OS. There were a few gotchas that I thought I’d document here.
I run full disk encryption. After my computer died I wanted to grab a few files and backup the most before re-installing the os. I grabbed the Debian Live DVD image with xfce.
Everything booted. I clicked on my encrypted partition. I was prompted for a password. The password was accepted. But then the GUI complained that it couldn’t mount the filesystem.
After some trial-and-error, I learned that I needed to install lvm2:
sudo apt-get install lvm2
Then I was able to access my encrypted partitions and get the backup files that I needed.
After that I reinstalled the OS and all my favorite packages. Gnupg2, enigmail, thunderbird, keepassx, etc. But after that my smartcard wouldn’t work. I run into this problem every time I reinstall my OS!
But after installing gnupg2, I still couldn’t use the smartcard. This happens to me every time I reinstall Debian. One long-standing issue is that scdaemon, the driver for the smartcard isn’t installed unless you install the gpgsm package:
apt-get install gpgsm
I’ve done that before. But I still couldn’t use the card unless I was root. I also needed to install lib-ccid and pcscd:
apt-get install lib-ccid pcscd
After that I was good.
On this install I’m just running xfce. In the past I’ve had problems with gnome taking over the smart card. See my previous post on Using an OpenPGP Smartcard on Ubuntu 12.10 if you’re still having problems.
I also have an IronKey, which is a handy USB drive that has hardware encryption and (like an OpenPGP smartcard) will self-destruct if someone tries to brute force it.
Normally I just use the software included on the drive to mount the partition. But lately I’ve run into problems where the program cryptically doesn’t run. This is because the software is 32 bit and I’m running a 64 bit install.
You’ll need to enable multi-architecture installs for 32 bit software and install the 32 bit software to get the IronKey working:
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
After that the provided software should work.