Having a system secure is a great win, especially when talking about your notebook that could easily get into the wrong hands. However, most of the time more security means less convenience. Especially if you are used to the comfort that LVM gives you in combination with XFS to allow online resizing of your filesystem...

I just ran into the size limit of my home partition and wanted to add a few more GB. Searching the net, I found this how-to on the dm-crypt wiki: http://www.saout.de/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php?page=ResizeLUKSPartitions

It turned out that it is even easier with an XFS filesystem. Note that I did not find any documentation if this should work, but so far my system survived this change just fine:

transit:~# lvextend -L +16G /dev/vg0/home_crypted     # (1)
transit:~# cryptsetup resize home                     # (2)
transit:~# xfs_growfs /dev/mapper/home                # (3)

These commands are explained as follows:

  1. extend the logical volume underlying the crypted device
  2. propagate the change of size to the crypted device
  3. adjust the file system to the new size

As you might have guessed, I have my home partition in a logical volume home_crypted in volume group vg0. It is encrypted using dm-crypt and LUKS and usually mapped to /dev/mapper/home. Perhaps this is a help to someone...


?CategoryFileSystem