[SOLVED] Mount point for encrypted home partition unresponsive

brascher · 2017-09-01 20:26:47

Hi,

I just installed Arch Linux on a new Laptop, for the first time using a drive encryption for my home directory. I used dm-crypt, following the guide in the wiki. I also set up auto mounting of the encrypted home partition on login (but skipped the unmounting on logout for now), again following the guide in the wiki together with the pam_cryptsetup.sh file mentioned in the discussion.

I use gnome for my desktop environment. Now, whenever I boot my laptop and gdm starts up it immediatly deadlocks the entire laptop. I can't do anything not even switch to a console. When I disable gdm and log in my user from the console everything works just fine. Afterwards I can even start gdm again and log into the desktop environment without any hitches. When looking for the cause of the problem I found that when I log in on the console with the root user (so that my home directory will not be mounted) the mount point for the home directory is unresponsive. By that I mean that all commands interacting with the mount point hang forever and never finish (ls, lsof, chown, ...). I assume that gdm hangs because it tries to access my (unmounted) home directory and therefore hangs forever.

Any ideas how to debug/solve this? A first idea would be to prevent gdm from trying to access my home directory, though I don't know where to start on this one. Plus, if possible, I'd rather address the root of the problem, the unresponsive mount point.

Last edited by brascher (2017-09-02 09:12:21)

seth · 2017-09-01 20:54:28

Sounds like you're using x-systemd.automount for the device?

GDM probably tries to load a user icon or so, yes.

brascher · 2017-09-01 21:35:13

Yes, I am using x-systemd.automount, which also seems to be the reason for the mount point being unresponsive. But removing it obviously also means that my home directory no longer is automatically mounted on login, hmm.

Is there another option than using x-systemd.automount for automatically mounting the home directory on login? A gnome specific solution would be just fine.

seth · 2017-09-02 06:03:21

use pam_exec or pam_mount - otherwise every attempt to access the path will try to mount the encrypted container, what's not gonna work.

If you're fine w/ "not doing stupid", you'll only have to prevent gdm from accessing your home dir - a natural offender will be /.dmrc and I've no idea whether it's possible to block that access. You could also strace gdm and grep the output for your user path to see whether there's more (like you configured a theme/background/logo/... stored in the users path)

brascher · 2017-09-02 09:11:04

Thanks for the help, using pam_mount instead of the previous solution works like a charm.

Arch Linux

#1 2017-09-01 20:26:47

[SOLVED] Mount point for encrypted home partition unresponsive

#2 2017-09-01 20:54:28

Re: [SOLVED] Mount point for encrypted home partition unresponsive

#3 2017-09-01 21:35:13

Re: [SOLVED] Mount point for encrypted home partition unresponsive

#4 2017-09-02 06:03:21

Re: [SOLVED] Mount point for encrypted home partition unresponsive

#5 2017-09-02 09:11:04

Re: [SOLVED] Mount point for encrypted home partition unresponsive

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