Battery power bank, WiFi USB stick, and thumb drive

I then turn away to motor-less small storage, a 32 Gigs USB thumb drive so I can move on to other concern: on-the-fly encryption. Hence, I follow instructions to install True Crypt on Raspberry Pi. After unpacking of wxWidgets-2.8.12.tar.gz and TrueCrypt 7.1a Source.tar.gz in place, putting header files from pkcs-11-cryptoki2.20, and then install libfuse-dev, the following make will require long time:

$ export PKCS11_INC=/usr/local/src/truecrypt/pkcs/
 
$ make NOGUI=1 WX_ROOT=/usr/src/wxWidgets wxbuild
Configuring wxWidgets library...
Building wxWidgets library...
/usr/src/wxWidgets/src/common/string.cpp:84:39: warning: ‘wxEmptyString’ initialized and declared ‘extern’ [enabled by default]

$ make NOGUI=1 WX_ROOT=/usr/src/wxWidgets wxbuild
Compiling Buffer.cpp
Compiling Exception.cpp
Compiling Event.cpp
...
../Crypto/Aeskey.c:527:25: warning: operation on ‘ss[7]’ may be undefined [-Wsequence-point]
../Crypto/Aeskey.c:527:25: warning: operation on ‘ss[7]’ may be undefined [-Wsequence-point]
../Crypto/Aeskey.c:527:25: warning: operation on ‘ss[7]’ may be undefined [-Wsequence-point]
...
Converting Language.xml
Compiling Resources.cpp
Linking truecrypt

I created the TrueCrypt volume separately via its desktop GUI with ext3 file system to then mount it in Pi to a configured Samba share. As pointed out in a post, the following changes are added to smb.conf

...
wins support = yes
...
[pitruecrypt]
   comment= Pi Truecrypt Volume
   path=<the mount path of the USB thumb drive TrueCrypt volume>
   browseable=Yes
   writeable=Yes
   only guest=no
   create mask=0777
   directory mask=0777
   public=no

and then user-password are entered via interactive command.

For mobility, I already had the Pi as WiFi access point using hostapd (check these steps) and power bank, so it’s now matter of performance. In the case of rsync, initial sync of some 1,500 items totaling in 1 Gig size elapses in approximately the same 12 minutes of time compared to one bulk file of the same size. Of course, over the next incremental sync, it only takes less than a minute for the thousand items to just update slight differences.

Security

Back to security, there surely risk by opening Samba share to mounted TrueCrypt volume. But, for me it would be practically manageable (cross my finger). There is more concern to the fate of TrueCrypt after it is being closed in such a weird way, given that last audit finds nothing severe. Anyway, I found brute force tool, but no critical attack exists currently, unless e.g. it stays powered on and mounted, the person gain physical access. Beats me again.

tagsistant -o allow_other -o umask=0022 -o uid=1000 --repository=~/.tagsistant ~/tags

Prior to that, I change owner  from root to me on

$ ls -l /etc/fuse.conf
 
-rw-r----- 1 arif arif 215 2010-02-09 11:20 /etc/fuse.conf

and uncomment the user_allow_other of that config.

Running Tagsistant will add this mount

$ mount
...
gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/arif/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=arif)
tagsistant on /home/arif/tags type fuse (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,user=arif)
 
$ df -k
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on...
tagsistant           123593820  91720380  25595240  79% /home/arif/tags

Original file storage in this config is in ~/.tagsistant/archive/ and tagging structure in SQLite format is kept in ~/.tagsistant/tags.sql.

Serious Performance Drawback

I can use Nautilus or Krusader (basically any file browser) to access the tagged files but performance really drops when tags.sql reaches some 160MB. I don’t have time to look further and skip the chance to use it any longer in “production”.

$ sudo make install

After that I test tagsistant to organize /data/tags/

$ tagsistant /data/tags

The tagging works as expected but not too handy since no browser GUI is embedded. It is just like browsing through multiple OR and AND folders.

The installation process will also install tagman (a tag manager GUI) if libgtk2.0-dev and libglib2.0-dev are installed.