newbie: for my understanding of loop-aes

[Christophe Zwecker <doc@zwecker.de>]

Hi,

I just installed gentoo and wanted to use loop aes on a 420GB volume.

the volume resides on a 3ware ide raid5. I wanted to format it with the
XFS filesystem.

is it true I shall disable write cache on the controller ?

Now I read the README that comes with loop-aes. the parameters seem
wrong its not 

losetup -e AES128   it seems  to be

losetup -e aes -k 128. well no problem here.

Im trying example #3
It says I shall keep the seed somewhere, but in the example its in the
fstab isnt it ? I suppose its for convienience but better not to keep
there ? 

is solution #3 more secure because of the seed than number 4 (the gpg
solution), altho in #4 I could save the keyfile on a CD or an usb
keychain storage ?

I mean in #4 I dont do a dd over the whole disk.

I did the swap encryption thing as in the read me, however doesnt matter
which parameters I put in fstab swapon always works, so I wonder how can
I check if swap is really encrypted ?

And finally I wonder how much morge secure aes256 is over aes128 , cause
I got no idea. I wonder when/if I need 256.

my read/write acces seem to slow down about 50% with aes256.

thx for help on this :-))

Chris
-- 
Christophe Zwecker                     mail: doc@zwecker.de
Hamburg, Germany                        fon: +49 179 3994867
http://www.zwecker.de

"Who is General Failure ?  And why is he reading my disk ??"

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Linux-crypto:  cryptography in and on the Linux system
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