Das Blog wurde ursprünglich als öffentlicher Aufbewahrungsort für meine Notizen zum Aufsetzen einer verschlüsselten Arch-Linux-Installation gestartet; damals noch bei Blogger. Später kam die Entscheidung die bestehenden Inhalte auf Github Pages und Jekyll zu migrieren.

Nun folgt der dritte Umzug: Mit eigener Domain und eigenem Server auf Basis von Hugo.

Im Verlaufe des letzten Jahres ist mir Emacs überraschenderweise ans Herz gewachsen. Zunächst ging es ja nur darum mit Org-mode einen Ersatz für Evernote zu schaffen, aber dann hat evil auf einmal Vim ersetzt und auf einmal war Emacs mein Standard-Werkzeug in Sachen Textbearbeitungen aller Art. Natürlich wollte ich diesen Luxus auf all meinen Systemen haben, zum Glück ist Emacs plattformunabhängig. Meine init.el war, obwohl fein säuberlich in einzelne Dateien gegliedert, es allerdings nicht. Nach jeder Änderung mussten die betreffenden Abschnitte auf meiner Windows-Kiste händisch angepasst werden. Lästig, aber zu dem Zeitpunkt noch im Rahmen.

Jetzt kam eine zweite Windows-Maschine dazu und aus lästig wurde inakzeptabel. Also musste eine neue Lösung her, am Besten eine Art Single-Point-Of-Configuration um zwischen den einzelnen Systemen umzuschalten. Org-mode und Babel to the rescue!

Nachdem ich den Punkt erreicht habe, an dem fast mehr halbfertige Entwürfe als fertige Beiträge auf dieser Seite sind, habe ich mich entschlossen einen wichtigen Schritt zu gehen: Entsprechend der Empfehlung von Eric S. Raymond werden alle zukünftigen Beiträge in deutscher Sprache verfasst. Dadurch verringert sich zwar die potentielle Leserschaft, dafür steigert sich hoffentlich die Anzahl an Beiträgen und einige der Entwürfe reifen zu lesenswerten Artikeln. Alte Beiträge bleiben auf Englisch, da einige von Außen verlinkt sind und eine nachträgliche Übersetzung nur Arbeit und wenig Nutzen bringt.

Finally, I got my last grade in my university career: the grade for my Master’s Thesis. As a publication of the results cannot possibly hinder the evaluation process anymore I hereby proudly present the results.

You can find the whole thesis here.

It finally happened. I got hooked on Emacs Org-mode. And the worst part: I felt right at home. Though some keybindings are still mind-boggling, Emacs is going strong to become my text editor of choice for most use-cases. (Don’t worry VIM, I still love you) Org-mode on the other hand is going strong to become my PIM-tool of choice, at least for notes and todos and maybe a bit of my calendar. Thus, I now have two tools trying to fill the same void in my life: Evernote and Org. Evernote has a slick smartphone application and a polished web-interface, Org is free software, based on the glory of plain text and incredibly powerful. (And it gives more geek-cred) Let’s see if the latter can replace the former.

Most of the groundwork is done, therefore I can finally explain what happend here:

I started my blog on blogger.com because it seemed like a quick and convenient way to publish my occasional article about GNU/Linux, life and technology, but over time I got a bit annoyed with it. The system generates the current view dynamically with heavy use of javascript which leads to parts of the page breaking frequently if one of the content delivery servers doesn’t respond in time. On my blog, prime candidates for this kind of breakage were the top and the slide-in navigation. A blog with most of the navigation missing? No, thanks. In addition to that I had no control over the source code and the rich text editor behaves nothing like my usual tools of the trade. Those were itches I definitely wanted to be scratched.

The solution: Running my own blog somewhere safe.

There are many guides out there explaining how to do a full-system encryption on Linux, but most of them, including my own, have a little flaw: They focus on systems with exactly one hard drive. However nowadays hard disks are cheap, SSD+HDD combinations are getting more popular and even some notebooks (like my glorious Thinkpad T520) have multiple drives.

Although it’s not that difficult to adapt those guides in a way that all drive are encrypted, naive double execution of cryptsetup will lead to being asked for a passphrase multiple times at boot. I find this behaviour highly annoying and will therefore explain how to circumvent this situation without omitting security.

When using google for research purposes, you’ll often come across search results having a little picture aside and linking to the google+ profile of the author. See the picture below for an example.

The purpose is clear: Linking abstract information on the web to the people behind and making people with google+ profiles more prominent. But how can you get the badge for your blog? Well, there are hundreds of guides out there describing what to do and what to link where, but I believe most of them tend to be overcomplicated and not suited for google’s own product: Blogger. Therefore I decided to write down the necessary steps to accomplish this feat.

The following article is for novice to medium users who broke their encrypted system, be it by accident, stupidity or choice. It’ll show you how to regain access to your hard drive and conduct a repair attempt, but not tell you how to repair a broken encryption (e.g. corrupted headers), because without having countermeasures in place (e.g. backups of said headers) your data is probably lost for good.

Having not installed arch linux for some time, I was kind of surprised that the installer got abolished and replaced with pacstrap. Simon Dittlmann did a great job describing an encrypted setup on arch linux, but his guide is a bit outdated.

I couldn’t find a guide utilizing the current method of installing arch linux, so I decided to update Simon’s guide to 2013. I’ll explain setting up LVM on top of an encrypted partition, because it’s easier and more convenient than the other way round.

Advice: You should definitely backup your data and read the Beginner’s Guide to get comfortable with the installation process.