Miscellaneous Notes

Encrypted parition on Artix with OpenRC

A follow-up on one of my previous posts Artix Linux: Previously I’ve used runit as init system. When I switched to OpenRC I struggled setting up an encrypted home partition. I added the entry to /etc/crypttab, then the mapper entry to /etc/fstab, but it just never asked me the password on boot and subsequently didn’t mount the home partition.

Well it turns out, /etc/crypttab is ignored by OpenRC. It looks instead for /etc/config.d/dmcrypt. Also make sure that the dmcrypt service (‘dmcrypt-openrc’) is installed and started at boot: rc-update add dmcrypt boot.

Copy and Paste on Proxmox VNC

I also recently started to replace most of my Raspberry Pis with VMs running on Proxmox. Some of them have a desktop, and it’s handy to have copy/paste working there. The trick to get this working is to install the ‘spice-vdagent’ on the guest VM (even if you’re not using spice but VNC) and make sure to start the service rc-update add spice-vdagent.

Another trick how to use a proper VNC client: Edit the VM config /etc/pve/local/qemu-server/<VM_ID>.conf and add a line args: -vnc 0.0.0.0:77. Then you can connect to the guest with any VNC client using the host ip address and port 5977. For other guests just increment to 78, 79, etc.

While I’m at it… If you create a backup of a Proxmox VM, you’ll find it in /var/lib/vz/dump/.