I installed an additional SSD on my pc. Everything works ok, except I need to unlock it with my root password on every session so that it mounts.
I’ve tried formatting it to change the ‘owner’, tried adding it to the user group, and I can’t find any other solutions. Any ideas?
This happens irrelevant of DE (happens on KDE and hyprland). I’m running tumbleweed, though this looks like a config problem rather than a distro problem.
I have had the issue of having to enter a password to access an additional drive on my Manjaro PC.
I was pointed to this as a possible solution and it worked for me.
It may or may not work for you though.
I know a lot of people are recommending fstsb entries, but since you’re using a DE, you can have the credential stored in the wallet / session manager for your DE. KDE and Gnome should both have an automount option using keys from there. Then you also can find a preference somewhere to unlock your wallet / session keys thing on login. Bing bang boom you should have it mount and unlock automatically without having to enter any extra stuff with the added benefit of not leaving the key around (though since it seems you have FDE anyway that’s a minor issue depending on your threat model)
As you mentioned elsewhere it’s encrypted.
Take a look at
/etc/crypttaband creating and adding a key file that can unlock the drive.Essentially your additional SSD will have both a password and a file containing a password that can unlock the drive. When you unlock your root filesystem (I’m guessing at boot) it will then have the key file that can unlock the SSD.
Something like
cryptsetup luksAddKey /dev/pathtossd --new-keyfile /etc/newpasswordSystemd might make this easier to setup nowadays.
Edit: Also, yes, the password to unlock your SSD is just sitting in a file in your root drive. Be sure to restrict it to only be readable by root.
Be sure to restrict it to only be readable by root.
sudo chmod 400 /etc/newpassword
Generally, they enforce in Linux using root permissions to mount internal hard drives unlike USB drives that can be mounted by the user If you want to mount it automatically in every boot, you could modify the /etc/fstab to add an entry for it
I have a related issue. Mine is a network share and it’s in fstab, but I have Linux boot without waiting for wifi, so the mount fails and then asks for root password when I try to mount it later.
I think I just need to add “user” to the options field, right?Try adding the nofail and _netdev options in your fstab entry. I have this on a few computers that connect to nfs shares including my laptop that obviously can only connect when I’m at home or on VPN. Example:
server:/path /mnt/path nfs4 defaults,nofail,_netdev 0 0Will that add two minutes to my boot time though?
Nope it doesn’t add anything for me. The _netdev option tells mount to wait until the network is connected before attempting to mount. And the nofail option tells it not to error or block the process that called it if the mount doesn’t work or is delayed.
Now if the mount contains your etc or other critical config files, it could cause problems and maybe you want to wait, so don’t want the nofail. And of course this kind of thing is somewhat OS specific depending on what boot system and service manager, etc., is used, so YMMV, but on Fedora, Rocky, and Ubuntu, it has worked for me for many years.
You may be right, but I worked around this using https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NetworkManager#Network_services_with_NetworkManager_dispatcher
I added the CIFS shares to my fstab with the
_netdevoption and created /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/30-nas-shares.sh containing (got the WiFi UUID usingnmcli con show):#!/bin/sh WANTED_CON_UUID="UUID-OF-MY-WIFI" if [ "$CONNECTION_UUID" = "$WANTED_CON_UUID" ]; then case "$2" in "up"|"vpn-up") mount -a -t cifs ;; esac fiThis waits for my WiFi to come up, ensures it’s my home WiFi, and then mounts my shares.
There are probably other and better ways to do it, but it works.
I believe systemd after targets work tho I have never tried them Try adding this to mount options
x-systemd.after=network-online.target
sudo mkdir /media/NewSSD # the name you like lsblk -f # look for UUID of new ssdthen add it to fstab https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Fstab
Something like
UUID=<insert drive UUID> /media/NewSSD ext4 defaults 0 2Make sure you use the correct filesystem (e.g. ext4 or other)
If its encrypted, you can also decrypt the drive automatically once booted by adding an entry in
/etc/crypttabThis will make it so you don’t have to type the password.
This never worked for me…
For automatically you need to add a keyfile to a slot in the luks device
openssl genrsa -out /root/keyfile.bin 4096cryptsetup luksAddKey /dev/mapper/extra /root/keyfile.binThe entry in the crypttab would be like this
extra UUID=XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX /root/keyfile.bin luks
And technically the key file can just be a plain text password and still work. Just as long as the key file matches the drive’s encryption password.
Encrypted volume? If so, that’s why.
Right. Wouldn’t it make sense to unlock it along with my root drive when I log in though? There should be a way to do that
You could set the password to be the same. It’ll attempt to use all known methods when unlocking it.
You can also probably store a key on the root drive instead of using a password, but I’ve never done that.
They do use the same pass though, that’s why it’s so strange to me. Thanks for the help, this at least gives me a clue.
I’ll dig around and update the post for reference.
No
No
KDE has option to automount during login. I found that to be the best solution.
Edit: I am mainly a PCLinuxOS user, so not sure if that would work for you.
Add it to /etc/fstab. Tons of guides everywhere online.
