CentOS - May 2014 - my setup

I'm not sure if this is helpful to anyone else and I can't
decide if it's mildly clever or just a stupid pet trick, really.
I recently decided to reinstall my work laptop with
centos. as part of the install I used an 8g
sandisk USB drive; it's roughly the size of a
wireless mouse receiver.   I put /boot, / and /usr on
the USB drive, set encrypted partitions for
swap, /home, /opt, /var and put them as well as
the boot loader the internal drive.  so now the USB
drive is quite literally acting like a 'key' for whole
laptop.  with no drive, the laptop comes up to an error
like 'No OS found' or something of the like.

anyway, not sure anyone else will find it useful,
helpful, interesting or anything else, but I felt like
sharing, I guess.

--On Thursday, May 29, 2014 12:43:16 PM -0400 zep <zgreenfelder at
gmail.com>
wrote:
> I'm not sure if this is helpful to anyone else and I can't
> decide if it's mildly clever or just a stupid pet trick, really.
[...]
> I put /boot, / and /usr on
> the USB drive, set encrypted partitions for
> swap, /home, /opt, /var and put them as well as
> the boot loader the internal drive.  so now the USB
> drive is quite literally acting like a 'key' for whole
> laptop.
You may find this of interest in that case:
  <http://www.gno.org/~gdr/sysadmin/centos/6/usb-crypto-key.html>
That configuration has the benefit that if you don't have the
USB key, it does a fail-safe fallback to asking for a crypto
passphrase.  

Devin