Security

One of the problems of running a Samba share on Linux is that occasionally one of the Windows machines accessing it will get a virus, and infect all the files on the share. You can use one of the AV tools to do this of course, (Clam AV, AVG and Kaspersky all have them these days) but they're pretty slow generally.

I noticed at one client that the virus was putting exe files into directories, with the same name as the containing directory eg.it would create the file /share/Software/Software.exe.

So the first thing to do is to see who is creating them. Here we go …

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On Ubuntu there is an option to create an encrypted directory in your home directory called ~/.Private, which is mounted at ~/Private. To set this up you need to issue two commands:

 sudo apt-get install ecryptfs-utils

 ecryptfs-setup-private

It asks you for a mount password. Log out and log back in again and everything you drop in the Private directory is encrypted and stored in the .Private directory, so that no-one can access your files if, for example, they log in to the machine in Single user mode, or take the hard disk out. So far so good.

But what happens when you move your encrypted files to a different machine? The instructions on this weren't so clear, so I'm just writing down a step-by-step approach to help others who are unsure.

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