Preparing Fedora 26 laptop with ZFS and encryption — introduction (part 1)

The plan

In order to setup a laptop with one encrypted SSD disk, Fedora 26 OS, partitioned with ZFS and Docker pre-configured to use ZFS we will in this tutorial:

1. Boot to a Fedora 26 Live Preview from a pendrive.
2. Create four partitions on a single drive.
3. Encrypt root and home partitions.
4. Install ZFS and create zpool for our home partition.

Introduction

On a Linux system /dev/sda is usually the primary disk unless you have an SSD M2 connected to PCI then you primary disk is /dev/nvme0n1 .

sda

sd[a-z] is the drive name and it’s an old acronym which stands for S CSI (Small Computer System Interface — pronounced “skuzzy”) D rive plus a letter starting from “ a” . 

Each new drive will be assigned a new letter [a-z] then [A-Z] if you have more then 26 disks and then [a-z][A-Z] and so on.

We don’t use SCSI drives anymore but this naming convention is still used in Linux ecosystems.

nvme

nvme is also a drive name and it’s an acronym for N on- V olatile M emory E xpress which is the disk connected to the PCI Express on your motherboard. NVME SSD M2 disks are much faster (and twice as expensive) then normal SSD drives.

nvme*n* is the name of the disk where * is a following number.

nvme*n*p* is the name of the partition.

You can check what disks and partitions are in your laptop with:

lsblk

lsblk stands for L i s t Bl oc k D evices and it lists information about all available block devices. Block devices commonly represent hardware such as disk drives where you read and write one block of data at a time.

If you have an M2 SSD disk then you will see something like this:

NAME MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINT
nvme0n1                          259:0    0 238.5G  0 disk  
├─nvme0n1p3                      259:3    0    20G  0 part  
│ └─luks-9e2bd0d0-9006-4b4b-b32e-dfd23a3bcceb 253:0 0 20G  0 crypt /
├─nvme0n1p1                      259:1    0   256M  0 part /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p4                      259:4    0 217.2G  0 part  
│ └─luks-cf1d74d5-fed2-43bb-b759-06e9a417c30b 253:1 0 217.2G 0 crypt 
└─nvme0n1p2

I have a normal 2.5" SSD disk so my current output is:

NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT

sdb 8:16 1 59.8G 0 disk 
└─sdb1 8:17 1 59.8G 0 part /run/media/andrzej.rehmann/64GB

sdc 8:32 1 14.4G 0 disk 
└─sdc1 8:33 1 14.4G 0 part /run/media/andrzej.rehmann/DATA 1

sda 8:0 0 238.5G 0 disk 
├─sda4 8:4 0 217.2G 0 part 
│ └─luks-ab435781–0913–4e0f-8d8a-64aeeab9470e 253:1 0 217.2G 0 crypt 
├─sda2 8:2 0 1G 0 part /boot
├─sda3 8:3 0 20G 0 part 
│ └─luks-332dd1ac-b97c-4fb5–8c0d-fd5ec239de36 253:0 0 20G 0 crypt /
└─sda1 8:1 0 256M 0 part /boot/efi

I have mounted three drives. One SSD drive and two pendrives.

1. Pendrive mounted at /dev/sdb 59.8G with one partition /dev/sdb1 called “64GB” mounted on /run/media/andrzej.rehmann/64GB
2. Pendrive mounted at /dev/sdc 14.4G with one partition /dev/sdc1 called “DATA 1” mounted on /run/media/andrzej.rehmann/DATA 1
3. SSD 2.5" disk mounted on /dev/sda 238.5G with four partitions:

• /dev/sda1 256M allocated for /boot/efi
• /dev/sda2 1G allocated for /boot
• /dev/sda3 20G allocated for / (root) LUKS encrypted
• /dev/sda4 217.2G which is shown as unallocated (it’s because of ZFS, more on this later) but I have there my /home/andrzej.rehmann and /var/lib/docker  , this partition is also LUKS encrypted

It’s recommended to have your home /home/andrzej.rehmann directory to be on a separate partition then the root / directory. 

In the / partition you should only have the binaries which comes preinstalled with the Linux distribution of your chosing and the installed/downloaded binaries from the internet.

Binaries by default are installed in the /usr/bin directory, for example:

$ which cat
/usr/bin/cat
$ which docker
/usr/bin/docker

Cat (which is pre-installed on every distro) and Docker which I installed from the internet are both in /usr/bin .

One could argue that encryption is not necessary for the / partition but you don’t want your binaries to be manipulated by someone who got hold of your laptop.

Partitions

Insert the pendrive in the USB with the Fedora 26 ISO installed on it, then boot to Fedora 26 Live Preview.

Now we will create partitions on the disk. System is loaded in the memory and we have booted from a pendrive so we can manipulate the hard drive safely.

I’m using the following setup for my own laptop:

Partitions setup on 256G SSD drive.