Experience Using Flash + USB For SSH Keys?

Ben Elliston bje at redhat.com
Tue Dec 3 08:30:18 EST 2002


  Alex> Based on this rambling, does anyone know of lessons I have yet
  Alex> to learn?

One thing you forgot in your fstab entry is the "noatime" keyword.
Otherwise, if you mount your CF disk under your home directory, every
time you run find(1) for something, you unnecessarily write to the
flash, shortening its life.  You might consider mounting the CF disk
as read-only, except when you explicitly wish to modify it.

My old laptop used to automount my USB thumb drive and my ~/.ssh files
were symlinked into the automount tree.  I zapped my Unix login
password and installed pam_ssh so that my thumb drive had to be
present and connected to the laptop in order to even log in.  I told
xdm to use pam_ssh for authentication.  pam_ssh has the nice property
that it will automatically load the key you've just unlocked into an
agent keyring.

Ben





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