[Samba] Folder Encryption and Samba

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 12:28 PM, Aaron Clausen
<mightymartianca at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's been passed to me from on high that one of our file servers needs
> to be encrypted.  I'm considering either whole-disk encryption or
> folder encryption.  I like the latter since, well, it's less work.
>
> Is there any particular folder encryption systems out there that the
> folks around here can recommend?

You can encrypt *filesystems* on individual partitions on the back end
easily enough, in the Linux world. There are numerous technologies for
this, though there is an inevitable performance penalty, but that's
pretty muchb invisible to the Samba system. The webpage at
http://encryptionhowto.sourceforge.net/Encryption-HOWTO-4.html
consistently refers to them as "folders", which may be where the
confusion arises.

I've been hearing good things about AES for robustness and blowfish
for speed, but haven't had the chance to try it for Samba serviced
filesystems.