openSUSE-12.3 : upgrading again …

The least risky approach to upgrading a system should be by cloning it as a virtual machine, and upgrade the clone. That’s what I did this time, and it worked, and I am rather happy.


Of course upgrades always come with unexpected effort.
  • I downloaded the “Network / 64 Bit PC” ISO image,
  • moved it to my folder with DVD/CD ISO images,
  • and included it in the virtual machine’s “Storage / Controller / IDE Controller” section.
  • I let VirtualBox create a new MAC address in the “Network / Adapter 1” section. (You will have to drop the old network interface later within YaST, and create and set up a new one then, once you have a running system.)
  • Then I started the VM,
  • it booted from this ISO image,
  • and I went the update installation path.
  • A couple of hours later (next morning!), I found the installation hanging on the Packman repository. I simply ignored that for the time being.
For quite some time I used /etc/init.d/boot.crypto as a way to mount encrypted file systems on the command line.

$ /etc/init.d/boot.crypto start  MOUNTPOINT
$ /etc/init.d/boot.crypto status MOUNTPOINT

$ /etc/init.d/boot.crypto stop   MOUNTPOINT

 (Yes, of course, there is also a GUI way to do this). Apparently that facility got dropped. The file simply disappeared. /etc/crypttab still exists, but within /etc/init.d/ I could not find any file dealing with it. I found this SDB article on “Encrypted filesystems” then, which had a slightly outdated section on systemd support [Link], that deals with this topic. I updated that wiki article to reflect the change coming with 12.3. I am rather excited to see, whether somebody else will notice that, maybe discuss the matter with me, and maybe also even further update the article. This is how to mount your encrypted file system now:

$ systemctl start  MOUNTPOINT
$ systemctl status MOUNTPOINT
$ systemctl stop   MOUNTPOINT

This looks pretty simple too me. I like it.

Update 2013-05-29:


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