Power Management and Encryption

[Bill Bogstad]

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 9:10 PM, Matthew Gillen <me-5yx05kfkO/aqeI1yJSURBw at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On 5/17/2010 4:50 PM, Daniel Feenberg wrote:
>>
>> We have a desktop Fedora 12 box with encrypted disks. This satisfies a
>> government agency worried about confidential data on the machine, but I
>> would like the data to revert to encrypted after X minutes of idle time.
>> The gnome-power-management GUI only provides for "sleeping" on idle and I
>> can't find the appropriate configuration files to improve on that, such as
>> by shutting down. I did test and found that one only needs input the Linux
>> password to gain access to the disk after sleeping, although if sleeping
>> could suitably unmount the encrypted disks, that would be fine also. (It
>> might be hard since it is full disk encryption, including the OS).
>
> To unmount your root fs, you'd essentially need to shutdown.  To do
> that, you'll have to tweak gconf2.  Note, I haven't tried this myself,
> but it looks like it should work ;-)
>  Use either gconftool-2 or the gui editor to change the value of the key
>  /apps/gnome-power-manager/actions/sleep_type_ac
>  from 'suspend' to 'shutdown'.

On my Ubuntu 9.10 system, the description for that key only mentions
hibernate, suspend, and nothing as possible values.
This is using gconf-editor.   The critical_* keys add shutdown as a
legal value.   Is the schema incomplete for the sleep_type_* keys or
was shutdown added with more recent versions of gnome-power-manager?

Bill Bogstad