Power Management and Encryption

[Matthew Gillen]

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'.

There are some other keys in that directory (e.g. 'low_ups') whose
default values are 'hibernate' that you'll want to change to 'shutdown' too.

HTH,
Matt