Hi there ! I have a little box at home, hosting some little services for personal use under freebsd with a full disk encryption (geli). I’m never at home and long power outage often occurs so I always need to come back home to type my passphrase to decrypt the disk.
I was searching this week a solution to do it remotely and found the “poor-guy-kvm” solutions turning a Raspberry like board (beaglebone black in my case) in a hid keyboard. It works fine once the computer has booted but once reboot when the passphrase is asked before it loads the loader menu, nothing. When I plug an ordinary USB keyboard I can type my passphrase so USB module is loaded.
Am I missing something ? Am I trying something impossible ?
(I could’ve asked on freebsd forum but… Have to suscribe, presentation, etc… Long journey)
I’m using encrypted ZFS as the root partition on my server and I’ve (mostly) followed the instructions in point #15 from here: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting%20Started/Debian/Debian%20Bookworm%20Root%20on%20ZFS.html
This starts dropbear as an SSH server that only has a single task: when someone logs in to it they get asked for the decryption key of the root partition.
I suspect that this could be adopted to whatever encryption mechanism you use.
I didn’t follow it exactly, because I didn’t want the “real” SSH host keys of the host to be accessible unencrypted in the initrd, so the “locked host” has a different SSH host key than when it is fully booted, which is preferred for me.
I’ve read that freebsd 14 proposed zfs native encryption, so it could worked. Maybe it’s time to upgrade, I will see. Thanks !