Login Fail On Crypted /home

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I have a fesh install of CentOS release 6.6 on my laptop. I want to use a more secure config with /home crypted. But when this partition is mounted I cannot login anymore on my laptop. Only root can login. This occur at level 5 (graphic login) or 3 (text login). The message is
“Cannot enter home directory. Using /.”

Logged as root I can create a new user (with useradd) and his home is created on this crypted partition.

Logged as root I can issue a “su – anotheruser” in a terminal and access the home of this user on the crypted partition.

The problem looks strange for me and google has not helped….

This how I build the crypted partition (following a tutorial, just changing ext4 with xfs):
lvcreate -L 30G -n lv_home vg_portable badblocks -s -w -t random -v /dev/vg_portable/lv_home cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/vg_portable/lv_home cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/vg_portable/lv_home c_home mkfs -t xfs -L /home /dev/mapper/c_home

The blkid command shows:
/dev/mapper/c_home: LABEL=”/home”
UUID=”1118317e-cc5a-4183-a498-21418f82e982″ TYPE=”xfs”

In /etc/fstab I add:
UUID18317e-cc5a-4183-a498-21418f82e982 /home xfs defaults 1 2

In /etc/crypttab I add:
c_home /dev/vg_portable/lv_home none luks

Thanks for your advices.

Patrick

2 thoughts on - Login Fail On Crypted /home

  • Does the new /home have the SELinux context home_root_t? Does your new home directory have the context user_home_dir_t? Does running
    ‘/sbin/restorecon -r -v /home’ fix the issue?

  • Thanks for this very good suggestion Jonathan. I’ve disabled selinux and it works now. When I install desktops with kickstart, I always disable selinux on our internal network and I do not thought about this. This laptop was installed from DVD support!
    May be on a laptop that can be connected everywhere I’ll have to understand this selinux application for a more secured system.

    Thanks again.

    Patrick

    Jonathan Billings a