Move Documents and Settings to its own drive and/or partition

Synopsis

This paper describes how to move `C:\Documents and Settings' to its own drive and/or partition, which will improve system performance by minimizing the fragmentation of Operating System (2000/XP/2003) files. In addition, should the Operating System become corrupt one can reinstall Microsoft Windows without losing any profile data.

This has not been tested on Microsoft Windows Vista. If you have successfully done this please let me know!

Warning: This paper assumes the reader has prior and competent knowledge of installing and administering Microsoft Windows and takes no responsibility for any data lost.

Description

1. Create a new temporary Administrative account, reboot your PC and log-in under the new profile. Include this account in the changes below unless stated otherwise.

2. Open Regedit and modify the following string value to point to your new profile location (e.g. E:\):

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\ProfilesDirectory

3. Expand ProfileList and modify the following string value of each profile (except S-1-5-18), replacing C:\Documents and Settings with the new profile location:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\<profile>\ProfileImagePath

4. Navigate to the key below and modify all string values so as C:\Documents and Settings points to the new profile location:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders\*

5. Close Regedit, open Explorer (be sure you can view hidden files, including system) and copy all profiles (except LocalService(XP), NetworkService(XP) and the temporary profile you are using) from C:\Documents and Settings to the new profile location.

6. Reboot your PC; log-in as Administrator and remove the temporary profile; and then delete C:\Documents and Settings.

If you have any questions or suggestions my e-mail is below.

Create Encrypted File System on FreeBSD using GELI

Synopsis

This paper describes how to encrypt a file system on FreeBSD using GELI with 448bit Blowfish encryption. See the GELI(8), MDCONFIG(8) and NEWFS(8) manual pages for more detailed description of the commands and parameters.

Description

Create Memory Disk

If a memory disk is to be used then this needs to be created first. The following commands create a 10GB file and then links to it with a vnode.

• dd if=/dev/urandom of=/path/to/memory.disk bs=1M count=10240
• mdconfig -a -t vnode -f /path/to/memory.disk -u 0

Create Encrypted File System

1. Create Key
   • dd if/dev/urandom of=/geli.key bs=56 count=1
2. Initialise GELI Provider
   • geli init -s 4096 -e Blowfish -l 448 -K /geli.key /dev/disk
3. Attach to GELI Provider
   • geli attach -d -k /geli.key /dev/disk
4. Create a new File System
   • newfs -U /dev/disk.eli

Mount Encrypted File System

If an entry in /etc/fstab is not present then the disk will need to be mounted manually after each boot using a standard mount command (mount /dev/disk.eli /mnt). If, however, the Memory Disk option is used then the mdconfig command will need to be run beforehand.