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teddyhyesterday at 9:38 PM4 repliesview on HN

If you want to be able to reboot remotely, and non-interactively (i.e. while you sleep), I (and one other person) created Mandos for this purpose: <https://www.recompile.se/mandos>. It gets the password over the network. If this seems insecure to you, read the FAQ: <https://www.recompile.se/mandos/man/intro.8mandos>

Mandos works with initramfs images created by both initramfs-tools and dracut, and is present in Debian since 2011, so no need to use a third-party package.


Replies

akdev1lyesterday at 10:02 PM

How does this compare to: https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...

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YorickPeterseyesterday at 10:29 PM

I haven't looked deeply into either, but how does this compare to the combination of Clevis and Tang that e.g. Red Hat/Fedora seems to favor?

kroyesterday at 9:46 PM

Good FAQ, clearly stating the weak point of physical access. For a server that threatmodel can work, for a fleet of edge/iot devices in unsecured locations without permanent uptime there is no real solution to be expected without custom silicon logic (like in smartcards) on the soc.

koolbayesterday at 10:05 PM

Why is this needed at all? As the decrypted key is in memory before the reboot, can’t it just be written to a know location in memory and have kexec be instructed to read it early on?

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