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Re: [LUG] 20150419 Advice on USB Key live drive, please

 

On 19/04/15 22:05, Eion MacDonald wrote:
> Dear folk,
> 20150419 Advice on USB Key live drive, please
> 
> I have set up a Live Linux Mint USB key for someone to use to operate a
> hand-me-down MS Windows 7 (illegal OS upgrade) computer for his email
> and web browsing.
> 
> Fine with persistence set albeit small memory size.
> However if I add a separate user name say "Blogs" with password, this
> would I believe, allow him alone to access that user and his private
> email inside Blogs, as opposed to him and world using machine on Live
> linux to browse.
> For many reasons , no dual booting set up used.
> Any help appreciated.
> 

You'll almost definitely want to encrypt the user Blogs' home partition
or just the entire stick - USB pendrives are easily lost or stolen.

Easy guide here:

http://www.itninja.com/blog/view/create-a-bootable-encrypted-usb-running-linux-mint-16

To answer your question directly, yes, you are correct - that is
basically the whole concept of "users" in an operating system. You
assign each person a set of resources and restrict access to them with a
password. It's perhaps worth pointing out that with a USB stick based
install, that authentication system is trivially bypassed by simply
plugging it into any other Linux computer which will immediately quite
happily automount your (presumably) LVM/ext4 filesystems. If that's a
worry, then encrypt (which is probably best practice anyway) but if it
seems like too much effort, don't bother.

Hope that helps.

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