Hey, so I've Googled around and I haven't found anything definitive. I was wondering how I'd encrypt a drive and have it auto mount at boot. I've found a couple "tutorials" that were like "it's easy, just do this, this, and this." But they weren't detailed.

I honestly don't know where to start because I don't know what daemons would handle it, if you even need them, I don't know. Does the kernel support drive encryption natively?

I also read about how encryption can be bad for data loss because the reason for encryption is a defense against digital forensics, so parity isn't an option. I really don't know enough about this, but I can't find a thorough and comprehensive source of information.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? Some documentation, lectures, lessons, just about anything to give me a crash course so I have a better understanding and sense of direction.

If you are talking about LUKS encryption, you can use /etc/crypttab to automatically unlock an encrypted volume and map it to a device name during mount processing. You might use this if you were going to encrypt only certain partitions, such as your /home partition. If you want to encrypt everything (e.g., your root filesystem and /home, etc), you'll need to create an unencrypted partition for /boot, and create an initrd (initial ram disk) with LUKS suppport using mkinitrd, then change GRUB or LILO to boot that.

I think many distros have guides on how to do this. While it might not apply directly to your situation with Ubuntu, you may find the Slackware README_CRYPT.TXT document informative, as it explains many of the concepts at length.

http://slackbuilds.org/mirror/slackw...ADME_CRYPT.TXT