LUKS -- bad password or options?
 

Well, I just had a bit of a scare...

A few months back, I decided to might play with using LUKS for whole disk encryption. Everything was working fine until tonight when I turned on my computer to do some work, and after entering my password, I got an error saying that it had failed. Nonplussed, I tried again... it failed again. Fat-fingered it twice in a row? How odd.

Three failures?! Maybe I am not typing it right? Maybe I'm not remembering it right? Holy smokes, did something go hokey with the disk or some software update to hose the encryption somehow?

Well, after freaking out a little bit, I remembered that I had been playing with writing some software to interface with a credit card reader. The credit card reader is a usb thing that by default shows up as a HID... and it was still plugged in... Could that be interfering somehow?

Well to end a long story, the answer is yes... once I disconnected the card reader, I could enter my password and boot up the computer...

Thought I'd throw out a message about it since my panic-laden google searches didn't come up with that being a possibility (not that _that_ many people will have the problem, but...)

Cheers, and good night!

I had the same situation a while ago with a new keyboard. Some odd reason, booting up after plugging in a new keyboard resulted in a password failure.

So in the end i booted up with the old keyboard plugged in, and all worked fine. Only until plugging in the new keyboard and rebooting with it still plugged in... seemed to allow me to unlock the disk at boot time.

Strange either way...

Maybe a new piece of hardware is being detected as a key device for pam authentication, but not being able to read the keyfile? I have no idea tbh.