found drama

F[ileV]ault. Love the concept. Hate the implementation.

I’ve written a couple of times about my love/hate relationship with Panther’s FileVault feature. I love^3 the idea of being able to have all of my shit encrypted. Especially since the performance hit is soooooooo small. Some people have commented: “Well what do you need to encrypt though?” Frankly my response is everything. Work stuff on KetelOne doesn’t really belong to *me* and if it gets ganked then it’s not just me that gets screwed. (You can never be too paranoid about that sort of thing…) But then there’s also (you know) my bank records and stuff. I don’t want that stuff floating around on free-wheeling drive. Likelihood of someone stealing my iBook *for* that information? Slim. But you can never be too paranoid when it comes to that stuff. Better not leave the avenue open if you can help it.

But that brings me back to… *le sigh* Me hating FileVault. I’ve written before about how it interferes w/ Apache and how I’ve had to write all these shell scripts to test my web-based material in my local environment. Well, come to find out this all has to do w/ .sparseimage.

Refresher: FileVault takes your files, applications, preferences, etc. — everything in your ~ and wraps it up as random bits in yourusername.sparseimage. When you log in, it mounts that file and decrypts on the fly. So when you’re logged in and accessing your files as a person this all happens in a totally transparent fashion. However, when the system tries to access (say) ~/Documents/yourfile.doc it can’t resolve the location. Example: Write an AppleScript to launch Excel and open a spreadsheet that is saved in your (encrypted) ~. Well, AppleScript cranks and launches Excel and goes looking for ~/Documents/myspreadsheet.xls … only ~/Documents/myspreadsheet.xls doesn’t exist to AppleScript … AppleScript only sees ~/yourusername.sparseimage. Which is of no fucking use to anyone.

Secure? Maybe. But endless hoops to be jumped through here. Must be a better way.

About Rob Friesel