this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2025
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I've done a little research but curious about first hand experience.

I've got a little home server that is full disk encrypted with LUKS (+LVM, of course). It's headless (no display, no keyboard, etc) and just lives attached to the back of my desk, out of the way.

If it gets rebooted due to a power outage, I can plug in a keyboard, wait long enough for it to get to the LUKS password prompt, enter password, hit enter, and assume it worked if I see the disk activity light blinking. Worst case scenario, I can move it to a monitor and plug it in to get display too.

Because lazy, I'd prefer to be able to enter the decrypt password remotely. "Dropbear" seems to be a common suggestion but I haven't tried it yet.

So, asking for your experience or recommendations.

I'll start. Recommendation #1 - get a UPS : D ... But besides that.

Addendum: either way, I currently need to be home to do this because I access it remotely via tailscale along with my desktop. Since both are full disk encrypted, neither will boot to the point of starting tailscale without intervention. But, I might repurpose a nonencrypted RPi with SSHd to act as a "auto restarts with tailscale so I can SSH to it, then SSH to server to enter the LUKS password" jump point.

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[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

Clevis with TPM+Tang is the most secure you're going to get as far as automated unlocking goes.

https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/security_hardening/configuring-automated-unlocking-of-encrypted-volumes-using-policy-based-decryption_security-hardening

Dropbear is still a thing, but going to be more problematic.

[–] data1701d@startrek.website 3 points 1 day ago

+1 for Clevis. I’ve been using it on my laptop for a year and it works like a charm. Sometimes, you need to update bindings after kernel updates, but it’s overall quite smooth.

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