This is not meant to be a flame or trollbait, so please don't take it as such.
While it's great to see guides of this ilk, I'd rather see people encouraged to use v.3+ loop-aes instead of cryptsetup and dmcrypt.
Why? Because it's better, and in actual fact is no more difficult to use, once set up. I'm no expert, but a bit of searching on the linux-crypto maillist will provide plenty of heated debate on this if you're curious The upshot is that loop-aes author Jari Rassu has been campaigning for years to get (eg) vulnerabilities fixed (he now outright calls dmcrypt "backdoored"), however these have been ignored. The dmcrypt people have responded in a rather ugly fashion imho - but when cornered they nevertheless admit he is correct but that the vulnerability is not significant enough to warrant fixing, or rather strange words to that effect.
It's a great pity that Fedora etc have seen fit to go with dmcrypt instead of loop-aes. However you can find recent versions of loop-aes in a number of livecds, including some of the leading security-oriented ones (eg INSERT, knoppix-STD).
Use loop-aes instead
This is not meant to be a flame or trollbait, so please don't take it as such.
While it's great to see guides of this ilk, I'd rather see people encouraged to use v.3+ loop-aes instead of cryptsetup and dmcrypt.
Why? Because it's better, and in actual fact is no more difficult to use, once set up. I'm no expert, but a bit of searching on the linux-crypto maillist will provide plenty of heated debate on this if you're curious The upshot is that loop-aes author Jari Rassu has been campaigning for years to get (eg) vulnerabilities fixed (he now outright calls dmcrypt "backdoored"), however these have been ignored. The dmcrypt people have responded in a rather ugly fashion imho - but when cornered they nevertheless admit he is correct but that the vulnerability is not significant enough to warrant fixing, or rather strange words to that effect.
It's a great pity that Fedora etc have seen fit to go with dmcrypt instead of loop-aes. However you can find recent versions of loop-aes in a number of livecds, including some of the leading security-oriented ones (eg INSERT, knoppix-STD).