I recently setup a desktop computer with two SSDs using a software RAID1 and full-disk encryption (i.e. LUKS). Since this is not a supported configuration in Ubuntu desktop, I had to use the server installation medium.

This is my version of these excellent instructions.

Server installer

Start by downloading the alternate server installer and verifying its signature:

  1. Download the required files:

     wget http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/releases/bionic/release/ubuntu-18.04.2-server-amd64.iso
 wget http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/releases/bionic/release/SHA256SUMS
 wget http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/releases/bionic/release/SHA256SUMS.gpg

  2. Verify the signature on the hash file:

     $ gpg --keyid-format long --keyserver hkps://keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 0xD94AA3F0EFE21092
 $ gpg --verify SHA256SUMS.gpg SHA256SUMS
 gpg: Signature made Fri Feb 15 08:32:38 2019 PST
 gpg:                using RSA key D94AA3F0EFE21092
 gpg: Good signature from "Ubuntu CD Image Automatic Signing Key (2012) <cdimage@ubuntu.com>" [undefined]
 gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
 gpg:          There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.
 Primary key fingerprint: 8439 38DF 228D 22F7 B374  2BC0 D94A A3F0 EFE2 1092

  3. Verify the hash of the ISO file:

     $ sha256sum --ignore-missing -c SHA256SUMS
 ubuntu-18.04.2-server-amd64.iso: OK

Then copy it to a USB drive:

dd if=ubuntu-18.04.2-server-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdX

and boot with it.

Manual partitioning

Inside the installer, use manual partitioning to:

  1. Configure the physical partitions.
  2. Configure the RAID array second.
  3. Configure the encrypted partitions last

Here's the exact configuration I used:

  • /dev/sda1 is 512 MB and used as the EFI parition
  • /dev/sdb1 is 512 MB but not used for anything
  • /dev/sda2 and /dev/sdb2 are both 4 GB (RAID)
  • /dev/sda3 and /dev/sdb3 are both 512 MB (RAID)
  • /dev/sda4 and /dev/sdb4 use up the rest of the disk (RAID)

I only set /dev/sda2 as the EFI partition because I found that adding a second EFI partition would break the installer.

I created the following RAID1 arrays:

  • /dev/sda2 and /dev/sdb2 for /dev/md2
  • /dev/sda3 and /dev/sdb3 for /dev/md0
  • /dev/sda4 and /dev/sdb4 for /dev/md1

I used /dev/md0 as my unencrypted /boot partition.

Then I created the following LUKS partitions:

  • md1_crypt as the / partition using /dev/md1
  • md2_crypt as the swap partition (4 GB) with a random encryption key using /dev/md2

Post-installation configuration

Once your new system is up, sync the EFI partitions using DD:

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1

and create a second EFI boot entry:

efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sdb -p 1 -L "ubuntu2" -l \EFI\ubuntu\shimx64.efi

Ensure that the RAID drives are fully sync'ed by keeping an eye on /prod/mdstat and then reboot, selecting "ubuntu2" in the UEFI/BIOS menu.

Once you have rebooted, remove the following package to speed up future boots:

apt purge btrfs-progs

To switch to the desktop variant of Ubuntu, install these meta-packages:

apt install ubuntu-desktop gnome

then use debfoster to remove unnecessary packages (in particular the ones that only come with the default Ubuntu server installation).

Fixing booting with degraded RAID arrays

Since I have run into RAID startup problems in the past, I expected having to fix up a few things to make degraded RAID arrays boot correctly.

I did not use LVM since I didn't really feel the need to add yet another layer of abstraction of top of my setup, but I found that the lvm2 package must still be installed:

apt install lvm2

with use_lvmetad = 0 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.

Then in order to automatically bring up the RAID arrays with 1 out of 2 drives, I added the following script in /etc/initramfs-tools/scripts/local-top/cryptraid:

 #!/bin/sh
 PREREQ="mdadm"
 prereqs()
 {
      echo "$PREREQ"
 }
 case $1 in
 prereqs)
      prereqs
      exit 0
      ;;
 esac

 mdadm --run /dev/md0
 mdadm --run /dev/md1
 mdadm --run /dev/md2

before making that script executable:

chmod +x /etc/initramfs-tools/scripts/local-top/cryptraid

and refreshing the initramfs:

update-initramfs -u -k all

Disable suspend-to-disk

Since I use a random encryption key for the swap partition (to avoid having a second password prompt at boot time), it means that suspend-to-disk is not going to work and so I disabled it by putting the following in /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume:

RESUME=none

and by adding noresume to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX variable in /etc/default/grub before applying these changes:

update-grub
update-initramfs -u -k all

Test your configuration

With all of this in place, you should be able to do a final test of your setup:

  1. Shutdown the computer and unplug the second drive.
  2. Boot with only the first drive.
  3. Shutdown the computer and plug the second drive back in.

  4. Boot with both drives and re-add the second drive to the RAID array:

     mdadm /dev/md0 -a /dev/sdb3
 mdadm /dev/md1 -a /dev/sdb4
 mdadm /dev/md2 -a /dev/sdb2

  5. Wait until the RAID is done re-syncing and shutdown the computer.

  6. Repeat steps 2-5 with the first drive unplugged instead of the second.
  7. Reboot with both drives plugged in.

At this point, you have a working setup that will gracefully degrade to a one-drive RAID array should one of your drives fail.

Keep the EFI partitions in sync

Since the EFI partition is not RAIDed, I decided to setup a cron job to keep it in sync on the two drives.

First of all, I made sure that both partitions were mounted by explicitly using their PARTUUID (use blkid /dev/sda1 to look it up) in /etc/fstab:

PARTUUID=9a923b8a-6d41-473d-b4f3-b7488eedeace  /boot/efi  vfat  umask=0077,rw,x-gvfs-hide      0       1
PARTUUID=ef386bc2-e184-4397-86b4-88ecd4469a9b  /mnt/efi   vfat  umask=0077,rw,x-gvfs-hide      0       0

and then creating the /mnt/efi directory and mounting everything:

mkdir -p /mnt/efi
mount -a

Then put the following script in cron.daily/efi-sync:

#!/bin/sh
if [ ! -e /mnt/efi/backup.mnt ] ; then
    echo "The backup drive is not mounted in /mnt/efi."
    exit 1
fi
if [ ! -e /boot/efi/orig.mnt ] ; then
    echo "The original drive is not the EFI partition"
    exit 1
fi
rsync -aHx --delete --exclude=/efi/orig.mnt --exclude=/efi/backup.mnt /boot/efi /mnt/

and adding the guard files:

touch /mnt/efi/backup.mnt
touch /boot/efi/orig.mnt