Friday, July 25, 2008

FileVault and EncFS on Mac OS X (Leopard)

In the past I have used FileVault in attempt to protect files in the event of my mac falling into dubious hands. I find it frustrating on a few counts:

  • the root user can access your files while you are logged in

  • it regularly asks to reclaim space when logging out, making logging out much slower

On my linux machine I am using EncFS, which is working out well. So I thought I would try and install EncFS via MacPorts. I ran into all the following issues:

Then I ended up with an error I couldn't find a solution for:

$ sudo port install encfs
---> Building encfs with target all
Error: Target org.macports.build returned: shell command " cd "/opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_release_ports_fuse_encfs/work/encfs-1.4.2" && make all " returned error 2
...
FileUtils.cpp:163: error: 'make_binary_object' was not declared in this scope
make[2]: *** [FileUtils.lo] Error 1
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make: *** [all] Error 2

Error: Status 1 encountered during processing.

So I uninstalled MacFuse in MacPorts and used the installer from the MacFuse homepage. After installing EncFS from here and a reboot, I had success.

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