Sunday, April 23, 2017

14.04 - How to remove user with encrypted home directory when password and passphrase are lost



After this here, I want to remove user secureuser whose home directory is encrypted, but password and passphrase are lost. Since the home directory was holding some 30 Gig of data, I want to be sure that the encrypted content will really be gone afterwards. Will a



deluser --remove-home secureuser



be ok in this situation or is there anything special to care for?



Background: I do not want to end up in a situation where I have the user removed and some zombie 30 Gig occupying the SSD which cannot be addressed any more...



As there were no useful hints or caveats from the community, I just jumped into cold water and did a



sudo deluser --remove-home secureuser



Just in case anyone else might share my hesitation: It worked fine and released the 30 Gig from the file system. The deluser also removed the group secureuser and all the references in group assignments.


No comments:

Post a Comment

11.10 - Can't boot from USB after installing Ubuntu

I bought a Samsung series 5 notebook and a very strange thing happened: I installed Ubuntu 11.10 from a usb pen drive but when I restarted (...