Encrypting mirrored drive

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xy16644

I have a machine running FreeBSD 7.2 and I have installed it with two 80GB hard drives and setup software mirroring (RAID 1) using "geom".

The next thing I would like to do is encrypt everything on this machine (including the swap file if possible).

I have been reading up about this and I see theres two options:

1) gbde

2) geli

The question I have is, can I encrypt an existing system without having to rebuild it? I want to take an existing partition and encrypt it. I'm *not* adding a new hard drive to the system that I want to encrypt.

This may sound like a silly thing to say but I don't want to lose whats on the existing unencrypted drive....:e

Can anyone offer some advice or pointers as to how I should approach encrypting my servers mirrored drive?

The other thing that is bothering me is that I have a software mirror setup, will this cause any problems when encrypting the drive?

Many thanks!

PS: I have read this so far:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/disks-encrypting.html
 
AFAIK you can't encrypt existing partitions. So you will have to backup the data, setup encryption and restore the backup.
 
When you remove one disk (aka provider) from your mirror, you have a complete backup of your data. Than you could reinstall your system with gmirror (with only one disk/provider at that time!) and geli encryption. After that you copy the relevant data from the other disk to your encrypted disk. Finally you insert the other disk/provider to the new gmirror.

cheers,
honk
 
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