I installed Debian 9 on a VPS and configured the root partition to be encrypted. However, due to the installer giving me trouble when attempting to encrypt, I had to do this manually.
To be able to unlock the root partition via SSH during boot I also installed dropbear-initramfs
and updated the initramfs using update-initramfs -u
.
On boot, I am now able to connect to the dropbear
server.
After the login process, cryptroot-unlock
(which is invoked automatically when logging in via SSH) fails with the following error message:
Error: Timeout reached while waiting for askpass.
and closes the connection.
I didn't find anything on this exact error message on the web and tried to make sure I didn't make any config mistakes, but nothing seemed to help so far.
At the moment, I am able to chroot into the system using a rescue live system; what can I do to fix this error?
Best Answer
I was able to fix the problem myself, but maybe someone else runs into the same problem, so I'll post the solution here:
As it turns out, my
/etc/crypttab
had syntax errors, which led toaskpass
(amongst others) not being included in the initramfs when runningupdate-initramfs -u
.For me, it was enough to add each separate logical volume into
/etc/crypttab
instead of the volume group as a whole. Here's an example:After updating your initramfs once again your system should ask for the logical volume passphrases on startup and then resume booting normally.