zfsify

DigitalOcean encryption acceptance — 2026-10-09

Disposable DigitalOcean Droplets in SFO3 used Ubuntu 24.04 amd64, BIOS boot, 1 GiB RAM and a 25 GiB boot disk. No attached volumes were used. Production Droplets were not modified.

The packaged installer SHA-256 is 7f9e233be7409fbd568264374fd52853ff537f7cd2ded120e595e8baa9e157b8.

Encrypted preservation

The normal 50/50 conversion with --yes --encrypt and a supplied environment key booted into rpool/ROOT/ubuntu. The temporary plaintext boot hook unlocked the native AES-256-GCM pool. Preservation checks covered file contents, users, shadow entries, SSH host keys, ACLs, extended attributes, hard links, sparse files and configuration. The pool occupied the remainder of the boot disk and scrub reported zero errors.

The same checks passed after a normal reboot and again after rebuilding every Ubuntu initramfs and rebooting. Encryption verification confirmed inherited encryption, the expected key source, and root-only key/initramfs permissions. Captured verification output.

Console selection

The stock image supplied both console=tty1 and console=ttyS0. ZFSBootMenu uses the last console argument for interaction, which put its passphrase prompt on serial instead of the provider’s display console. The installer now orders an existing active graphical console last for rescue and ZFSBootMenu when a framebuffer or VGA console is available. Serial-only systems and the final Ubuntu command line retain their original ordering.

The final package booted its RAM environment with console=ttyS0 followed by console=tty1; /proc/consoles confirmed tty1 controlled /dev/console. Linux regression tests cover graphical/serial combinations, inactive displays, quoted console arguments, and GRUB syntax.

Manual passphrase entry, encrypted slice conversion, and snapshot recovery in DigitalOcean’s browser console are covered by the 2026-10-11 acceptance report.

Other checks

• 17 encryption, 17 strategy and 12 progress tests pass.
• Linux boot-argument, GRUB syntax and network replay checks pass.
• Shell syntax, focused ShellCheck and packaged installer integrity pass.
• An earlier HTTPS-key attempt stopped before disk mutation when its test server was unavailable. The original ext4 root remained bootable. After the endpoint became available, TLS-verified key retrieval in RAM succeeded.

The preceding installer build d9a2aeda6d26f33fb9c7e586f18e057156d97046a04e931a1b8a3fde5a276005 also passed encrypted preservation, automatic reboots, and an initramfs rebuild followed by reboot. A wrapping-passphrase change took 0.358 seconds; this does not establish revocation of old disk copies. These results preceded the console-order fix and are not substituted for final-build acceptance.

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