Again I would reiterate that using xfs on large partitions in unwise. In order to attempt repair this disk (it remains to be seen if it will be successful) I had to boot into single user mode, cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdx xfscrypt, xfs_repair -t 60 -v /dev/mapper/xfscrypt. This is a dual-code 2.4GHz machine with 2GB of DDR2 RAM. The repair process has been running for over 10 hours so far, is 75% done with “Phase 4”, and estimates almost another 2 hours to go. It has also consumed 1.9GB of resident memory and 6.6GB of virtual memory. And of course, my computer is unusable at this time (I’m entering this from my laptop). Not exactly the kind of thing one wants from a filesystem.

Update: After running for 15 hours I gave up and decided to take the time to move the data off the disk, reformat it with ext3, and restore the data.

I was happy to read the article Digital Certificates: Do They Work? which mentioned the excellent paper by Carl Ellison and Bruce Schneier titled Ten Risks of PKI: What You’re not Being Told about Public Key
Infrastructure. I have always found the certicate industry to be a racket because it strongly encourages websites to pay money to give their users what amounts to an illusion of security. The solution is to support efforts like CAcert.org which generates certificates for free.