26 April 2013

398. Securing your Dropbox with encfs

Quite some time ago I made a post about how to use truecrypt and dropbox together. It wasn't a very elegant solution as it consisted of putting a truecrypt container in the dropbox folder.

 Apart from being pretty obvious, it suffers from drawbacks, such as the fixed size of the truecrypt container taking up space whether you're using it all or not.

[Note that mounting the dropbox folder inside a truecrypt container isn't a real solution either since it won't actually encrypt anything.]

Playing around with encfs made me realise that THIS is the perfect solution for secure Dropbox.

We'll make the assumption that you don't want to encrypt everything in your dropbox, but only things which is kept in a specific folder.

I'm presuming that you've got dropbox set up and working. If not, get the deb files from https://www.dropbox.com/

If you're having issues, make sure that fuse is installed, and that you belong to the group fuse (too add, do sudo usermod -a -G fuse $USER . To check do cat /etc/group|grep fuse)

Getting started:

sudo apt-get install encfs
mkdir ~/Dropbox/encrypted
encfs ~/Dropbox/encrypted ~/decrypted
The directory "/home/me/decrypted" does not exist. Should it be created? (y,n) Y Creating new encrypted volume. Please choose from one of the following options: enter "x" for expert configuration mode, enter "p" for pre-configured paranoia mode, anything else, or an empty line will select standard mode. ?> p Paranoia configuration selected. Configuration finished. The filesystem to be created has the following properties: Filesystem cipher: "ssl/aes", version 3:0:2 Filename encoding: "nameio/block", version 3:0:1 Key Size: 256 bits Block Size: 1024 bytes, including 8 byte MAC header Each file contains 8 byte header with unique IV data. Filenames encoded using IV chaining mode. File data IV is chained to filename IV. File holes passed through to ciphertext. -------------------------- WARNING -------------------------- The external initialization-vector chaining option has been enabled. This option disables the use of hard links on the filesystem. Without hard links, some programs may not work. The programs 'mutt' and 'procmail' are known to fail. For more information, please see the encfs mailing list. If you would like to choose another configuration setting, please press CTRL-C now to abort and start over. Now you will need to enter a password for your filesystem. You will need to remember this password, as there is absolutely no recovery mechanism. However, the password can be changed later using encfsctl. New Encfs Password: Verify Encfs Password:
Put the files you want to be encrypted in ~/decrypted -- NOT ~/Dropbox/encrypted. Once you're done, unmount ~/decrypted:
sudo umount ~/decrypted


When you want to access your encrypted files or add more files to the encrypted file, just mount ~/Dropbox/encrypted using encfs:
encfs ~/Dropbox/encrypted ~/decrypted/

397. Briefly: compiling ck (Con Kolivas) kernel 3.8.9 in arch linux


mkdir ~/tmp
cd ~/tmp 
wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.0/linux-3.8.9.tar.bz2
tar xvf linux-3.8.9.tar.bz2
cd linux-3.8.9/
wget http://ck.kolivas.org/patches/3.0/3.8/3.8-ck1/patch-3.8-ck1.bz2
bunzip2 patch-3.8-ck1.bz2
patch -p1 < patch-3.8-ck1
cp /proc/config.gz .
gunzip config.gz
mv config .config
make oldconfig
make -j2
make -j2 modules
sudo make modules_install
sudo make headers_install INSTALL_HDR_PATH=/usr/src/linux-3.8.9-ck1-ARCH
sudo cp arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-3.8.9-ck1-ARCH
sudo cp System.map /boot/System-3.8.9-ck1-ARCH.map
sudo mkinitcpio -k 3.8.9-ck1-ARCH -c /etc/mkinitcpio.conf -g /boot/initramfs-3.8.9-ck1-ARCH.img
sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

396. Compiling gromacs 4.6 with gpu support, openblas and fftw3 on debian wheezy

NOTE: with ACML my performance on my FX8150 and FX8350 nodes is only 25% of that with Openblas (double precision). Yes, for some reason gromacs is four times faster with openblas than with the machine vendor libraries in my tests.

Here are the release notes: http://www.gromacs.org/About_Gromacs/Release_Notes/Versions_4.6.x
As far as I understand you don't have to rely on openmm anymore for CUDA. Yes, the PITA of compiling openmm is gone!

Note that GPU calcs only speed things up under certain, specific conditions  -- and not all nvidia cards are supported (or equal). My own set-up, using statically cooled graphics cards, is definitely not appropriate for a GPU cluster. Once nwchem comes out with GPU support I might upgrade to fancier $200 graphics cards (maybe COSMO in NWChem will finally become more reasonable in terms of computational cost), but there's little reason for that at the moment.

Not all cards are created equal either -- e.g. GT210, which has GPU compute capability 1.2, is too poor to run with gromacs. GT430 (compute cap GT430) works. Both are obviously not viable for professional work.

Also note that it seems that you still need to use OPENMM if you want GPU support for implicit solvation.

Gromacs used to be easy to install. It's become a fair bit more complicated between 4.5.5 and 4.6. See here for gromacs 4.5.5: http://verahill.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/gromacs-with-external-fftw3-and-blas-on.html

CUDA: If you want to build with cuda you need gcc-4.6, which is still available in the wheezy repos. 4.7 won't work. Luckily, you can have both on your system, but you'll need to specify CC and CXX as shown below.

Openblas
Note that the links to the openblas file tends to die after a while, so you might have to download it manually.

sudo mkdir /opt/openblas
sudo chown ${USER} /opt/openblas
cd ~/tmp
wget http://github.com/xianyi/OpenBLAS/tarball/v0.2.6
tar xvf v0.2.6
cd xianyi-OpenBLAS-87b4d0c/
wget http://www.netlib.org/lapack/lapack-3.4.1.tgz
make all BINARY=64 CC=/usr/bin/gcc FC=/usr/bin/gfortran USE_THREAD=0 INTERFACE64=1 1> make.log 2>make.err
make PREFIX=/opt/openblas install
cp lib*.*  /opt/openblas/lib

add
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/opt/openblas/lib
to your ~/.bashrc [for later use with nwchem and ecce, add /opt/openblas/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf and do sudo ldconfig -- you might want to make libopenblas.so and libopenblas.so.0 sym links to the main lib, libopenblas_bulldozer-r0.2.6.so]

single-precision gromacs 4.6 with both CPU and GPU

CUDA
If you have an nvidia card and want to enable GPU calcs, do
sudo apt-get install nvidia-cuda-toolkit gcc-4.6 g++-4.6

If /usr/lib/libcuda.so is nothing by a symmlink to /usr/lib/libcuda.so.1, and the file /usr/lib/libcuda.so.1 is missing (this was the case on my wheezy amd64), then do
sudo rm /usr/lib/libcuda.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcuda.so.1 /usr/lib/libcuda.so

You can also simply make sure that there/s no /usr/lib/libcuda.so.

Continue with the gromacs compilation:
cd ~/tmp
sudo apt-get install cmake
wget ftp://ftp.gromacs.org/pub/gromacs/gromacs-4.6.tar.gz
tar xvf gromacs-4.6.tar.gz
mkdir build_gromacs46
cd build_gromacs46
sudo mkdir /opt/gromacs
sudo chown ${USER} /opt/gromacs
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/lib/openmpi/lib:/opt/openblas/lib
export LDFLAGS="-L/opt/openblas/lib -lopenblas"
export CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/openblas/include"
export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.6 && export CXX=/usr/bin/g++-4.6 && cmake -DGMX_FFT_LIBRARY=fftw3 -DGMX_BUILD_OWN_FFTW=On -DGMX_DOUBLE=off -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/gromacs/gromacs4.6_single -DGMX_EXTERNAL_BLAS=/opt/openblas/lib ../gromacs-4.6
make
make install

Note: for acml I used this instead:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/lib/openmpi/lib:/opt/acml/acml5.2.0/gfortran64_fma4_int64/lib
export LDFLAGS="-L/opt/acml/acml5.2.0/gfortran64_fma4_int64/lib -lacml"
export CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/acml/acml5.2.0/gfortran64_fma4_int64/include"
export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.6 && export CXX=/usr/bin/g++-4.6 && cmake -DGMX_FFT_LIBRARY=fftw3 -DGMX_BUILD_OWN_FFTW=On -DGMX_DOUBLE=off -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/gromacs/gromacs4.6_single -DGMX_EXTERNAL_BLAS=/opt/acml/acml5.2.0/gfortran64_fma4_int64/lib ../gromacs-4.6


Double-precision gromacs without GPU acceleration:

cd ~/tmp/build_gromacs46
rm * -rf
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/lib/openmpi/lib:/opt/openblas/lib
export LDFLAGS="-L/opt/openblas/lib -lopenblas"
export CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/openblas/include"
export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.6 && export CXX=/usr/bin/g++-4.6 && cmake -DGMX_FFT_LIBRARY=fftw3 -DGMX_BUILD_OWN_FFTW=On -DGMX_DOUBLE=on -DGMX_GPU=off -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/gromacs/gromacs4.6_double -DGMX_EXTERNAL_BLAS=/opt/openblas/lib ../gromacs-4.6
make
make install

Note: for acml I used this instead:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/lib/openmpi/lib:/opt/acml/acml5.2.0/gfortran64_fma4_int64/lib
export LDFLAGS="-L/opt/acml/acml5.2.0/gfortran64_fma4_int64/lib -lacml"
export CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/acml/acml5.2.0/gfortran64_fma4_int64/include"
export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.6 && export CXX=/usr/bin/g++-4.6 && cmake -DGMX_FFT_LIBRARY=fftw3 -DGMX_BUILD_OWN_FFTW=On -DGMX_DOUBLE=on -DGMX_GPU=off -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/gromacs/gromacs4.6_double -DGMX_EXTERNAL_BLAS=/opt/acml/acml5.2.0/gfortran64_fma4_int64/lib ../gromacs-4.6

Add gromacs to path:
echo 'export PATH=$PATH:/opt/gromacs/gromacs4.6_single/bin:/opt/gromacs/gromacs4.6_double/bin' >> ~/.bashrc

Switching between GPU and CPU
You can use the same binary for both, but remember that only the single precision binaries have GPU support to begin with. To set gpu vs cpu, use the -nb option in mdrun:
-nb enum auto Calculate non-bonded interactions on: auto, cpu, gpu or gpu_cpu


Quick test:
cd ~/tmp
wget http://www.gromacs.org/@api/deki/files/128/=gromacs-gpubench-dhfr.tar.gz
tar xvf \=gromacs-gpubench-dhfr.tar.gz
cd dhfr/GPU/dhfr-solv-PME.bench
mdrun -nb cpu -s topol.tpr -testverlet

Hit ctrl+c to stop and get statistics. Then try
mdrun -nb gpu -s topol.tpr -testverlet

I got
XPU ns/day -------------- auto 7.4 GPU 7.7 CPU 4.1 gpu_cpu 7.5

where I have a 3 core 3.1 GHz AMD Athlon II X3 445 CPU and an NVIDIA GeForce GT 430 graphics card -- neither of which is anything special.

Note also that the ns/day values depended highly on how long I let the calc run, and as I didn't time it and make them run the same amount of time, I suspect that auto, GPU and gpu_cpu are all about the same.