I'm setting up an array with encrypted HDDs (using LUKS2) and would like to retain control over manually opening them.

In other words, each time I reboot the unraid server I would like to manually open the encrypted device (using cryptsetup luksOpen) via CLI. How can I do this so that unraid can still use those disks in the array?

Currently I have a couple of disks that are encrypted but have yet to add a FS to them. I'm happy to do that manually using CLI.

Don't really get the use case, and this is certainly not officially supported, but even unofficially, I don't see a way to accomplish this, because you need to decrypt the md devices to keep parity in sync, and they are only available after array start.

1 hour ago, JorgeB said:

Don't really get the use case, and this is certainly not officially supported, but even unofficially, I don't see a way to accomplish this, because you need to decrypt the md devices to keep parity in sync, and they are only available after array start.

Thanks Jorge. The use case is keeping the luks header separate from the drive encrypted by luks. When using luksFormat you can write the header to disk rather than having the header file at the front of the device being encrypted.

If the only thing keeping holding this back is the use of a parity drive, you can relax that assumption. I'm going to be rolling a snapshot parity (through a third party) as it suits my dataset better than unraid's real time parity.

I was doing research on how to interact with unraid via the CLI. I see you can start the array but couldn't find much more functionality than that.

12 hours ago, PizzaPirate said:

If the only thing keeping holding this back is the use of a parity drive, you can relax that assumption

Even without parity, Unraid used md devices for the array, and they are only created after the array starts, so there is no way to decrypt them before, and if you do it after, Unraid would already have tried to mount them and failed, so don't see how this would work.