Adding Persistence to a Kali Live USB, some questions

[Beholder42]

Hi,

I am having some trouble generating a Live Encrypted Persistant USB stick with kali.
I get the general Idea, but because I am not so much into Linux I am having trouble understanding the process.

First

dd if=kali-linux-1.0.8-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

Does that mean even when I have an running Kali USB Stick, I have to generate a second one?
Or do I have to put the image file somewhere on the USB Stick I am booting from?
Because I cant really copy the image from my local network to the machine where Kali is running on because it says it doesn't have enough memory space left.


Second

size=5gb

Can I change that to "500mb"?
Do I just type that into the console? Or is this entire thing the stuff that has to go into the persistance.conf file?

read bytes _ < <(du -bcm kali-linux-1.0.8-amd64.iso |tail -1); echo $bytes
parted /dev/sdb mkpart primary $bytes $size
cryptsetup --verbose --verify-passphrase luksFormat /dev/sdb3

I guess I replace passphrase with the passphrase I want to use? Are there letters I can use? The @ sign for example?

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb3 my_usb

What is my_usb? Is that a variable?

mkfs.ext3 -L persistence /dev/mapper/my_usb
e2label /dev/mapper/my_usb persistence
mkdir -p /mnt/my_usb
mount /dev/mapper/my_usb /mnt/my_usb
echo "/ union" > /mnt/my_usb/persistence.conf
umount /dev/mapper/my_usb
cryptsetup luksClose /dev/mapper/my_usb

The rest, I guess, stays pretty much as it is, am I right?

[Beholder42]

PS: I tried creating a persistent USB Stick with just changing kali-linux-1.0.8-amd64.iso to kali-linux-1.0.9-amd64.iso but it didn't work.

I have a USB Stick with Kali on it now. It runs in the live mode. I created a second 5GB partition, labelled it persistence, created the persistence.conf and pasted the code in it. I copied the iso into the new partition as well. I restarted using the encrypted persistence mode. Nothing happened. Has anyone an idea what I am doing wrong?

[Beholder42]

PPS: I used this tutorial instead of the official one and it works like a charm.
(I know no one had the chance to reply yet, but probably this might be of some help anyway )