loop devices?

[Steve George <steve@blah.dircon.co.uk>]

Hi,

I am looking into using loop devices so I can encrypt stuff onto a floppy file system.  I am stuck right at the start with loop devices.  The manual says to do the following:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/file bs=1k count=100
losetup -e des /dev/loop0 /file
Password: <type a password>
Init (up to 16 hex digits):

This is the part I am stuck on...what hex digits am I supposed to type??
I've tried hitting return and typing randomly......I can't find anything in the man pages or the kernel src docs.

Anyone know what I should type please?

Thanks,

Steve