[NTLUG:Discuss] Linux Lab

[David Stanaway]

terry wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 6:58 AM, terry <trryhend at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 10:45 AM, Mike Owens <mikeowens at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 9:31 AM, Kenneth Loafman <kenneth at loafman.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>       
>>>> Let me know if any of this could be useful.  Are you doing this as a
>>>> charity?  Tax writeoff maybe?
>>>>         
>>> Yes, this is all volunteer work. I am not selling anything. The router
>>> and KVM would certainly be handy. How old are the laptops? The basic
>>> criteria for laptops/PCs is that they need to be able to run a vanilla
>>> Ubuntu install. If they can manage that, then they're good. It
>>> apparently doesn't take all that much. I set up a lady's laptop last
>>> week which was an older model with 512Mb RAM and it seemed to work
>>> just fine, even with Compiz. I would just install these and offer them
>>> to whoever in the class needs them.
>>>
>>> A good way to wipe the drives and test Ubuntu capability would be to
>>> just drop in an Intrepid CD. If it makes it to the desktop, you're
>>> good. Then just open a console and use do:
>>>
>>> dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda (or /dev/hda depending on your drive)
>>>       
>>     
>>> before you go to bed. By morning, your data should be toast. I'm sure
>>> there is probably a better way, but that's what I've done before.
>>>
>>> Thanks for your support.
>>>
>>> -- Mike
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> http://www.ntlug.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>>>
>>>       
>> I understand that
>>
>> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX
>>
>> seven times is the industry standard.
>>
>> e.g.
>>     
>
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX ;dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX ;dd
> if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX ;dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX ;dd if=/dev/zero
> of=/dev/hdX
>  ;dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX ;dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX ;dd
> if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX
>
>   

Well that isn't the Guteman method, but it should probably be work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_remanence

""On the other hand, according to the 2006 NIST 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIST> Special Publication 800-88 (p. 7): 
"Studies have shown that most of today’s media can be effectively 
cleared by one overwrite" and "for ATA disk drives manufactured after 
2001 (over 15 GB) the terms clearing and purging have converged."^[1] 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_remanence#cite_note-SP800-88-0>""

[1] http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-88/NISTSP800-88_rev1.pdf



for d in /dev/hd[a-z] /dev/sd[a-z]; do
echo wiping $d
i=0; while [ $i -lt 7 ]; do i=$[i+1]; echo -n .; dd if=/dev/zero of=$d 
bs=1M; done; echo done
done


to see its progress, you can
kill -USR1 `pidof dd` in another shell and dd will dump block counts to 
stdout.

EG:
* 18335302+0 records in 18335302+0 records out 9387674624 bytes
(9.4 GB) copied, 34.6279 seconds, 271 MB/s


*