[rescue] Secure Sun wipe utility?

[Phil Stracchino]

Kevin Loch wrote:
> Mike Hebel wrote:
> 
>>I'm rescuing an E450 from $work and I'd like to wipe the drive at least to
>>DOD standards.
> 
> 
> Wouldn't it be easier to ditch the drive and replace it?

If you just want "a sufficiently good wipe for most purposes", all you
should need is:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdsk/[the disk]s2

If you want to be really certain you've wiped the hell out of it, look
up Mersenne Twister, a strong PRNG.  Seed it from /dev/random and use it
to generate a stream of pseudorandom data.  Direct the output into a
fifo.  Then do something like the following:

for i in `seq 1 5` ; do
    dd if=/tmp/mersennefifo of=/dev/rdsk/[the disk]s2
    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdsk/[the disk]s2
done

Then go out for lunch.  And afternoon coffee.  And a trip to the zoo,
and supper and a movie and a hot date.  You can increase the number of
passes beyond 5 if you really want, but you're already well past the
point of diminishing returns in terms of practical security at five
passes.  After even *one* pass, about the only way anyone's going to
have any realistic chance of ever recovering any data off that disk is
with a SQUID.


-- 
 Phil Stracchino       phil.stracchino at speakeasy.net
    Renaissance Man, Unix generalist, Perl hacker
 Mobile: 603-216-7037         Landline: 603-886-3518