Re: your mail

On Tue, May 21, 2002 at 06:37:30AM -0400, [email protected] wrote:
> >From ???@??? Tue May 21 10:33:18 2002
> X-cs: R
> From: Yan Fitterer <[email protected]>
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> To: "Nicholas Knight" <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [tomsrtbt] /dev/random and dd
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> Date: Tue, 21 May 2002 11:33:01 -0000
> 
> 
> That's very usefull Nicholas - thanks. The goal of this dd was to properly destroy 
> all data on a HD prior to disposal of a machine (old laptops in this case). Zeroing 
> the disk (even repeatedly) isn't really considered good enough, as all bits are 
> affected by the same value, hence my use of a random source.
> 
> tomsrtbt was an ideal solution: you plug in the old hardware, boot it on the fd, 
> then do a dd. A little change of the scripts could even do this automatically...
> 
> Am I right then in thinking there's really no easy solution with Linux? (short of 
> leaving the dd running overnight, or mounting the HD in another (faster) machine...)

Suggestion: Creata a nice big fat file of random data on a modern
machine you intend to keep around. Make it's directory available as an
NFS export. Boot the old machine with tomsrtbt, and mount the exported
directory. With a short shell script you should be able to
continuously write the file over and over again to the drive.

Short of that, such a file on a zip disk, the tomsrtbt disk, or some
such.

-- 

Charles Curley                  /"\    ASCII Ribbon Campaign
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