[ubuntu] What's the best way?

[Edu-IT]

At the end of this month my leased dedicated server expires and I'll not be renewing. What's the best way to wipe the hard drive clean? It's only hosting a forum and a Joomla test site but I would like to wipe the drive clean nevertheless and make it difficult for anyone to recover data.

 

Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

[Hightower]

Hammer?? Kill Disk?? Those are my prefered tools of choice.

[powdarrmonkey]

Not from a remote datacentre, they're not.

 

I would stop service you want to wipe data for, uninstall their packages, and then use shred on their data directories.

[unixman]

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda If you have multiple drives, you'll need to do /dev/hdb, /dev/hdc, etc.

 

To go a bit faster, use /dev/zero (to fill the disk with zeros) or /dev/urandom (for not quite random data)

[Edu-IT]

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda If you have multiple drives, you'll need to do /dev/hdb, /dev/hdc, etc.

 

To go a bit faster, use /dev/zero (to fill the disk with zeros) or /dev/urandom (for not quite random data)

Thanks. Shoould I run that a few times, perhaps a mixture of both commands, or will one do?

[ahuxham]

As root:

 

rm -rf /*

 

Reboot, and enjoy.

[CyberNerd]

If the host is any good they will have a backup, so I'm not quite sure what you would achieve by wiping the disk. IIRC you need to rewrite data on the disk seven times before it gets too difficult to recover !

I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Edited February 3, 2009 by CyberNerd

[siuko]

We use Dban here.

 

It is supposed to be able to wipe data to MoD standards and you can download a bootcd image.

 

Takes quite a while if you set it to the MoD standard wipe as it does multiple passes.

[kesomir]

I also back Dban, but - can't use it on a remote computer in a datacentre.

[siuko]

Hehe indeed

 

I hadn't fully registered what had been said... sorry

[unixman]

Thanks. Shoould I run that a few times, perhaps a mixture of both commands, or will one do?

 

Once will do, but if you are really paranoid, run a mixture several times. Here is a link Dave Farquhar's Silicon Underground - Wiping a disk securely

 

rm -rf /* is NOT good enough; anyone with half a brain knows how to get files back from an rm.

 

Anecdote time. Back in the early days of SCO/Unix, if you ran rm -rf * from / it would continue to run right up until the /bin/rm file was removed, and then the command would crash, leaving your machine in a very strange state. Some commands would work, and some wouldn't, depending on what had been written where on system install. I tried it once just for a lark and got my botty smacked for the pleasure.

[ahuxham]

rm -rf /* is NOT good enough; anyone with half a brain knows how to get files back from an rm.

 

Why would a hosting company require the files back, why would they waste resources on very few files that may/may not be important. If the hosts are reputable, they won't give a damn, and the easiest way to just leave the disk in a state for the next user would be rm -rf.

 

The hosting company are likely to hold backups, so your data is always their's, they'll have a copy somewhere, and will likely format the disk themselves and re-install said linux operating system for the next lease holder.

[powdarrmonkey]

Why would a hosting company require the files back, why would they waste resources on very few files that may/may not be important.

 

And when the new image on the disk doesn't overwrite all the space and the next leaseholder recovers them?

 

@Edu-IT: Once should be fine, it's pretty thorough.