[CentOS] wiping of unused space on ext3

Thu Sep 7 13:43:46 UTC 2006
Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com>

On 9/7/06, Mindaugas <mind at bi.lt> wrote:
>
>   Hello,
>
>   I was asked if it is possible to zero unused space in ext3 partition?
>
>   Users write to the server via Samba and are far from computer geeks so
> teaching them to use some safedelete utility is quite impossible.
>

A safedelete may not work via samba anyway. It doesn't work very well
on Windows Native CIFS shares from what my forensics friends have told
me.

>   Is there some way or utility to wipe out all the data from unused space?
>

For the simplest level of 'wiping' you can try the following:

make sure your samba share is its own physical partition seperate from
say /var, etc.

have a regular job that runs at off hours and does the following:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/my/local/filesystem/zero_file

when dd dies from lack of space remove /my/local/filesystem/zero_file

It wont be DOD regs but it will give some level of cleanliness [where
level is better than nothing, but not much.] Your big problem will be
that this can/will cause problems with clients that are writing
regular data to that disk.



>   Thanks,
>
>   Mindaugas
>
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-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"