Thanks. Is it possible that shred exit abnormally in any case (for example, some files that it relies on have been shreded)? -----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On Behalf Of Carl T. Miller Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2013 4:36 PM To: CentOS mailing list Subject: Re: [CentOS] wiping out data on a disk (no physical acess to the machine) On 01/08/2013 05:06 PM, Yungwei Chen wrote: > I need to securely wipe out a disk on a remote machine, but I don't have access to that machine. > Therefore I cannot use the LiveCD+shred (or dd) combination. > Besides manually shreding known data files, I am wondering if there is a (free) tool that can be used in my case. > Thanks. I hoping that you mean to physical access but you can make an ssh connection. If so, here are the steps. Note that you'll need to replace /dev/sdXX with the device of your swap part- ition and /dev/sdX with the device of the hard drive. It will run for several hours and leave you with a blank hard drive. 1) connect using ssh and stop all services 2) swapoff /dev/sdXX 3) shred -n5 -z -v /dev/sdX 4) echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq 6) echo o > /proc/sysrq-trigger c _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS at centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos