On Sat, Jan 12, 2013 at 7:05 PM, Gordon Messmer <yinyang at eburg.com> wrote: > On 01/08/2013 02:06 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. > > If you have enough RAM to hold the live disk, you can boot the whole > thing from grub, probably using memdisk. If you boot a live image with > memdisk, you can safely wipe the hard disks without the running kernel > crashing. at $long_ago_job we'd use a pxe-netboot image; effectively DBAN (http://www.dban.org/). which only really works if you have another server in the remote location to act as the pxe server. maybe if you were really playful (and had throw away hardware to try it on) you could figure a way to extract the dban iso into the boot partition of the remote machine, do a reboot and let it go? about all I can think of. -- Even the Magic 8 ball has an opinion on email clients: Outlook not so good.