[CentOS] wiping out data on a disk (no physical acess to the machine)

Sun Jan 13 13:10:57 UTC 2013
Carl T. Miller <carl at carltm.com>

On 01/12/2013 07:03 PM, Gordon Messmer wrote:
> On 01/08/2013 02:36 PM, Carl T. Miller wrote:
>> 1)   connect using ssh and stop all services
>> 2)   swapoff /dev/sdXX
>> 3)   shred -n5 -z -v /dev/sdX
>
> I assume that all of the disks are to be shredded.  Shredding non-system
> disks wouldn't be difficult enough to ask about.  If you shred a mounted
> filesystem, the kernel will probably panic if it tries to read from the
> filesystem after shred starts overwriting data.
>
>> 4)   echo 1>  /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq
>> 6)   echo o>  /proc/sysrq-trigger
>
> You wouldn't be able to do that once shred had run.

Hmm.  I find it odd that you're saying something doesn't work when I've
seen it work.  Don't forget shred is loaded into memory and that echo is
an internal command and hence stored in memory.  The final command turns
off the system, effectively clearing the memory.

c