On 3/6/06, Edward Norton wrote: > > On 3/6/06, Edward Norton wrote: > > > > On 3/6/06, Ben Weatherall wrote: >> > > > I have been lurking on the list since I left the Phoenix area for Texas > > > earlier this year. I now need answers from those I know and trust. Help! > > > > > In the past, I have used both wipe and shred to remove files from a disk > > > > > > so they cannot be recovered. I am now having to do this under both Linux > > > (SuSE SLES-9) and AIX (v5.2) where both use a journaled file system. All > > > of the documentation says these tools will fail under these conditions. > > > The final solution needs to handle ext3, Reiser and JFS. > > > > > > Does anyone have any suggestions? > > > -Ben Weatherall > > > > > > dban (dban.sf.net) is probably by far the best. However, of the > > filesystems you listed, it only covers two: ext2/3, and reiserfs. JFS is not > > supported AFAIK. UFS, however, is. > > Ok, nevermind, I think I misread your email. shred should work just fine. > Just try something like `shred -n100 -z`. I looked up shred again, just to make sure I wasn't mistaken. From http://www.gnu.org/software/fileutils/doc/manual/html/fileutils.html#shr ed%20invocation it states, "Please note that shred relies on a very important assumption: that the filesystem overwrites data in place. This is the traditional way to do things, but many modern filesystem designs do not satisfy this assumption. Exceptions include: * Log-structured or journaled filesystems, such as those supplied with AIX and Solaris. * Filesystems that write redundant data and carry on even if some writes fail, such as RAID-based filesystems. * Filesystems that make snapshots, such as Network Appliance's NFS server. * Filesystems that cache in temporary locations, such as NFS version 3 clients. * Compressed filesystems. Since ext3, Reiser, JFS, etc. are all journaled filesystems, shred will only work at the partition level. For ext3 I could convert it to ext2, shred the file(s), and then convert it back to ext3, but that is not really a good idea on production systems. I also looked at dban (thanks for pointing it out), but it only wipes disks. I just need to wipe specific files. I did find dban's notes about the "Gutmann method" (http://dban.sourceforge.net/faq/index.html) used by both shred and wipe interesting. Any other ideas? -Ben Weatherall --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change you mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss