Re: OT - Wipers

[Robert Citek <rwcitek@alum.calberkeley.org>]

On Aug 24, 2005, at 11:55 PM, JohnH wrote:
> I have a Windows program called BC Wipe. It is suposed to wipe the  
> files (or HD) to government standards.
> First could this statment true and second, is there a Linux type  
> wiper?
> Also, exactly how does a wiper work?

Boot with Knoppix and you can use wipe or shred.  'man wipe' and 'man  
shred'  Keep in mind that they work best on whole disks and  
partitions.  They may not work so well to wipe individual files,  
especially files on journaled filesystems.  From the shred man page:

        CAUTION:  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.  The following are examples of filesystems on   
which  shred
        is not effective:

        * log-structured or journaled filesystems, such as those  
supplied with

               AIX and Solaris (and JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, Ext3, etc.)

Real government standards are to melt the disk down to a slag.

Regards,
- Robert
http://www.cwelug.org/downloads
Help others get OpenSource software.  Distribute FLOSS
for Windows, Linux, *BSD, and MacOS X with BitTorrent


-
To unsubscribe, send email to majordomo@silug.org with
"unsubscribe silug-discuss" in the body.