Quick formatting 1

[phorbiuz]

I have several Solaris servers which are to be disposed of in work. However, beforehand, sensitive data on them needs to be erased. Does anyone know of a good way to wipe each disk without having to use the format command? That way I can script it.

Thanks in advance.

 

[KenCunningham]

Hi. I've never done this myself, but a quick keyword search in the forum for wipe disk provides several alternatives.

 

[Mike042]

I am not convinced that the format command will actually overwrite the "data blocks" (see the Basic Disk Structure for terminology) with anything. It just creates the various other "blocks" (ie bootblock, superblocks and cylinder group blocks, etc). An additional worry is that 'disk scavanging' programs can re-create the data into files and even worse, by using more sophisticated equipment, data can be extracted from the disk even after all blocks have been overwritten with 'zeros'.

In my opinion, the way to achieve successful disk 'wiping' is to overwrite the existing disk structure several times with 'harmless data' (eg Solaris installation CD), after deleting your files & directories. Then re-format the disk into a single partition and repeat the process of overwriting with 'harmless data' several times. The process of deleting files & directories and copying the CD (cp or tar or ufsdump, or a combination of all 3) and deleting it all again can be scripted.

There are also a number of so-called "Disk wiping" software products (do a Google search for: disk + wiping + software).

I hope that helps.

Mike

 

[daFranze]

this is an often discussed topic. If you copy _known_ "harmless data" eg. a Solaris CD, lastest Bon Jovi Track, etc., the data which was on disk before overwriting is reproducable!!! Depending on the level of secrecy a simple overwriting might NOT be enough. A "secure" procedure would be to write _random_ data on disk. Usually you would perform this 3-4 times. For this porpouse you will need something like a disk whiping software or "just" a random number generator and a pipe

# ./myrandomnumbergenerator | dd if=- of=/dev/dsk/c4t8d0s2

Best Regards, Franz
--
UNIX System Manager from Munich, Germany

 

[cndcadams]

phorbiuz;

I wish I still had my info on this but I left it at my old company. We were asked to do a similar task.



Check these links out;

http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/trustedsolaris/ts_tech_faq/faqs/purge.xml

http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0600/scrub.pdf

The first link was ok'ed by the department of defense.

Thanks

CA

 

[maximusGeek]

Just for your information, you can script format to partition the drive. Not that you would want to do this with any sensitive data.

format -fd scriptName c0t0d0s0

scriptName:

partition
print
modify
1
yes
0
0.00gb
0.00gb
0.00gb
0.00gb
0.00gb
0.00gb
yes
ddd
label
yes
print
quit
quit