[NTLUG:Discuss] Linux Lab

[Leroy Tennison]

terry wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 10:45 AM, Mike Owens <mikeowens at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 9:31 AM, Kenneth Loafman <kenneth at loafman.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Let me know if any of this could be useful.  Are you doing this as a
>>> charity?  Tax writeoff maybe?
>> Yes, this is all volunteer work. I am not selling anything. The router
>> and KVM would certainly be handy. How old are the laptops? The basic
>> criteria for laptops/PCs is that they need to be able to run a vanilla
>> Ubuntu install. If they can manage that, then they're good. It
>> apparently doesn't take all that much. I set up a lady's laptop last
>> week which was an older model with 512Mb RAM and it seemed to work
>> just fine, even with Compiz. I would just install these and offer them
>> to whoever in the class needs them.
>>
>> A good way to wipe the drives and test Ubuntu capability would be to
>> just drop in an Intrepid CD. If it makes it to the desktop, you're
>> good. Then just open a console and use do:
>>
>> dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda (or /dev/hda depending on your drive)
> 
> 
>> before you go to bed. By morning, your data should be toast. I'm sure
>> there is probably a better way, but that's what I've done before.
>>
>> Thanks for your support.
>>
>> -- Mike
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> http://www.ntlug.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>>
> 
> I understand that
> 
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX
> 
> seven times is the industry standard.
> 
> Is dd  if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hdx  similar or ...?
>     (when run all night)
I don't know anything about this industry standard but it would seem 
that writing a random pattern would do a better job of obscuring any 
underlying residual data which might be detected than writing a constant 
pattern.