Decommission a HPUX server

[Robb Bailey]

My company is auctioning 3 servers (NClass, HPK200, E35). We are concerned about making sure the machines are "scrubbed" prior to auction.

Can you recommend a method or series of steps as to how I should go about the process of stripping the machine of the data and ensuring that it is not recoverable by the receiving party? These machines have housed our financial and payroll data, so the data is sensitive.

I know that there are commercial companies that do this, but I have been tasked with doing this in house at no additional cost.

Thank you in advance.
Robb

[Torsten.]

In case of very sensitive data consider to keep the HDDs.

[Pete Randall · Accepted solution]

Use dd:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdsk/c0t0t0 bs=1024k


Pete

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Robb:

A large degauser and an aqua regia bath for the disks works well.

You can overwrite your disks, but strictly speaking, the data is still recoverable given enough sophistication even after several passes of:

# dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/rdsk/cXtYdZ bs=256k

Regards!

...JRF...

[Jaime Bolanos Rojas.]

Robb, I agree witht the above answers, dd will be the only option as is the only utility that will write at the most basic level in the hard drive, bit by bit, giving you "warranty" that it will destroy pretty much everything that is on that drive.

Regards,

jaime.

[Patrick Wallek]

If you work for a public company, then you are likely bound by the Sarbanes-Oxley act. There may be provisions there for how things are disposed of.

Just to be on the safe side I would pull all drives from the servers and keep them and physically destroy them.

[DCE]

Other than destroying the disks, there is no way to insure yourdata is not recoverable.

You should probably pull the drives when you sell the equipment

[A. Clay Stephenson]

With the possible exception of the N-box (and it is doubtful as well), you aren't going to get enough return to bother with the auction -- so, whack each drive with a hammer and sell them "as is". This will actually be your least expensive option -- especially if your time is considered.

In the real world, it would be all but impossible to extract meaningful data after a few passes writing random data to the disk so if you want to invest the time, it's very easy to write a small C program that will write random data to every disk block as a raw device. The "trick" is to do every disk except the boot disk which also houses your program first --- and is statically linked. You then start your program on the boot disk and specify the number of passes and because it is in memory it will execute and then terminate leaving a wiped system.