Shredder Tool on Boot Media for HP PARISC?

[Ralph Grothe]

Hello,

though this topic probably has been raised here already a dozen times
I am curious whether a shred tool exists for HP PARISC servers?
The ideal place for such a tool would be to put it on the bootable Core OS media that HP distributes for its PARISC enterprise servers.

The problem is that it is difficult to shred a disk from which operating system commands are run at the same time.

Wouldn't it be nice to have some live "HP distro" on CD for exactly this purpose very similar to those popular in the Linux world like DBAN or (for even forensic tasks) INSERT

http://dban.sourceforge.net/
http://www.inside-security.de/insert_en.html

Maybe only a command similar to shred but put onto the Core OS Install/Recovery CD would suffice,
or is there one such tool (apart from dd) already?

http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/shred-invocation.html

Unfortunately, to my knowledge there aren't any Linux Kernels that support HP Enterprise Servers.
These only seem to work half-way with HP Workstations.

http://www.parisc-linux.org/hardware/supported.html

While for the average security concerned a dd of random blocks read from /dev/urandom and written to the disks to be shredded would suffice,
the problem with this is that we lack boxes with vacant disk slots (and temporarily splitting existing root disk mirrors only for this purpose is too much fuss).
Also one can hardly attache HP Server SCSI disks to commodity PC SCSI SE controllers without soldering ones custom adapters.

Assumed, that the disks are to be scrapped anyway, what kind of mechanical treatment would you consider sufficient for moderate secure data deletion.

This article offers some background about the physics I suppose

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html

[Pete Randall]

> Assumed, that the disks are to be scrapped anyway, what kind of mechanical treatment would you consider sufficient for moderate secure data deletion.

How about a very large magnet?


Pete

[TwoProc]

Drilling multiple holes through the case and through all of the disk platters, then flattening the whole mess to a pancake with a hand-held maul works great!

[Dennis Handly · Accepted solution]

Here are some old threads:
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=957297
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=236342
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=140201

One talks about using ignite.

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

Hi Ralph,

the only think close to this is mediainit which used to be on the ODE media.

Of course, this is not sufficient for a secure/irrecoverable deletion of media.

The "scrapping anyway" argument is only ok if you, or someone completely trustworthy watches over the process, otherwise there's just too high a chance of someone finding a better use for one of the disk, simply forgetting one out of 500 by mistake and so on.
This is definitely an issue, I got a nice server still running the OS and data the prior owner (a finance institution) installed, whne i got it off ebay.

The last time I had to wipe a LOT of data I used a tool called diskscrub, the author helped me with making it run on AIX.

I statically linked it and thus could wipe all system disks during runtime.

now, how about we set out to make a script for building a live cd based on the the install images? it's been done often enough, even including resizing the RAMFS to more than the 20ish Megabytes it usually has, and it's been on my todo-list for about 5 years now, together with a HP-UX port of diskscrub.

Greets,
Florian

[Geoff Wild]

How to use ODE to wipe out a disk
Reboot the machine
Insert the support plus media cd
Stop the "boot primary path"

Then find the cdrom drive:

>search

>boot

At the ISL prompt:

ISL>ode

At the ODE prompt:

ODE>diskexpt

You will be prompted for a password, you need to get one from your HP Rep...

Commands to use in DISKEXPT:

To see disks: dispmap
Select disk: testdisk #
Then enter:

wrtmt

For range, enter 0/ and the max number displayed
Select 3 for userdefined, then enter 0 to write all zero's

Wait.....a long time............

Do this for all disks.....


Or, just either do a dd or just a rm -rf /* and then re-install HP-UX again...

Rgds...Geoff

[Torsten.]

Why not connect the disk to a simple PC and use win or linux tools?

I bought a adapter for internal SCSI cables to hot-plug connectors (conrad/reichelt) and I'm able to connect all hot-plug scsi disks to my simple PC.

Could be a simple solution.

[Torsten.]

AFAIR it is this:
http://www2.produktinfo.conrad.com/datenblaetter/975000-999999/990434-da-01-en-SCSI_III_SCA_Adapter.pdf

[Ralph Grothe]

Hi Torsten,

I remember this SCSI adapter which I also had bought from Conrad's years ago.
However, at the time I wasn't too happy with it because under the Linux (kernel) I had been using then I wasn't able to access the disks.
(apart from this, due to their high rotational speed they were much too noisy for agreeable household usage and too power greedy for the commodity mains transformer of my PC, though this wouldn't matter for just shredding purposes).
Then much later I read in an article of a PC mag (was it c't?) that those adapters required soldering a bridge between certain pins to make them being sensed by a commodity SE SCSI HBA for PC usage (like the Dawicontrol thing I posses).
Unfortunately, I had put away the article somewhere I haven't been able to rediscover it ever since.
Did you exercise this sort of tinkering with your adapters?
Which HBA and driver for which Linux kernel and distro are you using?
I am very much interested in giving it a second try.

[Ralph Grothe]

Hi Florian,

thanks for pointing me to the ODE tools.
I will have to give them a closer look...

Your diskscrub kind of port sounds very interesting to me.
I also would be very keen on mastering some sort of HP-UX live recovery/erasure CD image.
I only fear that I lack knowledge about hpux internals, and am not sure how much openness/disclosure of internals of this proprietary OS and HW is prerequisite.
It only makes me wonder that there doesn't seem to be a Linux kernel for the HP Enterprise PARISC Server Architecture around that has sufficient drivers for HP HW incorporated to at least rudimentary talk to controllers of disks and NICs.

[Ralph Grothe]

Hi Geoff,

many thanks for advising me on the usage of diskexpt as part of the ODE suite.
Next time I am in the data center I will boot a to be scrapped HP server from CD and have a closer look at it.
However, a real setback is its password protection.
Every time making a call to HP support and justifying my intended usage there just to get a disk scrubbed seems too much fuss to me.

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

Ralph a LSI U320 singlechannel adapter runs about EUR 100, and I'd expect it to be less hassle than the usual trashy adaptec hbas people use. But if it's more than 5-10 disks the high amount of manual work might turn out too annoying - if possible instead of connecting single disks to the adapter, connect your DSxxxx or SC10 array to the adapter.

I'll try to fix my C3600 some day, then I could look at porting diskscrub.