Wipe

[Alberto Diaz_2]

Could anyone tell me if there is a wipe tool for HP-UX. I would accept any free tool working as WIPE tool running in HP-UX 11i.

Thanks in advance

[RAC_1]

Do you say wipe the disk?

You can simply do dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/dsk/xxxx

command mediainit can also be used.


No wipe tool per se in HP-UX.

There one such tool on gnu. But I don't remember the name.

[Stefan Farrelly]

You want to use this perl command to produce random numbers then dd them to your raw disk;

# Works - random number from 0 to 255 - this version to write random numbers to a disk
perl -e 'srand(time() ^ $$); while (1) { print int(rand(1)*256); }' | dd bs=8k of=/dev/rdsk/cxxxxxx

[Alberto Diaz_2]

I am working for a client very interested in security and he wants to sure that every information deleted in the disks is not available anymore (I am talking about any tool similar to rm command but more secure).

Thanks

[Stefan Farrelly · Accepted solution]

There is no such tool to do it. This was discussed at some length here on the itrc a while ago. The consensus was not to use mediainit as it may damage the disks. If you use dd from /dev/zero this only writes zeroes which may not be sufficient to wipe your disks.
If you use the perl command in my earlier reply this will dd random numbers to your disk. If you really want to be safe run it 3 times - this should be more than sufficient to ensure all data on your disks is wiped forever.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

This topic was discussed rather fully here:
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/parseCurl.do?CURL=%2Fcm%2FQuestionAnswer%2F1%2C%2C0x24b53a7b3682d611abdb0090277a778c%2C00.html&admit=716493758+1066657969319+28353475

[Brian Markus]

I have used the perl/dd method, then attempted recovery with specialized tools. (little to no success with the best tools) Do more passes. I generally do 7 - 30 passes depending on what is on the disk. After 3, someone is going to be spending major $$ to recover if it's even possible. You can write a quick script that will call that routine. Read the info on DOD wiping util's. They normally don't go beyond 7 wipes.

-Brian.