Tracy R Reed wrote: > David Looney wrote: > >> Anyone out there know of *any* way to predictably (or at least >> probably) flush a reiserfs journal of recent transactions ? > > > What is the problem you are trying to solve?
Short Answer: Seeking some way to cheat and overwrite data on a resiserfs partition. Long,long Answer: I set up several computers (work, home desktops, laptops) to use encfs encrypted directories in my home directory, which in turn resided on a reiserfs "/" partition, thinking I would keep everything sensitive there. But, it turned out there were unexpected (by naive me, anyway) snoops, which transfered information between the "secure" directories and my home dir. I found a lot of interesting stuff (for s in `find . -type f -print`; do grep -l "[0-9][0-9][0-9][ -][0-9][0-9][ -][0-9][0-9][0-9] [0-9]" $s; done) in the .viminfo directory in my home directory, and more stuff in the beagle cache directory in my home directory (sneaky little program, there, that Gnome has introduced). Oops. O.K., so I'm resigned to encrypting at least /home (with symlinks for /tmp and perhaps /var into home), but have been cringing at the thought of blowing away whole systems (take off reiserfs, wipe partition, reinstall system with separate partition for /home) to overwrite stuff already written to disk. Wouldn't it be nice, I lazily thought, if I could just make a big file out of all the available disk space, and use shred or some other file-wipe utility to overwrite it ? However, the info I found on shred warned against using them on reiserfs (or other journalling fs) partitions. I was assuming this was because of the journal itself, that old information was cached in the journal, and thinking that if it was possible to "flush" the journal (or turn off journaling), perhaps this simple strategy might still be viable. But looking more carefully, it looks like the journal is not the only problem, in that information may not be written to the same place on disk even when writing to a specific offset in a file, i.e. a write does not reliably produce an overwrite. David Looney -- Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment. - Will Rogers -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
