On 17/08/15 22:33, Volker Kuhlmann wrote:
[...]
Paranoia is a good thing.
Ha. Just came from a Christchurch Robotics meeting. They all laugh about
privacy, and the power companies collecting power use data from everyone
with at least 30min resolution. What problem.
[...]
Hm, how do we get back on topic now, that is, Linux if not PATA drives?
Well, this country's largest electricity metering service provider is
extensively using Linux on their back office servers...
... and regarding the electricity usage data - well, people want
time-of-use tariffs, like day / night, and this means that the metering
system must have a clock, and electricity must be metered based on the
usage per the times of use as defined in the tariff. This is all subject
to pretty tight and strict regulations not only governing the accuracy
of the metrology and the clocks, but also the privacy of the data. And
BTW, some electricity users, like myself, actually appreciate having the
half-hourly data for their own use. So where is the problem really?
And yes, for wiping disks something like
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx
does the job (obviously replacing 'x' with the letter for the drive to
be wiped). Without any further arguments, this will eventually fill the
disk and terminate when running out of space. You can give is a block
size "bs=..." and count=... to exactly fill the disk.
If you want better security use /dev/urandom instead of /dev/zero,
however take into account that this can be slower as it does require
some CPU work, whereas /dev/zero produces the zero bytes with very
little CPU involvement and thus is noticeably faster, particularly on
old hardware.
Kind regards,
Helmut.
_______________________________________________
Linux-users mailing list
Linux-users@lists.canterbury.ac.nz
http://lists.canterbury.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
