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Showing posts from May, 2014

Securely wiping a hard disk in Linux

We're getting ready for some changes at home, and I thought I'd go through the old hard disk drives I have laying around. Once I'd managed to get them all together there are a staggering 25 to be wiped :( Usually I use the excellent Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN) which is awesome and very simple to use. In this instance, however, I'm also doing a fairly large data sort, archive etc and I need to have a functional machine to browse the disks prior to their destruction and reissue. Given my well know love for Linux Mint I executed an extensive (20 second) search of Google and came up with the following interesting information:- ATA, SATA and SSD's now have an internal way of securely wiping themselves! From a command prompt (elevate it to root for ease of use and make a note of your disk drives - if you wipe your system disk or data disk then it's game over!  Maybe use a LiveCD?) Go and check out  https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase Th

Effects of travel on IT or What the hell do I take when I go overseas?

Recently I was on a trip to Jakarta, for pipe band of all things, however while there I still needed to keep up with my normal information load. My gear load out for work, or for holidays in Australia typically consists of two mobile phones (one work / one private), Google Nexus 7 (WiFi) and my 11" MacBook Air or 15" MacBook Pro. Taking all of this junk to Indonesia was unfeasible - although altogether the weight was under 3KG. I knew I would have my normal number of emails, still want to check my Feedly, Facebook, take photos etc. Keeping everything charged and good to go is a usual challenge, and I imagined it would be worse in Jakarta. Heading over, I took my HTC One X, Nexus and that was it. It was a gamble because I didn't want to unplug too much, but still needed to have access to a wide variety of data. I wondered at what other people travelling took and it seemed very much that this was fairly typical - tablet + mobile phone. Very few people seemed to have inclu