Unusual Question

[Doug Hardie]

> On 9 July 2017, at 06:14, Ian Smith <smithi at nimnet.asn.au> wrote:
> 
> In freebsd-questions Digest, Vol 683, Issue 8, Message: 1
> On Sun, 9 Jul 2017 02:57:14 -0700 Doug Hardie <doug at mail.sermon-archive.info> wrote:
> 
>> I have a FreeBSD 9.3 remote server that needs to be purged.  I know 
>> that rm -rf / will remove all the directory entries, but I need to 
>> write over the drive.  I thought that dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada0 
>> might do the trick, but it gives an not permitted error.  The whole 
>> thing can crash and burn at the end.  This is an unmanned site so 
>> moving drives is not viable.
> 
> # sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16
> 
> purge at will.  if=/dev/random for the more paranoid :)
> 
> cheers, Ian

Today was the experimentation.  I had an old system here at the house with 8.2 on it.  So I started with a dd in=/dev/ada0 out=/dev/null to find out how many blocks were on the device.  Once I had that number, I then ran dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/ada0 skip=<number of blocks minus a few>.  I typed oskip, but somehow the o didn't make it through the keyboard.  When it finished, I realized the error.

So I had an install memstick for 11.0 and put it on as I wanted to try camcontrol sanitize.  Unfortunately, it reports an error accessing my drive.  I then used dd if=/dev/ada0 skip=<same large number> | od -c.  Then I wrote down the first few bytes of the output.  They were non-zero.  I was a bit surprised by that since the last partition is swap and it was never used.  But perhaps that was left over from the random write.  From here on I have pictures of the output.  This is a dumb terminal and I will attempt to enter in the data since the list doesn't accept attachments.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada0 bs=32k
dd: /dev/ada0: short write on character device
dd: /dev/ada0: end of device
2442211+0 records in
2442210+1 records out
nnnn bytes transferred.....

ls -l
<directory listing>
pwd
/bin/pwd: Exec format error.  Binary file not executable.
who
/usr/bin/who: Exec format error. Binary file not executable.

dd if=/dev/ada0 skip=1000 count=5 | od -c
0000000  \0 \0 \0 \0 ...
*
0005000
5+0 records in
5+0 records out

dd if=/dev/ada0 skip=10000 count=500 | od -c
0000000  \0 \0 \0 \0 ...
*
0764000
500+0 records in
500+0 records out
nnnn bytes transferred...


I didn't capture this but I did run the dd with the oskip of the big number and it showed all zeros.

I believe that dd, od and some of the current directory blocks were still remaining in memory.  However, the drive was definitely zapped.  It did write to the end of the drive.  However, I suspect that if something else was running during the dd and it tried to access the drive things could have come to a halt before the zap completed.  At this point I tried to do a shutdown command and got the same Exec format error.  However, hitting the reset switch did cause a shutdown.  It seemed to be a normal shutdown as there were messages on the console, but I was not expecting it to work and only saw them for a brief second before the display was shut off.

I would like to have tried camcontrol sanitize as that appears to be handled completely in the drive and controller.  It would complete regardless of what happened to the OS.  I couldn't use it anyway on the production systems as they are only at 8.3 and the sanitize command was added in 11.0.

Net result:  I am not sure if the first production drive actually completed the zap.  It might have, but there is no way to tell.  However, it was not important as it does not hold any sensitive data.  It was tried first to see what would happen.  I will make sure nothing is running but sshd and dd when I do it on the critical systems.  I am considering starting the dd with a nohup and then killing sshd before it gets very far.  I think that has the best possibility of completing properly.