Do the wipe activities wipe all disks present in the host?

[kmstory]

I’ve got a stack of old PATA and SATA HDDs with sensitive information on them that I need to wipe. I already use FOG for most of my work, so using it to wipe all these drives would be pretty simple for me.

However, I can’t find any information about which drive(s) the wipe activities run on. It’d be a hassle to swap drives out one at a time to wipe them (I’ve only been able to scrounge up one PC with PATA support that will actually boot).

I’m not very knowledgeable about bash scripting, but from what I can understand of the fog.wipe script and the getHardDisk() function in funcs.sh, it looks like it only looks for and wipes 1 drive. Is that correct?

[george1421]

Just thinking out of the box on this one. If you can get at least one computer with a pata and one with a sata interface you should be able to wipe these drives.

We can usb boot the FOS engine (the customized linux OS that) runs on the target computer and then instruct FOS to wipe the first drive. If I’m thinking right the FOG server wouldn’t need to be used. If the only drives in the target computer is the usb flash (for booting) and the target hard drive you want to wipe, then the risks are low about wiping the wrong disk.

[kmstory]

Actually, my goal is to wipe all disks present in the host with one task. If I could fill all of the PC’s SATA and PATA slots and set a full wipe task for all of them, I could wipe everything much faster than if I were to wipe a single disk at a time. Plus, I could use the task manager to check the progress, instead of switching my monitor input and keyboard+mouse to the second computer.

[Tom Elliott]

@kmstory I guess I don’t understand the want here.

Wiping a disk is a “blocking” system. This means you can only handle one at a time, unless you plan on backgrounding the task itself to work on multipels at the same time (which FOS does not do).

Wiping only cares about the “main” hdd though, or the first in the list.

You can write a postinit script to take handling of this as needed though.

[kmstory]

@Tom-Elliott Here’s the scenario:
I have large stacks of SATA and PATA HDDs that all need to be wiped. I only have 1 PC with PATA support that can boot (it also has support for 4 SATA drives).

Wiping them all at once with a FOG task would be the most convenient solution for me, since I could check the progress from any PC in the network. Originally, I considered my options for wiping these disks to be (in order of convenience/preference):

• Schedule full wipes on all drives at once in FOG (hence my question)

• Put a single hard drive in the PC, schedule a wipe, and keep checking in the task manager in FOG, then replace them. I wouldn’t have to keep switching my monitor and keyboard+mouse around, but it would be less convenient than being able to cram 6 disks in at once and wipe them all.

• Load the PC up, boot into Xubuntu live (I’ve already got that set up in FOG) and wipe all the drives. The problem with that is I have 1 monitor, 1 mouse, and 1 keyboard, so I’ll have to keep switching back and forth to get my other work done and also check on the status of the wipe.

It’s not that I want to wipe them in parallel, either; I’d just love to be able to say, “queue up full wipes on all disks present in the host” and then go about my work.

To be clear, this isn’t a feature request. I was just asking whether it wipes 1 or multiple drives, since I’m not knowledgeable enough to fully understand the scripts and functions used for wipes. I’ll have to learn how to write postinit scripts and work on that (which I’m definitely eager to do!) so I can spend as little time as possible manually attending to these drives.

I’m an intern and the only IT staff at a non-profit neighborhood center, so my resources are extremely limited. FOG has already helped me so much and saved me an incredible amount of time and frustration. Thank you for making such a great tool! I hope I’ll be able to contribute soon.

[Quazz]

An alternative might be to use DBAN, which you could also load through iPXE and I believe it can wipe multiple drives.

[BedCruncher]

@Quazz @kmstory
I do this already… here is my menu entry.

menu DBAN Nuke Menu
item autonuke AutoNuke DoD 3-Pass
item zero AutoNuke 1-Pass Zero Wipe
item choose-disk Single Disk Selection
item return Back to top menu...
item
choose --default return --timeout 10000 target && goto ${target}
:autonuke
kernel http://${fog-ip}/dban/dban.bzi nuke="dwipe --autonuke" silent vga=785
boot || goto failed
:zero
kernel http://${fog-ip}/dban/dban.bzi nuke="dwipe --autonuke --method zero" silent vga=785
boot || goto failed
:choose-disk
kernel http://${fog-ip}/dban/dban.bzi nuke="dwipe" silent vga=785
boot || goto failed
:return
chain ${boot-url}/service/ipxe/boot.php?mac=${net0/mac} || prompt goto MENU

As you can probably tell, from that menu, I have the DBAN iso extracted to this folder /var/www/html/dban/

Try it out… Works wonders for me.