Sterilizing free space

Lennart Sorensen lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Tue Jan 3 18:36:22 UTC 2006


On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 01:12:27PM -0500, Neil Watson wrote:
> Using /dev/random may not be practical.  The system will need you to
> generate entropy.  You'll need to give the system some mouse traffic
> throughout the procedure.  This could take a very long time.  I'd stick
> with /dev/zero.  No, there is no /dev/one.

Depends if you use random or urandom.  One uses entrophy for quality
random values, while the other is just pseudo random and not of high
quality.  Probably still plenty random for wiping though.  I can never
renember which /dev/random is which though.

Len Sorensen
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