If Gentoo can die off, ReiserFS is doomed (was Re: Reiser FS or ext3?)

[jim at jimani.com]

Hi,

On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 08:10:37PM -0500, Monty J. Harder wrote:

> Anyone who thinks that "reformatting a filesystem" is the same thing as
> "wiping a hard drive" doesn't understand the meanings of the words
> "reformatting", "wiping", or "filesystem' for that matter.

The D.O.D. doesn't use the term "wiping", they talk about "de-classifying"
which requires "degaussing", not something easily done with software.  I
can't remember their term for "wiping", removing non-classified data from
the media before selling to J. Q. Public, but the procedure was basically
what you use for "wiping".  They didn't seem to care much about the 0xAA
and 0x55 patterns, they just wanted the 0's, 1's and random, and wanted
thousands of passes rather than dozens of passes.  And there was concern
that the software might be doing all its writing to a disk buffer somewhere
in RAM rather than the actual disk.  So I guess if you want to "wipe" someone's
disk you should first remove all but one stick of RAM, then fire up Open Office,
the Gimp, and a few instances of Firefox, and THEN run your "wipe" program.

-- 
Jim