From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Oleg Drokin Subject: Re: securely deleting files Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 11:50:22 +0400 Message-ID: <20030512075022.GC21604@namesys.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Return-path: list-help: list-unsubscribe: list-post: Errors-To: flx@namesys.com Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: Jason Holt Cc: reiserfs-list@namesys.com Hello! On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 05:37:13AM +0000, Jason Holt wrote: > Now, a good friend of mine pointed out that part of the space on a filesystem > is kept aside just for root, so you may want to fill the disk up as root. > (Is this actually a concern? Can blocks which used to hold user data end up > being reserved?) Yes they can. No, we don't have such (supported) feature in reiserfsv3 yet. Also if the file was deleted, but something still have open filehandle to it (or hardlink), its blocks are not freed at rm time and therefore filling all the free space won't help. There are other caveats. > Also, if your sensitive file was in memory recently it might have been swapped > out, in which case it may still be in the swap partition. I have a program > which fills up all available *memory* as well, and I could post the source > here if everyone's interested. If the program that used the file and still have the copy of it is still running, no matter how much you eat all the ram, the file still can end up in swap. The program that fills up all available memory is called "tail". Just run "tail /dev/zero" and enjoy ;) (this does not work on FreeBSD, though). Bye, Oleg