Re: Coming from XP
- From: Dances With Crows <danSPANceswitTRAPhcrows@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 16 May 2006 14:32:01 -0500
On Tue, 16 May 2006 19:09:19 GMT, Rick staggered into the Black Sun and
said:
With [Windows] XP, I need several application to keep my hard drive
clean of [viruses], spyware, worms, etc. and cookies, history, all the
web caching.
Er, what does your last clause there mean? Mozilla and Firefox manage
cookies/history/cache on their own. The "clear all cookies", "clear
cache", and "clear history" choices in the UI do exactly that AFAICT.
You can force the issue by cd'ing to the appropriate directory under
~/.mozilla and rm -rf'ing the Cache directory or cookies.txt or
*history*. No problem.
popup blockers, registry cleaners, free space cleaners....etc.etc.
Popup blockers are built into Firefox and Mozilla. The registry doesn't
exist in Linux, so no worries there. WTF is a "free space cleaner"?
What apps do we [use] [in] Linux to remove and (secure delete) files?
rm removes files. You can also delete files with any number of GUI or
text-based file managers. "Secure delete" is harder to do with modern
filesystems. In ext3 (default Linux filesystem in most cases), there's
something that makes it difficult to grab the block list for a file and
overwrite those blocks repeatedly with random data and 0s. I can't
remember specifics; I've never needed this "secure delete" capability.
And when I needed to wipe a partition, I just did "dd if=/dev/urandom
of=/file/on/partition bs=32k" followed by "dd if=/dev/zero
of=/file/on/partition bs=32k" a couple of times. Won't stop the NSA,
but will stop any casual script kiddie from obtaining any data from that
partition.
ReiserFS behaves similarly to ext3 wrt secure deletion IIRC. On ext2,
at least, you could use the "shred" utility and it'd mostly work IIRC.
You don't want to use ext2 though, because it doesn't have journalling.
wipe free space
What do you mean by "wipe free space"? If the filesystem's block bitmap
says a block is free, you can write to that block. You can attempt to
write 0s to all free blocks on a partition with that /dev/zero thing
mentioned above, but that's usually completely pointless. If you're
*totally* paranoid, the only safe way to make data unreadable is to heat
the head-disk assembly above its Curie temperature (thermite, an
oxyacetylene torch, or maybe a pool of molten iron). But most people
don't need or want that level of paranoia. HTH,
--
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin / mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong
http://www.brainbench.com / "He is a rhythmic movement of the
-----------------------------/ penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL
.
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- Coming from XP
- From: Rick
- Coming from XP
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