Secure Deletion of Data in Linux – part 2

 Howto  6 Responses »
Nov 042012
 

At the base of these articles there is a simple fact: a simple rm of a file or deleting it via any file manager is not enough to really remove it from your hard disk.

If you really want to delete files from a computer you have to use more sophisticated commands, and in former articles we have seen:

Dban: Darik’s Boot and Nuke (commonly known as DBAN) is an open source project hosted on SourceForge. The program is designed to securely erase a hard disk until data is permanently removed and no longer recoverable, which is achieved by overwriting the data with random numbers generated by Mersenne twister or ISAAC (a PRNG).

Shred : Overwrites the specified FILE(s) repeatedly, in order to make it harder for even very expensive hardware probing to recover the data.

Wipe : Wipe is a secure file wiping utility.

Today we’ll take a look at the package secure-delete that contains some useful programs to delete in a safer way files, memory, free space and/or the Swap space. Continue reading »

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Understanding the Top command on Linux

 Howto  7 Responses »
Aug 282012
 

top

Article by AlexioBash published on his website about ArchLinux in italian.

Know what is happening in “real time” on your systems is in my opinion the basis to use and optimize your OS. On ArchLinux or better on GNU/Linux in general the top command can help us, this is a very useful system monitor that is really easy to use, and that can also allows us to understand why our OS suffers and which process use most resources. The command to be run on the terminal is:

$ top

And we’ll get a screen similar to the one on the right:

Let’s see now every single row of this output to explain all the information found within the screen.
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Linux memory management

 Howto  4 Responses »
Jun 222012
 
atemyram

Image from http://www.linuxatemyram.com/

I think that is a common question for every Linux user soon or later in their career of desktop or server administrator “Why Linux uses all my Ram while not doing much ?”. To this one today I’ve add another question that I’m sure is common for many Linux system administrator “Why the command free show swap used and I’ve so much free Ram ?”, so from my study of today on SwapCached i present to you some useful, or at least i hope so, information on the management of memory in a Linux system.

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