Hi all,
I am about to move from 1 vServer to another. Now before I leave I would like to secure erase all the files on the harddrive. Or rather the part of the harddrive I can use.
This is to ensure the privacy of my customers emails.
The Server runs on Suse Linux and I have shell access. Thats about all I know and am able to do. Where can I find a tutorial which tells a complete noob (me) how to erase all there is?
Thank you so much for your help, it is really appreciated!

You don't need a tutorial to do secure erase. Just grab a copy of DBAN. It goes on a floppy disk and does all manner of different secure erase (wipe) routines. Boot from the floppy and follow directions.
http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Boot from a liveCD and then use dd like this (well don't run it 10 times)

I wrote an article on securely deleting files that has instructions on how to do it properly..

Sorry if I wasnt clear. Its a server. I dont have access to the actual hardware. I only have shell access.
All the proposed suggestions use Boot media which I cant use. Further its a virtual Server (vServer) which means the actual PC is shared by many. Booting with Knoppix and wiping the entire drive would not go down well.
Any other ideas?
Can I use shred to shred my portion of the Harddrive?

Edit: How about shred -f? how would I tell it to delete all? run it from root?

Is your portion of the hard drive in a dedicated partition?

You could shred the email files, but files that where deleted previously and not overwritten could be recovered. If you have a dedicated partition, you could use dd to write a temporary file (or files) to the partition nearly filling it. Then shred those files. That will shred the areas of the partition that contain free space.

It would still be able to restore old email files from backups however, so maybe shredding the current files would be the best you can offer.

Thank you jschiwal that sounds like what I need to do/find out. How do I know if my partition is just one? When I use putty it just says
h9xx217:~ #
I miss C:...

I don't know how well the filesystem is virtualized. Do you have /sbin/fdisk, and does it return virtual values. It could be that each virtual server has it's own partition on a large raid array and everything is mounted on the root dir. However that isn't ideal for a server because you would want /var on it's own partition to protect against an attack where an attempt is made to fill all available space by doing something that would grow the logs quickly.

If you have your own partition, the df value returned for '/' and for '/var' and the other partitions would return the same value. If that value seems like a reasonable value for a single server, you can probably try filling up the space with temporary files to shred. On the other hand, the host system may be using quotas instead.

Because a backup probably exists, unless the tapes/discs are rotated, you might just settle for shredding the files that exist.

Also, it could be that some of the system partitions like /bin and /sbin are static and shared. That could complicate things a little bit, but it is the /var partition with the email that you need to really look at. ( See the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (www.tldp.org)).

Rute contains a tip on how to overwrite files in place that may be of interest. See 20.7.10 in this chapter

Since I am not sure what I am doing in any case, I settled for shredding single files for emails, etc.

But how do I shred a folder?

Or would it be possible to shred a whole path say /var/* ??