I have a situation where I no longer have physical access to a linux box, but I can still log in remotely. The long and shotr of it is that I wasn't supposed to have this linux box and I could get busted for it being there. So, I would like to completely scrub the hard drive from a remote ssh session. This is totally without malicious intent. I just want to conver my ass.

I am wondering if anyone knows what will happen if you do this using dd.
Specifically, I would like to know if the command has any hope of actually finishing the job once it is started. Or, will the thing bail out because it is scrubbing the hard disk on which the entire operating system is installed.

This is what I was going to use:

dd if=/dev/random of=dev/hda && dd if=dev/zero of=/dev/hda

an let it repeat like 10 times.

thks
dangergirl

Here's what I would try to do, because usually you can't do something like that to a mounted filesystem (i've never done this, but it should work on principle):

1) add a partition
2) add a minimal linux install that has the shred utility and can be loaded to ramdisk
3) modify your bootloader to reboot directly into the ramdisk linux
4) shred the drive

It would be easier if someone could get to the machine with a Knoppix CD and use shred on the drive.

I'm not sure, but you might be able to on the fly load linux into ramdisk and then shred the drive. The key here is to somehow get a minimal kernel with network support (since you'll be connected) loaded up and running shred on the drive...