secure deletion

[brooks at one-eyed-alien.net]

On 21 May 1999, Dag-Erling Smorgrav wrote:

> "Ilmar S. Habibulin" <ilmar at ints.ru> writes:
> > Why mount option? Secure deletion is a feature of fs and impacts files of
> > this on this fs. All of them. So why use mount option?
> 
> Because a mount option can be changed at runtime, whereas a kernel
> option cannot. A mount option would allow you to enable the security
> feature on file systems which need it but not on file systems which do
> not need it, whereas a kernel option would enable it unconditionally
> on all file systems.

I'd definaly agree that it should be done on an FS by FS bases, but it
seems that a tunefs flag like softupdates might be more appropriate.  My
reason for this is simply that if you forget to enable the option once and
do any write operations to speak of, you will need to completly wipe the
entire FS to ensure you actually destroy the old data.  Making it a tunefs
option would mean that you couldn't forget.

-- Brooks

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