secure deletion

[Eivind Eklund]

On Fri, May 21, 1999 at 11:04:25AM -0700, brooks at one-eyed-alien.net wrote:
> 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.

Either tunefs or chflags - it would be relatively expensive, so if you
only need it for some data, it is probably better to have more
fine-grained control than per-FS.

Eivind.

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