wiping of unused space on ext3

[Wolber, Richard C]

> From: Mindaugas [mailto:mind at bi.lt] 
> Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2006 12:26 AM
> To: ext3-users at redhat.com
> Cc: CentOS mailing list
> Subject: wiping of unused space on ext3
> 
> 
>   Hello,
> 
>   I was asked if it is possible to zero unused space in ext3 
> partition?
> 
>   Users write to the server via Samba and are far from 
> computer geeks so teaching them to use some safedelete 
> utility is quite impossible.
> 
>   Is there some way or utility to wipe out all the data from 
> unused space?


I believe you can use the "chattr -s" command to mark all of the files
so that
when they are deleted, their blocks are wiped with zeros. I believe that
you'd
need to set up some sort of cron job to make sure all of the files have
this
attribute set on a regular basis, unless this works as a directory level
attribute.

..Chuck..