changing to EXT2 that WIPE can do its work

[René L. Reingard]

Am Sat, 09 Jul 2005 04:55:38 +0200 schrieb ZIYAD A. M. AL-BATLY  
<zamb at saudi.net.sa>:

> In a nutshell, "wipe" will *not* help you!  Sorry, but "EXT3" is a
> "journal file-system"¹ which means that "wipe"² and "shred"³ can not do
> their work right.

> There are two solutions for you:
> 1. Use encrypted file-system (as mentioned by Lee Braiden)
> 2. Don't use a journal file-system

> You said you have an EXT3 file-system (which is the default in Ubuntu).
> To disable the journal, mount it as EXT2 by doing this:

> Make a backup of "/etc/fstab" in a safe place (You could print it in a
> paper).  Find the line in your "/etc/fstab" that have only "/" as it's
> 2nd argument.  It should look something like:
>         /dev/hda1  /  ext3  defaults  0  1
> Now, change the 3rd argument of that line to "ext2".  Your line should
> look like this:
>         /dev/hda1  /  ext2  defaults  0  1

> Reboot your system.  To make sure it's now an EXT2 file-system, run "df
> -T /" like this:
>         zamb ~ $ df -T -h /
>         Filesystem    Type    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
>         /dev/hda1     ext2    9.8G  9.6G  191M  99% /

> At this point, your system doesn't use "journal file-system", and as a
> result "wipe" and "shred" should work fine.


I got it, ZIYAD, and i did it. no problem so far for me.
so the next step will be to understand with what software to encrypt  
important files and how to do that, right?
thank you.
René