100 Days - Day 4 - Prepping Things for Sale

Today was a slightly boring day prepping the 1U server I was using for sale. I swapped my CPUs over, applied new thermal paste, and then tested the 2U server again.

Hard Drives

I started by using dd to wipe each of the disks. It's slow but I trust it. It doesn't have confidential information anyways, no common passwords, etc. I typically run a few passes of this command

sudo dd status=progress if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=64K

Having the progress flag is helpful for seeing where you are in the runtime, and increasing the block size from the default values can speed things up quite a bit. I also like to sometimes switch from /dev/zero to “/dev/one”. This would be like writing all 1's to the disk. It's much faster than /dev/random or /dev/urandom, but at least flips the bits and theoretically makes it harder to read magnetically. I do this with

tr '\0' '\377' < /dev/zero | dd status=progress bs=64K of=/dev/sdx

IPMI and HBA Card

I essentially followed the reverse of the guides found in Day 1, removing users from IPMI, clearing logs, resetting information on the HBA, etc. This was pretty easy. I took some photos, and prepped a few listings on local market places first because I prefer not to ship giant blocks of expensive sand and metal.