Re: How to erase all data on a Power server so it can be transported safely

Here's the thing about the data on the drives: 'Ragu, It's in there.'

Now if you took half the disks out (3 of 6) you could NOT rebuild the RAID set that is true but could you get data? Sure. Can I prove that? Yes and easily.

I have an old boat anchor PC with SAS cards and SCSI cards in it that I boot Linux on. I can then use tools to look at the data on the drives sector by sector. 520 vs 512 bytes you say? Who cares, Linux can read those extra big sectors. EBCDIC you say? Sure hit an F-key and there are the characters before my eyes, no security there.

NOW Will I have all your data? Of course not, you took half the drives! BUT there might still be some files that I got all of, and maybe others I got no part of whatever. You can't know.

Would I have usable data? Well...... notsomuch really. Several things are true:
1) I don't know your record formats, but can infer by looking.
2) The data isn't in any way easily organized, it's everywhere.
3) The data is likely incomplete.
4) The data is blasted all over the sectors I can read in blocks at least but mostly 'it's everywhere'.

SO in summary while it would take a lot of work and result in incomplete data, a lot could be gleaned from those drives if you were willing to work at it long and hard enough.

Security by obscurity is no security at all.

So either purchase new drives at the destination or format them a couple times before you send the machine.

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.

On 3/9/2020 3:05 PM, Laurence Chiu wrote:

Thanks for all the responses. They've been incredibly helpful

This is my final proposal.

Take two backups of the system in BRMS but exclude any application data. I
since learned that there is such an option.

Erase the discs and reformat the RAID as per the first response to my query.

Ship the server as it is including one backup tape to the target location.

Restore the system from the backup tape and then restore the application
data which we are able to transfer securely over our internal network. Then
we should be good to go.

I just need to make sure that the BRMS backup taken in the first step is
something that can be IPLd from. I'm sure it can be.

Just out of interest if I only ship the server with say three discs and
sent the other three separately if either shipping was intercepted could
any sensible data be recovered from the drive? There's been a lot of
discussion about the drives in which location but nothing about if some of
the drives are missing from the raid.

Thanks


On Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 1:47 AM Patrik Schindler <poc@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hello Larry,

Am 09.03.2020 um 13:33 schrieb DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:

With SAS drives even the Load Source location doesn't matter. The only

thing you need to get right is that the load source drive is on the correct
RAID card as designated for the system. Since there are only 6 drives there
will be only 1 RAID card. So, stuff 'em in anywhere and you're good to go.

Wow, even more easy, then. Thanks for the hint!

:wq! PoC

PGP-Key: DDD3 4ABF 6413 38DE - https://www.pocnet.net/poc-key.asc


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