Bit of irritation at work today: several ... / 2011-03-28

Bit of irritation at work today: several servers to be decommissioned so I wanted to wipe the disks. Armed with 2 dban cd's and one dban bootable usb stick I thought I had everything. But the end result was 0, due to cd players with trouble reading the cd's, drivers missing for newer harddisk controllers and 3 systems not wanting to boot from usb. The newest server saw usb for boot but gave a boot error when trying. Time to bring out the pxeboot pxelinux setup (aka heavy duty boot service). But with a twist: on the big client vlan at work there is a pxe/dhcp setup for centrally managed windows desktop PCs which responds to *all* pxe dhcp requests and not just those from the managed PCs. So I had to move systems to a vlan where this doesn't happen.

It all worked although 2 systems didn't want to boot the dban pxe image. Workaround: Boot the PLD Linux rescue CD which I added to the Heavy Duty Boot Services (screenshot of bootmenu). The PLD Linux rescue cd includes the wipe program.