Retiring VPSs

What do you lovely people do when retiring / not renewing a VPS?
Leave all the data there? Have a quick tidy up? rm -rf --no-preserve-root?

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Comments

  • uhu said: rm -rf --no-preserve-root

    Generally, yes, or something similar. If it's an encrypted LVM, then more fun can be had.

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    It wisnae me! A big boy done it and ran away.
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  • K4Y5K4Y5 OG
    edited December 2019

    @uhu said:
    What do you lovely people do when retiring / not renewing a VPS?
    Leave all the data there? Have a quick tidy up? rm -rf --no-preserve-root?

    And you rely on the integrity of the service provider by trusting him/her to wipe off VM backups too :P
    Edit: If they keep backups, that is.

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  • tgltgl OG
    edited December 2019

    best way is to delete your data and use sfill (from secure-delete) to fill the drive with garbage, if you have sensitive data

    theres also sswap but i guess, sfill is enough if you're not into some secret government service

    you can also boot from a live cd, and do

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/vdX

    but it will take a long time

  • Just shutdown. (LUKS volumes mean quick and simple retirement)

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  • I generally just delete my personal files and shut down.

    "A single swap file or partition may be up to 128 MB in size. [...] [I]f you need 256 MB of swap, you can create two 128-MB swap partitions." (M. Welsh & L. Kaufman, Running Linux, 2e, 1996, p. 49)

  • @seriesn said:
    Send it back in factory format. OS reinstall :)

    That's what I've done in the past, I just wondered how paranoid people got.

  • @tgl said:
    best way is to delete your data and use sfill (from secure-delete) to fill the drive with garbage, if you have sensitive data

    theres also sswap but i guess, sfill is enough if you're not into some secret government service

    you can also boot from a live cd, and do

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/vdX

    but it will take a long time

    Yes, sfill for me is sufficiently secure (and for most people)

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  • WSSWSS OGRetired
    edited December 2019

    Since I buy KVMs, I tend to just renice a DBAN on it. Any decent provider will have a snapshot of your image for awhile, anyhow. I don't care about that, I just don't want someone who takes over my allocated space getting bored after a fastwrite and getting any of my beautiful headshots.

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  • williewillie OG
    edited December 2019

    Are you saying someone who buys a VPS can get the data dregs from the last user, instead of getting zeroed out file space? That seems like a monstrous security hole. It should never be allowed to happen.

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  • WSSWSS OGRetired

    @willie said:
    Are you saying someone who buys a VPS can get the data dregs from the last user, instead of getting zeroed out file space? That seems like a monstrous security hole. It should never be allowed to happen.

    Generally, no. It would require direct disk access for the most part for this to occur, but I don't trust LE* providers to wipe drives when replacing them. It was mostly intended as a funny, but it is technically possible. You'd want/need root on the hypervisor in virtually all cases or the disk to be directly raw-device-hardware-attached to your VM, at the very least..

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  • @willie said:
    Are you saying someone who buys a VPS can get the data dregs from the last user, instead of getting zeroed out file space? That seems like a monstrous security hole. It should never be allowed to happen.

    Now you know why everyone posts 'iso boot supported?' on every kvm thread.
    LUKS aes128xts has practically no overhead on intel Cpus after 2011

    Be safe my friends.

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