Package: wipe Version: 0.20-2 Severity: normal *** Please type your report below this line *** Running wipe on a large partition, eg with
wipe -kD /dev/hda1 does not always wipe the whole partition. Example: I tried to wipe a partition with 81956657664 bytes; wipe wrote only 352279040 Bytes per pass (checked with strace). Since this number is exactly the same as (81956657664 % 2^32) = 352279040, I conclude that wipe tries to coerce the size into a 32 bit number. This is serious problem: not only does it fail to erase the whole partition, the progress output does not really indicate that. Nowhere it is explained that the numbers mean the number of 16kB blocks being written. In the case in question, I only noted the obvious mismatch between the time for a pass and the size of the partition. If my analysis is correct, then it might be a good idea to check what happens if one tries to wipe a file of more than 4GB size. Rainer Schoepf -- System Information: Debian Release: testing/unstable Architecture: i386 (i686) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Kernel: Linux 2.6.15-1-k7 Locale: LANG=en_US.ISO-8859-15, LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-15 (charmap=ISO-8859-15) Versions of packages wipe depends on: ii libc6 2.3.6-15 GNU C Library: Shared libraries wipe recommends no packages. -- no debconf information Rainer Schöpf
