New Task...OF DOOOOM!!

[Geek King]

So my workplace has a whole room full of old, outdated PCs that they're going to sell on auction. PCs that have client data and licensed software on them. The room is in a building that my workplace is trying to sell. Guess what I get to do the next few days?

If you guessed clean all traces off the hard drives, you would be right! Collect one internets and go foreward two spaces. I have two copies of Darik's Boot and Nuke, and about sixty computers to toast. Whee!

Fortunately, I have an internet connection here, and freedom to browse while I wait for the DBAN to run. Sadly, there are only enough outlets to do two computers at a time, plus have one workstation open so I can take IT support calls forwarded to my cell. Bad News: Compys all too slow to really do well with streaming audio, so I'm missing my radio shows. Good news, no one up here to bother with loud music. Note to self: Load up PSP with music and bring speakers tomorrow. Also, bring another book. Really boring duty, all told.

Day One
Work area cleared and set up. Work begun. Fought epic battle with dustbunnies, and won, for now. I suspect they may be regrouping to take back their lost territory though. Need to stock up on canned air to combat the eventual uprising. Managed to not give in to the temptation to chew off arm to escape.

[cawaker]

lol sounds like a fun task to me, I'd just surf the net all day and mess around. granted I kinda do that at work anyway.

[technical.angel]

Me too!!

Except I got caught. So now, my surfing is limited to CS on the one monitor the AA can't see. That way, I can pop back over to gmail if I hear someone coming.

[SteeleDragon78]

Day One
Work area cleared and set up. Work begun. Fought epic battle with dustbunnies, and won, for now. I suspect they may be regrouping to take back their lost territory though. Need to stock up on canned air to combat the eventual uprising. Managed to not give in to the temptation to chew off arm to escape.

might i suggest a small shop compressor with a drier cartridge?, think of it as a machine gun for dust bunny killing. that coupled with a hepa filtered shop vac makes for a fun day of dust bunny genocide.

[MrSmiley]

Bad News: Compys all too slow to really do well with streaming audio, so I'm missing my radio shows. Good news, no one up here to bother with loud music.

I find CPU usage of streaming audio depends mostly on the encoding/codec the people are using and bitrate of course. From experience, most of the streams on http://www.shoutcast.com/ (designed originally by the Winamp guys) will run on relatively low powered hardware because the codec used is simple. Then again, it's still a bit more guts required than just listening to non-streaming mp3s.

[Geek King]

Day Two

Day Two

Finished more computers today. Dustbunnies returned in numbers unimagined. My dual-wielded compressed air was overcome and I was forced to fall back on an aerosol can of cleaner and a lighter. Dustbunnies were routed, but at high cost. Poor Harv. What will I tell his components? How do you tell a CPU that her fan is dead?

Nibbled a bit on my shoulder before I came to my senses. Command has fled for the weekend already. But not before calling an all hands meeting tomorrow. The horror. The Horror.

I can hear the drums of the dustbunnies in the dark depths of the room. The drums are angry.

[Ironclad Alibi]

Command has fled for the weekend already. But not before calling an all hands meeting tomorrow. The horror. The Horror.

I can hear the drums of the dustbunnies in the dark depths of the room. The drums are angry.

Perhaps the dustbunnies could attend the all-hands meeting.

[Eric the Grey]

Sadly, there are only enough outlets to do two computers at a time, plus have one workstation open so I can take IT support calls forwarded to my cell.

KVM switches are your friend. If you can get one or two, it will speed this job up tremendously. I used to do these during my "down time" whenever we had old PC's that were being sold off, and being able to run d-ban on 4-6 machines at once really helped. Just add a couple of power strips to the mix, and you're set to go.


Eric the Grey

[PepperElf]

about sixty computers to toast.

welllll there is a faster way....

a good old hand-held degausser comes to mind...

[skyspirit]

a good old hand-held degausser comes to mind...

Exactly what I was thinking of. Even a rigged electromagnet hooked up to wall current would probably work. Then you could do all 60 in an hour and have a couple of days to play around.

[Geek King]

KVM switches are your friend.

Except I also only have two floppies that work in the entire building, apparently. New computers have no 3.5" drives, but have BIOSs that will boot to memstick, but the old ones don't do that and need floppies. No blank floppies in the building, so I literally wiped a couple that used to contain software we no longer use. Besides...

welllll there is a faster way....

a good old hand-held degausser comes to mind...

Then you could do all 60 in an hour and have a couple of days to play around.

But then I wouldn't look like I was doing anything when the boss wanders in once a day or so. Not often, but not predictable either. Boss is bright enough to know the difference.

Without further ado....

Day Three
With command fled, I am forced to field requests for support myself. I fear the dustbunnies will reclaim their lost ground while I am forced to stay in the communication post during the morning. The pit traps and landmines should slow them a bit, though.

Attended the all hands meeting in the afternoon. It had nothing to do with my duty station. Three hours of nothing to do with my duty station, to be exact. Gnawed off arm to escape, but they made me stay anyway. Heartless bastards.

The weekend comes. Blessed time away from the front. Maybe I'll go hang out with the girl from the local village that I talked to last time I got leave.

[MrSmiley]

Except I also only have two floppies that work in the entire building, apparently. New computers have no 3.5" drives, but have BIOSs that will boot to memstick, but the old ones don't do that and need floppies. No blank floppies in the building, so I literally wiped a couple that used to contain software we no longer use. Besides...

CDs too... most BIOSes from about 1996 on should be able to select it as a boot device. If you have a burner handy you can essentially burn the contents of a floppy diskette to cd (make sure it's set to bootable)

[Eric the Grey]

CDs too... most BIOSes from about 1996 on should be able to select it as a boot device. If you have a burner handy you can essentially burn the contents of a floppy diskette to cd (make sure it's set to bootable)

Hell, when I had to do this, I took one of their CD's home with me and made the copies myself, although we DID have a few machines unable to boot from CD for whatever reason, and needed to have a floppy...

I always thought that degaussers did not do all that good of a job at wiping drives.



Eric the Grey

[prb]

Day Two

Finished more computers today. Dustbunnies returned in numbers unimagined. My dual-wielded compressed air was overcome and I was forced to fall back on an aerosol can of cleaner and a lighter. Dustbunnies were routed, but at high cost. Poor Harv. What will I tell his components? How do you tell a CPU that her fan is dead?

Nibbled a bit on my shoulder before I came to my senses. Command has fled for the weekend already. But not before calling an all hands meeting tomorrow. The horror. The Horror.

I can hear the drums of the dustbunnies in the dark depths of the room. The drums are angry.

Why does this sound like an IBM ad?

[Pedersen]

Amusingly enough, I just configured dban on my home network. It's now possible for me to boot from network and run dban on any computer in my house. No mem stick, no cd, no floppy. Turns out it's mostly easy (once you have network booting working such that you already have an easy way to boot a linux setup over the network, anyway).