Tag Archives: delete

Securely Delete Files on Linux

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We can use srm to securely delete files on Linux.

Install srm with 

sudo apt install secure-delete

We can now securely delete files by running 

srm filetodelete.txt

# srm --help
srm v3.1 (c) 1997-2003 by van Hauser / THC <vh@thc.org>

Syntax: srm [-dflrvz] file1 file2 etc.

Options:
        -d  ignore the two dot special files "." and "..".
        -f  fast (and insecure mode): no /dev/urandom, no synchronize mode.
        -l  lessens the security (use twice for total insecure mode).
        -r  recursive mode, deletes all subdirectories.
        -v  is verbose mode.
        -z  last wipe writes zeros instead of random data.

srm does a secure overwrite/rename/delete of the target file(s).
Default is secure mode (38 writes).
You can find updates at http://www.thc.org

Other links for securely erasing drives.
https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/secure-erase-ssd-or-hard-drive

Delete files older than x days – Linux

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You can use find command to find and delete files older than the specified days. In this case 30.

find /backup/* -mtime +30 -exec rm {} \;

Non recursive example. The -prune option should limit find to only look for files in the /backup directory. So it won’t check any subdirectories. 

find /backup/* -prune -mtime +30 -exec rm {} \;

LibreNMS manually clean up MySQL Syslog Database

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Adding the following option to the config.php file is supposed to delete anything over 30 days.

$config['syslog_purge']                                 = 30;

You can also manually delete the entries out of the MySQL database by logging into MySQL, selecting the librenms database, and running the command below.

The command deletes all entries older than 12/9/2018 at 08:00. Change the date and time as needed.

DELETE FROM syslog WHERE timestamp < '2018-12-9 08:00:00';

The following link has some more clean up options.
https://docs.librenms.org/Support/Cleanup-options/