A couple Things

[Robert Meyer]

--- Justin Bennett <justin.bennett at dynabrade.com> wrote:
> Two things.
> 
> One: is there a quick way to erase a linux drive other than formatting. 
> I have 107GB of user data (on several mirrored scsi drives) I backup to 
> tape every night, before I do that I copy it to a Large harddrive so I 
> can easily grab something from yesterday when our users blow it away. 
> Right now I'm doin a \rm -r on the backup drive, but that beats the 
> drive up pretty good and takes a while. I could unmount it, mke2fs -j 
> /dev/sdb1, then remount it this would be quicker, is there an easy way 
> I'm missing to clean a volume?

Nope, a newfs/mke2fs is the fastest way to clean a drive.  'rm -rf' takes
quite a while as I'm sure that you've noticed...
 
> 
> Two: Any easy way to supress Timestamp warnings from Tar? I know I'll 
> get the answer fix the problem not the symptom, but these are user files 
> systems accessed via samba, and I have no interest in being the PC time 
> police.

Well, you could route 'stderr' to /dev/null:
tar cvfz junk.tar.gz somedir >& /dev/null (tcsh) or
tar cvfz junk.tar.gz somedir > /dev/null 2>&1

Unfortunately, you won't see anything else, either :-(.  Other than that, you
*could* change the date on your system before the tar and change it back
when you're done.

I'd recommend that whoever takes care of the PCs should teach them all to use
xntp to sync to one of the Linux servers and have the Linux server sync to
someplace in cyberspace...

Cheers!

Bob

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