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Just cleared 300 laptops from a school district's old inventory
I got a call from the local school district to wipe and recycle a bunch of old machines they had in storage. When I finished the count, it was exactly 312 laptops, all from the same 2015 model year. I set up a bench with three drives and a network cable to run DBAN on batches of six at a time. It took me two full weeks working after hours to get through them all. Has anyone else had to handle a bulk job like this and found a faster way to do secure wipes?
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willows385mo ago
Hey, didn't I read somewhere that some places use a boot server for stuff like this? Like you set up one machine to send a wipe command over the network to a whole room of laptops at once. I mean, you'd need them all on and plugged into ethernet, but it could maybe do dozens in one shot instead of six. Sounds like it needs more setup time though. For 300 old laptops, maybe the two weeks wasn't even that bad.
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lilyallen5mo ago
Totally, boot servers are the way to go for that many machines. Watched a tech at my old college do a whole lab of thirty in about an hour once. They had all the desktops on a switch and just pushed one image out. The setup took them a morning to get right, but then it was just coffee and waiting. For a one-off batch of three hundred, doing six at a time sounds like a proper slog.
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