How to securely erase my linode?

Linode disk images are securely deleted on the host prior to the underlying storage being made available for another Linode to use. Therefore, all you need to do is remove the Linode in the Linode Manager, and the rest will be taken care of for you.

@dwfreed:

Linode disk images are securely deleted on the host prior to the underlying storage being made available for another Linode to use. Therefore, all you need to do is remove the Linode in the Linode Manager, and the rest will be taken care of for you.

Thanks for the info dwfreed.

It's good to know that Linode does it for you … however I would like have control over process before Linode takes over so can I do some preprep and are there any recommended set of steps to follow to do this?

If you're really paranoid, you could boot into Rescue Mode and zero the block device with dd:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4k

Note that this will completely erase the entire disk image, and no data will be recoverable from it.

@dwfreed:

If you're really paranoid, you could boot into Rescue Mode and zero the block device with dd.

Thanks dwfreed will try that command out!