On Fri, 22 Sep 2000, you wrote:
1). Please (Pretty Please!) change the 'subject' when changing, well, the subject.
You may have to use 'Send' rather than 'Reply' as well, for those using mail clients which support message threading. Version 1.0.29.2 of kmail doesn't BTW, but I am hoping that the version in kde2 does.
2). Re erasing old disks - this is a particularly difficult one as who knows what levels you really have to go to. Some companies make lots of money providing tools/service to do this. Why not suggest that the machines are provided ex-harddisk, who ever collects them simply takes a screwdriver and removes the disks before taking the machines away.
You have to write data to every sector on the drive, i.e. have a looping program which just writes 0xFF to /dev/hd* until the end of the disks are reached. Not quite as simple as it sounds, as some sectors may have write errors, so the program must ignore these are carry on. I'm sure that there is some PD software to do this, which will fit on a bootable floppy. Main problem with this is that old drives are *slow* so that process can take ages (1 hour per drive or more). Good news is that you can use software RAID to glue them all together to produce a more useful size and performance.
3). Another problem is the 'safety', you may need to sign a waiver stating that the company can not be held responsible if the kit is electrically unsafe.
An ex-employer used to give us their old PC's, but because of a court case against them they had to be put into a skip. We removed them from there, which is actually stealing. This did save them a lot of money, as about 250 pcs with monitors fitted into 1 skip, so they switched off the security cameras while the stealing was taking place. I think that their current policy is to have old pcs crushed :( For this reason PCs are often 'donated' anonymously, purely because it saves money, and they would not want any publicity if it could be helped, in case any of their shareholders are legal experts. Another angle may be to study the eco-angle (there is a relevant howto), then get your local environmental pressure group to do all the collecting etc. for you. Clive, who not so long ago had a house full of dirty Wyse terminals ;)
Simon Wood