If a user attempts to start a wipe but hasn't yet
selected any drives for wiping, a warning message
will now appear for a few seconds suggesting
they select a drive.
Prior to this patch, if you tried to start a wipe
without selecting a drive, nwipe would immediately
display a message saying the wipe was complete
and press enter to exit. You had no choice but to
exit and restart nwipe.
I have come across a new user that couldn't start a wipe, until it was
pointed out that to start a wipe you needed to type shift S. While this
is often true, shift S doesn't start a wipe if you have caps lock on. To
be precise you need to type a capital S. Confusing to a new user because
if they have been told to type shift S but their caps lock is on, then
nothing happens. Also how would you know you are supposed to type a
capital S when the key info puts all keys in caps.
The fix for this is to trap the lower case s and then print a message on
the status line that says "Use capital S to start a wipe". This message
could remain on the status line for 3 seconds then revert back to the
standard key info.
The use of capital S is to try to reduce the likelihood of an accidental
wipe you didn't mean to start, however, I've always thought that maybe
we should have a 'are you sure ?' after the user types 'S' .
A non issue once you're familiar with nwipe but probably irritating to
a new user.
Added NVME and VIRT to device type table.
VIRT are virtual devices such as loop devices
created with losetup.
NVME for solid state storage devices.
Due to the longer device names used for NVME, I will
need to do some work on the device name in the selection
window so column alignment is maintained.
If you use the option --nousb, all USB devices will be ignored.
They won't show up in the GUI and they won't be wiped if you use
the --nogui --autonuke command. They will even be ignored if you
specifically name them on the command line.
Add serial number support for USB devices for USB
to IDE/SATA adapters. Note this will only work
with USB IDE/SATA adapters that support ATA pass
through. See #149 for further details of
supported devices.
This patch requires readlink and smartmontools (smartctl)
to be installed. If not installed the serial number for
supported USB hardware will be missing.
The device type, i.e USB or ATA is now shown on the selection
and wipe windows.
Fix throughput so it shows the average throughput
calculated from the start of the wipe.
Because we currently use cached access to the disks
initially for a few seconds or minute the throughput looks high
as nwipes writes are cached in memory before being written to disc.
When we change to a non cached or nwipe buffered model the
throughput will reflect a throughput that is actual
disc throughput.
Using an averaged throughput means that when the wipe finishes it will show
a higher value than the previous calculation but this new calculation is the
actual averaged speed of the wipe and reflects a value that is closer to what
you would expect a given drive to exhibit.
For instance a 160GB WD1600AAJS using Dod-S, B+VL, using the old
calculation would finish with a throughput of 48MB/s, using the
new calculation it finishes with a throughput of 76MB/s. This was tested
over multiple wipes and multiple rounds and gave consistently similiar
results.
Throughput is not so accurate on small loop drives due to the fact the drive
is so small it fits within CPU memory so when reading back to verify your're
actually reading back from cache not the disk. Another reason I want to move
to non cached I/O and have nwipe manage buffering and size of block writes.
Add a summary table to the log that shows each drives status
i.e. erased or failed, throughput, duration of wipe, model,
serial no etc. In particular it benefits those that wipe many
drives simultaneously in rack servers. At a glance any failed
drives can be seen without having to browse back through the
log. Especially useful in --nogui mode, but also useful in GUI
mode.
Add a spinner to the GUI for each drive being wiped.
When nwipe is syncing the percentage completion pauses,
having a spinner gives a clear indication that the wipe
is still running. Each devices spinner disappears on completion
of a given devices wipe.
Add verbose option -v, --verbose
Only display thread cancellation info messages, excluding error
messages, only when verbose option is selected.
This helps to keep the log a bit cleaner especially when wiping many
drives simultaneously.
