East-Tec Dispose Secure

Good morning everyone!

Well, this web site is finally up to date I’m happy to say – so you can expect fresh reviews to be the order of the day.

I’d like to encourage my readers; to take a few moments from time to time, to write some constructive comments at the end of each post, so that I can either improve my reviews for you, or your experience at this web site.

Now on to the review!

Developer: EAST Technologies

Supported Languages: English, Romanian?

System Requirements:

• Any version of Windows 3.1 up to XP Pro (Not Vista?)
• Any Linux distribution; FreeBSD; Solaris;
• SCO UNIX, UNIXWARE OS/2, BeOS, etc.

Additional Requirements:

• 286 or higher processor (386, 486, Pentium, etc;)
• 550 KB of free conventional memory;
• Bootable 1.44 MB floppy disk drive or CD/DVD drive;
• The OS doesn’t seem to be a factor in the operation of this product.

Tested on: Windows XP Pro.

Requirements to create the bootable floppy disks or CDs/DVDs:

• 300 MHz or higher processor;
• 128 MB of RAM (256 MB recommended;)
• 5 MB of available hard disk space
• Windows XP Home/XP Pro/2000/NT/Me/98;
• 1.44 MB floppy disk drive or CD/DVD drive.

Credit:

My husband (David,) has been a software engineer for many years. He was largely responsible for the technical information on this software. Thanks babe!

So what does the program actually do?

Securely removes all data from hard drives or disk partitions. (Consider if you’ve only leased your computer.) Even if you’ve reformatted, there is still information readily available to the tech., who knows what he’s doing.

However, this software can be used in a current working environment also. It would be especially useful to companies who lease hardware all the time; or to companies looking to safeguard their sensitive information. Of course there is also the home user who doesn’t want anyone to know what he had been storing on it.

As you can see by the above requirements, East-Tec Dispose Secure appears to be two programs:

A bootable media creator for the software and something called “Network Sanitizing.” At the end of the install you’re asked if you want to launch both. I said yes, and two programs launched. I was somewhat confused that both windows that popped up were labeled “East-Tec DisposeSecure 2007 Enterprise” and I had to enter the install key for both. It’s not clear why I couldn’t simply enter the key once, since both programs use the same key.

Today’s software is not for the computer neophyte. Unless you comprehend this type of software; what it does; and how it works, I am steering you clear. However, having said that, this is no reflection on East Technologies, only on the complexity of running such software to acquire a specified safe output.

Network Sanitizing:

As indicated by the title, the Network Sanitizing program wipes the disk of a networked computer. However, I was perplexed that the documentation implied that you must first configure a computer to boot over a LAN.

Question: Why do you have to physically access the computer (to be wiped,) in order to set it to boot over the LAN? I’m not quite clear on why you’d have to bother with wiping over the LAN, instead of using booting media while you have physical access to the computer in question?

The only thing that I could think of was that you already have computers to wipe, that already boot over the net. However, I thought that most “boot over the net” computers are diskless workstations, which don’t have any disks to wipe.

I suppose I could be wrong. Also, many (most?) computers don’t have a boot ROM on their network card, making it impossible to “configure the BIOS to boot from the network.” However, East Technologies, solution for this problem is to create a bootable CD for the networked computer.

But then that puts us back to going from one computer to the other and booting it using a CD. Another disadvantage to using this method, is that the user would need a different boot CD for each type of network card you own; that is unless the network card has a boot ROM, as mentioned above. It’s not clear what you do if your network card isn’t among the (admittedly long) list of supported cards.

Possible Solution:

I think you’d probably have to just try using the regular bootable CD. Regardless, the main advantage to Network Sanitizing seems to be that you can have the sanitizing process logged to a central server.

A disadvantage is that you need a different boot media for each type of network card (which implies that you know what type of network card is in the PC to be wiped!) Also, you can’t create floppy boot media for Network Sanitizing. You must boot from a CD. All in all, using the bootable version of East-Tec DisposeSecure seems simpler and easier (unless you the centralized logging feature.)

Creating the PXE media for the computer I wanted to wipe went smoothly. Initially I thought the program had hung at the start of the CD burn process. The burner appeared to be doing something, so I waited and the burn was complete in less than a minute.

Now What?

Once that had completed, I had to choose between Implementing Network Sanitization based on “MAC Address” or “Successive Boot Sequence.” Not actually knowing what these meant, I checked out the help file which explains:

MAC Address Based Sanitization allows you to sanitize only the computers with their MAC Address specified in a list. If you try to network erase a computer not in the list of MAC Addresses, you will not be able to do so, until you enter it in the list.”

From that statement, it still wasn’t clear why the program makes it possible to attempt to sanitize a computer that’s not in the MAC list if it’s impossible to actually do the sanitization.

However the answer is found a little further down in the same help file. Apparently it is possible to sanitize a computer that’s not in the MAC list. You just get a warning and can override the warning. Alternatively you can add the computer to the MAC list. I suppose this later feature would be useful for when you wish to sanitize a computer multiple times.

The Successive Boot Sequence lets you sanitize the first (n) computers booted on your network. The example in the help file says that if you have 150 computers and want to sanitize 25, choose “Successive Boot Sequence” and set the number of computers to 25. The first 25 booted over the network will be sanitized! This seems dangerous to me. How do you know that the first 25 booted will be the 25 you want? On the other hand, I’m not an IT professional, so maybe this really is useful.

Hopefully EAST Technologies will visit this review (since they commissioned it!) and enter a few comments answering these questions, in the comments section at the end of this review.

Uh Oh!

Ultimately, I found that I was unable to configure and use Network Sanitize. The documentation appears to say that you must be running a DHCP server (which assigns IP addresses) and a TFTP server (which serves the boot image for Network Sanitizing) on the Network Sanatizing server. Also, the boot ap (from the CD) appeared to assume that the DHCP server and the TFTP server are at the same address.

Our network’s DHCP server is on a Linux box (which can’t run the East-Tec Network Sanatizing server because it’s a Windows application). You cannot run more than one DHCP server on a network segment. It seems likely that this will be a significant hurdle for many East-Tec customers.

It would have been much better if the program was capable of booting the Sanitizing application from a TFTP server that was at a different address from the network’s DHCP server.

Then again:

After further thought, I realized that it might be possible to run a TFTP server on the Linux box that runs our DHCP server. But I’m afraid that’s way too much work for me within the scope of this review.

All in all, I do suspect that the network sanitizing feature could work as well as East-Technologies’ other products – I just can’t know for sure. (We use several of their products at home.) In addition, the network product appears to have only one small advantage over the “bootable media” product: centralized logging.

Bootable Media:

The other way to use East-Tec DisposeSecure is to create a bootable media that will work on any computer. You can create media on CD or floppy.

Oddly, you must choose your sanitizing options at the time you create the boot media. I can see that being useful when you want to enforce a particular set of options for your customers. But if your IT department is going to be using the program, it would be nice if they could choose options (e.g. “Perform a last sanitize with zeros”) at run time instead of at media creation time.

Written later: Apparently you can choose your options at run time. It appears that the set of options chosen here becomes the default for the sanitize disk. You can change any of them when you actually use the sanitizing application.

GUI (Graphical user interface:)

Character mode applications are pretty archaic. I’ve even seen BIOS’ that have a GUI. It seems like this software could use one too. Especially if EAST Technologies would really like to sell this product to people at the user (not IT.,) level. Having said that, the character mode does work very well (just like it does for most BIOS’s.)

Partitions -v- Hard Drive:

As mentioned in Features, you can choose between wiping a hard drive or only a partition on that hard drive. After choosing the list of partitions to sanitize, I was presented with a list of twelve sanitizing methods. Each method is nicely described, along with some indication of when each method is appropriate to use (e.g. Single Pass with Zeros is approved by the US Department of defense for clearing most disks but not for disks with “secret information”.)

After choosing my sanitizing method I was presented with a list of options (the same options I had when I created the boot CD.) Apparently, the options chosen at CD creation time are only used to set the defaults for the program.

Logging:

I found it odd that there’s an option to create a log file which is saved in the “default installation directory.” I’ve booted from a CD. There is no default installation directory. Besides, I was trying to wipe the disk. If I wrote a log file onto it, it wouldn’t be wiped! The help file suggests that you write the log file onto a floppy disk, which is a good idea. In fact, it seems like this should be the default. The log file option also says the log can be re-directed to a printer, though there’s no indication of how to do this.

After choosing your options, you’re presented with a warning screen telling you of the dire consequences of proceeding: meaning that you’ll unrecoverably wipe out your drive. I allowed the process to proceed.

The actual sanatizing process went very smoothly.

At the end of the process, I had a disk filled with zeros. Since I had chosen to wipe partitions instead of the whole disk, my partition table was still intact, and each partition was filled with zeros as intended.

Help File:

The sanitizing applications help file, is in the form of a scrollable page that appears to be the text from the DisposeSecure help file. It’s not clear why I’d want information on the network version when I’m running the non-network version, but information for both applications is available. Conclusion: built-in help files are always copacetic, but it would be preferable if the help were tailored to the actual program I’m actually running.

Features:

The first feature has to be that East-Tec Dispose Secure 2007 was chosen specifically by the Dept., of Justice for their erasure needs;

Ability to view the raw data on a drive before you sanitize it;

For hard drives; choice between sanitizing physical drives (the entire disk) or partitions on a drive. This is very useful, as you may only want to wipe one partition while leaving others intact;

Ability to determine how fast sanitization will run before you begin. Each drive to be wiped can be tested separately and the time-to-sanitize is estimated. On the other hand, I had to check each drive (there are two in the computer I checked) separately, and add the estimated times together to get the total time.

East-Tec DisposeSecure 2007 has been positively reviewed by many places.

Negatives:

• A simplification process is definitely necessary for the installation procedure (eg: only enter the registration key once!) and a more informational name given to the windows caption heading, to distinguish one window from the other;

• When you boot the media (floppy or CD) on the computer to be sanitized, you’re presented with a character mode application. The first screen asks if you agree to the East-Tec license. It’s a little irritating to be asked to agree to the license every time you use an application. I agreed to the license when I created the media. Why do I need to agree to it again?
• There should be an option to estimate the total time to sanitize for all drives on a computer. See my note under Features.

• There should be two help files, one for each program.

Points:

• Originality: 8/10
• Functionality: 8/10
• Intuitiveness: 6/10

Price: USD$199 and upwards, depending on how many technicians will be using the software.

At this price, it’s probably more palatable to companies, since ordinary users will tend to buy other kinds of software before considering the need to wipe their hard drives. I’d like to see a significant drop in price for a single home user license.

Summary:

Incidentally, it appears you can sanitize any media that can be accessed via the BIOS’s INT13 interface. On my computer that meant SCSI hard drives and floppy drives. However, I was confused again when DisposeSecure offered to sanitize Floppy A and Floppy B even though I have only one floppy drive.

This is an antiquated holdover from the early DOS days when computers with only one floppy drive would assign drive letters A & B to that drive. Micro$oft’s relentless pursuit of backward compatibility means that this feature is preserved even today.

That being said, there’s no reason why EastTec’s program could not probe and discover that there’s really only one physical floppy drive to sanitize. I didn’t pursue this to find out what would happen if I asked it to sanitize two floppies even though I have only one.

The program on the bootable media is easy to use and does what it says. There are some confusing design choices, but no IT person will have any difficulty using this application to wipe hard drives.

Oh, and at the end of the process I was asked to approve the License Agreement again. Grrrrr.

Recommendation:

Again, this software is only for those that understand the consequences of running the software. I suspect that it’s why the License Agreement appears so often. This would cover EAST Technologies‘ liability, should any user lose critical information in the process.

Why not spend a little time shopping at ~ Software by Swan ~

This was a very intensive review to conduct, plus David went into so much technical information that the need for screenshots seemed like overkill for this review.

Thank you EAST Technologies for the opportunity to review yet another product of yours. We do love the other products of yours that we have!
~ Swan

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Ahhh Agloco!

“The day will come when machines and software will tell us whom to know; what to eat; what to wear; when to go to work and what profession to pursue; when to sleep; what entertainments to enjoy and with whom to have any kind of relationship. It can’t be avoided and you will succumb.”
~ Swan (2005)