How do you create or boot ShredOS?

[PartialVolume]

Poll: In order to get an idea about what program or method is used to create a bootable ShredOS flash drive or boot ShredOS via other means.

[PartialVolume]

If you use some other method not listed, please let us know. Thanks.

[Firminator]

LinuxMint has a build-in utility called MintStick ( https://github.com/linuxmint/mintstick ) which is reliable, non-bloated, not Electron-based (like Etcher), and has a sha256 checksum and GPG verification.
It handles both the ISO or USB IMG provided by ShredOS and I haven't had an issue ever with it or any other ISO or IMG.
For Windows I recommend Rufus when putting any one image on a flash drive. Pete is an expert in his field. The history of Rufus speaks for itself. Regular releases with bugfixes (fixing Windows bugs handling USB!) and expert knowledge since 11 years is hard to top.
Ventoy for Multi-images.

[tlschenkjr]

We use ShredOS in multiple ways including, dd to USB flash drive on LInux, creating a custom ISO and burning to CD, booting ShredOS from the PXE server that is part of RedHat Satellite. The USB flash drive is used for wiping desktops, laptops, and one in a while, a rackmount server. Boot from PXE is used for our server farm (10,000 plus rackmount servers and blade servers) and for virtual machines. The reason why we customize ShredOS is because the download versions don't properly recognize drives in some of our HP servers (missing kernel menuconfig option) and to add support for log shipping via SFTP instead of lftp or tftp (both of which our security team frown upon) to the nwipe_launcher script..

[PartialVolume]

I would be interested in seeing some of those customisations. They might be useful in updating the ShredOS launcher especially with sftp.

[tlschenkjr]

I'll put them in a tree for you to look at. They work, but it is not the most secure setup because I put the ssh keys in /etc/ssh_keys under the fsoverlay directory. But I think that it would probably be better to get the key to the system running ShredOS using wget and a URL passed on the kernel command line. I just haven't had the bandwidth to make those changes and test them. As it stands, using sftp as the log shipping protocol requires creating a custom image with the SSH keys on the resulting ISO. The other modification I made is to use dmidecode to put the system serial number into the name of the nwipe log file and the dmesg file, so that if you are running against multiple servers at the same time, they don't stomp on each other when writing to the remote host.

[PartialVolume]

That will be appreciated, thanks. Always good to see new ideas and it does look like it would be worth incorporating them into ShredOS.