If "DBAN" was one of the Fedora install-disk options...

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 21:04:13 -0700,
  Linda McLeod <lindavaldeen at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> My IP and OS are a vandalism target of mindless childish hellbound kooks
> hellbent on causing me grief to appease their delusions that I'm in any
> ways like them, and that I might somehow want to help them solve their
> useless bullyish lives..  is why I find it best to "DBAN" compromised
> OS's, to make hd's totally clean for new installs...

DBAN is used when you are going to lose control of the media (because you are
selling it or throwing it out) to prevent people from recovering your data.
It isn't needed to prevent you from accidentally running code looking at
data left behind after a compromise. A reinstall (including rewriting the
MBR and repartitioning) is good enough.

Also related to this is that hdparm will let you use the secure erase
feature of disk drives that support that feature.