Don’t ever, ever, ever run the following command on your redhat/fedora box:
rpm -qa | xargs rpm -e
Especially if what you meant to run was:
rpm -qa | grep postg | xargs rpm -e

I was trying to clean off my server. I wanted to leave it in a runing condition, I just wanted to get rid of my working data. I thought I’d uninstall the postgres rpms before wiping out the /var/lib/pgsql folder to avoid boot errors.

Let’s just say the server is now, ahem, clean.

By the way, when I want a clean wipe of all freespace on a drive I do this:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp.txt bs=1024 count=1840268
where 1840268 is the “available” column from df
/dev/hda3 2063536 118444 1840268 7% /
end result is
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3 2063536 1960516 0 100% /

I know, this won’t keep the CIA from finding my old data but it does make things a little more difficult. Do the above steps for each filesystem making sure to put tmp.txt in the folder that the partition is mounted on.