Our client is a leading asset liquidation company in Texas that provides data center decommissioning, e-waste recycling, and generator removal services that go above and beyond other liquidation companies.  They have serviced numerous businesses like hotels and large enterprises by helping them resell old but still functional equipment at a  good value. They are a green company whose aim is to reduce the e-waste footprints left when equipment upgrades are made within a company.

Problem

Our client handles a lot of e-waste recycling and reselling of used IT equipment, including PCs, laptops, and servers for resale after liquidation.  As part of their business model, they need to test all this equipment thoroughly, accurately documentation configuration and hardware specifications for each unit, and (most importantly) ensure all of their clients’ data is securely destroyed.

Once a unit has been tested and its data wiped, an eCommerce listing must be generated to tell prospective buyers about the machine so that it can be resold.

Solution

At Liquis, we built a script, which would run on a Linux live CD, or USB bootable thumb drive, to automate the processing of PCs, laptops, and servers for resale after liquidation.  The script used various Linux utilities to extract hardware specifications, format them into XML and insert that data into the company’s FileMaker database.

After this process was completed successfully, the script would also securely erase the machine’s hard drive using a process based on DoD standards, in order to ensure sensitive client data is not left on the machines upon resale.  For this project we made use of Linux Bash scripting; utilities like dd, dmidecode, and others; and FileMaker’s XML-based custom web publishing.

Results

Automation was the first step in simplifying what was originally a complicated system with a lot of manual data entry. Through automation, they were able to optimize the time and resources spent during the processing of PCs, laptops, and servers for resale after liquidation and reinvest that time better.