This was adapted very, very, slightly from this original blog post by Daniel Z. Stinson, thank you!

1. Download Office Deployment Tool: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=49117
   Extract to a simple path such as c:\Files\Office_Deploy
2. Create share on the folder you created above. I shared the folder named “Office_Deploy” and set “Full Permissions” to “Everyone”
3. Edit the configuration-Office365-x86.xml file to be the following below. Edit line 2 to be the path to your share that you created in the previous step:
   

   <Configuration>
   <Add SourcePath="\\YOURSERVER\Office_Deploy\" OfficeClientEdition="32" >
   <Product ID="O365ProPlusRetail">
   <Language ID="en-us" />
   </Product>
   </Add>
   <!-- <Updates Enabled="TRUE" UpdatePath="\\Server\Share\" /> -->
   <Display Level="None" AcceptEULA="TRUE" />
   <Property Name="SharedComputerLicensing" Value="1" />
   <!-- <Logging Path="%temp%" /> -->
   <!-- <Property Name="AUTOACTIVATE" Value="1" /> -->
   </Configuration>

4. Run the following from an elevated command prompt:

   C:\Files\Office_Deploy>.\setup.exe /download configuration-Office365-x86.xml
   This downloads the installer files/package.

5. Wait for files to download, there is no visual confirmation, but I did see an “Office” folder get created.
6. Run the following from an elevated command prompt:
   C:\Files\Office_Deploy>.\setup.exe /configure configuration-Office365-x86.xml

Enjoy!

I ran into my first need to secure erase an SSD. On a traditional spinning disk hard drive, I used the ‘shred’ command in Linux and would write zeros to the drive and it would take a long time with multiple passes (paranoid?).

With SSDs writing zeros is strongly discouraged for the sake of the SSD lifespan. The steps below I used on two Dell 6400 series laptops and were adapted from the AskUbuntu forum.

Note: I could not find any instructions on how to do this with a SSD drive attached via a USB SATA dock. I had to plug the SSD directly to the motherboard via a SATA cable.

1. Boot Ubuntu from a Live USB Flash Drive
2. Open a Terminal
3. Find your drive with: fdisk -l in this example, my drive was on /dev/sda
4. Check your drive to see if it is frozen: hdparm -I /dev/sda
5. If Frozen suspend the device with: systemctl suspend
6. Wait a few seconds and then power the system back on.
7. Check the frozen status again with: hdparm -I /dev/sda
8. Once drive is ‘not frozen’ I found I had to set up a password, in this case, I just set the password to 12345678:
   hdparm --user-master u --security-set-pass 12345678 /dev/sda (replace 12345678 with the chosen password)
9. This should return some confirmation text including: security_password: "12345678"
10. Check that security has been enabled: hdparm -I /dev/sda (look for the enabled or not enabled line)
11. Issue the Secure Erase command: hdparm --user-master u --security-erase 12345678 /dev/sda
12. Do a quick: fdisk -l /dev/sda to make sure no partitions are there.