Tuesday 15th May 2012: 6.46pm. Had to securely wipe the old server. Amazingly this works:
screen ssh <server>
sudo -s
# swapoff <swap device>
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=16M
dd: writing `/dev/sda': No space left on device
14905+0 records in
14904+0 records out
250059350016 bytes (250 GB) copied, 4087.39 s, 61.2 MB/s
# echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq
# echo o > /proc/sysrq-trigger
... and just like that your headless remote server no longer contains data and is shutdown (the echoing values into /proc is because the shutdown command no longer exists). I think it's pretty impressive that ssh and the kernel can cope with you zeroing out the storage from underneath them :)
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