Obfuscate hostnames and IP addresses in support script output using SOScleaner

When you work with Support, we might ask you to gather troubleshooting information using the command puppet enterprise support. If your organization requires you to remove hostnames and IP addresses, you can automatically obfuscate them by using the SOScleaner tool.

Ensure that you meet your organization's policies for removing hostnames and IP addresses by reviewing the processed files before sending them to us.

Note: We cannot troubleshoot third-party software. For more information on SOScleaner, see https://github.com/soscleaner/soscleaner.

Version and installation information

PE version: 2016.4.3 and later
OS: RedHat variants, Ubuntu, SLES

Solution

Install the SOScleaner tool and use it to obfuscate hostname and IP addresses in support script output.

SOScleaner scans files in the support script tarball and replaces strings that match IP addresses and hostnames with generic placeholders. Replacement is deterministic, so a given hostname or IP address is always replaced with the same placeholder.

Install the SOScleaner tool

On RedHat variants:

1. Enable the EPEL repository.

   Note: Installing the puppet-epel module enables the EPEL repo.

2. Install SOScleaner: yum install -y soscleaner

On other platforms:

Install SOScleaner and its dependencies as Python packages using pip.

1. Ensure Python is installed.

2. If you don't have pip installed, install it by running:
curl "https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py" -o "get-pip.py" ;python get-pip.py


3. Install the Python bindings for libmagic:

   puppet resource package python-magic ensure=installed

4. Install soscleaner and ipaddr using pip:

   pip install soscleaner ipaddr

Prepare and process the support script tarball with SOScleaner.

1. Run the support script.

   Note: This links to information about the support script in the latest version of PE, please navigate to the correct version for your deployment.

   When the support script finishes running, the location of the zipped tarball is output:

   
       # /opt/puppetlabs/bin/puppet-enterprise support
       Puppet Enterprise Support Script v1.0.0
       SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (x86_64)
       Creating drop directory at /var/tmp/puppet_enterprise_support_m7zzkk8qcxbwiji_20170223031820
       Collecting information
   
        ** Collecting output of "netstat -anptu"
   
       ...
   

   Please submit /var/tmp/puppet_enterprise_support_m7zzkk8qcxbwiji_20170223031820.tar.gz to Puppet Support using the upload site you've been invited to.

2. Create a new tarball containing the obfuscated data by running SOScleaner on the support script tarball.

   Note: If your PE installation includes nodes with different domain names than the node which generated the support script, these additional domains must be passed to the soscleaner command using the -d flag. For examples, see man soscleaner or the SOScleaner Host and domain obfuscation documentation.

   soscleaner /var/tmp/puppet_enterprise_support_m7zzkk8qcxbwiji_20170223031820.tar.gz

   The output includes the path to the tarball containing the obfuscated data:

   02-22 19:32:03 soscleaner CONSOLE: Creating SOSCleaner Archive - /tmp/soscleaner-2059271064217724.tar.gz

3. SOScleaner removes all files that are not plain text, including log files. If your support engineer asks for archived logs to use when troubleshooting your issue, get the logs from the original support script tarball.

Ensure that you meet your organization's policies for removing hostnames and IP addresses by reviewing files before sending them to us.