Many projects ask to share lots of logs when reporting issues. It’s difficult to go through all the logs and redact informarion such as usernames, environment variabled etc.
Any ideas on how to anonymize logs before sharing? Change your username to something generic?
For me this typically involves doing a search&replace for my username, hostname, and IP addres(es)
This is the correct answer. Private IPs are less concerning (on noes now someone knows a network in my homelab is 10.0.0.1/24!) - but absolutely change public IPs in logs.
If it’s necessary to reference external users/systems in multiple log files, I’ll change the names to
user1
,user2
,server1
,db2
, etc
A quick google search found these:
sed
Just came here to say you could always look for alternative projects that have this built in as well. I’m not sure what logs you as looking at, but it might be best to contribute or request this feature directly for the software.
For example I use crowdsec and they have a button on the logs pages that will anonymize the entire page and is great for taking screenshots.
I agree with another poster that getting something to work with a number of different logs would be a huge undertaking and unrealistic for most solo devs. I do think asking whatever project could be a start. I’d love if journalctl and syslogd etc had a flag to anonymize the log output.
Personally often times I just open the screenshot in gimp and pixelate out the areas I want hidden, but that’s not an automated solution.