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
, etcThis can also be mitigated by using a username and/or hostname that doesn’t leak private data.
No need to make your username your real name, or make your hostname contain anything more revealong than say “living room thinkpad”
Counterpoint: https://xkcd.com/910/
Also, both hostname and username might fit a company schema that you want to anonymize.