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Blancco LUN Eraser

Warning

This Plugin Provider implements non-recoverable disk wipe/erasure capabilities. Running the workflows/workorders defined in this Plugin will completely and irrevocably destroy all data as defined by the ble/wipe-disks Param. There is absolutely no way of recovering data from drives wiped with this tooling.

This plugin implements the commercially licensed industrial grade Disk and LUN wiping tool from Blancco Technology Group. The tool requires additional licensing direct from Blancco. The integrated product is Blancco LUN Eraser (BLE).

Note

RackN licenses do not entitle use of the Blancco LUN Eraser product. You must obtain use licenses directly from Blancco Technologies Group.

The product originates loosely from the open source Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN) disk wiping solution.

A short video on setting up a DRP Endpoint specifically to use the Blancco LUN Eraser, and then wiping systems with this integration can be found on Youtube.

Youtube video:

Overview of Usage

This plugin requires external third party licenses to be purchased from Blancco to operate correctly. Product information and purchasing details can be found on Blancco's website at:

By default this plugin utilizes the Blancco Cloud services to validate and consume licenses, and upload completed Reports. The operator must have a valid Blancco Cloud account username and password with license entitlements. The Blancco Management Console can be found at:

It is possible to install a local (eg for "airgap" requirements) Blancco License and Console management service internally. Contact Blancco for further details.

Basic Usage

By default this content will not wipe any disks without a number of Params being set correctly on a target Machine. An example Profile can be found under Profiles, which provides a sample of Params that should be set. The example profile is named:

  • EXAMPLE-blancco-lun-eraser

Specifically, the following required Params must be set with values:

  • ble/username - The Blancco Cloud or local Console server user account
  • ble/password - The Blancco Cloud or local Console server user password
  • ble/disks - an array of disk targets to wipe, each disk consumes 1 (one) Blancco license entitlement
  • ble/wipe-disks - set to true to enable disk wiping

Optional configuration Params can be set; if no value is specified, the default value will be used:

  • ble/noop-test-mode - test the automation without running the wipe processes, for usage validation and disks selection verification
  • ble/custom-report-fields - adds custom fields to the completed wipe report, can use DRP based Golang template expansion in these, see the example Profile
  • ble/license-server - defaults to https://cloud.blancco.com:443
  • ble/wipe-report-profile-tag - if specified, collect DRP based combined report information in to a single Profile (see Profile Documentation for more details)
  • ble/wipe-level - defaults to 16: NIST 800-88 Clear
  • ble/wipe-report-profile-tag - no default - if set, enables aggregate Machine wipe reports written to a single Profile
  • ble/wipe-speedlimit - defines a maximum I/O throughput in MB for wiping processes, see the BLE PDF documentation in files/plugin_providers/blancco-lun-eraser for more details
  • ble/wipe-buffersize - I/O buffer size to use for wipping, can dramatically increase/decrease overall wipe process time, see the BLE PDF documentation in files/plugin_providers/blancco-lun-eraser for more details
  • ble/disks-target-param - an alternate Param to use for the list of disks to wipe (for example inventory/Disks)
  • ble/disks-suppression-list - a String List of disks to NOT wipe even if they have been explicitly specified to be wiped
  • ble/url-BlanccoLUNEraser-tool - altnernate download location for the BLE binary
  • ble/url-license-dat - altnernate download location for the license.dat
  • ble/url-shasums - altnernate download location for the ble-sha256sums.txt file, empty value turns off SHA hash checking

The Blancco LUN Eraser tooling supports several standards for different wipe level requirements. See the ble/wipe-level Param documentation for specific standards supported wipe levels and setting values.

Note that the list of Optional/configuration params will grow and expand over time. Please see the individual Params defined in this Content for complete configuration capabilities and details.

Disk Selection, Suppression, and ReadOnly Handling

Normally the ble/disks Param is the input definition for which target devices should be wiped. The operator may override this to use any other Param that is a List of Strings as an alternate input list. For example, by setting:

  • ble/disks-target-param: inventory/Disks

The system will use the disk devices identified in that alternate Param. In this example, this allows the standard Inventory collection processes in DRP to define the disk wipe target selection based on Inventory found devices.

In addition to the input Param definition of what disk devices to wipe, the operator can additionally choose to specify a Suppression (or "blacklist") of devices to NOT wipe. The primary intention of the suppression list to prevent erasure processes on non-writable disks (eg cdroms). However, the list can be used to ensure preservation of a specific devices from being wipe if desired.

By default the disk wipe suppression list contains /dev/sdr0, /dev/cdrom, and /dev/dvd.

In addition, any block device that are marked Read Only by the Linux Kernel will automatically be removed from the target wipe list. Note that not all actual Read Only devices are marked by the kernal as such. The system uses the lsblk device information output (which reads the kernel structures) to determine which disks are Read Only.

Finally; the Task will remove any defined devices that do not have a block device entry in /dev correlating to the requested device.

Testing Without Wiping/Consuming Blancco Licenses

It is generally highly encouraged to test this automation prior to running any actual wipe/erasure operations on live disks. Each disk erasure or wipe process requires license entitlement and consumption from the Blancco Cloud management console or on-premises airgap Blancco Management Console.

To support test validations without actually wiping disks or consuming licenses, set the following Param:

  • ble/noop-test-mode: true

Info

The ble/wipe-disks Param is a safety control setting. If set to false (the default value), then the erasure Tasks will completely exit without running any subsequent code. This will NOT test the tasks appropriately.

Most of all of the automation tooling will run, with the following exceptions:

  • The BlanccoLUNEraser binary tool will not be executed
  • No reports will be generated and the report aggregation Profile writing will not be tested

Defining What to Erase

The BlanccoLUNEraser tool operates on LUNs (Logical Unit Numbers). LUNs may represent a group of drives configured as a single volume, a partition on a drive, or the entire drive itself.

The operator must provide an explicit list of LUNs that should be destroyed and wiped by setting the string list type Param to the names of the LUNs as will be found by the Sledgehammer operating system.

Typically, an operator can determine the LUN names by use of the lsblk command while in the Sledgehammer environment (this may also be run on other Linux variants, however device names are not guaranteed to match). Network based LUNs can potentially be mounted in Sledgehammer to be presented for wiping operations. These operations may be run via the Flexiflow task injection pattern of the universal-discover workflow.

At this time (as of v4.13.0) the system will not automatically wipe all drives on a system. It is possible that a new Task could be constructed to automatically determine a systems attached drives and build up the Param to support full system automatic wipe operations.

See the ble/wipe-disks Params Documentation field for additional details.

License Availability Check

A limited attempt to determine if the defined Blancco Management Console (BMC) (as defined by ble/license-server) has valid licenses for consumption. If no licenses are available, the process will exit with an error. This is also true when ble/noop-test-mode is enabled.

The license availability check does not (as of v4.13) attempt to validate licenses based on License Expire Date.

The tooling uses a fairly basic curl call to the BMC to determine license availability. It is possible this check may fail in a way that obscures the failure reason. Typically this can be re-run with rs-debug-enable set to true, and reviewing the debug job log output for more clues.

Workflows

The Blancco LUN Eraser (BLE) tasks must be run in Sledgehammer. The following Workflow enforces that the machine is in Sledgehammer, then runs the Blancco LUN Eraser tooling Tasks:

  • blancco-lun-eraser

Workorders and Blueprints

The Blancco LUN Eraser (BLE) tasks must be run in Sledgehammer. The following Blueprint enforces that the machine is in Sledgehammer, then runs the Blancco LUN Eraser tooling Tasks:

  • blancco-lun-eraser

'universal-decommission' Integration

The Universal Decommission process (both an Infrastructure Pipeline and a Workflow) can be flexibily extended to replace the standard drive erase processes with the Blancco LUN Eraser tool. To do so, set the Flexiflow Param that modifies the universal-decommission Workflow stage named universal-decommission-during-flexiflow to inject the BlanccoLUNEraser Tasks.

Doing this will replace the current Task list that typically runs in the Stage by default. Other desired Tasks can be added along with this.

Example usage by setting the following Param:

  • universal-decommission-during-flexiflow: [ "blancco-lun-eraser" ]

See the example Profile named EXAMPLE-BlanccoLUNEraser-universal-decommission for further details.

Reporting for Disk Wipes

When utilizing the Blancco Cloud Management Console, completed wipe reports may be uploaded to the Console for review and certification proof of disk wipe operations. From time-to-time, the reports may fail to upload. In the case of a report upload failure, Digital Rebar Platform (DRP) will not fail the Task. The Job Log for the task will record the failure as a "500" error in the log.

Additionally, DRP records wipe results in the Blancco native Reporting format (XML) as Params on the Machine, and optionally, in a Profile with an aggregate report grouped together by an operator specified tag value. This allows multiple Machines to execute wipe operations, and aggregate the wipe reports together in a single Profile.

A completed Wipe Report will be added to each Machine object of each Machine that completes a successful wipe. The wipe report will be recorded in the Param:

  • ble/wipe-report

The Optional Profile based aggregate reports must be explicitly enabled, if desired. To enable the Profile based reports, you must set the following Param with a "tag" value to identify this group of wipe operations. The tag is an arbitrary string, but should not contain any special characters. An example value setting:

  • ble/wipe-report-profile-tag: "20240317-green"

In the above example a Profile will be created and the "tag" appended, creating a report Profile named:

  • ble-wipe-report-20240317-green

This Profile will be added to each machine. Each machines specific wipe report will be written as a separate Param in the Profile, with the Machines UUID value as the Param name, prefixed with machine-.

Note

Reports are in Blannco's native reporting file format, which is XML.

To remove the report, you must remove the Profile from the Machine(s), then remove the Profile.

Warning

Subsequent re-runs of the blancco-lun-eraser Workflow, with the same Profile tag will cause older wipe records for a given Machine (if they exist), to be deleted prior to the new Wipe Report being recorded.

Virtual Machines

If you are using Virtual Machines and wiping disk volumes, note that any of the erase levels implemented by Blancco LUN Eraser will cause the disk to inflate to its fully specified size. This is an important consideration if you are backing your disk volumes as Sparse type disks. You must ensure that your backing storage for your Virtual Machine volumes is large enough for the disks to be fully inflated.

Customizing the BlanccoLUNEraser Tool Operation

The BlanccoLUNEraser (BLE) tool requires a separate configuration file which defines the operational capabilities and enablement of the tools features. In addition, the DRP implementation allows the operator to override the command line flags and arguments for calling the tool. See the below sections for further details.

Configuring the BlanccoLUNEraser 'config.txt'

The BlanccoLUNEraser tool utilizes a file with the name of config.txt which carries the configuraiton for the tool. By default, DRP will render the config file as part of the operation of the tool, utilizing the Template named blancco-lun-eraser-config.txt.tmpl. This configuration file utilizes several of the Params to create a customized configuration for each operational run of the BLE tool.

The operator can construct and specify an alternative configuration file to be utilized by the BLE tool. To do so, set the DRP configuration Param to the name of an alternate Template with the desired customizations. An example is as follows:

  • ble/config-template: my-blanccoluneraser-config.txt.tmpl

This file is not validated for correctness by DRP. Any customizations to it must be validated against the BLE documentation.

BlanccoLUNEraser Binary Runtime Arguments

The BlanccoLUNEraser tool operates with a congirutaion file (defined above), in conjunction with a set of shell arguments. From time to time, Blancco may choose to update or change the arguments that are used. Subsequently, this would necessitate the update of the Plugin contents to adjust the arguments appropriately.

To ensure rapid updating of how the tooling is executed, it is possible to specify alternative command line arguments to the binary tool (BlanccoLUNEraser). Note that ONLY the argument flags can be specified; and the Binary command name may not (and SHOULD NOT) be specified in the Param.

The Param is defined as ble/wipe-command-arguments. See the Params Documentation field for additional customization information.

BlanccoLUNEraser Tool Documentation

For convenience the BlanccoLUNEraser tool documentation PDF is embedded in the DRP Plugin Provider. It will be installed and is available for review on the DRP Endpoint in the HTTP file server space. It can be found at:

  • http://:8091/files/plugin_providers/blancco-lun-eraser/
  • or https://:8090/files/plugin_providers/blancco-lun-eraser/

Note that RackN does not guarantee that the documentation in the PDF exactly matches the binary operation or usage.

Binary File Download Integrity Validation

If the Param ble/url-shasums contains a file with sha256sums for the downloaded assets (namely BlanccoLUNEraser and license.dat), then the files will be validated after download.

If the Param is empty, the SHA hash checking will be skipped.