End-to-end fixes for Blancco Drive Eraser PXE flow uncovered by chasing
"reports never reach SMB share" across two air-gapped sites:
playbook/blancco-init.sh:
* Drop silent || true on wget of preferences.xml + config.xml. Fail
loud with shell-drop if download or marker grep fails. Background:
airootfs /opt/scripts/validate_preferences.sh restores
/albus/preferences.save (factory defaults, empty network_share) if
xmllint fails. wget failure made every report silently land nowhere.
* Clobber /albus/preferences.save with the same served file so even if
the validator fallback fires, the SMB target survives.
* Bind-mount /dev/null over /sys/power/{state,disk,mem_sleep,autosleep}
before switch_root. Albus's license-retry path writes /sys/power/state
directly (bypassing systemd targets); this is the last-line block.
* /dev/null symlinks for sleep/suspend/hibernate systemd targets in the
airootfs overlay + logind drop-in with IdleAction/Handle*=ignore.
Three independent layers because cmdline systemd.mask alone is bypassed
by direct /sys/power/state writes.
* xinitrc.d/00-no-screen-blank.sh runs xset s off -dpms + setterm
-blank 0 -powerdown 0 so the Blancco GUI doesn't blank during long
erasures.
* Removed the 20-failsafeDriver.conf "modesetting" pin. modesetting
needs DRM/KMS which we disable on kernel cmdline; "vesa" also failed
on NVIDIA. With the pin gone Xorg auto-picks fbdev which uses the
kernel framebuffer from vga=normal - works across Intel, AMD, and
older NVIDIA without nouveau.
playbook/pxe_server_setup.yml:
* dnsmasq.conf: explicit empty-value dhcp-option=3 + dhcp-option=6.
Without them, dnsmasq defaults to sending its own IP as router AND
DNS. Commenting the configured-value lines did NOT disable the push
(root cause of "wired keeps picking up 10.9.100.1 as gateway").
* Split the Blancco config.img extraction and preferences.xml deploy
into separate tasks. The previous shell-with-creates: gate caused
playbook re-runs to skip the prefs deploy entirely after first run.
* Added a validation task that runs python3 xml parse + grep on the
deployed preferences.xml to fail the playbook at deploy time if the
SMB markers are missing.
* Added Environment=TZ=America/New_York to the pxe-webapp systemd
service so report mtimes and audit log render in Eastern time even
if the Python process is started before timedatectl converges.
webapp:
* services/blancco_report.py: parse Blancco's XML report format
(recursive <entries name="..."> walker) into a friendly dict.
* templates/report_view.html: Bootstrap "Drive Erasure Certificate"
layout - hero summary, customer + system cards, per-drive cards with
step-by-step erasure timeline, document signing footer with
integrity hash detail.
* /reports/view/<filename> route + View button on the reports list
(XML reports only; PDFs still download).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
