The NTLARS/DNC registry carries an FTP password in cleartext and it was stored
verbatim. That put it in the backuprevisions table, on the revision panel which
renders values, and in the download route which hands back a ready-to-import
.reg - so anyone holding backups.view could read it off a web page.
Redaction happens at PARSE, so the secret never reaches the database at all.
Redacting on display would have left it at rest and one query away.
What is deliberately NOT done is dropping the value silently. This codec already
refuses to discard an unparseable value, precisely because a backup that looks
complete and restores a machine with a setting missing is the worst outcome. A
redacted value keeps its name, is listed in the projection, and renders as a
COMMENT naming what must be set by hand. Emitting a placeholder as the password
would produce a machine that looks restored and cannot connect, and the
technician would go debugging the network.
scripts/redact_backup_secrets.py scrubs revisions recorded before this, dry run
by default. It leaves contenthash alone: the hash identifies the configuration a
bay reported, so rewriting it would make every bay's next post look like a
change and insert a duplicate revision across the fleet.
Separately, sourcehostname is now normalized at ingest. samesource() maps '' to
IS NULL for the query while the insert stored the raw '', so rows written by a
client posting an empty hostname could never match their own next post: every
post inserted, the table grew without bound, and the history filled with
identical entries nobody could read. Whitespace did the same thing more quietly.
The stale-backup card could not be built as designed, and the reason is more
important than the card. Dedup means an unchanged configuration writes no
revision, so collectedat moves only on a CHANGE. A machine stable for six
months has a six-month-old newest revision and is perfectly healthy. Keying a
staleness card on revision age would have flagged most of the fleet - exactly
the noise that makes a board worth ignoring.
Underneath that: ShopDB could not distinguish those cases at all. On a no-op
the server returned "unchanged" and wrote nothing, so "we checked yesterday and
it matched" was discarded. That fact is the one thing a backup system must be
able to prove, and the only record of it was a line in a log file on the PC.
lastseenat records the check rather than the change. Touched on every matching
post including the no-op; set on creation, since a new revision has by
definition just been seen; backfilled from collectedat or createdat so existing
rows start from the last moment the config can be PROVEN current, rather than
from now - claiming a check that never happened would be worse than silence.
The card keys on it, one row per CHAIN rather than per asset: a machine with
two part markers can have one still reporting while the other stopped, and a
per-asset view would report the machine as fine. It stays deliberately silent
about assets never backed up, because whether one SHOULD be is a question only
the manifest can answer, and guessing would list a hundred healthy machines.
The rule lives in services/staleness.py rather than the route, so it is
testable without an auth layer in the way - the same split retention.py uses.
Threshold is backups_staledays, default 3, and 0 disables the card.
