Stop Sharing Passwords in Your Config Files — Use This Free Sanitizer

We’ve all seen it. Someone posts a config on Reddit asking for help with their OSPF adjacency, and right there in the paste — enable secret 5 $1$xyz..., three SNMP community strings, a TACACS key, and every real IP address in their production network.

Sometimes they catch it and edit the post. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the post gets archived before they notice, and now their credentials are indexed forever.

It’s not that engineers are careless. It’s that scrubbing a config manually is annoying. You’re troubleshooting at 11 PM, you need help, and you’re not going to spend twenty minutes carefully redacting every sensitive line before posting. So you either share it as-is and hope nobody notices, or you don’t share it at all — and don’t get the help you need.

I built a tool to fix this.

What the Sanitizer Does

The Config Sanitizer at ciscotools.dev takes a Cisco configuration and strips out everything you shouldn’t be sharing:

• Passwords and secrets — enable secrets, line passwords, username passwords, key chains, pre-shared keys
• SNMP community strings — read-only, read-write, and v3 auth/priv credentials
• TACACS and RADIUS keys — server keys and shared secrets
• Banner text — login, MOTD, and exec banners that often contain internal information
• IP address anonymization — replaces real IPs with addresses from RFC 5737 documentation ranges (192.0.2.0/24, 198.51.100.0/24, 203.0.113.0/24), preserving the structure so the config is still readable and debuggable

The key thing: it preserves the config structure. You still get a complete, valid-looking configuration that someone can read and troubleshoot. It just doesn’t have your actual credentials or addressing in it.

When You Need This

Posting on Reddit, forums, or Cisco Community — the most obvious use case. Get help without giving away the keys to your network.

Sharing with vendors — TAC cases, third-party support tickets, or consultant engagements where you need to provide config context but don’t want to hand over live credentials.

Internal documentation — config examples in runbooks, wiki pages, or training materials that shouldn’t contain production secrets even if they’re “internal only.”

Sending to TAC — Cisco TAC asks for configs constantly. The sanitizer lets you share what they need for troubleshooting without including what they don’t.

Code reviews and change requests — when you need to show a config change in a ticket but the full config contains sensitive data unrelated to the change.

Just Use It

The sanitizer is free at ciscotools.dev. No login, no account, no email signup. Paste your config in, get a clean config out.

While you’re there, check out the other tools too — IOS to NX-OS translator, Config Diff, and Template Manager. All free, all built for the same reason: network engineers shouldn’t be wasting time on things a tool can handle in seconds.

Stop sharing your passwords on the internet. There’s a better way now.