I would like to know, at INFO (default) log level, when the
monkeyspehere makes a "real" modification to my known_hosts file; that
is, when it adds or deletes a key.
Apparently this is hard because monkeysphere is currently configured to
delete all keys and then add good keys, so a key added for the first
time seems to the monkeysphere very similar to a key re-added ten
seconds after last login.
Still, from a UI perspective, I want to know what monkeysphere is doing.
It looks like jrollins committed a change for reporting at INFO level
when a host key gets added by the monkeysphere:
2459fa3ea277d7b9289945748619eab1e3441e5c
When i connect to a host whose key is not already present in my
known_hosts file, i get the following to stderr:
ms: * new key for squeak.fifthhorseman.net added to known_hosts file.
This doesn't fully close this bug, because we aren't notifying on key
deletion, afaict.
So current log level DEBUG will output a message if the known host
file has been modified. If the issue is that you want to know at the
default log level everytime the known_hots file is modified, then we
should just move this message to INFO instead of debug, and then maybe
remove the message that I added above. I was under the impression
that the issue was more about notification that a new key was added
to the known_hosts file, and therefore the new INFO message above
fixed that problem. Should we do this instead?
In general, more verbose log levels do tell the user what the
monkeysphere is doing. Moving to DEBUG log level will tell you pretty
much everything that happens. I do not think that this should be
the default log level, though.
I wouldn't want to see an extremely verbose default log level. But i
do think that saying something like "key blah blah blah was stripped
from your known_hosts file because it was expired" (for example)
would be useful. I think this case would occur infrequently enough
that it is worth reporting in the UI at the regular log level.
--dkg
