please support using actual unobstructed ssh

[daniel-baumann]

Hi,

nerdlog is great, however, when people have a complex ~/.ssh/config it is very frustrating of getting nerdlog to somewhat work (I still didn't).

It would be nice if there's a way of just leaving any ssh fiddling completely out of the way, and not enfording ssh-agent use or anything like that. just call 'ssh $host' and be done with it - leaf all the rest (jumphost/control sockets/usernames/keys/passphrases/2FA/$whatever) completely to the user to deal with.

Regards,
Daniel

[dimonomid]

Hey Daniel,

It's already supported for about 1.5 months (since 1.10.0); just pass the --set 'transport=ssh-bin' flag when starting nerdlog. I plan to make it a default once there is enough evidence that there are no issues with it; in fact I also have this HELP NEEDED issue where I ask users to try it out and report whether it works fine or if there are issues, so would appreciate if you give it a try.

[daniel-baumann]

Hi,

I'm aware of transport=ssh-bin, I use this config in .config/nerdlog/logstreams.yaml:

---snip---
log_streams:
  example.org:
    hostname: example.org
    port: 22
    transport: ssh-bin
    user: my_user
    options: {"sudo": true}
    log_files:
      - /var/log/apache2/example.org/access.log
      - /var/log/apache2/example.org/error.log
      - /var/log/apache2/example.org-ssl/access.log
      - /var/log/apache2/example.org-ssl/error.log
---snap---

yet, starting 'nerdlog -h example.org' still want's to use ssh-agent.

I see though that 'nerdlog -h example.org --set "transport=ssh-bin"' seems to work, so maybe I just got the config wrong?

Regards,
Daniel

[daniel-baumann]

Hi,

I try to restart a bit more constructively/with more actual information:

• when setting "transport: ssh-bin" in config, this seems not to work (see config above) and has no effect. specifying it on the
  command line with set, works.

• without specifying a username (which kind of defeats the purpose of using transport: ssh-bin), nerdlog will eventhough transport: ssh-bin is in the config, ignore it and fall back to wanting to use ssh-agent.

Regards,
Daniel

[dimonomid]

when setting "transport: ssh-bin" in config, this seems not to work (see config above) and has no effect

Yes, setting transport: ssh-bin in the config like you pasted above won't work: transport is a global option, not a per-host setting. I have some plans to make it customizable per host as well, but it's not done yet, and also btw when it's done, it will be in the options object, together with sudo.

So, as of today, you can either type :set transport=ssh-bin in the running nerdlog, or run it with the --set transport=ssh-bin flag (and if you want it to be a permanent setting, consider making a shell alias)

without specifying a username (which kind of defeats the purpose of using transport: ssh-bin), nerdlog will eventhough transport: ssh-bin is in the config, ignore it and fall back to wanting to use ssh-agent.

Tbh not sure I understand what you mean here, can you elaborate?

---

Also, an unrelated issue, but specifying these log files:

    log_files:
      - /var/log/apache2/example.org/access.log
      - /var/log/apache2/example.org/error.log
      - /var/log/apache2/example.org-ssl/access.log
      - /var/log/apache2/example.org-ssl/error.log

in a single logstream won't work properly. To quote the docs on Logstreams:

As the name suggests, a logstream (or shortened to lstream) is a consecutive stream of log messages

The key thing here is consecutive. The log files specified in a single logstream can only be consecutive: when concatenated, they should form a unified stream of log messages with non-decreasing timstamps. The first filename in the yaml array being the latest log file, e.g.

    log_files:
      - /var/log/syslog
      - /var/log/syslog.1

Also btw, as per the current limitation (also mentioned in the docs), as of today there can be at most two files in a logstream.

Anyway, for your case (reading apache logs from example.org/access.log, example.org/error.log, example.org-ssl/access.log, example.org-ssl/error.log), these have to be separate logstreams, like this:

log_streams:
  example-org-access:
    hostname: example.org
    port: 22
    user: my_user
    options: {"sudo": true}
    log_files:
      - /var/log/apache2/example.org/access.log

  example-org-error:
    hostname: example.org
    port: 22
    user: my_user
    options: {"sudo": true}
    log_files:
      - /var/log/apache2/example.org/error.log

  example-org-ssl-access:
    hostname: example.org
    port: 22
    user: my_user
    options: {"sudo": true}
    log_files:
      - /var/log/apache2/example.org-ssl/access.log

  example-org-ssl-error:
    hostname: example.org
    port: 22
    user: my_user
    options: {"sudo": true}
    log_files:
      - /var/log/apache2/example.org-ssl/error.log

And then to quickly select them all, you can type example-org-* in the logstreams input.