Human readable .ssh/known_hosts?

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Tue, Sep 29, 2020 at 8:22 PM Darren Tucker <dtucker at dtucker.net> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 29 Sep 2020 at 23:16, Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel at gmail.com> wrote:
> [...]
> > I gave up on $HOME/.ssh/known_hosts a *long* time ago, because if
> > servers are DHCP distributed without static IP addresses they can wind
> > up overlapping IP addresses with mismatched hostkeys
>
> You can set CheckHostIP=no in your config.  As long as the names don't
> change it'll do what you want, and it's far safer than what you
> suggest.
>
> [...]
> > This has been the case since SSH-1 was written in 1995.
>
> CheckHostIP was added to OpenSSH in 1999 before the first release and
> has been in every release since:
> https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/ssh/readconf.c.diff?r1=1.7&r2=1.8&f=h

As I understand this option, it does not help at all with the nearly
inevitable re-use of the same IP address for a different host with a
different hostkey in, for example, a modest DHCP based environment.
Such environments are common both in smaller, private networks and in
large public networks, and it's perhaps startlingly common in cloud
environments: it's one of the reasons I'm so willing to disable
$HOME/.ssh/known_hosts.