Shell: Extra warnings when connecting to remote hosts

[mvollmer]

Shell: Extra warnings when connecting to remote hosts

Connecting to multiple hosts in a single Cockpit session allows all these hosts to access each other freely. Eventually Cockpit will not allow multiple connections, but in the mean time, we want to educate people better.

This warning can be disabled by including the following in /etc/cockpit/cockpit.conf:

[Session] 
WarnBeforeConnecting=false

---

Demo: https://youtu.be/Un6k3DiukOg

[garrett]

I was thinking of something more like this:

Then we can succinctly explain what can happen, provide a link with more information, and say this will show up once per session on the very first connection to any remote machine (instead of a "don't remind me"). If accepted, it would not show up again until the next Cockpit session.

The external page would explain it a little more in depth and mention the config file options, including:

1. Being able to toggle the host connection feature on and off completely
2. Being able to toggle off this warning message (which only matters if remote host connection is on)

Marius said this could be a three-state option, which I agree with:

1. Off (default for RHEL/CentOS)
2. On (default for non-RHEL/CentOS)
3. On without warnings (never default; an override to prevent the connection message that must be manually set)

This would prevent someone from connecting to a host machine without knowing the ramifications, but also allow them to work more-or-less how they currently do, with a workaround to skip the warning in some environments.

If we are indeed going to outright remove this feature, then we could even rephrase the modal and be explicit about the timeline in the external page, something like this:

These mockups are just examples of what we could do instead, and we'd want to revise the text and plan for the actual version where it would be removed.

[mvollmer]

@garrett, could you check https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL4VyE9tUb8 and tell me whether this goes in the right direction? Then I can work on making this nice and robust.

[garrett]

@mvollmer: I'm watching this video and wondering: Why is it different form the mockups and discussion we talked about? (See above comment #20826 (comment))

[mvollmer]

I'm watching this video and wondering: Why is it different form the mockups and discussion we talked about?

@garrett, the difference I see is that the dialog is shown more often than what you described. Correct? The warning should be shown only for the very first connection in the session, right? So maximum number of times we show the warning per session is 1. (And reloading doesn't start a new session.)

What do you think of immediately opening the connection dialog when the URL already points to a remote machine when you login to the Cockpit session?

Any opinions about the "Not connected" placeholder page that you see when cancelling the connection dialog in that case? Should we keep it? Redesign it?

[mvollmer]

There are lots more opportunities for cleanup, but I think this is fine for now. The next step would probably be to turn the whole shell into a React component and move the trigger_connection_flow thing into the top component so that it can be cleanly triggered from anywhere in the shell.

[garrett]

This looks mostly great. Thanks!

However: After I added a new host, I got the connect warning dialog and then the key dialog, all as expected. However, it didn't switch to that remote host. Instead, it stayed on the original host and the switcher persisted.

I would have expected it to switch to the new host and the switcher to go away at the same time.

Are you splitting that out into this other PR?

• shell: Navigate to new host after adding one #21004

(If that's the case, I can approve this one and check out that one to make it works as expected.)

(I thought I spotted some regressions, like the host switcher not having a hover state, but it looks like that in main too, so I guess we picked up that regression elsewhere, in the past. I guess after we land the rework and reimplement the shell's UI, it'll be automatically fixed. Otherwise, I could send up a PR to fix the CSS outside of your changes.)

[mvollmer]

However: After I added a new host, I got the connect warning dialog and then the key dialog, all as expected. However, it didn't switch to that remote host. Instead, it stayed on the original host and the switcher persisted.

Yes, that's the current behavior of the shell. I have included #21004 here now to jump to a newly added host immediately.

[cockpituous]

These 2 added lines are not executed by any test.

[cockpituous]

This added line is not executed by any test.