Writing ~/.ssh/config only helps if the key is accepted at the other end.
Both SSH options now offer to create an ed25519 key when none exists — the
same choice deploy_qemu.ensure_ssh_key makes, so created and adopted VMs share
one key — and to push it with ssh-copy-id.
Hosts that already accept the key are skipped, tested with
PasswordAuthentication=no: without it ssh would fall back to the password and
every host would look like it already had the key. ssh-copy-id runs on the
real terminal rather than through captured output, otherwise its password
prompt would be invisible.
In the recursive walk the key is deployed BEFORE probing each level, not at
the end. The probe uses BatchMode, so an un-keyed machine answers nothing and
the level below it stays invisible — deploying afterwards would find only the
first level.
virt-manager, when installed, gets the machines that actually run libvirt
added to its connection list, so their nested VMs can be driven from the local
GUI. The URI uses the SSH ALIAS rather than the raw IP: qemu+ssh goes through
the ssh binary, hence ~/.ssh/config, so the alias already carries both the
address and the ProxyJump — a bare IP could not reach a nested VM at all.
Connections live in GSettings, not a file. The list is READ first and written
back merged, so nothing already configured is lost, and a failed read (no
schema, no virt-manager) simply means the whole feature stays silent — no
prompt, no write. virt-manager rewrites its settings when it exits, so a
warning says to restart it.
Verified: key generated with 0600 on the private half and reused on the second
call; ssh-copy-id issued only for hosts that need it; the recursive walk
deploying level by level before each probe; GSettings merge keeping existing
URIs and skipping the write when nothing is missing; « @as [] », a populated
list and a missing schema all parsed correctly.
Caveat: virt-manager is not installed on this machine, so the absent path was
exercised for real and the write path only against a stubbed gsettings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Mathieu Benoit
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