Eeli Wiitala

@orangecat219799

Kivijärvi, Finland Joined Jan 2026

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Eeli Wiitala

@orangecat219799 · Jan 12, 2026

SSH Certificates and user principal logging/auditing?

Hi all,
I've been looking at SSH Certs for authentication. One of the things I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around is this idea of user to principal mapping. From my perspective it just makes auditing/logging more difficult to track.
For example:
Let's just say I have users\[1-5\] all issued SSH certificates with principal 'www' for all prod servers (or some other generic user).
If everyone logs in to the system with their 'www' principal (ssh -i \~/.ssh/my\_signed\_cert.pub www@server), there's no way to distinguish who did what on the local system. I get that there are paid and open source agent solutions that do per session auditing and tracking, but why complicate it with an extra layer?
I'd rather have a system log show up like this
* 'user x made xyz change'
* 'user y made abc change'
Rather than
* 'www made xyz change'
* 'www made abc change'
In the system log there's only a record of authentication with the serial number, so you know who logged into the system as 'www' at what time, but after that it's all a blur.
The way I see it, it's better to have a 1:1 user to principal mapping. I guess I understand that some systems only have generic user names like 'postgresql

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Eeli Wiitala echoed

Eeli Wiitala

@orangecat219799 · Jan 11, 2026

Jackson Anderson

@ticklishwolf217949 · Jan 11, 2026 10:50 am

CMV: American politics was designed to give us all mental disorders

In the US our parties have become ideologically sorted. About 50 years ago there used to be “liberal republicans” and “conservative democrats”. Today that’s almost non existent. In other countries parties are often forced to be more centrist to attract coalition parties. In the US, because it’s a winner takes all system, the constant 4-8 year shift between republican and democrat now feels like a total change in the countries identity constantly and on loop for our entire lives.
Because of this dynamic, as a collective we basically have BPD, DID, Schizo personality disorder, and bipolar disorder. The political related violence in our streets and in our societies closely resemble regular manic episodes. It appears to be manufactured this way and somehow the rich is almost always benefited from this dynamic. Every leader we shift to almost always tends to use selective empathy as a proxy, like claiming to care about LGBT and immigrants, or claiming to care about the economy and individual liberty, and this is because emotional manipulation is the primary tactic that schizophrenics claim the “voices inside their head” use on them as well to justify the harmful acts they do to themselv

415 likes 154 responses