Question on logging best practices and ALLOWED_HOST

[Dan Davis]

First Question - How valuable is the check on ALLOWED_HOST?   

How many folks out there simply have settings:

ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['*']

Second Question - What is the best practice for enriching the log record?

On-premise, we've struggled with the interaction of the AdminEmailHandler and security scans:

                'mail_admins': {

                    'level': 'ERROR',

                    'filters': ['require_debug_false', 'skip_nessus_scan_requests'],

                    'class': 'django.utils.log.AdminEmailHandler',

                    'include_html': True,

                },

Now we want to go farther and divert logs originating from the security scanner to a different log.

That means that some variant of this code would run again and again:

class SkipNessusScanFilter(logging.Filter):

    """

    Avoids a trace back for requests coming from a NESSUS scan.  Depends on NESSUS_SCAN_IPS.

    """

    def filter(self, record):

        request = getattr(record, 'request', None)

        if request and hasattr(request, 'META') and request.META.get('REMOTE_ADDR') in NESSUS_SCAN_IPS:

            return False

        return True

I want to centralize the check and make it more performant.   Is there a better place to enrich the log record than when the filter runs?

def is_nessus_scan(record):

    is_nessus_scan = getattr(record, 'is_nessus_scan', None)

    if is_nessus_scan is None:

        request = getattr(record, 'request', None)

        is_nessus_scan = (request 

                          and hasattr(request, 'META') 

                          and request.META.get('REMOTE_ADDR') in NESSUS_SCAN_IPS)

        setattr(record, 'is_nessus_scan', None)

    return is_nessus_scan

class SkipNessusScanFilter(logging.Filter):

    """

    Avoids a trace back for requests coming from a NESSUS scan.  Depends on NESSUS_SCAN_IPS.

    """

    def filter(self, record):

        return is_nessus_scan(record)

class RequireNessusScanFilter(logging.Filter):

    """

    Diverts nessus logging to another file.   Depends on NESSUS_SCAN_IPS.

    """

    def filter(self, record):

        return not is_nessus_scan(record)