I think it would make sense to avoid printing this error if there are just a small number of failed initial connection attempts, but still print something if the connection is failing for a long time. It seems reasonable to only print out such messages when there are persistent problems on the connection.
Yes, I think I agree. Since we don't have any better infrastructure for reporting things like this, I'm more OK with the message if we just try and suppressed the "noise".
I still don't think the console is the "right" place for it, but that's all we have at the moment. It would be really cool to be able to, instead, post some sort of event that a another process (e.g. userspace daemon) could consume and then decide what to do (e.g. ignore, ping monitoring software, send email, etc). But that's a whole 'nother can of worms.
I think having some sort of timer (or number of resends) to suppress the message would go a long way in this particular case.
Patch landed to 2.7.0 to improve console message and quiet it down considerably.