That's a great clarification for which I cannot thank you enough. I will look up SSH Agent Forwarding and start getting the hang of it. The centos list is a tremendous help for situations like these! :)
On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 12:22 AM, Cameron Kerr cameron@humbledown.org wrote:
On 16/01/2011, at 2:12 PM, bluethundr wrote:
Hello and thanks for your reply!
Well I took your advice and removed that keychain scriptlet from .bashrc and put it into .bash_profile. Not sure what the functional difference between the two would be. Perhaps you would care to elaborate? I know that rc stands for "resource configuration" but other than that I don't know why this statement would be more appropriate in the .bash_profile. However you do seem well versed in this and I hope you don't mind answering this question.
.bash_profile is executed for login shells (followed by .bashrc).
.bashrc is executed for non-login shells as well.
.bash_profile should therefore be used for session setup tasks.
So this is what I put into my .bash_profile
$(keychain --eval --agents ssh id_rsa)
and here is an ssh session from after when I did this:
[bluethundr@LCENT01:~]#bash [bluethundr@LCENT01:~]#ssh-agent SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-cBwwRR5466/agent.5466; export SSH_AUTH_SOCK; SSH_AGENT_PID=5467; export SSH_AGENT_PID;
Here you are not actually starting the ssh-agent in the background (which explains why it is outputting environment variables). You should give it a second parameter to tell it which program to launch.
ssh-agent bash
However, this will cause the parent shell to become redundant, so you want to instead replace it with the shell that ssh-agent starts (that shell has the environment variables set appropriately).
exec ssh-agent bash
Now when you use ssh-add, it should be able to see the agent.
echo Agent pid 5467; [bluethundr@LCENT01:~]#ssh-add Could not open a connection to your authentication agent. [bluethundr@LCENT01:~]#exec ssh-agent bash [bluethundr@LCENT01:~]#ssh-add Enter passphrase for /home/bluethundr/.ssh/id_rsa: Identity added: /home/bluethundr/.ssh/id_rsa (/home/bluethundr/.ssh/id_rsa)
So this behavior did not change. I still have to enter my passphrase again after I put this into my .bash_profile
Of course. The passphrase is important because it encrypts the private key. This, presumably, is why you are using the 'keychain' program, which is typically used to have a key unlocked manually by a system administrator (eg. after boot), so that cron jobs, etc, can access it.
[bluethundr@LCENT01:~]#ssh virt1 Last login: Sat Jan 15 11:51:08 2011 from 192.168.1.42 ######################################################### # SUMMITNJHOME.COM # # TITLE: LB1 BOX # # HOST: VIRTCENT01 # # LOCATION: SUMMIT BASEMENT # #########################################################
- keychain 2.7.0 ~ http://www.funtoo.org
- Found existing ssh-agent: 27556
- Adding 1 ssh key(s): /home/bluethundr/.ssh/id_rsa
Enter passphrase for /home/bluethundr/.ssh/id_rsa: Bad passphrase, try again for /home/bluethundr/.ssh/id_rsa:
- ssh-add: Identities added: /home/bluethundr/.ssh/id_rsa
This is new.. now I get prompted for the passphrase AGAIN once I reach the server I am ssh'ing in to.
This is why ssh-add (and presumably also 'keychain'), should NOT be included in your ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc (or similar). SSH Agent Forwarding is the correct way to approach this problem: it generally increases system security (keys become easier to manage) and reduces user support requirements.
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