I recently noticed a LOT of ssh-agent processes running on my system (CentOS 4.2). It seems that the ssh-agent gets started before the session manager (in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc-common) which is great. The only problem is that the agent process does not die when the session shuts down.
I run ssh-add in my session startup to get my key loaded into ssh-agent, so that might be part of the issue. I just haven't been able to figure out where to kill the beast. Is there somewhere I can run an arbitrary program when the session manager runs down? A medium-intensity search of the docs and sourcecode didn't turn up anything applicable. Plenty of ways to run programs at session START, but not at the end. Anybody got any ideas?
Am Mi, den 21.12.2005 schrieb Jay Leafey um 20:17:
I recently noticed a LOT of ssh-agent processes running on my system (CentOS 4.2). It seems that the ssh-agent gets started before the session manager (in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc-common) which is great. The only problem is that the agent process does not die when the session shuts down.
I run ssh-add in my session startup to get my key loaded into ssh-agent, so that might be part of the issue.
That is the cause of what you describe.
I just haven't been able to figure out where to kill the beast. Is there somewhere I can run an arbitrary program when the session manager runs down? A medium-intensity search of the docs and sourcecode didn't turn up anything applicable. Plenty of ways to run programs at session START, but not at the end. Anybody got any ideas?
Use "keychain" for more flexibility in loading and handling ssh keys with ssh-agent.
http://centos.karan.org/el4/extras/stable/i386/RPMS/repodata/repoview/keycha...
Alexander
Alexander Dalloz wrote:
Use "keychain" for more flexibility in loading and handling ssh keys with ssh-agent.
http://centos.karan.org/el4/extras/stable/i386/RPMS/repodata/repoview/keycha...
Thanks for the suggestion, but I looked at keychain and thought it was overkill for my setup. Anyway, I really didn't WANT a long-running copy of ssh-agent. I tried deleting the ssh-add entry in my session startup preferences, but the ssh-agent process still does not go away at logout.
Just on a mad whim, I commented out the bit that runs ssh-agent in a subprocess from xinitrc-common, then altered my .Xclients-default to use ssh-agent to run the window manager instead of a plain old 'exec'. This is a kludge, but it DOES properly terminate the ssh-agent process when you log out of the session manager. It also seems a bit slower, but that's purely subjective.
I'd REALLY rather use it the way the upstream provider documented it, but it doesn't appear to work that way. Guess it's time to open a ticket with Red Hat... all I have to do is confirm the same behaviour on one of my RHEL4 systems.
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Alexander Dalloz -
Jay Leafey