Guys, I wonder if anyone can give me any pointers here, I hope it's CentOS related enough not to be too off topic, if it is then apologies. I'm attempting to setup a CGI which can connect to a remote system and execute a command. On the 'client', for the Apache user 'apache' I've given it a shell and generated a key-pair. I've configured Keychain [ http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/keychain/ ] to load the keys for the apache user and make these persistently available via ssh-agent. I've setup a specific user 'cgissh' on the remote target system and configured its authorized_keys with apache at client's pubkey. >From the client system, running the following script from the shell returns the information I'd expect... [apache at webdev1 cgi-bin]$ cat perl-net-ssh-perl-test.pl #!/usr/bin/perl print "Content-type: text/html\n\n"; print "<HEAD><TITLE>Quick Test</TITLE></HEAD>"; $ENV{HOME} = "/var/www"; $ENV{USER} = "apache"; use Net::SSH::Perl; $sshhost='target'; $sshuser='cgissh'; $sshport='22'; $sshprotocol='2'; $sshdebug='1'; $sshcipher='3des-cbc'; $sshconn = Net::SSH::Perl->new($sshhost, protocol=>$sshprotocol, port=>$sshport, debug=>$sshdebug, cipher=>$sshcipher); $sshconn->login($sshuser); my($out,$err) = $sshconn->cmd('hostname'); print "<HTML>"; print "<BODY>"; print $out; print "</HTML>"; print "</BODY>"; It's definately using the pubkey information from Keychain as the target system ONLY accepts key-based authentication and I'm "su - apache"d to run the script so it's not picking up another users ssh-agent key info from the environment. Attempting to execute the same script as a CGI by accessing http://client/cgi-bin/perl-net-ssh-perl-test.pl results in the following in the logs... [Wed Nov 01 17:10:53 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Reading configuration data /var/www/.ssh/config [Wed Nov 01 17:10:53 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh_config [Wed Nov 01 17:10:53 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Connecting to manlvs1, port 2251. [Wed Nov 01 17:10:53 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Remote version string: SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_3.9p1 [Wed Nov 01 17:10:53 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] [Wed Nov 01 17:10:53 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Remote protocol version 2.0, remote software version OpenSSH_3.9p 1 [Wed Nov 01 17:10:53 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Net::SSH::Perl Version 1.30, protocol version 2.0. [Wed Nov 01 17:10:53 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: No compat match: OpenSSH_3.9p1. [Wed Nov 01 17:10:53 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Connection established. [Wed Nov 01 17:10:53 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Sent key-exchange init (KEXINIT), wait response. [Wed Nov 01 17:10:53 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Algorithms, c->s: 3des-cbc hmac-sha1 none [Wed Nov 01 17:10:53 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Algorithms, s->c: 3des-cbc hmac-sha1 none [Wed Nov 01 17:11:30 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Entering Diffie-Hellman Group 1 key exchange. [Wed Nov 01 17:11:30 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Sent DH public key, waiting for reply. [Wed Nov 01 17:11:30 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Received host key, type 'ssh-dss'. [Wed Nov 01 17:11:30 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Host 'manlvs1' is known and matches the host key. [Wed Nov 01 17:11:30 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Computing shared secret key. [Wed Nov 01 17:12:07 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Verifying server signature. [Wed Nov 01 17:12:18 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Waiting for NEWKEYS message. [Wed Nov 01 17:12:18 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Enabling incoming encryption/MAC/compression. [Wed Nov 01 17:12:18 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Send NEWKEYS, enable outgoing encryption/MAC/compression. [Wed Nov 01 17:12:18 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Sending request for user-authentication service. [Wed Nov 01 17:12:18 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Service accepted: ssh-userauth. [Wed Nov 01 17:12:18 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Trying empty user-authentication request. [Wed Nov 01 17:12:18 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Authentication methods that can continue: publickey,keyboard-interactive. [Wed Nov 01 17:12:18 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Next method to try is publickey. [Wed Nov 01 17:12:18 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Trying pubkey authentication with key file '/var/www/.ssh/id_dsa' [Wed Nov 01 17:12:18 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Will not query passphrase for '/var/www/.ssh/id_dsa' in batch mode. [Wed Nov 01 17:12:18 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] clienthostname: Loading private key failed. [Wed Nov 01 17:12:18 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.2] Permission denied at /home/clientusername/cgi-bin/perl-net-ssh-per l-test.pl line 18 Why is it failing to load the private key? Do I need to source something from the shell into the Perl script as would with a shell script to use the Keychain agent information? If this was a shell script I'd have used '[[ -f $HOME/.keychain/$HOSTNAME-sh ]] && source $HOME/.keychain/$HOSTNAME-sh'. Additional info: Both systems are up-to-date CentOS 4.4 systems running the default Apache with perl-Net-SSH-Perl and its dependencies from RPMForge. Any pointers greatly appreciated. Will.