Re: [vox-tech] ssh-agent help

[Ken Bloom <kabloom@ucdavisMAPS.edu>]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 07:05:44AM -0700, p@dirac.org wrote:
> trying to understand ssh-agent...
> 
> my understanding is that for ssh-agent to be useful, the process needs
> to be an ancestor of all your login (vc) and non-login (xterm) shells.
 
It doesn't need to be the ancestor of your shells - it needs to have 
certain environment variables in the shells so that whenever you 
randomly call ssh, ssh can use those environment variables to find out 
how to talk to ssh-agent.

> where should it be run from?

As a result, a good place to start it from is .login (.profile for you 
bash guys) and from .xsession, if that's not running .login or .profile 
first (this assumes you use .xsession).

> login shells source /etc/profile, so when i log into a virtual console
> and type "startx", it should be an ancestor of all my xterms.
> 
> but in my /etc/bash.bashrc, i source /etc/profile.  will that cause
> problems with ssh-agent running separately for each xterm i create?
> 

Even as I described, there is still a problem with this, and that is 
that every virtual console you log into (and I frequently log into three 
or four at a time) will have its own copy of ssh-agent running. The 
keychain package (apt-get install keychain) includes a utility that can 
ensure that a user only has one ssh-agent running. Instead of running 
ssh-agent in your .login, .profile, and .xsession, run the following two 
lines (for tcsh) in those files.

keychain -q ${HOME}/.ssh/id_rsa ${HOME}/.ssh/id_dsa >& /dev/null
source $HOME/.keychain/*-csh

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