[Developers] sshkeychain and 10.4.9?

[Tim Cutts]

On 18 Mar 2007, at 10:13 pm, William Uther wrote:

> Hi,
>   Just a quick note that sshkeychain has stopped working for me  
> under MacOS 10.4.9 (well, it stopped working at the time I updated  
> - I don't know if that is causal or just a random correlation).  I  
> traced the problem to that fact that sshkeychain no longer seems to  
> be managing global environment variables for me.  That means it  
> cannot set SSH_AUTH_SOCK and then it can't work :).
>
> Setting SSH_AUTH_SOCK, if it isn't already set, in a login-script  
> (~/.zshenv), with .e.g:
>
> export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=${SSH_AUTH_SOCK:-/tmp/${UID}/SSHKeychain.socket}
>
> solves the issue for me.

I use something a little more sophisticated, so that my ssh agent is  
started even if SSHKeychain is not.  I use the following shell  
function in bash:

setup_ssh_agent() {

   # Change the following to your preferred ssh key
   local key=phobos2

   # Check that the ssh-agent is running, and start it if not,
   # using the same path that SSHKeychain uses
   if [ "$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" = "" ]; then
     pid=`ps cx -opid,command | awk '$2 ~ /^ssh-agent$/ {print $1}'`
     if [ "$pid" = "" ]; then
       eval `ssh-agent -a /tmp/$UID/SSHKeychain.socket` > /dev/null
     else
       SSH_AGENT_PID=$pid
       SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/$UID/SSHKeychain.socket
       export SSH_AGENT_PID SSH_AUTH_SOCK
     fi
   fi

   # Add keys if they haven't been added already
   ssh-add -l | grep -q $key || ssh-add -t 86400 $HOME/.ssh/$key

   chmod 600 $SSH_AUTH_SOCK
}

and then later in my .bashrc:

# Only set up SSH in interactive shells
if [ -t ]; then
   setup_ssh_agent
fi

Tim