https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article43/opportunistic-ssh-agent en a blog about Debian and self-hosting Tue, 21 Feb 2012 01:34:00 +0000 PluXml https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article43/opportunistic-ssh-agent/#c1329788059-1 https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article43/opportunistic-ssh-agent/#c1329788059-1 My bad, it does. You need to tell it to manage the key via sshcontrol, otherwise it ignores it. Tue, 21 Feb 2012 01:34:00 +0000 Brownout https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article43/opportunistic-ssh-agent/#c1329786375-1 https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article43/opportunistic-ssh-agent/#c1329786375-1 Regarding comment #3. I don't see how gpg-agent can perform opportunistic key loading, afaik you still need to run ssh-add manually. Tue, 21 Feb 2012 01:06:00 +0000 Brownout https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article43/opportunistic-ssh-agent/#c1329779913-1 https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article43/opportunistic-ssh-agent/#c1329779913-1 I have a wrapper for the 'ssh' command that adds keys opportunistically: $ cat ~/bin/ssh #!/bin/sh if [ -n "$SSH_AGENT_PID" ]; then # See if ssh-agent has any identities, and if not, add some ssh-add -l > /dev/null || ssh-add fi exec /usr/bin/ssh "$@" and the same sort of thing for ~/bin/scp. It works very well for me. Mon, 20 Feb 2012 23:18:00 +0000 Marius Gedminas https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article43/opportunistic-ssh-agent/#c1329779714-1 https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article43/opportunistic-ssh-agent/#c1329779714-1 Keychain as mentioned above is really nice for that kind of things :) Mon, 20 Feb 2012 23:15:00 +0000 Hyde https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article43/opportunistic-ssh-agent/#c1329778840-1 https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article43/opportunistic-ssh-agent/#c1329778840-1 @Matt Palmer : Indeed, I experienced that too and it was kind of hard to understand. :-) Mon, 20 Feb 2012 23:00:00 +0000 Tanguy https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article43/opportunistic-ssh-agent/#c1329775989-1 https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article43/opportunistic-ssh-agent/#c1329775989-1 The problem with opportunistic key loading, however, is that if you have more keys than MaxAuthTries, you'll get curious authentication failures, as I wrote about a couple of years ago: http://www.anchor.com.au/blog/2009/12/error-ssh-agent-has-too-many-keys/ Dumb software that pretends to be smart: just say no. Mon, 20 Feb 2012 22:13:00 +0000 Matt Palmer https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article43/opportunistic-ssh-agent/#c1329763357-1 https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article43/opportunistic-ssh-agent/#c1329763357-1 IIRC, OS X also do this with launchd. But I just say that for completeness :) Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:42:00 +0000 Misc https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article43/opportunistic-ssh-agent/#c1329760071-1 https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article43/opportunistic-ssh-agent/#c1329760071-1 The keychain package provides a similar function for commandline logins. Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:47:00 +0000 -dsr-