Using ssh-agent with KDE?

Question

I had this working once before, but for some reason it's not working on my new system.

in .kde4/Autostart/ I have a symlink to ssh-agent called 01-sshagent and then a simple script called 02-sshkeys that looks like this:

/usr/bin/ssh-add $(find $HOME/.ssh/keys -type f | egrep -v '\.pub$')

The problem seems to be that when I startup, ssh-agent is run alright, but KDE doesn't hold onto the output and store it in the environment, so for every Konsole session, I have to run ps to find the PID and then manually type:

SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-YtvdiEtW3065/agent.3065; export SSH_AUTH_SOCK;
SSH_AGENT_PID=<pidnumber>; export SSH_AGENT_PID;

...just to get it to work, and it does... just in that Konsole window.

I've tried removing the aforementioned symlink and just havining the ssh script look like this:

/usr/bin/ssh-agent | sh
/usr/bin/ssh-add $(find $HOME/.ssh/keys -type f | egrep -v '\.pub$')

But still, the agent variables aren't in the session and I'm never prompted for the password to my keys.

I'm obviously missing something, but what is it?

Answer 1

My simple solution is to just run one ssh-agent and always keep it running. You can kill it on log-out if you really want to. The key is to just use a fixed socket. Add ssh-agent -a /tmp/$USER.agent to an Autostart script. Then do "export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/$USER.agent" followed by ssh-add. Also, you can add that export to your .bashrc, .profile or other shell log-in script and always have access to the agent even when using a remote ssh in.