I did an Archive and Install Tiger upgrade a few days ago and so far everything has been excellent EXCEPT that "SSH Agent" (http://www.phil.uu.nl/~xges/ssh/) no longer seems to work. It starts up and outputs its normal messages to Console but when I attempt to "Add Default Identities" or add an identity manually nothing happens. It does not prompt me for the password and it does not add the identity to the main window. Has anyone else seen this behavior? Thanks for any information.
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Does Tiger break "SSH Agent"?
- Thread starter mdakin
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mdakin said:
Indirect answer, but: SSH Keychain works under Tiger for me, so it might be worth giving it a try.
A while back I switched from SSH Agent to SSH Keychain because I found SSH Agent caused some sporadic instability problems, especially after sleep. THAT was a bugger to track down, I'll tell you...
daveL said:
These programs (SSH Agent and SSHKeychain) actually work in conjunction with the ssh comes with Tiger/Panther. Once you have one or the other set up and working you no longer have to type in your password to the remote machine every time you log in or copy files. (This is very handy when you want to copy a bunch of files or log in a bunch of times!)
It is all a little complicated to understand at first but basically what you do is use ssh to generate a public/private key pair. The public key gets put into the ~/.ssh directories of the remote machines you log into, and you keep the private key, (conventionally) encrypted in the ~/.ssh directory of your Mac. SSH Agent and SSHKeychain manage the decryption of this private key at your request and also arrange for the key to be passed to any ssh process you start up. When an ssh process is passed a key in this manner it uses it to try to log into the remote machine using a cryptographic handshake. If all the checks pass in this handshake you are in without typing your remote machine password. If not it will default back to password authentication.
If you are interested take a look at http://mah.everybody.org/docs/ssh for some details. Read it with the knowledge it is written from the perspective of a traditional UNIX machine. Instead of using "ssh-agent" and "ssh-add" (as you would on a traditional UNIX machine) you use one of the nice GUI programs SSH Agent or SSHKeychain on the Mac. The parts about generating and distributing the keys should work exactly the same.
Westside guy said:
Excellent! Thanks for the tip. I've installed SSHKeychain and it is working fine!