ssh agent troubles

[William Park]

On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 06:29:53PM -0400, Christopher Browne wrote:
> I'm running into an odd situation where my shell loses connectivity to
> ssh-agent.
> 
> I'll commonly set things up via:
> % ssh-agent zsh
> [which starts a fresh zsh, and all is good...]
> % ssh-add -l
> 2048 d3:b8:ab:c1:a8:f8:03:a7:31:b7:ad:a2:40:ec:70:40 cbbrowne at cbbrowne (RSA)
> 2048 03:c3:e6:2e:1a:8c:08:9c:84:ab:3f:0a:d9:2d:9a:71 cbbrowne at cbbrowne (RSA)
> 2048 31:34:0f:bc:90:bf:1f:fd:4a:49:7f:ad:44:04:4c:62 cbbrowne at wolfe (RSA)
> 
> Lovely, I have some of my favorite ssh keys in place.
> 
> But a little bit of time passes, and, for inexplicable reason, ability
> to connect fails.  I find my ssh connection requests asking either for
> passwords (for remote hosts) or for the passphrase for the key.
> 
> %  ssh-add -l
> Could not open a connection to your authentication agent.

Here, are you still in 'zsh' session which you started with 'ssh-agent
zsh' above?

> 
> I still have legitimate values for $SSH_AGENT_PID and $SSH_AUTH_SOCK, and if I
> search for the PID, it's an agent that's still running.
> % echo $SSH_AGENT_PID
> 2737
> % ps auxww | egrep 2737 | grep agent
> cbbrowne  2737  0.0  0.0  12392   772 ?        Ss   17:58   0:00 ssh-agent
> 
> Curiously, if I start another child shell, everything's fine again, for a little
> while...
> % ssh-agent zsh
> [new shell]
> % echo $SSH_AGENT_PID
> 2737
> 
> And I have intermittent success at using the agent, again.  Until it decides
> to stop.  Quoi?!?!?
> -- 
> When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
> question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
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-- 
William
--
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