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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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set-ssh-agent for Mac OS X 2 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • An alternative (Score:1)

    by pjm (639) on 2002.09.12 21:19 (#12810)
    For those who don't want to go the >console route all the time there's SSH Agent, which is a small free GUI app that does similar things. It replaced SSHAgentServices for me and is travelling fine. Source is available.

    http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=16051&db=mac

    This is from the readme file:
    -------------------------------------
    The Global Agent

    The key to making the agent accessible is the SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable. The tools in the SSH suite communicate with the agent over a socket whose location is given in the environment variable. If some tool can't read the environment variable, it can't find the socket which means it can't use the agent.

    The best way to set an enviroment variable globally is documented in Apple's Technical Q & A 1067. Unfortunately, ssh-agent uses a different socket each time it is launched. So it seems we can't use this method.

    The trick is this: we specify a unique file location in the global environment (using the Environment tab in SSH Agent's Preferences pane) and then link that file to the socket ssh-agent uses.

    There are a number of rules to follow when using this trick. The most important one is that both ends of a link should reside on the same filesystem. Since ssh-agent creates its sockets in /tmp the default value for SSH_AUTH_SOCK is also a file on /tmp. If you want to customize this variable, make sure the file you specify in is on the same filesystem as the socket by using the df command. (For more ways for link to fail, see it's man page.)

    • I'm glad to see this, as I've really missed SSHAgentServices. But neither of these solutions is as optimal as SSHAgentServices was, IMO. The ">console" login stuff is a PITA, and I hate the idea that I have to have the SSH Agent application running whenever I want to use SSH (which is to say, all day long!).

      I wrote to Kevin Van Vechten, the creator of SSHAgentServices, to see if he'd be willing to update it for Jaguar, but I've not heard back from him. I tried to write him once before, several months a

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