passphrase-free ssh sessions w/ GNOME?

[dynamint]

I'm trying to connect to all of the servers I support via SSH on my Redhat 9 server (I'm using gnome-terminal and multi-gnome-terminal) without having to type my passphrase for each session. I've tried using keychain but haven't had much success. Red Hat's suggestion [

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/...ide/openssh-clients.html#SSH-AGENT-WITH-GNOME

] works for me sometimes, but not all the time.

Can anyone share how you're doing it?

 

[dynamint]

Found the solution. ssh-agent is invoked by default via X, and in my setup, it becomes defunct after a period of time, causing future invocations of ssh-agent from behaving normally.

All I needed to do was disable the ssh-agent command from automatically starting during my login, then script it in from my .bash_profile. For Red Hat 9 running in graphical mode (runlevel 5) ssh-agent is invoked by the /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession script. I simply disabled the lines mentioning ssh-agent.

Keychain is a front-end for ssh-agent so I'm now loading this from my .bash_profile. It works great for this purpose:

/usr/bin/keychain ~/.ssh/id_dsa
source ~/.keychain/${HOSTNAME}-sh > /dev/null

Now I can open all the terminal sessions I want and ssh into all of my servers without the annoyance of submitting a passphrase each time.

 

[Bluecrack]

dynamint,

Are the two lines you mentioned above in the .bash_profile the only lines you needed to get things working? I'm trying to do this under KDE in RH9.

Bluecrack

 

[dynamint]

The key for me was disabling this line in /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession

# is ssh-agent available?
#SSHAGENT=
[ -x /usr/bin/ssh-agent ] && SSHAGENT="/usr/bin/ssh-agent"