[conspire] ssh-agent and ssh-askpass [Re: Two technical questions]

[Don Marti]

begin Tony Godshall quotation of Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 10:54:33AM -0800:
> > ...  It's a lot like the ssh agent you get for free in GNOME. ...
> 
> Actually, ssh-agent is part of ssh, and is generally started by the
> display manager (e.g. gdm).  Often X itself is a subprocess of
> ssh-agent.  The interactive popup is provided by ssh-askpass, if
> installed.  The commandline equivalent is ssh-add.

On my GNOME system, the ssh-agent that comes with ssh
doesn't get run by default.  What I do get for the
SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable is the name of a
socket with /usr/bin/gnome-keyring-daemon listening
on it.

AFAIK, "seahorse" is the GNOME project name for the
GUI tools for managing GNOME's "keyring" system for
storing keys and passwords.  The keyring daemon
is another part of the system, and it speaks the
ssh-agent protocol among other things.  (So when you
do an "ssh-add -L" in this setup, you're actually
getting a list of keys that the GNOME keyring daemon
knows about.)

-- 
Don Marti                    
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org