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

[Tony Godshall]

On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 11:12, Don Marti <dmarti at zgp.org> wrote:
> 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.)
>

tony at S29:~/.ssh$ env|grep SSH
SSH_AGENT_PID=1752
SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/keyring-s1vpzh/ssh
tony at S29:~/.ssh$ ps -efw|grep 1752
tony      1752  1717  0 13:40 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/ssh-agent
/usr/bin/dbus-launch --exit-with-session
/usr/bin/openbox-gnome-session
tony     14552  2066  0 15:57 pts/0    00:00:00 grep --color=auto 1752

Huh.

The above under gnome/openbox session, Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS.  Installed
from server CD IIRC.

The mechanism has changed.  I stand corrected.

Tony