Jax RCFB Sun Solaris Tip: Using ssh-agent in CDE



Disclaimer: No warranty or guarantee applies to this tip. This tip and all Jax RCFB Sun Solaris Tips are garnered solely from the author's own experience and the experience of his acquaintances.


If you have installed some version of the Secure Shell, e.g., OpenSSH , you might wish to use ssh-agent which allows you to establish an identity so that you don't have to log in and present your password again and again. The Secure Shell program ssh-agent allows you to do this. ssh-agent runs in the background and assists ssh in its authorization attempts. This is especially useful if you are doing CVS to a secure site.

To set up automatic authentication via a public/private key pair you must:

  1. Use ssh-keygen to generate the public/private key pair to the appropriate directory on your platform.
  2. Upload the public key only to the remote site and place it where instructed by the sysadmin
  3. Edit your $HOME/.dtprofile file so that your desktop session will be started by ssh-agent instead of just launched on its own. Assuming the ssh application executables are in /usr/local/bin, the line which launches dtsession should now read:
  4. Create the file or add to the file to $HOME/.dt/sessions/sessionetc the following to cause ssh-add to read your identity file at startup:
Log out and re-login. Now you should only have to enter your passphrase (the passphrase you fed to ssh-keygen ) once per session, or no times, if you chose an empty passphrase. You can have as many key lines in the (one) private identity file as you want, as long as you provide identity names for each which match the identity names of the hosts to which you are uploading your private keys. Just generate the private keys and paste them on one line each into the identity file, keeping the public keys in separate individual files and you can access as many sites as you wish this way.



$Id: use_ssh_agent.html,v 1.2 2001/10/03 00:39:35 jax Exp $