ssh-agent stops responding

[John Lenton]

I (and everybody on my team) have a list of 36 bzr repositories we pull in as source deps of our project. As updating them all is very slow, mostly due to network latency, we update them in parallel, 10 at a time, using xargs. Something like

    $ xargs -n1 -P10 ./update-repo.sh < sourcedeps.txt

where update-repo.sh does cd $1 && bzr pull, and bzr uses ssh-agent to get the ssh keys, and this is where you come in :) because since we moved to jaunty, we're killing ssh-agent every single time we do this. Not actually killing it; it simply stops responding: suddenly we get these bzrs asking for the passphrase (and failing, obviously). And,

    $ ssh-add
    Could not open a connection to your authentication agent.

but ssh-agent is still there,

    $ ps -C ssh-agent www
      PID TTY STAT TIME COMMAND
     3208 ? Ss 0:00 /usr/bin/ssh-agent /usr/bin/gpg-agent --daemon --sh --write-env-file=/home/john/.gnupg/gpg-agent-info-watermeal /usr/bin/dbus-launch --exit-with-session /usr/bin/pulse-session /usr/bin/seahorse-agent --execute x-session-manager

Thanks,

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

21:21 <rmcbride> Anyone seen any behavior like https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openssh/+bug/352154 ? A bunch of my team have this as a Nemisis since upgrading to Jaunty Beta
21:23 <cjwatson> rmcbride: very likely not openssh's fault at all, but due to seahorse
21:23 <cjwatson> rmcbride: echo $SSH_AUTH_SOCK
21:23 <cjwatson> it's only openssh if it's something like /tmp/ssh-BLAH/agent.BLAH
21:24 <rmcbride> cjwatson: ah, yea. OK that makes sense. One of our Devs spotted it first and wrote the bug based on observed behavior. I'm just following up because I'm seeing it on my dev system now.
21:24 <cjwatson> rmcbride: do actually do that $SSH_AUTH_SOCK check so that we can confirm though
21:25 <rmcbride> /tmp/keyring-gk1OMb/socket.ssh

Definitely not openssh's fault, then; I think seahorse is a likely culprit.

[Rick McBride (rmcbride)]

this started happening to me about the time I upgraded to jaunty beta. Prior to that I had been running late alpha-6 on the affected machine without seeing this problem.

[Andreas Moog (ampelbein)]

could this be related to bug #183514 ?

could you try the workaround proposed in
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/seahorse/+bug/183514/comments/5

and see if that fixes the issue for you?

[Christopher N. Deckard (chris-globalfoo)]

I was having the same problem and followed followed the workaround in 183514. I moved /etc/X11/Xsession.d/90gpg-agent out of the way and ssh-agent seems to continue to respond as it should.

[Christopher N. Deckard (chris-globalfoo)]

Apologies, I should have added that I'm running Jaunty-beta with all current updates, and the suggested workaround seems to resolve the issue.

[Steve McInerney (spm)]

Similar to Christopher, and OP, had the same problem. Latest jaunty beta updates. Two separate machines - both were upgrades from 8.04 -> 8.10 -> 9.04.

In my case is just ssh'ing direct into various servers vs funky bzr imports/updates. :-)

Moving the /etc/X11/Xsession.d/90gpg-agent file away, and logoff/login to X, solved the problem on both machines.

[Andreas Moog (ampelbein)]

I'm going to mark this bug a duplicate to bug #183514 . I have taken together the useful information from both #217270 and #352154. Feel free to add missing information. Thanks.