ssh.PasswordRequiredException: Private key file is encrypted

[sentimental bryan]

I already put this bug on stackoverflow, but didn't get any response, in digging further, I found this site, so I'm reporting it here:

Firstly I tried to get fabric working, but it kept asking me for a password.

So I'm trying to reduce the problem. Perhaps it would be a good POC to just create a SSH connection from Python. I discovered that fabric uses parmiko for it's SSH handling. Hmm. Ok, lets try to get an example working.

Here's what I wrote.

from ssh import *
import os

print "SSH-AGENT VARS"

print "SSH_AGENT_PID: %s " % os.environ['SSH_AGENT_PID']
print "SSH_AUTH_SOCK: %s " % os.environ['SSH_AUTH_SOCK']

a = Agent()
keys=a.get_keys()
print keys.count("192.168.1.10")

client = SSHClient()
client.load_system_host_keys()
client.connect('192.168.1.10')

Resulting in the following error messages:

% ./ssh_test.py
SSH-AGENT VARS
SSH_AGENT_PID: 26557
SSH_AUTH_SOCK: /tmp/ssh-pZHBElj26556/agent.26556
0
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./ssh_test.py", line 18, in <module>
    client.connect('192.168.1.10')
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ssh/client.py", line 332, in connect
    self._auth(username, password, pkey, key_filenames, allow_agent, look_for_keys)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ssh/client.py", line 493, in _auth
    raise saved_exception
ssh.PasswordRequiredException: Private key file is encrypted

ssh-agent is running in my session, I can SSH to that box, no problems, it doesn't prompt me for a password or anything.

I'm guessing paramiko isn't able to connect to the running ssh-agent for some weird reason.

Has anyone else had a problem like this? I'm using Ubuntu 11.10

I seem to remember trying Fabric a while back and having similar problems, perhaps it's been broken for a while?