feature request: reviving ssh-agent

[mukesh agrawal]

Binary package hint: openssh-client

ssh-agent sometimes dies on me. this leaves the problem that any existing clients of that agent, as well as any processes that were forked prior to the death of the agent, will be unable to reach the agent. this is quite a nuisance, since it makes starting ssh-agent from pam (using libpam-ssh) less useful.

i can't just resolve this by starting a new ssh-agent, because it will have a different authentication socket than what the prior processes expect. (those processes locate the ssh-agent via the SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable.)

it would be nice to have an option to ssh-agent to connect to the same socket as the previous agent. fwiw, for now, i'm using this script to emualte the behavior i'd like:

#!/bin/sh

set -o errexit

if [[ -z $SSH_AUTH_SOCK ]]; then
        >&2 echo "can't revive agent: SSH_AUTH_SOCK not set"
        exit 1
fi

SSH_AUTH_DIR=$(dirname $SSH_AUTH_SOCK)
if [ ! -d $SSH_AUTH_DIR ]; then mkdir $SSH_AUTH_DIR; fi
rm -f $SSH_AUTH_SOCK
chmod go-rwx $SSH_AUTH_DIR
ssh-agent -a $SSH_AUTH_SOCK

[aurel42 (marc-keyword-launchpad-69d7a8)]

ssh-agent dies after extended usage (sometimes after a couple of hours) on a system upgraded from 8.10 to 9.04 (jaunty).

[Chuck Short (zulcss)]

Hi,

I was wondering if this is still a problem for you on karmic.

Regards
chuck

[mukesh agrawal (launchpad-net-mukesh)]

Hi Chuck,

I'm not having ssh agent die on my very often any more.

Thanks,
mukesh

[Chuck Short (zulcss)]

Closing then.

Thanks
chuck

[Kerin (cernunnos)]

I'm running Karmic x64 and ssh-agent dies multiple times per day.

[hamannp (hamann-paul)]

Greetings. I have an i386 box that was running Jaunty with no SSH problems. I blew it up and installed Karmic when it was first released a few months ago. SSH would hang after a few minutes. It was so bad that I blew it up again and went back to Jaunty. That fixed it. Last night, I figured it was safe to re-install Karmic. SSH worked most of this morning. Now, it's just dead. I can log in for a minute at most before it locks. I was installing postfix when this started. I just installed autossh. We'll have to see what it does.

HTH,
Paul

[hamannp (hamann-paul)]

Nope, autossh didn't help. When I close the shell and try again, I get:

ssh: connect to host 192.168.0.2 port 22: No route to host

Waiting doesn't seem to help either. The only thing I can do is kill the power and start over. It locks again in minutes at most.

I wish I could hang around and help resolve this, but I need the machine. Back to Jaunty for me. I can try again with Karmic in a week or two, if that helps.

Thanks! Paul

[hamannp (hamann-paul)]

Almost forgot,

While I was at it last night, I put Karmic on a 4gb flash from the same machine. I can boot into that [ from the same machine ] and from different machines to see if the problems persists. Let me know if that would help.

Cheers!

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for openssh (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[jtolds (jtolds)]

this is back for me in precise.