The password-less ssh problem and ssh-agent on Fedora Core 3

[Andy Oram]

A recent thread on this list discussed setting up ssh so it
didn't demand a password, and one or two people gave the
standard advice of running ssh-agent behind a shell or X.

However, older versions of Red Hat and Fedora Core ran X with
ssh-agent automatically. In previous versions of Red Hat, I
could simply follow the usual procedure of running
ssh-agent, copying the key to the remote system, and running
ssh-add in .bashrc.

This no longer works in Fedora Core 3. (I haven't tried
Fedora Core 4.) The /etc/X22/xinit/xinitrc-common file
invokes SSH-AGENT, as in earlier distributions. A check on
ps and a .pid file suggests that ssh-agent is indeed
running. But ssh-add takes a long time before exiting, and
Ethereal reports that no network activity is taking
place. (I would expect some activity as ssh-add communicates
with the remote system and verifies the key.)

Thus, ssh always requests a password.

--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Oram  O'Reilly Media                     email: andyo at oreilly.com
Editor     90 Sherman Street                       voice: 617-499-7479
           Cambridge, MA 02140-3233                  fax: 617-661-1116
           USA                         http://www.praxagora.com/andyo/
Stories at Web site:
The Bug in the Seven Modules     Code the Obscure     The Disconnected
----------------------------------------------------------------------