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:
-
Use ssh-keygen to generate the public/private key pair to the
appropriate directory on your platform.
-
Typically, this is
-
$HOME/.ssh/identity (private key)
-
Make sure only you can read this file!
-
$HOME/.ssh/identity.pub (public key)
-
It's best to use a passphrase, although an empty passphrase will work.
-
Upload the public key only to the remote site and place it where
instructed by the sysadmin
-
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:
-
dtstart_session[0]="/usr/local/bin/ssh-agent $DT_BINPATH/dtsession"
-
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 $