[Sshkeychain-users] SSHKeychain vs. Apple SSH Agent

[Ian R. <ia...@ro...>]

In Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard, Apple provides their own GUI SSH
agent integration which works to a point but (IMHO) SSHKeychain is still
much superior.  Unfortunately the Apple approach overrides the
SSHKeychain one by default, as described in this post from early last year:

> On 10.6.2, two points.
> 
> 1.  I have a preference set
> 	General > Agent Socket Location:	/tmp/502/SSHKeychain.socket
> 
> and that is what is in my ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist file as well.
> 
> But what is actually in my environment in a fresh Terminal.app is this noise:
> 
> SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/launch-8ErLPG/Listeners
> 
> And so SSHKeychain doesn't work (that is, ssh prompts for the remote password).

(http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=2964D7B5-6D36-43C6-B69E-D34795CC96F9%40dtpq.com&forum_name=sshkeychain-users)

I have just discovered a way to get around this and I thought I should
post it here for the benefit of anyone else who (like me) would still
prefer to use SSHKeychain.

On Snow Leopard you can disable the Apple SSH agent for a single user by
running the following command in the terminal (all on one line, in case
your mail program has split it up):

launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/org.openbsd.ssh-agent.plist

Now use the SSHKeychain environment preferences pane to enable the
"Manage (and modify) ..." option, log out and back in, and you should
now find that SSHKeychain works as intended once again.

On Leopard the same command (possibly run under sudo) will disable the
Apple agent for all users.

Ian

-- 
Ian Roberts