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ubik
Asked: 2010-08-19 12:11:40 +0800 CST

byobu and ssh-agent

  • 772

byobu cannot connect to ssh-agent socket well. actually I can make just one connection via ssh-agent but if I try to establish another ssh connection using the agent, it doesn't work. I've tried 

setenv SSH_AUTH_SOCK `echo $SSH_AUTH_SOCK`

in ~/.byobu/profile but it didn't work as well.

ssh gnu-screen ssh-agent byobu

4 Answers

  1. I'm not sure why people attempt to solve this at the terminal multiplexer configuration level. That's not a place for it, unless you want to have to do it again because you've switched to tmux, screen, etc.

    Every time you open another window, your shell gets executed and reads its configuration files.

    Sourcing this from your shell configuration file solves the problem for any shell that I use:

    #!/bin/bash
SSH_AGENT_TYPE="ssh"
SSH_AGENT_INFO="${HOME}/.ssh-agent"

source_agent_info() {
  export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=''
  export SSH_AGENT_PID=''

  if [[ -f ${SSH_AGENT_INFO} ]]; then
    source ${SSH_AGENT_INFO}
  fi
}

agent_running() {
  source_agent_info
  proc_file="/proc/${SSH_AGENT_PID}/cmdline"
  if [[ "${SSH_AGENT_PID}" =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]] && \
     stat "${proc_file}" &> /dev/null && \
     grep ssh-agent "${proc_file}" &> /dev/null; then
    return 0
  else
    return 1
  fi
}

run_ssh_agent() {
  ssh-agent 2>&1 | grep -v echo > "${SSH_AGENT_INFO}"
  source_agent_info
}

if ! agent_running; then
  run_ssh_agent
fi
    • 9

  2. This issue is detailed in Bug #664059, and solved for byobu versions 3.7 and above.

    Basically, there is an incorrect assumption that /var/run/screen/S-$USER/ will exist and be writable at the point at which the SSH socket needs to be set. So I moved the symlink to the SSH socket to $HOME/.byobu/.ssh-agent.

    • 2

  3. There is a bug report #616899 which sounds similar to your problem. They suggest to download byobu v3.1 and manually install it.

    • 1

  4. I've been doing ssh-agent byobu all the environment variables gets passed easily.

    • 0