Xfce, Keychain And Two ssh-agents

Posted by fordfrog | Filed under Linux

While trying to find out how to make NetBeans work with keychain, I noticed that after I start Xfce and then keychain is run from my .bashrc, I end up with two ssh-agents running instead of one. I did not find out why it works this way, only thing I found out is that SSH_AGENT_PID is empty when running .bashrc, and I was not willing to dig deeper to find the cause. Anyway, I made a small patch that makes Xfce work with keychain:

--- /etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc.orig	2010-07-17 18:43:00.025468585 +0200
+++ /etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc	2010-07-17 18:54:10.045657796 +0200
@@ -113,7 +113,11 @@
 sshagent=`which ssh-agent`
 kill_sshagent=0
 if test -z "$SSH_AGENT_PID" -a "$sshagent" -a "x$sshagent" != "xno"; then
-	eval `$sshagent -s`
+	if test ! -e $HOME/.keychain; then
+		mkdir $HOME/.keychain
+	fi
+	$sshagent -s | grep -v "echo Agent pid" > $HOME/.keychain/$HOSTNAME-sh
+	. $HOME/.keychain/$HOSTNAME-sh
 	kill_sshagent=1
 fi

The patch saves output of ssh-agent into file that keychain uses so keychain then reuses the current data and does not have to spawn new ssh-agent. just to make the info complete, this is what i have in my .bashrc:

keychain -q
. ~/.keychain/$HOSTNAME-sh
. ~/.keychain/$HOSTNAME-sh-gpg

bug report at xfce: bug 6558

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Permalink | July 17th, 2010

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