SSH-Agent can't open a connection to authentication agent?

Question

When I SSH into my firewall server, then attempt to ssh into another machine on the local network from there I get the following error:

Could not open a connection to your authentication agent.

Is there a way that I can have the agent run correctly from within another SSH session?

txwikinger · Accepted Answer · 2010-10-13 18:49:50Z

10

Yes. you can enable agent-forwarding by adding

ForwardAgent Yes

in your ssh configuration file (either ~/.ssh/config for user or /etc/ssh/ssh_config system wide.

Alternatively, if ssh is called with the option -A, the agent forwarding is also enabled as pointed out in the other answer.

answered Oct 13, 2010 at 14:12

txwikinger

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However, be aware of possible security issues with using SSH agent forwarding: unixwiz.net/techtips/ssh-agent-forwarding.html#sec There's a reason why they are disabled by default, and they should only be enabled for trusted hosts/networks.
– Riccardo Murri
Oct 13, 2010 at 16:22
This is not a problem of enabling AgentForwarding. This is a problem of access to a private key via a unix socket.
– txwikinger
Oct 13, 2010 at 18:18
that option doesn't seem to be supported for this version of ssh (10.04)
– Rob
Oct 13, 2010 at 18:39
Sorry. I think I did some wrong pasting. I have corrected it. I use this with 10.04 and 10.10 without any problems.
– txwikinger
Oct 13, 2010 at 18:42

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itsadok · Accepted Answer · 2010-10-13 14:24:40Z

5

I addition to what txwikinger said, you can also just use the -A command line option when SSHing to your firewall.

answered Oct 13, 2010 at 14:24

itsadok

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This works, thanks. Do you know what the correct option is to make this a default in .ssh/config?
– Rob
Oct 13, 2010 at 18:41
Add ForwardAgent yes to the .ssh/config for that Host to default to the -A flag
– Rob
Oct 13, 2010 at 18:44
You can also try this "eval ssh-agent".
– Marky
Dec 4, 2012 at 3:45

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2 Answers 2