ssh key forwarding not working under i3wm

Question

I recently switched from the regular Lubuntu LXDE/openbox to the i3 window manager under Lubuntu 16.04.

In either environment I can ssh with authentication forwarding activated into another machine via a vpn tunnel using:

ssh -A user@remote-machineA

On my local machine I have a ssh key for a git repository on remote-machineB. I can access the repository fine while on remote-machineA with LXDE but get a "Permission denied" using i3 to start with. Assuming my i3 does not forward keys like LXDE does. But I don't know what the missing piece is.

I came across this: https://www.reddit.com/r/i3wm/comments/4ho1qj/sshagent_within_i3wm_on_ubuntu_1604_does_not_work/

But unsure if this is the same problem as I experience, I tried the solutions proposed there but to no avail.

Answer 1

Certain DE environments starts their own applications that can behave as a ssh-agent and that can be forwarded. But it is not probably the case for the i3. If you want to use "ssh-agent forwarding" (it is not "authentication forwarding" as you note), you need to have ssh-agent running and your keys loaded inside. You can verify that simply using command below. It should list your authentication keys

ssh-add -l

If it returns error, you need to start the agent first:

eval `ssh-agent`

If it does not list them, you need to add the keys to the agent:

ssh-add path/to/key

If you want to automate it, add these commands to your .bashrc (do not start new agent with every bash! Only if there is no ssh-agent connection yet). There is a lot of snippet you can use all over the internet.