LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <ak.linuxsa@topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 05:07:25 +0930

ssh-agent parenting for KDE virtual terminals

Although I asked about this on this list some months ago, I still haven't
figured out the answer.

Question:
How do you make an ssh-agent process the parent of all virtual terminal
and konsole processes running under KDE.
Obviously I want to be able to fund KDE and just enter in the
SSH passphrase once instead of once for each terminal, which is about
40 terminals to log in to various other machines.

Here's my little bit of (frustrating) progress today.
I modified the file 

/etc/opt/kde3/share/config/kdm/Xserver

on my SuSE 8.1 workstation as follows:

---------------------------------
# :0 local /usr/X11R6/bin/X vt7
:0 local /usr/bin/ssh-agent /usr/X11R6/bin/X vt7
---------------------------------

I.e. I parented the X process to ssh-agent.
The result is this:

---------------------------------
akenning@shark> ps fax |grep ssh
  589 ?        S      0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd
  881 ?        S      0:00  |   \_ /usr/bin/ssh-agent /usr/X11R6/bin/X vt7 -auth /var/lib/xdm/authdir/authfiles/blahblah
---------------------------------

(The "blahblah" is some random rubbish.)

So I expected to be able to type "ssh-add" in any old window in the
session and get something sensible, but I get this:

---------------------------------
akenning@shark> ssh-add
Could not open a connection to your authentication agent.
---------------------------------

So clearly the X process is not the parent of all the xterm and konsole processes.
In fact, I get this n "ps fax":

---------------------------------
  969 ?        S      0:00 kdeinit: Running...      
  997 ?        S      0:01  \_ kdeinit: kwin -session blahblahblah
  998 ?        S      0:00  |   \_ /bin/tcsh -c xterm 
 1042 ?        S      0:00  |   |   \_ xterm
 1282 pts/0    S      0:00  |   |       \_ -csh
---------------------------------

Okay, so I look at http://docs.kde.org/ for kdeinit and kwin and find not much.
Obviously I need to make ssh-agent the parent of "kwin".

Does anyone just happen to know how to do this?
I don't want to read every configuration file on the computer that starts
with k to try to guess what makes this happen.
I'm tired of spending hours every week chasing non-existent documentation
with Google and "man -k" and "locate" etc. etc.
(Actually right now, the big nuisance I've got is trying to get
two sound cards going one two different PCs.
None of the documentation I've read has solutions that actually work.
But that's another story....)

Thanks in advance for any assistance.
Cheers,
Alan Kennington.

-- 
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