SSH-AGENT-KEEPALIVE – A bash_profile mod that cacches agent env for reuse

github.com

4 points·ogsuspect··5 comments

I am a die-hard iterm + tmux user and often have many login shells open spread across many iterm windows/tabs, tmux sessions/windows/panes, etc.

I was tired of dealing with the pain of ssh-agent so I wrote some bash scripting that caches the agent environment, kills any extra uncached agents and automatically "attaches" to the cached environment so you don't have to type your ssh key passphrases in over and over.

Feel free to contribute, also feel free to talk trash :)

Curious if this could work to minimize 2FA authentications for repeated short SSH sessions? Particularly ssh commands run by 3rd party software such as Sourcetree.

Curious if this could work to minimize 2FA authentications for repeated short SSH sessions? Particularly ssh commands run by 3rd party software such as Sourcetree. Every new connection requires acknowledgement of 2FA push notification.

I think you want multiplexing:

https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSSH/Cookbook/Multiplexin...

It creates a control socket that lasts up to x minutes after your last session closes, so for me, all day + 15 minutes, which then new connections go over instead of re-athenticating.

Many places disable it for "security" reasons.

See ClashTheBunny's comment about Control sockets. You can `man 5 ssh-config` and search for the following settings 'ControlMaster', 'ControlPath', 'ControlPersist'. ControlMaster is a yes/no/auto... you probably want 'auto'. ControlPath is the path where the control socket is created. You probably want something dynamic like `ControlPath ~/.ssh/ctrl-%h`. ControlPersist specifies how long the control socket should remain open for. This enables SSH connection multiplexing.

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