Keychain problems

Hello all,

I'm trying to get D. Robbins' keychain working on a SuSE 8.2 machine, and not managing it.

I'm following Robbins article at:

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-keyc2/?open&l=252,t=grl,p=ossh2

ssh is correctly set up, the dsa and rsa keys work, and conventional set-up of ssh-agent with ssh-add for the keys leads to successful passwordless logins on the remote machines.

I am starting keychain from .bash_profile using Robbins' script:

#!/bin/bash
#on this next line, we start keychain and point it to the private keys that
#we'd like it to cache

/usr/bin/keychain ~/.ssh/id_rsa ~/.ssh/id_dsa source ~/.ssh-agent > /dev/null
#sourcing ~/.bashrc is a good thing

source ~/.bashrc

And the machine is indeed reading this and acting on it. I am asked for the passphrases ok, and things appear to have worked, an instance of ssh-agent is started, but when an attempt is made to log in to remote machines the passphrase is invariably asked for again. I need to use rsync over ssh as a cron job to do mirroring, so manually entering the phrase is no good - of course that's where keychain comes in.

Do you need help?

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Keychain is supposed to write to the file .ssh-agent, but this file is not created; creating it empty with touch just leaves it sitting their empty, keychain isn't writing to it.

Anyone have any clues? I am not keen on the null passphrase key approach ... Best
Fergus

-- 
Fergus Wilde
Chetham's Library
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Manchester
M3  1SB

Tel: +44 161 834 7961
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