From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Nov 11 15:09:50 2009 Return-Path: Delivered-To: questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 40F181065692 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:09:50 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from vince@unsane.co.uk) Received: from ostracod.unsane.co.uk (unsane-pt.tunnel.tserv5.lon1.ipv6.he.net [IPv6:2001:470:1f08:110::2]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8DAE78FC0A for ; Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:09:49 +0000 (UTC) Received: from vhoffman.lon.namesco.net (75.69-246-213.ippool.namesco.net [213.246.69.75]) (authenticated bits=0) by ostracod.unsane.co.uk (8.14.3/8.14.3) with ESMTP id nABFAEE5019690 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA bits=256 verify=NO) for ; Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:10:16 GMT (envelope-from vince@unsane.co.uk) Message-ID: <4AFAD3B8.1000609@unsane.co.uk> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:09:44 +0000 From: Vincent Hoffman User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 (Macintosh/20090812) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: questions@freebsd.org X-Enigmail-Version: 0.96.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Subject: ssh-agent and ordering of keys X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:09:50 -0000 Hi all, I've a bit of an annoying problem that hopefully someone here has delt with before. I have a large(ish) number of ssh keys as i like to keep things nicely seperated, I also use longish passphrases. To deal with long pass phrases I have started to use ssh-agent, which is working nicely but since i have a large number of keys and ssh-agent doesnt let you specify a particular key for a particular machine (I was using host and IdentiyFile lines in ~/.ssh/config before) I'm starting to hit a problem where I'm unable to log in to a machine as I'm hitting the MaxAuthTries value in sshd_config. I know i could just bung the MaxAuthTries value up to 20 or so on all my servers but I dont really want to, I'd rather a way of specifying which ssh key ssh-agent uses for a specific host, (like i said it ignores the IdentiyFile lines in the config file and ignores the -i switch to ssh itself.) Any ideas welcome. Thanks, Vince