Description of problem: Note this requires that you have fixed bug 1134592 in libvirt first. If you create a backing file that references an ssh server, libvirt doesn't pass the required SSH_* variables through to qemu so it cannot access the ssh agent. $ qemu-img create -f qcow2 \ -b 'json: { "file.driver":"ssh", "file.path":"/mnt/scratch/test1.img", "file.user":"rjones", "file.host":"onuma.home.annexia.org", "file.host_key_check":"no" }' test2.img $ ~/d/libvirt/run guestfish -a test2.img run [...] Original error from libvirt: internal error: early end of file from monitor: possible problem: 2014-09-09T11:36:32.304954Z qemu-system-x86_64: -drive file=/tmp/test2.img,if=none,id=drive-scsi0-0-0-0,format=qcow2,cache=writeback: could not open disk image /tmp/test2.img: Could not open backing file: failed to connect to ssh-agent: no auth sock variable (libssh2 error code: -39) [code=1 domain=10] Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): libvirt from git (2014-09-09) + patches to fix bug 1134592. How reproducible: 100% Steps to Reproduce: 1. See above. Related: bug 856619
Dan suggests that I make this bug into a more general feature request.
Just duping to the RHEL bug: if we are tracking this for RHEL then there isn't much use in having a duplicate upstream bug *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 1140166 ***