Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 169259
Starting X with 'startx' doesn't run ssh-agent (patch)
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:11:14 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050909 Fedora/1.0.6-1.2.fc4 Firefox/1.0.6 Description of problem: If one has a system which starts in run level 3, and one uses 'startx' to start 'X', then the ssh-agent isn't run. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): xinitrc-4.0.18.1 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot machine to run level 3 2. Run 'startx' 3. Once the desktop is up, run "ssh-add -l" in a shell Actual Results: Error: Could not contact agent Expected Results: No output (unless keys have been loaded into the agent) Additional info:
Created attachment 119251 [details] Patch to fix Patch to fix
Thanks, will review for consideration for FC5.
Triaging for FC5. Mike, there's a patch here, it would be great to take if you think its good.
The patch will do what it claims to do, however there is a deeper problem which has bounced back and forth since the first OS release that we started invoking ssh-agent from X scripts. We need to ensure that if we invoke ssh-agent during X startup, that we also shut it down when X shuts down, and that we do not shut ssh-agent down in X startup if X startup didn't start it up. In other words, some users start ssh-agent from .bash_profile or elsewhere manually, and they don't want X shutdown to stop it if they've started it. The other problem that has come up, is that starting ssh-agent without shutting it down in X scripts, causes machines to leak ssh-agent processes over time, more or less at a rate of one per login. So if we enable ssh-agent, we must ensure that these 2 conditions are met: 1) Do not leave the ssh-agent processes we start running after logout. 2) Do not kill ssh-agent processes started by the user, or prior to X startup when shutting down. There are other bug reports open concerning these I believe. It is too late to include a feature patch in FC5 which hasn't had widespread testing to ensure conditions #1 and #2 above are met, however we will review this for FC6 development, and also consider it for an FC5 update, once we can ensure the prerequisites above are met. Moving to FC6Target
This also happens on Redhat Enterprise 4 with update 4, which was just released. Starting X with startx does not start ssh-agent.
Patch committed. The concerns about not launching ssh-agent if it's already running is already handled by the code in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc-common. By letting ssh-agent launch the session (as done by the patch), the agent will automatically shut down once the session exits if it was started from startx. Nothing but startx sources /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc, so the patch should be safe, and anyway, worst case is that ssh-agent starts working correctly in some other combination.
*** Bug 159624 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***