From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.9) Gecko/20020513 Description of problem: When starting ssh-agent with /etc/X11/prefdm modified to "exec /usr/bin/ssh-agent `which [gkx]dm` ...", the ssh-agent isn't accessible to ssh-add from an terminal window after logging in. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Modify /etc/X11/prefdm to "exec ssh-agent" the [gkx]dm as appropriate. 2.From any xterm-like command line client such as xterm, konsole, etc., run "ssh-add" 3.ssh-add then fails with "Could not open a connection to your authentication agent." Actual Results: ssh-add didn't find the ssh-agent. ssh-agent is running as verified by ps and a search for its socket. Expected Results: ssh-add should have prompted me for a password. Additional info: The socket that ssh-agent uses is created in /tmp/ssh-XXxxxxxx/agent.<pid> as per the man page for ssh-agent. Dropping to runlevel 3 allows me to run the ssh-add. This was attempted as the root user. Repeated attempts to get this going by bouncing back and forth between init 3 and init 5 have left orphaned socket files. This may or may not be a security issue.
This bug is now over a month old and is still NEW. Why the delay?
In RedHat 8.0 at least ssh-agent is automatically run by /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession. This might be a better way to do it then hacking prefdm (especially since it seems to work, which means RH finally has an integrated solution for the ssh-agent problem.)
RH 7.3 is no longer supported.
Smooth move, Red Hat. Wait until 29 months after I first file this bug to respond.