I have my own ssh server (on raspberry pi 5, Ubuntu Server 23) but when I try to connect from my PC using key authentication (having password disabled), I get a blank screen. A blinking cursor.
However, once I enter the command eval "$(ssh-agent -s)" and try ssh again, I successfully login after entering my passphrase. I don’t want to issue this command every time. Is that possible?
This does not occur when I have password enabled on the ssh server. Also, ideally, I want to enter my passphrase EVERYTIME I connect to my server, so ideally I don’t want it to be stored in cache or something. I want the passphrase to be a lil’ password so that other people can’t accidentally connect to my server when they use my PC.
in the past some xserver environments started an ssh-agent for you just in case of, and for some reason i don’t remember that was annoying and i disabled it to start my agent in my shell environment as i wanted it.
also a possibility is tharlt there are other agents like the gpg-agent that afaik also handles ssh keys.
but i would also look into $HOME/.ssh/config if there was something configured that matches the hostname, ip, or with wildcards* parts of it, that could interfere with key selection as the .ssh/id_rsa key should IMHO always be tried if key auth is possible and no (matching) key is known to the ssh process, that is unless there already is something configured…
not sure if a system-wide /etc/ssh/ssh_config would interfere there too, maybe have a look there too. as this behaviour seems a bit unexpected if not configured specially to do so.
I am not sure I “solved” this but when I add this to my startup script for my terminal (~/.zshrc):
SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-agent-$USER-socket export SSH_AUTH_SOCKit works then. I am not sure I’m still using the ssh agent, but at least it also does not cache my passphrase.