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why can't I connect to my ssh server UNLESS I enter eval "$(ssh-agent -s)" first?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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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):
it works then. I am not sure I'm still using the ssh agent, but at least it also does not cache my passphrase.
you should definitely know what type of authentication you use (my opinion) !! the agent can hold the key forever, so if you are just not asked again when connecting once more, thats what the agent is for. however its only in ram, so stopping the process or rebooting ends that of course. if you didn't reboot meanwhile maybe try unload all keys from it (ssh-add -D, ssh-add -L) and see what the next login is like.
btw: i use ControlMaster /ControlPath (with timeouts) to even reduce the number of passwordless logins and speed things up when running scripts or things like ansible, monitoring via ssh etc. then everything goes through the already open channel and no authentication is needed for the second thing any more, it gets really fast then.