Re: [gnome-love] Gnome SSH agent applet

[George Karabin <gkarabin pobox com>]

On Apr 12, 2004, at 5:02 PM, Geiregat Jonas wrote:

> George Karabin wrote:
>
> > On Apr 6, 2004, at 7:35 AM, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> >
> > > On Tue, 2004-04-06 at 10:25, Ross Golder wrote:
> > >
> > > > I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but if I have, here it 
> > > > is
> > > > again for the newbies...
> > > >
> > > > What we need, for those of you who work with SSH on a regular 
> > > > basis, is
> > > > a panel applet that does pretty much the same as the command-line
> > > > 'ssh-agent' program, but as a GUI applet.
> > >
> > > Actually, you could probably do all of this with just wrapping
> > > ssh-agent.  Rewriting that code would be foolish; you don't want to 
> > > have
> > > *two* places for security breakage to happen.  ssh-agent can already 
> > > use
> > > a GTK+ frontend for asking for passphrases, so pretty much all the
> > > applet would need to do is call ssh-agent with various options and 
> > > parse
> > > a little output here and there.
> >
> >
> > Perhaps this applet should (at the user's option) use gnome-keyring 
> > to make the password persistent?
> > - George
>
> Yes that would be a good idea, but why do you need all the parsing ?
> Couldn't you just let the applet  drop down a selection list that 
> starts up an xterm with ssh running in it  ?

I'm not sure I understand your question, so forgive me if I've missed 
its point. The idea of the proposed applet is to wrap ssh-agent, which 
stores private keys for future ssh connections started from the current 
X session. The man page for 'ssh' talks about public-key 
authentication, and the man page for 'ssh-agent' tells you how to set 
up ssh to only need to authenticate the passphrase associated with a 
private key once per session.
I.e., enter your passphrase once for a given public key, and then you 
don't need to enter it again until you log out. Launching xterms the 
way you suggest doesn't tie into the ssh-agent, so you keep on neeeding 
to enter passphrases, and you only support that one way of starting 
xterminals - not all the many ways that ssh can be used ('scp', 'sftp', 
or 'ssh' launched from arbitrary processes).
gnome-keyring would provide a way to make the key persistent across 
sessions.
Regarding output parsing, I'd guess Sean means that the applet needs to 
parse the output of the 'gnome-ssh-askpass' and 'ssh-agent' commands to 
collect the passphrase and to give the user any necessary feedback - 
i.e., success, failure, error description, etc. It might get a little 
tricky if the output of the above programs changes over time. It may be 
worth setting up the code to parse the output of 'ssh -V' to determine 
which set of parsing rules to use. It still leaves the possibly of 
silent failures with version mismatches open, but without an ssh client 
library that gnome can add as a dependency, I'm not sure if there's a 
better option.
Regards,

- George


> > > > Regards,
> > > >
> > > > --
> > > > Ross
> > > >
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> > > --
> > > Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
> > > AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.
> > >
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>
> --
> Geiregat Jonas
>
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