Using ssh-agent under Windows

17 Jun, 2004

Thanks to Ovidiu Predescu for his blog entry on "Setting up ssh-agent on Windows XP".

ssh-agent allows you to protect your SSH private-keys with a pass-phrase, while avoiding having to continuously re-enter the pass-phrase.

It's very easy to set up under Linux; in fact, in most distros it's probably running by default. As Ovidiu points out, it's actually fairly easy to set up in Windows XP, too, using Cygwin OpenSSH. The trick is to pre-select the agent bind address ...

First, create a new Windows environment variable called "SSH_AUTH_SOCK", and give it the value "/tmp/.ssh-socket".

Next, insert the following snippet in your ~/.bashrc:

ssh-add -l >/dev/null 2>&1
if [ $? = 2 ]; then
    # exit-status 2 = couldn't connect to ssh-agent
    echo -n "Starting SSH agent ... "
    eval `ssh-agent -a $SSH_AUTH_SOCK`
fi

This will start a new ssh-agent if there isn't yet one running (this is a slight simplification of Ovidiu's script).

Now, type just "ssh-add", and your pass-phrase, and SSH in peace.