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Have tried everything I found in Google. Nothing seems to work. Here is what I've done.

user@home-machine ~ $ ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/user/.ssh/id_rsa): 
/home/user/.ssh/id_rsa already exists.
Overwrite (y/n)? y
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): 
Enter same passphrase again: 
Your identification has been saved in /home/user/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/user/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx user@home-machine
The key's randomart image is:
+--[ RSA 4096]----+
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
+-----------------+

user@home-machine ~ $ ssh-copy-id user@vps
user@vps's password: 
Now try logging into the machine, with "ssh 'user@vps'", and check in:

  ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

to make sure we haven't added extra keys that you weren't expecting.



user@home-machine ~ $ ssh user@vps 
Agent admitted failure to sign using the key.
user@vps's password: 

user@vps:~$ ssh-add
Could not open a connection to your authentication agent.
user@vps:~$ eval "$(ssh-agent)"
Agent pid 1501

I logged out, tried again and I still get the message:

Agent admitted failure to sign using the key.

I try again ssh-add and I get:

Could not open a connection to your authentication agent.

I deleted .ssh/authorized_keys and tried all over again and still nothing.

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  • ssh -vv user@vps or ssh -vvv user@vps will provide more (and much more) explanatory output. Posting that will make a diagnosis much easier. Commented Sep 21, 2013 at 10:33

1 Answer 1

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Try to find the processes running an ssh-agent and terminate them, the agent might be behaving incorrectly.

Also, note that the ssh-agent having trouble has nothing to do with your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys.

The ssh-agent is a helper to aid with ssh logins, by caching your passphrase in memory, so you don't have to type it every time you use it.

I have get used to add a call to the keychain utility to my ~/.bash_profile to help managing my ssh-agent (and my gpg-agent, but that's another story).

Simply put this line in your ~/.bash_profile (or ~/.bashrc, depending on your references, there are subtle differences):

eval $(keychain --clear --eval id_rsa id_dsa id_ecdsa other.id_rsa)

This way, you'll be prompted to type the passphrase of your keys only once in your entire shell session.

keychain is packaged in Debian and derivatives, but it is just a shell script. If your distribution does not have it, you can find it here. Just put it somewhere in your PATH. It is advisable to chown it root:root and chmod it rwxr-xr-x (755) to avoid unprivileged users modifying it.

Don't use keys without passphrase.

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