Issues with ssh-add

Question

I am attempting to add an ssh key using ssh-add. Upon running ssh-add ~/.ssh/insertkeynamehere I am prompted with:

Could not open a connection to your authentication agent. 

After doing some research it would appear as if this is because my ssh-agent is not running but ps -ef | grep ssh-agent indicates otherwise:

cdm 1760 1727 0 14:35 ? 00:00:00 /usr/bin/ssh-agent /usr/bin/dbus-launch --exit-with-session gnome-session --session=classic-gnome 

Even after running:

exec ssh-add bash 

And seeing:

cdm 1760 1727 0 14:35 ? 00:00:00 /usr/bin/ssh-agent /usr/bin/dbus-launch --exit-with-session gnome-session --session=classic-gnome cdm 2903 1 0 14:45 ? 00:00:00 ssh-agent 

This problem still seems to persist. Any help would be much appreciated and if you need to see anymore console output let me know and I'll be happy to post.

*Note I am using Ubuntu 11.04

Answer 1

Try:

$ `eval ssh-agent` 

Which echo series of environment variables making ssh-add to work. Just paste that into your terminal and:

$ exec ssh-agent bash 

Then:

$ ssh-add ~/.ssh/insertkeynamehere 

source: Ubuntu manpages: ssh-add