A few days ago I wrote in that I recompiled SSHKeychain for Mac OS Leopard. Turns out though that Leopard has built-in integration with ssh-agent which makes SSHKeychain obsolete and therefor has also been removed from my system.
I have appreciated the work people have done on SSHKeychain for over a year now and it was an extremely useful application under Tiger but now that Leopard handles this itself the need for SSHKeychain vanishes, except ofcourse for Mac OS X < 10.5 users.
When using Leopard drop your private keys in ~/.ssh/ Then when opening an ssh connection to a server a user credential window from application ssh will pop-up, asking for your passphrase and if you wish to remember this passphrase in the keychain so you don’t have to type it in every time.
Then you’re done!
For me, the key feature of SSHKeychain is the ability to automatically add keys to the agent and prompt you for your passphrase. You only have to do it once per login session, and you don’t have to store your passphrase in the system keychain (which isn’t very secure).
I have scripts that run from cron that use scp, so it’s good that Leopard will prompt me for the passphrase, but it doesn’t actually do the ssh-add, so I have to type it every time the script runs (instead of just once per login session).
Or am I just overlooking this feature in Leopard?
One of the primary reasons I use SSHKeychain is the nice GUI it offers to start a SSH tunnel.
I’ve come up with a simple way to get SSHKeychain overriding the OS-supplied version again. It’s very easy to do. See http://sportsdaft.blogspot.com/2008/04/getting-sshkeychain-to-work-on-leopard.html for details