Windows 10 Linux Subsystem SSH-agent issues

ssh_config.md

Host github.com-jiggneshhgohel
HostName github.com
User git
PreferredAuthentications publickey
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_work_gmail
AddKeysToAgent yes


Host csexperimental.abc.com
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_work_gmail
AddKeysToAgent yes

References:

• https://stackoverflow.com/a/45562886/936494 - summarizes everything listed in this gist in form of steps which can be followed to resolve SSH agent issues.
• https://superuser.com/questions/1238486/windows-10-linux-subsystem-ssh-agent-not-persisting-added-identities#1238595 - This is the original post which details the issue I was facing
• https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/269121/openssh-have-ssh-add-keys-to-agent-as-needed
• https://stackoverflow.com/a/41555393/936494 - This one I used to upgrade my SSH version

FROM

$ ssh -V
OpenSSH_6.6.1p1 Ubuntu-2ubuntu2.8, OpenSSL 1.0.1f 6 Jan 2014

TO

~$ ssh -V
OpenSSH_7.3p1 Ubuntu-1, OpenSSL 1.0.2g  1 Mar 2016

Thanks a lot for your last link jiggnesh, it helped me to deal with it :).

I tried all of the solutions in this gist and the links provided but kept running into issues - mainly around my keys requiring passphrases so they can't be automatically added (without manual intervention). I wrote a post here http://daveeddy.com/2017/10/18/persistent-sshagent-on-bash-on-ubuntu-on-windows/ about how I solved the issue.

Long story short, I create a Windows login service that starts a hidden instance of bash that runs ssh-agent to keep it running so long as the computer is up. When you add a key to the agent (with or without a passphrase), it will stay in the agent and the agent will stay up so long as your user is logged into Windows.

All of the code for the scripts is on GitHub as well available under an open source license: https://github.com/bahamas10/windows-bash-ssh-agent

@jiggneshhgohel is this persistent on a workstation reboot?

is this persistent on a workstation reboot?

@ralphie02 By explicitly stating workstation if you are referring to something special then sorry I cannot comment on it. But after doing the config shown in above steps and rebooting the machine the config is persistent.

This method was not working for me with latest Ubuntu 18.04 and Windows 10
Errors connecting to SSH agent still occur

FYI - looks to be a bug

microsoft/WSL#3183

According to the discussion in microsoft/WSL#3183, the issue with ssh-agent on Ubuntu 18.04 is fixed in insiders build 17704. The fix will be pushed out to regular Windows builds as part of the Fall 2018 update. In the meantime, one reported work-around is to retrieve the ssh-agent binary for Ubuntu 16.04 from the Ubuntu site and use that on 18.04 for now. In #3183 there is a recipe by @rcarmo how to do that.