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jpanderson-keldin's avatar
jpanderson-keldin
New Contributor
1 month ago

SSH Agent Forwarding to Remote Mac

Okay! I have a Mac Mini that I use as a home server (it was effectively free after trade ins of old stuff). I do have 1Password and its SSH agent running there for when i'm using it with a screen att...
macos
troubleshooting
jpanderson-keldin's avatar
jpanderson-keldin
New Contributor
1 month ago

Ok I actually discovered the problem. I needed the following in `~/.ssh/config` on the laptop.

Host *
    IdentityAgent "~/Library/Group Containers/2BUA8C4S2C.com.1password/t/agent.sock"

there's a chance a less aggressive host configuration might work. Maybe it needs to be `Host <the Mac mini's host name` to enable forwarding?

Michael_Mercuri's avatar
Michael_Mercuri
Dedicated Contributor
7 days ago

There are generally two ways to set the auth socket used by the identity agent (whether using 1Password SSH Agent, OpenSSH, or any other SSH agent): 

  1. Specify IdentityAgent option  in ~/.ssh/config file like you're already doing (also works on command line with "ssh -o IdentityAgent")
  2. Specify via SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable.

 

For option 2, you could set in your shell startup (e.g. ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc):

export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=${SSH_AUTH_SOCK:-~"/Library/Group Containers/2BUA8C4S2C.com.1password/t/agent.sock"}

Then you could leave the IdentityAgent option out of ~/.ssh/config. This should also work when logged in remotely and SSH_AUTH_SOCK is already set via SSH agent forwarding.