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2020-09-21 - talk to my agent

My 3 weeks of holiday time are wrapping up mid-week. It’s been excessively pleasant, even though I can’t go out much. I’ve collected so many little things to do as part of my daily routine now, and the rest of the time just…evaporates somehow.

This arvo[1] evaporated via some idle tech fiddling. I’m tempting fate by talking about it, but I might have finally sorted out my confusion around using GnuPG’s agent for my SSH keys on a machine I sometimes use completely via terminal (on my iPad) and occasionally at its desktop. It’s been bugging me for ages in that way that things often do on Linux - there’s the eternal promise of things working _better_, only it’s just out of reach because of some odd edge case you can’t quite work out.

The problem was thus:

the GPG agent had my SSH key in it just fine, as far as it was concerned.
sometimes when I ssh’d somewhere (eg. in a fresh pty in tmux), I’d get a “sign_and_send_pubkey: signing failed: agent refused operation” error, though.

Annoyingly, I was able to do _other_ GnuPG operations involving GPG keys just fine - it was just SSH-related stuff that was having trouble.

Fixing it appears to be a combo of:

forcing the use of pinentry-tty in ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf
putting this in ~/.ssh/config

Match host * exec "gpg-connect-agent UPDATESTARTUPTTY /bye"

I’d futzed about with forcing the TTY occasionally before, but that wasn’t catching _all_ the scenarios, like this does…I think!

Footnotes:

[1] - arvo == afternoon, at least in .au