About:
keychain helps you to manage ssh keys in a convenient and secure manner. It acts as a frontend to ssh-agent, but allows you to easily have one long running ssh-agent process per system, rather than the norm of one ssh-agent per login session. This dramatically reduces the number of times you need to enter your passphrase. With keychain, you only need to enter a passphrase once every time your local machine is rebooted. keychain also makes it easy for remote cron jobs to securely "hook in" to a long running ssh-agent process, allowing your scripts to take advantage of key-based logins.

Author:
Aron Griffis [contact developer]

Rating:	reset 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
8.73/10.00 (12 votes)

Homepage:
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/keychain/index.xml
Debian package:
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/keychain
CVS tree (cvsweb):
http://www.gentoo.org/[..]in/viewcvs.cgi/keychain/?root=gentoo-src

Trove categories: [change]

[Development Status]		5 - Production/Stable
[Environment]		Console (Text Based)
[Intended Audience]		Developers, End Users/Desktop, Other Audience, Quality Engineers, System Administrators
[License]		OSI Approved :: GNU General Public License (GPL)
[Operating System]		POSIX
[Topic]		Security, Utilities

Dependencies: [change]
No dependencies filed

 Branches

Branch	Version	Last release	License	URLs
Default	2.3.4	25-Jul-2004	GNU General Public License (GPL)

 Comments

[»] Great tool - good read
by maxdakwing - Dec 14th 2006 14:53:26

I can only recommend the articles mentioned earlier, however it seems the URLs have changed -

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc.html
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc2/
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc3/

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[»] how does this compare to win-ssh-askpass
by Ralf Hauser - Jul 15th 2003 13:51:37

When using the ganaware.jp solution as per http://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=496#c6 and c8, I only have to enter my passwords once for all the cygwin logins I have under my one windows user session - is the ganaware solution therefore a win32 equivalent?

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[»] idle timeout like screen saver with password
by Ralf Hauser - Jul 15th 2003 13:46:54

for end users, it may be important that my ssh-tunnels are only operational as long as I am logged on to my machine via the terminal.

Does keychain have such an option or do I have to wait until http://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=496 is available from ssh directly?

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[»] A great tool if used wisely
by Vijay Avarachen - Nov 21st 2002 19:42:31

Anyone looking into key based authentication into their boxes should definitly look into this software. Also I highly suggest that you read the three part series called "OpenSSH key management" by Daniel at the IBM website.
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-keyc1/
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-keyc2/
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-keyc3/
I am looking forward to implementing key based authentication on all our servers in the datacenter (after testing of course ;-) ) Also do note that the article was writted for ver 1.0. As I write this note keychain is at version 2. So don't follow the article blindly (just like any other document). Make sure you read keychain --help and the Readme.

--
Vijay Avarachen http://www.dggcentral.net "Knowledge is the only wealth, that grows as you share it, and decreases as you save it up. "

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