Server Maintenance

The EIDE drive in my server died.. It had a grand life – 4-Oct-2004 to 3-Mar-2007 on Slackware 9.1 and only two reboots. I moved to Debian Etch for the OS – Slackware has been rock solid, but after swapping to Debian on other machines, the maintenance and software availability are just too easy – no more building custom packages.. Post images are currently broken, and the gallery has not been restored, yet. I wanted to get mail services dialed in first, and I may write more on that setup later – postfix+postgrey+tls+saslauthd and dovecot imaps/pop3s – no unencrypted mail services 🙂

ssh-add over ssh

ssh-add picks up the agent fine when using X11, but when logged into a remote ssh session:

michael@apollo:~$ ssh-add
Could not open a connection to your authentication agent.

Ah, we have to fire up ssh-agent and cut/paste the env variables…

michael@apollo:~$ ssh-agent
SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-erlzEU7907/agent.7907; export SSH_AUTH_SOCK;
SSH_AGENT_PID=7908; export SSH_AGENT_PID;
echo Agent pid 7908;
michael@apollo:~$ SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-erlzEU7907/agent.7907; export SSH_AUTH_SOCK; SSH_AGENT_PID=7908; export SSH_AGENT_PID;
michael@apollo:~$ ssh-add
Enter passphrase for /home/michael/.ssh/id_dsa:
Identity added: /home/michael/.ssh/id_dsa (/home/michael/.ssh/id_dsa)
michael@apollo:~$

Thanks, Brandon! 😉