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Grigorios

Member

Registered: 2021-01-10

Posts: 23

[SOLVED] virt-manager ignores ssh-agent

Hello,

I have a QEMU/KVM hypervisor running on a remote server.
I use the libvirt tool virt-manager.
I added the remote connection via ssh.
My ssh key is in the authorized keys file of my user on the remote machine and during shell startup on my local machine, I have set up keychain to ask for my ssh key password and store it.
I recently changed from X11/dwm to Wayland/Sway and now the virt-manager is ignoring the already stored ssh key. I kept being asked for my ssh keys passphrase, which I have already added to my ssh agent via keychain. I have to enter my passphrase a dozen time, before I can use the spice viewer built into virt-manager.
Also, when I start virt-manager initially, I am being prompted for my ssh keys passphrase, even thought it is already added.
I confirmed that by checking whether the ssh agent knows about my key with

$ssh-add -L

Also, I can just fine connect to my remote hypervisor via ssh when I am in a shell, without being prompted for my ssh keys passphrase
It previously worked, and the only big change I made was switching to Wayland.

Does anyone have an idea what could be the problem?

Sincerely

Grigorios

Update:
It turns out that change to Wayland was indeed the problem. I was running my keychain command in my .zshrc and with how Wayland works (as far as I understand) what I do in my terminal emulator, is not affecting my other applications like libvirt/virt-manager. Therefore, I took another approach, instead of the keychain command in my .zshrc I followed the wiki wiki and now make systemd start my ssh-agent and I decrpyt my ssh passphrase with systemd-user-pam-ssh. However, I am thinking about migrating completely to the pam_ssh project.

Last edited by Grigorios (2022-11-11 12:33:45)

Grigorios

Member

Registered: 2021-01-10

Posts: 23

Re: [SOLVED] virt-manager ignores ssh-agent

This topic can be marked as solved. I don't want to delete it, so other people may can find some help.
Also, I think about extending the keychain article soon with this information, for people migrating to Wayland.

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,260

Re: [SOLVED] virt-manager ignores ssh-agent

Edit your first post in the thread.  Editing that post gives you the option to edit the title.  Prepend [SOLVED] tot he title.
We ask that you do that as we don't know when something is truly solved for you.

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