ssh-agent is a program to hold in memory the private keys used by SSH for public-key authentication. When the agent is running, ssh forwards to it the signature requests from the server. The agent performs the private key operations and returns the results to ssh. It is useful if you keep your private keys encrypted on disk and you don’t want to type the password at each connection. Keeping the agent secure is critical: someone able to communicate with the agent can authenticate on your behalf on remote servers.

This describes a method for maintaining a separate ssh-agent to hold your ssh key for connecting to Toolforge/CloudVPS.

The problem

You use an ssh-agent to connect to your personal or company systems. You want to connect to Toolforge/CloudVPS using an agent and you created a separate ssh key to connect to Toolforge/CloudVPS, but you don't want to forward your personal key to Toolforge/CloudVPS systems. If you just add both keys to your existing agent, they both get forwarded to Toolforge/CloudVPS. It's a pain to constantly remove your personal key from your agent each time you want to connect to Toolforge/CloudVPS. Additionally, you might be connected to both your personal system and Toolforge/CloudVPS simultaneously, so just removing the key is insufficent; you must run a separate ssh-agent. You don't want to run one agent per connection because then you have to type your passphrase on every connection (and you have a nice long secure passphrase on your key).

This page describes a method for getting your shell to maintain two agents, your primary agent and your Toolforge/CloudVPS agent. When you connect to Toolforge/CloudVPS you connect to the existing Toolforge/CloudVPS agent (or create one if it doesn't exist) and the rest of the time you use your default agent.

KeePassXC is a community fork of KeePassX, a native cross-platform port of KeePass Password Safe, with the goal to extend and improve it with new features and bugfixes to provide a feature-rich, fully cross-platform and modern open-source password manager.

General note concerning the use of guest agent interfaces:

"unsupported" is a higher-level error than the errors that individual commands might document. The caller should always be prepared to receive QERR_UNSUPPORTED, even if the given command doesn’t specify it, or doesn’t document any failure mode at all.