I now notice I haven’t written anything in almost a year, which nobody else seems to have noticed, so I guess it’s just as well. I have, though, broken my unintentional hiatus to post something that reminds me why I hate technology so much: All UX is bad.

I’ve been a Linux user for more than a decade now, but the latest Ubuntu update decided to randomly break my system’s ability to remember SSH keys. No matter what I tried, SSH keys just would not be remembered. I saw a lot of guides online that said to install ksshaskpass and set the SSH_ASKPASS environment variable to it, but that didn’t work for me (I kept getting the password prompt in the cli).

Basically, nothing I tried worked, not even startup scripts that people were advising to install, not even manually adding the keys to my SSH agent (that worked for the current shell session, but nothing else). Eventually, I did find something that worked, and this problem plagued me for so long that I just had to write the solution here for you to hopefully see.

What worked

What I did that finally worked was to set the SSH_ASKPASS_REQUIRE variable to force and SSH to my host:

export SSH_ASKPASS_REQUIRE=force
ssh some.host.that.needs.a.key

That forced KDE to pop up a KDE window asking me for my password, then I could click “save password”, which saved the password in the KDE keychain. After that, even though SSH_ASKPASS_REQUIRE is back to prefer, I don’t get asked for my key any more. I think KDE just needed to be forced to store my passphrase in the keyring.

Epilogue

That’s it! As always, if you have comments, tweet or toot at me, or email me directly.