pinentry fails with gpg-agent for ssh, but works for gpg

[brian saia]

On 01/25/2018 03:03 AM, Werner Koch wrote:
>> $ ssh some-host
>>
>> fails to ask for the PIN.
> That is because ssh has no mechanism to tell the ssh-agent (in this case
> gpg-agent) the DISPLAY or tty to use for pinentry.  This the pinentry
> pops up on the tty or X server gpg-agent was initially started.
>
> Running
>
>   gpg-connect-agent updatestartuptty /bye
>
> on your current tty tells gpg-agent to updates its default tty and
> DISPLAY to the one where you run gpg-connect-agent.  ssh will then work
> again.  After you switch back to another terminal you need to do the
> same.  
>
> I have to use it always when I move from my standalone laptop to the
> Xserver connected to that laptop.  It is a bit annoying and the only
> clean solution would be to enance the the ssh-agent protocol and
> implement that in both, ssh and gpg-agent.

One option could be to add that snippet of code...

  gpg-connect-agent updatestartuptty /bye

to your /.bashrc/ (or equivalent) file. At the very least it might reduce the
number of times you would have to enter it manually.

Another option could be to create a script which calls gpg-connect-agent first
then calls SSH. Something like this:

$cat ~/bin/ssh
#!/usr/bin/env bash
gpg-connect-agent updatestartuptty /bye &>/dev/null
/usr/bin/ssh "$@"

-- 
Thank you for your time.
-Brian Saia

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