ssh-agent not starting in OpenSuSE desktop

Question

It seems that ssh-agent is not starting on my OpenSuSE system. When I run pgrep -fl ssh-agent, the result is blank. On my Linux Mint laptop, I get 1785 /usr/bin/ssh-agent /usr/bin/dbus-launch --exit-with-session x-session-manager.

How do I fix this? Can anyone with OpenSuSE check to see if it's not started up by default, or if I maybe messed something up?

things tried...

I've tried adding the following to .xinitrc,

if test -S "$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" -a -x "$SSH_ASKPASS"; then
      ssh-add < /dev/null
fi

and my .xsession file contains,

ssh-agent {
  ssh-add &
  startkde
}

but neither of these things seems to do anything. Thanks in advance!!

Answer 1

OK, so yesterday I installed the new 12.2RC2 ("GM") and 12.1 on separate partitions, both using KDE.

After I upgraded everything to the latest packages and enabled the SSHD service, I restarted and generated a private/public key pair with ssh-keygen

On both machines the sshd was running - but ssh-add output an error about not being able to connect to authorization agent or something.

So I ran ssh-agent -k where the -k flag "killed" the current running agent and then re-ran ssh-agent to restart it.

Then I restarted the PCs (you might be able to just restart the sshd service instead) and it was working! I could then issue ssh-add without any errors.

It looks like on KDE desktops ssh-agent is not initialized properly when you first start the sshd service, it works fine on other DE like GNOME or XFCE.