Hello. First thanks again for OpenSSH, it is so omnipresent here, what would i do without it... (Dropbear ok, this is true. Etc. Etc.) Two or three days ago i faced the problem of not being able to git push data to Sourceforge repositories. It turned out not to be just another maintenance hang, but instead it was owed to one more resource cramping on their side: the reduction of MaxAuthTries i presume. There are some keys loaded in the ssh-agent, and the one for sfnet simply happens to occur "too late". (ssh-agent, one of those comfortable things to thank for.) Now, that actually surprised me a lot, because in my configuration i do use IdentityFile and IdentitiesOnly. It seems i have blindly assumed that this local configuration is passed on and over to the jump host, from which the commit on sfnet actually happens --- but this is actually not the case, all those nice configuration efforts are local and only local! This i found out thanks to search engines! And there i found the tip which helped me out, i was enabled to do ssh-add -L | awk '{print $2 " " $3}' | while read k n; do echo $k > ~/.ssh/$n; done and create a minimalized configuration Host *.code.sf.net *.sourceforge.net HostKeyAlgorithms ssh-rsa IdentityFile ~/.ssh/... IdentitiesOnly yes which picks up the public key, and uses the private key from the agent etc. etc. etc.! Wonderful. But it made me wonder why this is at all necessary, couldn't the ssh on the jump host realize that it has no configuration by itself and check, possibly optionally, the local configuration whether there is an entry for the next destination? And, now that i write this, i have always wondered why the agent needs the private keys after they have been loaded. (At least it was like that last time i tried.) I.e., it would be fantastic to be able to load the stuff into the agent, and remove the stick thereafter! Are these observations correct or have i missed something? I want to remark i have read the manual, and it was a search engine (oh what a mess!) odysee to get to this point at all. Ciao, and a nice Sunday! --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)