[ Thanks to Sam
Rowe for this link. ]
“Security is best when it is handy. ssh-agent is pretty darn
handy. Ssh-agent can authenticate you to a remote machine via
keypairs, rather than the traditional hand-typed username/password
combination, with no loss of security.”
“In this tutorial, I hope to teach you how to use ssh-agent
to automate logging in to your machines securely via the X Window
System. One thing to note about this tutorial, my intention isn’t
to give you the nuts and bolts of ssh or ssh-agent, but rather to
give you a quick-and-dirty method to get more secure. I do,
however, encourage you to look for other online documentation to
learn about the ways that ssh works and the things that are going
on behind the scenes in this tutorial. This tutorial also assumes
you have some knowledge of X11 and how to start your
window-manager/desktop-environment of choice. The machine that I
use is running RedHat 6.2 and ssh 1.2.27, but this tutorial should
work across platforms.”
“The first step in using ssh-agent is to generate your private
and public keys. The private key will have a pass-phrase that
allows ssh-agent to decrypt it and keep the decrypted key in
memory. Pass-phrases should and can be much longer than
conventional passwords…”