ssh_agent + screen

Screen is awesome, ssh agent forwarding is wondrous. If you've been following along, you know this already.

You may be frustrated that when you reconnect to a screen session your agent stops working. ssh-agent sets environment variables to tell ssh where to find the agent, and your old shells get stuck with pointers to dead agent processes.

There are a few ways around this. A common method is to make a pair of scripts, one to dump the vars to a file in your login shell and another to read them back in from your screen shells. This works, but you have to do something manually after you reconnect - IN EVERY SHELL IN YOUR SCREEN SESSION.

Some will tell you to launch the agent from within the screen session, and then manually copy the env variables to each shell. This keeps a long running agent, which is nice but less secure. I like to run keep my keys local to my laptop and agent around from there. Also, when you spawn new shells, they still need to be updated with the ssh environment vars.

For years I've used a work around of using a symlink pointer for my agent. Before I launch screen, I set SSH_AUTH_SOCK to point to ~/.ssh/agent. All of my screen shells point to symlink, making it easy to update when my agent changes.

rm -f ~/.ssh/agent 
ln -s $SSH_AUTH_SOCK ~/.ssh/agent
export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=~/.ssh/agent

In practice it looks like this:

[vm53@vm53] 1003% rm -f ~/.ssh/agent; ln -s $SSH_AUTH_SOCK ~/.ssh/agent; export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=~/.ssh/agent

Meachum used to have an LD_PRELOAD hack that would pass certain ENV vars (SSH_AUTH_SOCK and DISPLAY) through to his running in-screen shells, but that was some crazy magic.

I've heard that tmux has support for updating certain env variables in the running shells ( maybe via 'update-environment'?) , specifically to handle cases like this. Anyone have details? I know that tmux is teh new h0tness but I'm not really ready to flush 20 years of screen familiarity. But maybe.