Talk:ssh-agent

Article title

I am unsure of what the title should be. I am used to the acronym for secure shell being in caps but I've seen this as "ssh-agent", "SSH Agent", etc. Hmm, from what I can tell SSH Agent is the proper name but the program runs as ssh-agent. So... I don't know. gren 06:01, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

It's almost universally referred to as ssh-agent. 76.180.120.161 (talk) 06:41, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Sure, but ssh-agent is just one possible implementation. That's like renaming the Stackless Python article to just "Python". The top-level Python page correctly discusses just the parts that are common to all implementations, and makes room for specific implementations to split off to separate pages if need be.

The OpenSSH protocol documentation makes it clear that other programs can implement the agent protocol. And there are other programs that aren't called "ssh-agent" that implement the protocol:

• SSH Communications Security's ssh-agent2
• PuTTY's "pageant"

The OpenSSH protocol documentation refers to it simply as "agent". Other documents refer to it as the "SSH authentication agent". The O'Reilly SSH book calls it "SSH agent" or just "agent":

• §2.5 The SSH Agent
• §6.3 SSH Agents
• §6.3.1 Agents Don't Expose Keys
• §6.3.2 Starting an Agent
• §6.3.2.4 SSH-1 and SSH-2 agent compatibility
• §6.3.4 Agents and Security
• §6.3.4.2 Cracking an agent

My vote is for "SSH agent", or possibly "SSH authentication agent". --Underpants 16:03, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Chuckh1958 (talk) 15:31, 11 September 2008 (UTC) I modified the code presented to upload the public key to the server and changed it to use ssh/cat instead of scp. If there are multiple keys that have acces to the same user account, scp will overwrite the previously existing ones. ssh/cat will append the new key to the file and leave the old keys intact.