Re: sign_and_send_pubkey: signing failed: agent refused operation

[Jonathan Wakely <jwakely.gcc@gmail.com>]

On Mon, 1 Jun 2020 at 19:11, Frank Ch. Eigler via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:
>
> Hi -
>
> > git pull from the GCC and Glibc repos is failing for me with the error
> > below.  It worked fine last week and I haven't made any changes to my
> > ssh keys.
>
> And are you logging in from the same workstation with access to the same
> set of ssh private keys?
>
> > Is this a transient glitch or has something changed recently that I
> > need to make some adjustments for?
>
> I know of nothing relevant that has changed on the sourceware side.
>
> > sign_and_send_pubkey: signing failed: agent refused operation
> > msebor@gcc.gnu.org: Permission denied (publickey).
> > fatal: Could not read from remote repository.
>
> The usual advice is to run       % ssh -vv gcc.gnu.org alive
> and report the ssh level error.
>
> "agent refused operation" sounds like a problem on the client end.

Yes, it is. "agent" refers to the ssh-agent program.

Martin, what does 'ssh-add -l' show?

Is there only one ssh-agent process shown by 'ps -ef | fgrep
[s]sh-agent'? Does its PID match $SSH_AGENT_PID?

Another possible cause is that the file permissions are not strict
enough on the private key, or on the ~/.ssh directory that contains
it. Key files should be 600 and ~/.ssh should be 700.