Re: sign_and_send_pubkey: signing failed: agent refused operation

[Martin Sebor <msebor@gmail.com>]

On 6/1/20 1:12 PM, Jonathan Wakely via Overseers wrote:
> 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.

We solved the problem over IRC last night so just to close the loop
on it here: it turned out to be caused by Gnome keyring setting
SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/run/user/1000/keyring/ssh.  With the environment
variable undefined I get prompted for the password as expected.

Thank you both again for your help in getting to the bottom of it!

Martin