Mine the Harvest

I’ve finally gotten around to using ssh pass phrases on the ssh keys I uses to authenticate with, and recently was using a nifty applet on Gnome that managed the pass phrase for you when you log into your Gnome session.

Since I mainly use KDE, I found a very simple little app mentioned on this blog that does the same thing for KDE4, ksshaskpass which you can get from here

Compiling and installing is extremely easy, it is a very light app and uses cmake for the build, and builds in seconds.

(Note however that  you need to have cmake installed, and if using Ubuntu you also install build-essential and kdelibs5-dev if using KDE.)

Also, please see the readme describing the script to make in your ~/.kde4/Autostart directory setting your SSH_ASKPATH variable to point to the ksshaskpath binary.

After that you are good to go – when you first use your key a GUI window prompts you once for the password, which gets associated with your Kwallet for the remainder of your session.

Very nice.