anyone good with ssh-agent & cronjobs?

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Jul 29, 2014, Lonni J Friedman wrote:
>I'm trying to sort out the right way to use ssh-agent (using ssh keys)
>from inside of shell script driven cronjobs.  ssh-agent works fine
>outside of the crobjob (and even if I run the shell script manually).
>However, when invoked via cron, the script fails to connect to the
>pre-existing ssh-agent, and ssh auth fails as a result.  I've googled
>quite a bit, and the advice is rather muddy.  There are dozens of
>super hacky 'solutions', which seem to work for some people and not
>others.  The crux of the problem seems to be figuring out a reliable
>way of acquiring the SSH_AUTH_SOCK & SSH_AGENT_PID variables for the
>pre-existing ssh-agent session that already has all my ssh keys loaded
>into it.  I'd like to think its as easy as running 'ssh-agent -s',
>however all that seems to do is spawn a new agent session which has no
>keys pre-loaded, and is effectively useless.
>
>What am I missing here?  Surely this has to work, right?

It's been a while since I did this.  I think one way to do this is to use
keys with empty pass phrase which doesn't require ssh-agent.

Most of the remote cron things I do now are done via XMLRPC calls to a
server on the remote machine to handle specific tasks such as running
'make' in a DNS directory after updating zone files.

Using rsync modules works well with the primary security allowing access to
specific modules based on the IP address of the connecting system.

Bill
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