tmux: Cannot SSH from inside tmux, even though I have agent-forwarding (ssh -A) on [duplicate]

Solution 1:

When you open a second connection to your VM, it will use a different SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable, but tmux and the processes under it will only know the old value.

When you attach to an existing session, tmux can tell the master process to update some environment variables. SSH_AUTH_SOCK is already in the list, but you can add custom ones by ~/.tmux.conf:

set -ga update-environment " FOO BAR"

However, this will only affect new tmux windows opened by prefix c. It is impossible for tmux to update the environment of already running processes (shells, etc).

With OpenSSH you can reuse the same SSH connection for multiple sessions, retaining SSH_AUTH_SOCK.

1. Start a master connection:

   ssh -AfNMS ~/.ssh/myvmhostname.socket myvmhostname
   

2. Open a session over it:

   ssh -S ~/.ssh/myvmhostname.socket myvmhostname
   

(For automation of -M and -S, refer to ControlMaster/ControlPath in the ssh_config manual page.)

Solution 2:

Hi I know this is an old question, But I found this page basically saing add this to your .bashrc file on your VM. Basically it links your ssh socket to a predicable target. TBH this may be a security issue, but I dont think it should be a huge one if you are the machine admin (I am no expert on security however):

(From marks blog)

In your .bashrc or .zshrc file, add the following:

# Predictable SSH authentication socket location.
SOCK="/tmp/ssh-agent-$USER-screen"
if test $SSH_AUTH_SOCK && [ $SSH_AUTH_SOCK != $SOCK ]
then
    ln -sf $SSH_AUTH_SOCK $SOCK
    export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=$SOCK
fi