On Apr 30, 2004, at 9:29 PM, Chris Devers wrote:
I don't quite understand yet where things are going, but some of the
startup items in 10.3 have been rewritten in such a way that the service
is, when possible, not launched but primed such that that they're ready
to use on demand but they aren't taking up system resources when you
don't need them.
I thought they were using xinetd for that - if so, that's pretty standard.
If Linux users want to use ssh-agent, they can hook it in to their
~/.xinitrc file to cause it to launch at X login time and to export some
environment variables to all processes started in the X session.
Where is the best place to poke this on OSX?
You can create a ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist file, but this will only set variables, not launch programs (as far as I know). No help there.
Ah, but setting variables is what you want to do. The SSH_ASKPASS environment variable points to a program that SSH, when it's not connected to a terminal, will launch to ask for a login and password on its behalf.
Have a look at Bill Bumgarner's SSHPassKey utility. It provides just such an app, and it can (if you want) also store SSH passwords on the keychain. It'll even poke the necessary variables into environment.plist for you.
<http://www.codefab.com/unsupported/SSHPassKey_v1.1-1-README.html>
sherm--
