Hi, I asked a version of this question on #openssh on Freenode, but then realized that there was probably a newgroup on GMane that might be more helpful (in case you where on that channel and this feels like deja vu).
So I'm doing something a little non-standard with ssh. I have a dummy account, call it "dummy", that isn't a member of any groups but its own, which I use for installing locally built software. I have this "dummy" account on two computers. To assist maintenance of these accounts I use a sync program called unison, that communicates over ssh. But I use sudo to do all my work with stow from my normal user account, call it "normal". Since I'm the only user of these accounts, I use the same private/public SSH key pairs on all my accounts between both computers (this might be a slightly risky practice, but I'm okay with it). Okay, so I noticed after playing around with root that I could just export normal's SSH_AGENT_PID and SSH_AUTH_SOCK and use the common identity to unison via ssh transparently. But with dummy, I don't get the transparency. Is there any way to relax my ssh-agent to allow "dummy" to connect to it (and just "dummy" alone)? There's a simpler way to illustrate my problem without dealing with sudo and unison... just using su. Let's start in "normal"'s shell with an ssh-agent up with an ssh-add'ed identity and with SSH_AGENT_PID and SSH_AUTH_SOCK already exported. I can can "su root", and the exported environment variables will still be there. Then as root I can ssh transparently. However, if I "su dummy", this doesn't work. Furthermore, if I try to ssh-add, I get "Could not open a connection to your authentication agent." It would be really neat if I could get around this. I'm just trying to automate a task, and this is the one place where I find myself a few button's away from a one-button solution. Thanks for your help, Sukant Hajra
