apped.design

by David South Jr

One of the biggest pains with Tiger is saving SSH keys. Yes, you can create them and save them under the .ssh directory. You can also load them into the terminal using ssh-agent. But the moment you closed that terminal window, it would lose connection with ssh-agent. So I had to load a third-party ssh-agent application called SSHKeychain. It worked just fine, but about once a day it would spin off a runaway process that would slam my CPU to 100 percent. SSHKeychain is incompatible with Leopard. So what was I going to do now? Leopard had an answer—a built-in ssh-agent tied to the Leopard login keychain.

That’s right. The first time I ssh’ed into a remote account, Leopard popped open a dialog box asking for my ssh-key passphrase and then offered to save the passphrase into the login Keychain. That’s it. No more configuration. I can freely log into any remote shell that uses my key and do so securely—right out of the box.

I’ve read story after story about developers going crazy over Leopard. They claim it is the most developer friendly OS on the market. With little tweaks like this, I believe it.