Last week I started a thread Best Practice: Password Authentication. One of my blunders was solved in the thread, but I believe my underlying issue had to do with this excerpt found in Github’s docs: (as @fullyint suggested)
On Mac OS X, ssh-agent will “forget” this key, once it gets restarted during reboots. But you can import your SSH keys into Keychain using this command:
ssh-add -K
When I did that I would get the error:
ssh-add: illegal option -- K
With an output of:
usage: ssh-add [options] [file ...]
Options:
-l List fingerprints of all identities.
-E hash Specify hash algorithm used for fingerprints.
-L List public key parameters of all identities.
-k Load only keys and not certificates.
-c Require confirmation to sign using identities
-t life Set lifetime (in seconds) when adding identities.
-d Delete identity.
-D Delete all identities.
-x Lock agent.
-X Unlock agent.
-s pkcs11 Add keys from PKCS#11 provider.
-e pkcs11 Remove keys provided by PKCS#11 provider.
At first I was assuming the capital letter K in the command was a typo and was replacing it for a lower case ‘k’.
But upon further problems deploying I realized it was an entirely different command.
The solution was in this blog post on rotating ssh keys. I’m pretty sure the issue had to do with my current version of OSX Yosemite on my macbook (10.10.2).
If you ever get the error “ssh-add: illegal option – K” try this:
Specify the path to the correct version of “ssh-add”, run:/usr/bin/ssh-add -K ~/.ssh/id_rsa
That did the trick. Just wanted to document this better because it took me a little while to locate.
Thanks for your help @fullyint and @swalkinshaw