How do I clear out the ssh-agent entries (on Mac OS X )?
- by cwd
I'm running Mac OS X, and it appears that after SSHing to several machines, using identity files, my 'ssh-agent' builds up a lot of identity / keys and then sometimes offers too many to a remote machine, causing them to kick me off before connecting:
Received disconnect from 10.12.10.16: 2: Too many authentication failures for cwd
It's pretty obvious what's happening, and this page talks about it in more detail:
SSH servers only allow you to attempt
to authenticate a certain number of
times. Each failed password attempt,
each failed pubkey/identity that is
offered, etc, take up one of these
attempts. If you have a lot of SSH
keys in your agent, you may find that
an SSH server may kick you out before
allowing you to attempt password
authentication at all. If this is the
case, there are a few different
workarounds.
Rebooting clears the agent and then everything works OK again. I can also add this line to my .ssh/config file to force it to use password authentication:
PreferredAuthentications keyboard-interactive,password
Anyhow, I saw the note on the page I referenced talking about deleting keys from the agent, but I'm not sure if that applies on a Mac since they appear to be cleared after reboot anyhow.
Is there a simple way to clear out all keys in the 'ssh-agent' (the same thing that happens at reboot)?
