Problem with ssh agent

Make sure you have a corresponding id_rsa.pub or id_dsa.pub in your ~/.ssh directory.

When I had an id_rsa but not a corresponding id_rsa.pub, Mac OS X kept popping up the dialog and remember passowrd in my keychain did nothing.

cd ~/.ssh
ssh-keygen -y -f id_rsa > id_rsa.pub

generated the appropriate public key file for me.

If you already had your public file there (rename it to another name) and generate the public key again using the above command, you'll notice that the generated and the old one are not equal. Somehow the older versions of Mac OS X generated a public key that Lion does not like anymore, generating it again fixes that.

For the curious, the key is exactly the same, the part that changes is that there is no "comments" section after the key on the file any longer.

For anyone who ends up on this page, I realized I should post the answer:

Using launchd instead of cron does indeed fix the authorization problem. Your user launchd jobs (which run only when you are logged in) correctly use the SSH agent information that was unlocked via your keychain as part of login (as part of standard OS X key management, no other software required).

To minimize my interactions with launchd, I created a single launchd job that calls a bash script. In this way I can simply edit the script without dealing with launchd.

Here's the launchd file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
  <key>Label</key>
  <string>com.mycron.hourly</string>

  <key>ProgramArguments</key>
  <array>
    <string>/Users/john/bin/cron.hourly</string>
  </array>

  <key>Nice</key>
  <integer>1</integer>

  <key>StartInterval</key>
  <integer>3600</integer> <!-- start every X seconds -->

  <key>RunAtLoad</key>
  <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

I saved the file to ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.mycron.hourly.plist, and then loaded it with:

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.mycron.hourly.plist

Once loaded, it will run right away and then again every 60 minutes.

If you follow the same procedure, you'll want to change the `ProgramArguments' string with the right path to your script.