the parents of security

When developing in Unix, on any software project of marginal size, the remote toolkit of choice is always ssh.  Besides being stupidly secure it is also crazy fast and is supported on almost every platform in existence.  The only problem that slowly starts to develop is directly related to how often it is used… password management.  Thankfully ssh has support for key sharing requiring you to only enter you passphrase during the initial login on a given machine.  On KDE there is even a tool for getting your passphrase requested when initially logging in. That said, installing it DOES NOT set it up so here are some basic instructions for getting it working on any current version of Suse.  It even has support for kwallet to store the password (but if you do so remember to has a wallet password AT LEAST as strong as your passphrase or the whole point is mute from a security standpoint.

Start by installing ksshaskpass:

zypper install ksshaskpass

Now, create a file called ssh-add.sh and put it into your .kde4/Autostart directory. It should contain the following:

#!/bin/sh 
export SSH_ASKPASS=/usr/lib64/ssh/ksshaskpass
/usr/bin/ssh-add

The export path will depend on the install location of ksshaskpass. Try typing:

which ksshaskpass

and see what the result is. Make it executable by only your local users. While not really required it is a simply thing that can be done to help make the whole install a little more secure.

chmod 700 ./ssh-add.sh