[Discuss] rsync issue

[dbarrett at blazemonger.com (Daniel Barrett)]

On November 4, 2022, dan moylan wrote:
>> "ssh-add ~/.ssh/rsync.key" did the trick.  rsync now
>> passwordless as desired.
>
>> HOWEVER, i went to aldeberan:
>
>> moylan ~[1021] ssh-add -l
>> The agent has no identities.
>
>> and yet rsync works passwordless there.  (sigh) there is so
>> much i do not understand, but i'm glad that there are others
>> who do.
>
>BUT -- here's another little oddity.  it works fine from the
>command line prompt, but not in a cron script (where i want to
>use it).  it works in the cron script on aldeberan.

This suggests that your passwordless authentication on aldeberan is
not using ssh-agent.

I'll take a guess that your cron script on aldeberan uses a different
key, perhaps one with an empty passphrase so no prompting is needed.
Or (longshot) perhaps it's using HostbasedAuthentication rather than
PubkeyAuthentication?

As several folks on this list have suggested, if you show us the
output of a successful command and a failing command using

  ssh -v -v -v [...rest of args...]

we should be able to pinpoint the issue.

--
Dan Barrett
dbarrett at blazemonger.com