Enabling SSH Agent Forwarding in OS X

If you use EC2, you use SSH keys.

If you're sane, you keep the private keys on your workstation and forward them through the chain of public keys throughout your hosts.

I recently started working through OS X again and found some pretty obnoxious behavior: out of the box, the ssh keys don't forward. After some digging, I found the following discussion of the subject:

http://data.agaric.com/node/3061#comment-1604

Long story short, it appears that the location of the user's home directory isn't communicated when the keys are forwarded so the agent looks in the wrong place.

The fix? Run these two on your OS X machine:

ssh-add

ssh-add -l

et voila

Try again.