Dieter on the web

Phew! where to start? Probably at this blogpost. It's about making it very easy to work with external encrypted volumes. I'm not going to talk about the article itself but about a great tool i discovered thanks to it: Zenity.

::Read from here It's an LGPL-licensed program written in C by some guys from Gnome and Sun. You can call it from any script and present a user with a gtk widget such as a password-dialog, filechooser, calendar, ... It has many possibilities.
This is great if you want to run scripts on the terminal or even without a terminal (scripts automatically started by your desktop environment) and need user input.

This immediately made me think of using this together with ssh-add, because i was getting a bit tired to open a console and add my key by typing the ssh-add command for every X session. (For the record: ssh-add without any arguments is enough for most users: it looks for keys with default names, but i have multiple keys with some speial names so...)
(I can easily retrieve the right command by typing ssh-add*arrowup* but still it's cumbersome.. see this page for the bash-trick)

Of course I realized I was probably not the only one with this idea so I googled a bit and looked in the ssh-add manpage, and I found out some cool stuff!
It turned out ssh-add has support for such scenarios and offers the $SSH_ASKPASS environment variable for this. Since the system I'm currently using on my laptop (which i converted from Arch to xubuntu 7.10 but that's another story :-)) doesn't have this variable set by default I could of course set it myself, but it can be even easier then this...

When the $SSH_ASKPASS variable is not set, ssh-add will try to execute /usr/bin/ssh-askpass by default. I figured this out by typing this in a console:
ssh-add *mykey* < /dev/null
This revealed that there are already some utilities specifically for this purpose! Let's see...:

I decided to install ssh-askpass-gnome even though I use xfce. And it works great :D

After installing this you can just put your ssh-add line in the settings panel called "autostarted Applications" from Xfce and for your next session it will show a nice gtk popup to ask for your password and it works like a charm :)
However, since i use multiple keys, i used to use the globbing operator (*) but this doesnt work anymore with this method. I guess that makes sense as the globbing operator is probably a bash built-in...