Error: Agent admitted failure to sign
In rare circumstances, connecting to GitHub Enterprise via SSH on Linux produces the error "Agent admitted failure to sign using the key"
. Follow these steps to resolve the problem.
When trying to SSH into your GitHub Enterprise Server instance on a Linux computer, you may see the following message in your terminal:
$ ssh -vT git@hostname
> ...
> Agent admitted failure to sign using the key.
> debug1: No more authentication methods to try.
> Permission denied (publickey).
For more details, see this issue report.
Resolution
You should be able to fix this error by loading your keys into your SSH agent with ssh-add
:
# start the ssh-agent in the background
$ eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"
> Agent pid 59566
$ ssh-add
> Enter passphrase for /home/you/.ssh/id_rsa: [tippy tap]
> Identity added: /home/you/.ssh/id_rsa (/home/you/.ssh/id_rsa)
If your key does not have the default filename (/.ssh/id_rsa
), you'll have to pass that path to ssh-add
:
# start the ssh-agent in the background
$ eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"
> Agent pid 59566
$ ssh-add ~/.ssh/my_other_key
> Enter passphrase for /home/you/.ssh/my_other_key: [tappity tap tap]
> Identity added: /home/you/.ssh/my_other_key (/home/you/.ssh/my_other_key)