14

As described in many other posts, after upgrading to MacOS Sierra I modified the ssh config file like so:

Host me
HostName login.hpc.ugent.be
User vscxxxxx
Port 22

Host *
  AddKeysToAgent yes
  UseKeychain yes

Still I get the following error:

$ssh -Y vscxxxxx@login.hpc.ugent.be
/Users/manfredo/.ssh/config: line 8: Bad configuration option: usekeychain
/Users/manfredo/.ssh/config: terminating, 1 bad configuration options

What am I missing?

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3
  • What is the output of ssh -V and type ssh? Or do you know whether you have non-system-default ssh installed?
    – Jari Keinänen
    Mar 1, 2017 at 17:31
  • OpenSSH_7.3p1, OpenSSL 1.0.2k 26 Jan 2017
    – Manfredo
    Mar 1, 2017 at 17:52
  • BTW, the config file shown above seems to have incorrect indentation. Was this intentional?
    – David J.
    Jun 16, 2021 at 19:16

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
12

Just remove the UseKeychain yes line from your configuration. The update broke existing setup by removing this option.

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2
  • This is probably false, assuming we are talking the system-provided ssh. What update broke it? Or do you mean some non-Apple ssh update? I'm on up-to-date macOS and having UseKeychain yes or usekeychain yes give no errors.
    – Jari Keinänen
    Mar 1, 2017 at 17:32
  • That actually works. I don't really know what caused it to stop working, the only thing is I updated my macport packages today.
    – Manfredo
    Mar 1, 2017 at 17:53
7

Apple's documentation on OpenSSH updates in macOS 10.12.2 states that:

If you are sharing your ssh configuration with systems running older versions of OpenSSH that don't understand the UseKeychain option, you can specify the IgnoreUnknown option to keep your configuration compatible with both new and old versions.

So the trick is that in your ssh config file, add IgnoreUnknown UseKeychain like below:

Host *
  AddKeysToAgent yes
  IgnoreUnknown UseKeychain
  UseKeychain yes
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0

If you specify /usr/bin/ssh for the commands, it works. The default path in 10.12 puts /usr/local/bin at the top so any other version of ssh will not work with that option, since it's specific to the mac system.

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1
  • to add on to this, simply nano ~/.bash_profile then make sure /usr/bin is before /usr/local/bin if they aren't in your $PATH declaration at all simply add both with them in that order. Something like export PATH="~/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin/:$PATH then source ~/.bash_profile this resolved it for me
    – abc123
    May 30, 2017 at 13:45

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