Take the 2-minute tour ×

My mac running Snow leopard 10.6.8 is having trouble handling it's ssh keys.

I could previously access all my git repo's via Tower without an issue. The other day I ran Meerkat to see what it was about and it looks like it has broken the way ssh works.

Terminal doesn't seem to have a problem and can still connect to Git, but it can't access the keychain. Tower doesn't seem to be able to access anything.

The Tower support crew have been super helpful, but I wanted to float this here and see if anyone has any ideas on how to fix my problem.

The only hints I have are:

$ which ssh







(This one seems to be wrong as I think it's supposed to point to a Listener, but no idea how to fix it)

additional: Keychain first-aid finds no problems. The problem seems to be that ssh-agent is not being run properly... but that's just a guess.

share|improve this question
add comment

1 Answer

The issue was that Meerkat or some other process - I can't confirm that Meerkat is completely to blame - had changed environment.plist to use sshAskPass.app instead of the default and had not returned it to it's original condition when it was quit and deleted.

The fix for this was to rename ~/.MacOS/environment.plist and everything reset itself to their defaults allowing me to access the keychain and also allowing Tower to access the ssh keys correctly again.

share|improve this answer
add comment

Your Answer


